She hangs up on me.
It’s probably for the best.
46
Q
HAVEN’S VOICE COMES through the speakers not a minute later, a shade dimmer than usual. Will the rest of the station pick up on this subtle change in her, or am I simply hyperaware of it in light of the conversation we just had?
The announcement comes to a blunt end, almost as if Haven’s intentionally making our situation sound even more bleak than it is—if that’s even possible—just to get a rise out of me. I don’t regret what I said, though. We shouldn’t bend the rules for ourselves; it’s our responsibility to do everything in our power to conserve water while we figure this out. Whatever she feels for me right now, maybe my words will make her think twice. Maybe she’ll think about the entire station, not just herself.
Not that I don’t get the temptation. Didn’t I do the exact same thing just this afternoon? I turned off my buzz screen; I tried to sleep. I took a shower, and not a short one. That was before, though—when we were all riding high on the news of Zesi and Heath’s successful mission, when I expected we’d have the new filter installed within hours.
I try to push all these distractions from my mind. Focus on the task at hand. I’m back at Portside now, about to run a fresh series of tests on the hair and saliva samples pulled from Jaako and Kerr. This time, I won’t be looking for traces of the virus, but for clues as to what actually killed them. Natalin’s words replay in my head:Maybe you should go get to work on that, Lindley, before anyone else dies?Her caustic tone is like acid to my bones, eating away at me by the minute. Perhaps it was unfair of her to shove all the weight on my shoulders, but it doesn’t make what she said any less true. Ishouldget to work. Icouldhave a breakthrough, stop this madness before someone else dies.
Hopefully lockdown will help; hopefully it won’t backfire somehow. It’s not my style to make big decisions on the fly, but at least it’s something. Hopefully it will beenough.
I don’t have confirmation through testing yet, obviously, but I have a strong suspicion about thehowof these deaths: poison. Mila, Jaako, and Kerr were all covered in bloodbubbles—bloodbubbles that were planted on them, as I’ve already established—but their bodies were absent of flesh wounds. No signs of a struggle, no bruising, nothing at all except quick, silent death. They could have been asphyxiated, of course, but it’s far more difficult to run tests onabsence of breaththan it ispresence of toxins. If my tests come back true-negative, no poison present, it would be a neon sign pointing to asphyxiation as cause of death. I’m almost rooting for poison, though—one killer could not have suffocated both Jaako and Kerr at the same time.
Asphyxiation would meantwokillers. Two liars. Twice the level of coordination it would take to commit these murders alone.
So. Systematic toxicological analysis it is.
I wish I hadn’t been so quick to blame the virus for everything, because otherwise—if I hadn’t skipped the autopsies, if I hadn’t already had them burned to ash—I’d skip the hair samples and go straight for their livers. Not that I’ve had anything but textbook experience with livers; hair can simply be a little less reliable, from what I understand.Now I know for next time, I think, before I can stop the thought.
No. There will notbea next time.
I prepare the preliminary test to see if my toxin theory holds up; it’s a two-step process, the first step a simple screening to identify the presence of drugs or other toxicants on the hair. Unlike so many other lab tests, this one won’t make me wait even a minute—it will take less than ten seconds for the scanner to give a simple positive or negative analysis. If positive, I’ll move on to the next step, which Dr. Safran simply called Q for its ability to run both qualitative and quantitative analysis at the same time. In other words: Q will tell me exactly which toxin—and exactly how much of it—was present in Jaako and Kerr when they died.
The screener blips red even before the full ten seconds have passed. This... can’t be good. I run a second test on Kerr’s hair, just for the sake of being thorough, and it goes red even quickerthis time—not even five full seconds, compared to the eight it took for Jaako’s.
Well, that’s it. Poisoned, both of them. Mila’s results would yield the same, I’d bet anything.
I feel a sharp descent coming on—feel my thoughts start to avalanche—but I try my best to hold it off.
Tests first, theories next. Tests willinformthe theories.
I run Q on both samples, and for both, the results are clear: Jaako and Kerr were killed by belladonna—by off-the-charts, lethal dosages of it.
And there’s only one place on the station the killer could have possibly obtained it.
47
TOXIN
OF ALL THE times I’ve been to SSL, I’ve never actually used it as a lab.
That changes now.
I enter my access code—mymeaninglessaccess code, now that Yuki and Grace and stars know who else have it memorized by heart—and head to its central workstation. The countertops are pristine white, but I’m certain there must be substantial equipment in its various underlying doors and drawers. I’m looking for a tablet—a database system, specifically—that will help me make sense of the forest of glowing pillars and their exact contents. There’s nowhere else the killer could have found belladonna; the only other place that’s even a remote possibility is Medical, but Dr. Safran never kept anything like that lying around. I checked every cabinet there, just to be sure, but—in keeping with my theory—the cabinets were all clear.
I find what I’m looking for in the third drawer, beside a trio of microscopes: a tablet so thin it could be paper, so inflexibleit obviously isn’t. I handle it carefully, dust it for fingerprints before I do anything else—
It’s clean. Because of course it is.
I pinch the lower right corner and its dark screen blooms to light. My limited options are clearly marked:Storage Index,Compendium of Botanical Specimens,Calculator,Notepad, andSettings. I tap into the compendium, do a search for belladonna. As I suspected, it’s in our system. The entry reads:
Belladonna (Atropa belladonna):
