Page 112 of The Turning of the Tables

If I were totally alone, I might become much more bitter. Blame the society around me for not keeping us all safe.

“I think he’s an Arc,” I said out loud to Quincy. “And either he doesn’t know how he got it, or he got it from a patient who somehow faked their mandatory test.”

I heard Quincy suck in a breath. “How would you evendothat?” she asked. “It’s a blood test.”

“They use the rapid urinalysis for surgery because they don’t want to break the skin any more times than they have to,” I murmured.

“How do you fake your pee?” Quincy wanted to know.

“You go into the bathroom. And they leave the room when you put your gown on, so you could tuck some in an armpit or in the waist of your underwear or something.”

“Why would youdothat?” she asked.

“Because you’re a selfish asshole,” I answered. “You don’t want to have to bother rescheduling your surgery.”

“But they?—”

“Came in with Arcana,” I said. “All of them came in sick—which you could excuse if someone were asymptomatic, but I’d bet not all of them were.”

Quincy was quiet for a long minute. “I’m not bettingagainst those donuts,” she said, finally. “Do you think there are other people he gave Arcana to who canceled their surgeries?” she asked.

“It would be confirmation that I’m right if there were—and they’re still alive.”

“You have to tell Maginot.”

I shook my head, even though she couldn’t see me. “No, I don’t,” I replied. “Not my job anymore, remember?” I’d tried to keep the bitterness out of my tone, but I don’t think I entirely succeeded.

Noahand I watched the man led away in handcuffs and scrubs that night on the local news—Noah liked to stay on top of it, even if I could have done without local news entirely. He was average height, dark hair, fair skin, with an angry set to his jaw. His name was Mitchell Roche. The news didn’t provide any other details that I didn’t already know—they didn’t say whether or not he’d ever had Arcana, much less whether or not he was an Arc.

I didn’t tell Noah my theory about Roche. He’d want to know how I had gotten there, and he wouldn’t have accepted anything short of the truth about how I’d come to those conclusions. And I still wasn’t comfortable telling him how much I hated being what I was. What he was.

I’d told Elliot. Quincy hadn’t asked. And there really wasn’t anyone else I talked to about heavy shit besides Noah.

I might have understood—in theory, anyway—why Roche was so very angry. Why he resented having contracted Arcana from one of his patients. What I didn’t understand was why he’d then turned that anger againstothers. I would have understood better if he’d targeted the person who’d gotten him sick.

But if I was right, he’d instead created the opportunity for patients to do the right thing, or the wrong thing. According to a text from Quincy, Maginot had liked my theory. Roche had made it possible for people to stay home andnottransmit the virus to their surgical teams. And then he’d punished them when they’d done otherwise.

Maybe he’d been lonely. Maybe he wanted other people to be like him, to understand his rage and frustration, but also his experience.

And maybe trying to understand the psychology of a killer was an exercise in madness, futility, or both.

I cut a ground turkey meatball in half, soaked it in tomato sauce, then shoved the whole thing in my mouth. I’d cooked—spaghetti, marinara sauce with roasted mushrooms, turkey meatballs. Parmesan for Noah to top it off. It was the first time I’d cooked in almost two months.

I’d made myself tired, doing it, but not exhausted. That was an improvement. I’d hoped to have enough stamina to also make something for dessert, but I hadn’t, falling back instead on the fact that Noah was keeping the freezer stocked with ice cream—regular for him, vegan for me. I’d wanted to do cookies or brownies… but I’d had to sit down—in Elliot’s repaired chair, my head resting on crossed arms.

When Noah’d come in and found me, he’d tried to shoo me out of the kitchen, but I’d insisted on finishing the entrée, at least. He’d made garlic bread—the basic kind, with butter spread across a loaf of french bread and sprinkled with garlic powder and a little parsley.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Noah asked when thestory finished and the news people moved on to the weather.

“No,” I told him. “No point.”

“Seth…” His tone held an edge of warning. Like he was calling me out on my bullshit.

I put my fork down. “I’m glad they caught him,” I said, knowing my voice sounded about as flat as Quincy’s had when she’d said basically the same thing to me. “But it doesn’tfixanything. It doesn’t heal Tierney or get me my job back, or bring back any of the people he killed.” This was always true of arrests, but most of the killers we caught hadn’t targeted us. I wasn’t used to being the victim—wasn’t used to the hollow feeling of injustice that I’d thought would be assuaged when the killer was caught… only to find that it wasn’t.

I suppose it made me more sympathetic to the victims of the crimes I’d been investigating for years, but I didn’t much like it. It made the work feel hollow. Still necessary, but hollow.

“You hate it, don’t you?” Noah asked me, then, and guilt stabbed through my gut. Because of course he knew that. Noah is my twin. He knows me better than I know myself—just as I know him better than he knows himself. We’d vowed once that we would share everything—our lives, our deaths, everything. It had been a childish promise, made in the heat of emotions fueled by hormones, but it was one that had bound us our whole lives.