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Indeed, in that moment, two figures burst through the doorway, carrying between them a prone form—an unconscious woman in a Nationalist uniform. Benedikt Montagov blinked in bewilderment, taken aback to see Juliette standing mere meters away from his cousin. Marshall Seo only snorted, waving his hand for them to move aside so they could enter the lab. It was after hours now. The worktables had been cleared and emptied, wiped down and polished to ready a nice, spacious surface that the Nationalist could be set down upon. As soon as she was placed upon the table, her body stilled, but her hair rustled about, sections of her scalp twitching.
Juliette pressed her hand to her mouth. Her eyes tracked the dots of blood marring the Nationalist’s neck, little crescent moons that seemed to be the result of sharp nails. This woman was infected with the madness. But she was not yet dead.
“Sorry to barge in,” Marshall Seo said. He sounded a little too proud of himself to be truly apologetic. “Are we interrupting anything?”
Roma placed his vial down on another worktable. The blue of its liquid glistened under the glaring white light.
“Only the answer to whether the Larkspur really made a true vaccine, but it can wait,” he said. “Lourens, you wanted to run tests on a live victim of the madness, yes?”
“Certainly, but—” Lourens gestured to Juliette. “There’s a lady in the room.”
“The lady is interested in seeing you run your tests, please,” Juliette said. With the exception of her brief surprise upon her first sighting of the Nationalist, it would have been impossible to find any sort of shock from Juliette. She spoke as if this were an everyday occurrence.
Lourens blew out a breath. He wiped his brow, his movements slow even while the world around him sped up at the appearance of this dying Nationalist. “Very well, then. Let us see if we can find a cure.”
He began.
Juliette watched in fascination as the scientist hauled out a box and retrieved its contents, filling the lab with equipment and machinery more fitting for a hospital than a drug-testing facility. Lourens took blood samples and tissue samples and—with his lips thinned—he even took hair follicles
from the Nationalist on the table, putting them under a microscope and jotting notes at record speed. Juliette folded her arms and tapped her foot, ignoring the whispering between the three White Flowers on the other side of the room. Her ears would begin to burn if she listened in. She didn’t know what other topic could possibly engross them so much, would prompt Roma to gesture wildly with his hands as he hissed in low tones to his two friends.
“This is unfortunate.”
Lourens’s remark rapidly reeled back in the attention of the three in the corner.
“What did you find?” Roma asked, breaking away from his friends.
“That is the very problem,” Lourens replied. “Nothing. Even with advanced equipment, I see nothing that the doctors across Shanghai don’t already see. There is nothing about this woman’s vitals that would suggest infection of any kind.”
Juliette frowned, then leaned on the table behind her, remaining silent.
Marshall demanded, “Then is there no way to cure the madness?”
“Impossible,” Roma countered immediately. For his sanity, he had to believe that a cure existed. He could not even allow himself to entertain the notion of a doomed investigation, of Alisa never waking again.
“Perhaps it is not that there is no cure,” Benedikt added, speaking more evenly. His words were all enunciated to the cleanest degree, like he had practiced the sentence in his head before he spoke it aloud. “You said that this madness was somebody’s creation, after all. If there is a cure, it is not for us to see. If there is a cure, only whoever engineered the madness has the instruction.”
Lourens pulled off his gloves. The machines around him were humming at different pitches, filling the lab with an almost musical air.
“Too many factors,” Lourens said. “Too many secrets, too much information we do not have. It would be absurd to try attempting it—”
“You haven’t tried everything yet,” Juliette said.
Every pair of eyes in the room—those who were conscious, anyway—turned to look at her. Juliette lifted her chin.
“You took her blood, looked at her skin—it’s all too human, too bodily.” Juliette walked toward the unconscious Nationalist, peered down at this entity of flesh, a vessel for life that had been altered. “This madness is not natural. Why try to engineer a cure the natural way? Slice her head open. Pull the insects out.”
“Juliette,” Roma chided. “That’s—”
Lourens was already picking up a scalpel, shrugging unceremoniously.
“Wait,” Benedikt said. “Last time—”
The tip of the blade sank into the Nationalist’s scalp. Lourens pulled gently on only a small section of her hair to make a parting and clear space to extract an insect.…
The Nationalist spasmed viciously. The entire table rocked, and Juliette didn’t know if it had shifted seriously enough to make a terrible creaking noise or if it was actually her ragged gasp that echoed through the room. One second the woman on the table could have rivaled the dead. The next she was writhing, her hand clutched to her chest and her legs rigidly straight. Her eyes remained closed. The only way they could tell when she died was when her hand fell from her chest and swung down from the table, waving back and forth like a heavy pendulum.
Her hair, once again, stirred. This time, it was not just the insects settling—they were leaving, some streaming down her neck in little lines of black, hurrying down her body in a mass evacuation with such order that they resembled a dark fluid.
