Chapter 3: Dominant Strain
"We're not taking the elevator," Leon said.
"Obviously we're not taking the elevator."
"Just making sure we're on the same page."
You took the east stairwell. Seven floors, Leon first, gun up, you a step behind with the cooler strap cutting into your shoulder. Below you, faint at first and then not faint at all, came the sound of the lobby doors sliding open and staying open, and a great many feet crossing a marble floor.
"How long until they're on us?" Leon asked without turning.
"If he's directing them, as long as he wants."
"That's not comforting."
"It wasn't meant to be."
On the fifth-floor landing he stopped so suddenly you almost ran into his back. He turned, and in the red glow of the exit sign his face was very serious.
"When we get up there," he said, "you stay behind me. If I tell you to run, you run. You don't stop for samples, you don't stop to correct me, you don't stop for him. Promise me."
"Leon."
"Promise me."
You looked at him. Eighteen years of being the man they sent, and here he was on a stairwell asking for one thing.
"I'll run," you said, "if running is the right call."
He closed his eyes briefly, like someone who had expected exactly that answer and was furious at himself for liking it. "Fine. Good enough."
The research wing smelled like Earl Grey.
That was the first thing that undid you. Halvorsen had drunk it by the pot, black, steeped until it was bitter, and the smell of bergamot drifting down the dim corridor took you straight back to late nights in his old lab, arguing over gel images, him tapping a pen against his teeth and saying wrong, wrong, think about it again.
The office door at the end of the hall stood open. Warm lamplight spilled out across the linoleum.
He was sitting behind his desk.
He looked well. That was the obscene part. Better than he had at the end, when the funding stress had grayed his face. He wore the same moth-eaten cardigan, the same reading glasses pushed up into his white hair. A china teapot sat on a tray beside a stack of journals. Only his eyes were wrong. They were the same color as the hosts' downstairs, that banked-coal red, but bright and sharp, utterly awake.
"Hello, Doctor," he said to you, and smiled. "You got thin."
"You got dead," you said.
"Ah. Yes. Sorry about that. It was the only way to make the funders stop calling." He gestured at the chairs across from him. "Sit. Agent Kennedy, you can keep pointing that at me if it helps you, but I'd ask you to consider that there are two hundred and forty people in the lobby downstairs who will do exactly what I tell them, and I'm quite attached to my student."
Leon didn't lower the gun. He didn't sit. He moved two steps to his left so that he was between you and the desk without making it look like that was what he was doing.
"What do you want?" he said.
"Her." Halvorsen said it simply. "I want her to see it. To understand it." He leaned forward, and you saw it then, under the open collar of his shirt: a thick ridge of tissue running up the side of his throat, pulsing gently in time with something that wasn't his heart. "She's the only one who could. Do you know what I've done, my dear? I took Las Plagas, a weapon, a crude cult tool for making peasants into puppets, and I perfected it. A dominant strain that doesn't consume the host's mind. It shares it. I'm still me. I'm more me. And I can feel every one of them." His eyes went soft and distant. "Two hundred and forty minds, like voices in another room. It's the most beautiful thing in the world."
"They're people," you said. Your voice shook. "Marcus is down there. He brought me clementines. He has a daughter."
"And now he has purpose." Halvorsen spread his hands. "Join me. You'd be a dominant too. You'd be my equal. Not my student. My colleague."
Leon made a small noise. "Yeah, I've heard this pitch," he said. "Several times. It's never as good as the guy making it thinks it is."
Halvorsen ignored him. He looked only at you.
And you looked at him, and you looked at the ridge on his neck, and at the lamp on his desk, and the bright, cool overhead fixtures in the corridor behind you that were dark, and the windows he had covered with blackout film, and the reading glasses pushed up and never once pulled down.
Then you looked at the ceiling.
Saint Brendan's had been built five years ago by people who wanted it to look like a place where nothing bad happened. And every patient room, every surgical suite, every research lab in the building had been fitted with the same thing you'd seen in the brochures. An automated disinfection system. Ceiling-mounted ultraviolet arrays, the high-intensity kind, designed to flood an empty room with germicidal light between patients and kill every microbe on every surface in ninety seconds.
There was a control panel by the door. You had walked right past it.
"Leon," you said, very calmly. "When I tell you, close your eyes."
He didn't look at you. "Why?"
"Because I understand it," you said, and lunged for the wall.
Halvorsen was faster than a man his age had any right to be. He came over the desk in a single leap and something burst out of his throat, a whip of pale tissue thick as your wrist, and it would have taken your head off if Leon hadn't been there. He was just there, the way he'd been all night, his shoulder slamming into Halvorsen mid-air and both of them crashing into the bookcase in a rain of journals.
You hit the panel. Your hands found the override without thinking. EMERGENCY CYCLE. CONFIRM ROOM VACANT.
"Now!" you shouted, and squeezed your eyes shut, and pressed YES.
The light came on like a sound.
Even through your eyelids it was violet and enormous. Halvorsen screamed, a sound with two voices in it, and you heard Leon swear and the wet slap of something hitting the floor. You counted. Five. Six. Seven. You felt the heat of it on your face.
Then you heard the shot.
One. Clean. Unhurried.
You opened your eyes. The cycle was still running, the room drowned in harsh purple, and Leon was standing in the middle of it with his forearm thrown over his eyes and his gun pointed at the floor, where something long and pale lay in two pieces on the carpet, no longer moving.
Halvorsen lay against the ruined bookcase. His eyes were brown. Just brown. Tired, human, and confused.
You went to him. You couldn't not. You knelt in the scattered journals and took his hand and he looked at you without recognition at first, and then with it.
"Wrong," he said faintly. "Wrong, wrong. Think about it again."
And then he was gone.
They reached the helipad at six-fifteen, just as the fog started to burn off the river in long pink strips.
Downstairs, without their dominant, the hosts had simply stopped. Hunnigan's voice in Leon's ear said the Guard had found dozens of them sitting in the lobby and the parking lot, dazed and passive, and that the juveniles in their bodies were already dying off without a controlling signal. Some of them, she said, might recover. You thought about Marcus and his clementines and let yourself hope, just a little, like holding your hand near a stove to see if it's still warm.
The helicopter was a dot over the water. Five minutes out.
You sat on the edge of the pad with your legs dangling over the drop and the cooler beside you and watched the city come up out of the mist, roof by roof. Leon came and sat down next to you. He had a fresh cut on his cheekbone and his jacket was a lost cause.
"You didn't run," he said.
"Running wasn't the right call."
"I noticed." He looked out at the river. "UV disinfection arrays. I never would've thought of that."
"You'd have shot him eventually."
"Eventually." He turned his head and looked at you. "You'd have been dead by then. So would I."
The rotor sound got louder. The wind picked up, tugging strands of hair across your face.
"I have to go back to Washington," he said. "Debrief. Reports. They'll want you there too, probably for weeks. Somebody sold him that sample. Somebody's going to sell it again." He hesitated, which you had not seen him do once all night. "They'll probably assign you protection until it's sorted."
"Probably," you said.
"I could ask for the detail."
You looked at him. At the receipt still folded in his chest pocket. At the way he was watching your face, very carefully, like it was a lock he'd only get one try at.
"You'd have to learn the difference between a virus and a parasite," you said.
"I already did." That small thing happened at the corner of his mouth, and this time it kept going until it was an actual smile, crooked and a little shy, the least professional thing you had ever seen him do. "Viruses don't text."
You laughed. You hadn't meant to. It came up out of your chest all at once, and then you were kissing him, or he was kissing you, you would never be totally sure which one of you moved first. His hand came up to your jaw, careful, careful, like everything he did. He tasted like cold air and bad coffee. When you pulled back, his forehead stayed against yours, and his eyes were closed.
"That's not standard protection protocol," you said.
"I'll put it in the report," Leon murmured. "Third with the pictures."
The helicopter settled onto the pad beside you in a storm of wind and noise. Leon stood, offered you his hand, and pulled you up, and kept holding it a beat longer than he needed to.
Then his earpiece crackled, and you watched his face change.
"Say again, Hunnigan," he said. He listened. His grip tightened on your fingers. "How many?"
The rotors were slowing. In the sudden quiet you heard her answer as a thin buzz, too faint to make out, and you watched it land on his face.
"Copy," Leon said. He let the earpiece go and looked at you, and then down at the city, all those rooftops coming up pink out of the fog.
"They got into his funding," he said. "Shell company, offshore. Halvorsen didn't buy one dominant sample." He breathed out. "He bought five."
You thought of the man on the carpet seven floors below, with his brown eyes and his cardigan.
"One was in him," you said.
"Yeah." Leon's hand was still holding yours. He didn't let go. "So where are the other four?"