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“Look who’s conscious,” Edwin said.

“Hi,” I said weakly. “How’s Nadine?”

“Still in quarantine, no symptoms. She’ll probably be released in a day or two. I’m afraid you took the brunt of it.”

“And do we know yet what the ‘it’ might be?”

Edwin cleared his throat. “As I’m sure you’ve gathered, you walked into a trap. We’re still holding Henrik Soren. Going to charge him with attempted murder.”

“What’s Soren’s story?” I asked.

“Complete ignorance. He swears he just made a delivery to a man at that house on Thursday morning.”

“No names?” I asked.

“He gave us a generic physical description and a dark-web handle, which is, as you know—”

“Useless.” I strained to sit up, my ribs screaming. Edwin helped to arrange the pillows behind me. “Have you been over to the basement where it happened?”

“I have. We found the remains of two ice bombs. Definitely the strangest IED I’ve ever seen.”

“Was the ice H2O or—”

“H2O, formed into incredibly hard spheres. The explosion turned the ice into fléchettes. That’s what punctured your suit. And you.”

“Were you able to recover any of the melted water or ice fragments?”

“Yes. And we just finished sequencing a sample. Those ice spheres held a virus in supercold suspension.”

I was suddenly wide awake.

“Pretty ingenious actually,” he went on. “The shrapnel gets inside you through superficial cuts and melts without doing lasting physical damage.”

“Oh god.”

He put his gloved hand on my shoulder. “Before you freak out, it’s none of the Filoviridae family viruses you’ve probably been having nightmares about. It’s not Ebola or Marburg. We know it’s not smallpox. It actually has characteristics of the Orthomyxoviridae family.”

“Influenza?”

“Yes.”

“Synthetic?”

“That’s the assumption.”

And then I asked the question I almost didn’t want an answer to. “Did it encode a Scythe complex?”

He nodded.

Ah, fuck. I’d been infected, not only with a virus of unknown origin, but with a payload encoding the most powerful genome-modifying system ever created. Almost certainly it had been designed, not to make me sick, but to infect some or all of the cells in my body, potentially editing and rewriting portions of my DNA.

“Do you know which genes and pathways were targeted?” I asked.

“Not yet, but we’re running a test and a full analysis of your white blood cell sample.”

I tried to brace myself against the wave of fear, but I couldn’t hold it back. It simply leveled me. This was the worst possible news, though not exactly a surprise. I’d lain on the dirt floor in the basement as the ice melted inside me. But it made the reality of my situation solid in a way it hadn’t been before.

Edwin reached over the railing on my bed and patted my shoulder. “I want you to hear this from me,” he said. “We’re going to find who did this and take a serious shit in their coffee. You just focus on getting better.”

“I’ll try, sir.”

He was trying to comfort me, but catching the culprit wouldn’t really help if these DNA changes turned out to be lethal. A Scythe system could wreak all manner of havoc on my genome.

If a person’s genetic code were written into a standard-size book, that book would be a twenty-story tome consisting of three billion permutations of the letters A, C, G, and T, which represent the four nucleobases—adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine. The specific arrangement of these four nucleobases creates the code for all biological life on the planet. This code is the genotype, and the way it physically expresses in a life-form (eye color, for instance), combined with its interactions with the environment, is called the phenotype. But understanding the correlation between genotype and phenotype—which DNA code programs which traits—still largely eludes us.

Edwin rose from the chair. Then he walked to the door, zipped it open, and stepped through to the other side.

As I watched him zip me back into my universe of sealed plastic, I felt truly alone.

It reminded me of my time in prison and the crushing sense that others could come and go.

But I was here.

Trapped with my changing genome.



* * *



—

They started me on a course of interferon gamma and a set of new antivirals.

I spiked one more fever the following night and then began a period of rapid improvement. My energy roared back. My appetite returned. I started sleeping through the night.

Within three days, my bandages were gone, my ice-lacerations scabbing over.

My ribs still hurt, but I was desperate to get out of bed and walk around—even if it was only up and down the ICU corridor.

I longed for a real bathroom instead of my humiliating bedpan.

But they wouldn’t let me leave my bubble.

Because they knew almost nothing about the hacked strain of influenza I’d been infected with, Dr. Singh would take no chances. Though I was symptom free, I was still shedding the virus, which meant I could be contagious to others.