Maybe then they could go home.
She didn't even recognize him at first.
He came staggering out of the woods on foot, limping, purple-skinned, his face a swollen mass of scabs and pulpy bruises. He wore a thermochrome windbreaker with one of the arms torn away, and he lurched into sight just as Clarke was about to shut down for the evening.
"Hi again," he said. A bubble of blood grew and popped at the corner of his mouth. "Miss me?"
"Holy shit." She hurried over and helped him towards the MI. "What happened to you?"
"'Nother r. A Big r. Fucking capital r. Took my bike." He shook his head; the gesture was stiff and clumsy, as if rigor mortis were already taking hold. "That other K around? Taka?"
"No. I'll look after you." She guided him to Miri's right mouth, took his weight as he sagged onto the extended tongue.
"You really a doctor?" The teenager managed to look skeptical through all the gore. "Not that I care," he added after a moment. "You can check me over any time."
Finally it sunk in: Miss me?
Clarke shook her head. "I'm sorry, but I've seen a lot of people lately. I don't know if I'd recognize you even without all the facework."
"Ricketts," the boy said.
She stepped back. "You brought—"
"I brought that stuff that's gonna kill ßehemoth," he said proudly through cracked and puffy lips.
You brought the stuff that's going to kill us all, she thought.
It shouldn't have been any kind of dilemma. Get him into the MI. Clean him up, fix the physical injuries, confirm the presence of any new predator eating him from the inside out.
Maybe he's clean. All the contaminated stuff was sealed up in that bag, maybe he never had direct contact—
Confirm Seppuku. Isolate the victim. Call for extraction.
Hope to God that if he's got it, he can't breathe it on me…
"Lie back. Get your feet up." She was at the rear panel almost before Ricketts had taken his feet off the ground. She stabbed the usual icon, heard the familiar hum as Miri swallowed. Clarke told the vehicle to close both mouths and run the standard diagnostic suite.
She left him in there while she sprayed herself down with disinfectant. Overkill, probably. Hopefully. She was wearing the requisite sterile gloves, and the 'skin of her tunic protected her under Ouellette's borrowed clothing—
Shit. The clothing.
She stripped it off and bagged it for incineration. The rest of her diveskin was in her backpack, stashed in the cab. The forsaken pieces, retrieved, wriggled back into place, seams sealing together into a comforting second skin. Diveskins weren't built with antipathogen properties explicitly in mind, but the copolymer dealt with salt ions as a matter of course; it had to keep out anything as large as a living cell.
When she got back to Miri's rear panel, the diagnostic cycle had finished. Rickets was suffering from a broken cheekbone, a hairline fracture of the left tibia, second-degree concussion, borderline malnutrition (better than average, these days), two impacted wisdom teeth, and a moderate roundworm infection. None of that was life-threatening; most of it could be fixed.
The diagnostic suite did not include a scan for Seppuku. Seppuku didn't exist in the standard database. Ouellette had cobbled together a hasty, separate subroutine in the wake of her discovery. It didn't do much—no helpful breakdown into first/second/end-stage categories, no list of associated macrosymptoms. No suggested course of treatment. Just a blood count, really. Clarke didn't even know how to interpret that simple number. Was there such a thing as a «safe» level for Seppuku?
Zero, she assumed. She tapped the icon to start the test. Ricketts twitched in the little spycam window as Miri drank a few more drops of his blood.
It would take a while to run the analysis. Clarke forced herself to focus on Ricketts's other problems in the meantime. The roundworms and the teeth could wait. Targeted vasodilators and calcium suppressants eased the concussion. Broken bones were almost triviaclass="underline" plant microcharge mesh into the affected areas to crank up osteoblast metabolism. Clarke had been doing that almost since the day she'd become a rifter.
"Hey!" Rickett's voice sounded tinny and startled through Miri's intercom. "I can't move!"
"It's the neuroinduction field," Clarke told him. "Don't worry about it. It just keeps you from jerking around during the cut-and-paste."
Beep.
And there it was. 106 particles per milliliter.
Oh Jesus.
How long had he been wandering around in the woods? How far had he spread it? The person who'd beaten him up: was he spreading it now, had he invited Seppuku in through the raw oozing skin of his knuckles? How many days before he discovered how much he'd really paid for a lousy motorbike?
Isolate the vector. Call in a lifter.
A lifter. It seemed so strange to even contemplate. She had to keep reminding herself: they're not monsters after all. They're not fire-breathing dragons sent down from the heavens to burn us out of existence. They're working for the good guys.
We're on theirside now.
Still.
First things first. Ricketts had to be—
decirculated
— isolated until someone came by to collect him. Problem was, there weren't too many ways to do that. The MI would be useless for other field work as long as it kept him sequestered, and Clarke seriously doubted whether Freeport had had hot-zone isolation facilities even before it fell into ruin.
He can't stay here.
She watched the monitor for a few moments, watched Miri's jointed limbs and laser eyes putting Humpty together again. Then she called up the anesthesia menu. She chose isoflurane.
"Go to sleep," she whispered.
Within moments, Ricketts' wide, nervous eyes fluttered closed. It was like watching a lethal injection.
"Do you know who I am, you miserable fetus-fucker?" the demon spat.
No, she thought.
"I'm Lenie Clarke!"
The system crashed.
"Yeah," Clarke said softly. "Right."
She traded a dark view for a brighter one. Phocoena's viewport looked out on a muddy plain, not quite featureless; the muddy tracks of tunneling animals, the holes of invertebrate burrows stippled the bottom. A lone crab scuttled lethargically in the dim distance.
The ocean overhead was murky green, and growing brighter. The sun must be rising.
"What…?"
She hung the headset on the armrest and turned in the copilot's seat. Phocoena was too small to warrant a dedicated med cubby, but the fold-down bunk on the starboard side pulled double-duty in a pinch. It tucked away into the same kind of molded indentation that held the bunks on the opposite bulkhead; unlike its counterparts, though, its thicker base bulged from the wall in a smooth distension of plumbing and circuitry. When in use it folded down like a wide, short drawbridge, hung by twin monofilament threads spooled from its outer corners. Those threads, the edges of the pallet itself, and the overhanging bulkhead formed the vertices of a little tent. Isolation membrane stretched across the planes between.
Ricketts was trapped within. He lay on his side with one arm flopped against the membrane, distending it outward.
"Hi," Clarke said.
"Where's this?"
"We're underwater." She climbed back from her seat into the main cabin, keeping her head low; the curving hull didn't leave a lot of headroom.
He tried to sit up. He had even less headroom than she did. "What am I, you know…"
She took a breath. "You've got a—a bug. It's contagious. I thought it would be best to keep you isolated."