He turned back to the bed. Lenie was already half-dressed. Her face was a blank mask; it framed her eyes perfectly.
She noticed his gaze. She smiled again. Marq Quammen felt a tiny chill.
"Nice meeting you," she said. "Go, and sin some more."
Mask
The bloodhound nipped him on the finger and fixed him with one dark, suspicious eye.
GT analog my ass, Desjardins thought. What if it doesn't work? What if Colin's lying, what if—
The eye blinked and turned green.
Colin swept past security as Desjardins's guest. Guilt Trip wasn't an honor bestowed upon everyone, not even upon all those who might have legitimate commerce within the halls of the Entropy Patrol. Colin passed beneath eyes that stripped flesh to the bone—thoracic implants, Desjardins noticed, although the machines seemed to think them innocuous enough—but there was no need to drink his blood or read his mind. He was, after all, in the trusted company of Achilles Desjardins, who would never dream of granting access to any potential security threat.
This fucker could kill me, Desjardins thought.
Colin closed the cubby door behind them; Desjardins linked his eyes into the panel and split the feed to the wall so Colin could eavesdrop. He told the board to route incoming assignments around him until farther notice. The system, confident that no minion would shirk responsibility without good reason, acknowledged promptly.
Alone again, with the man who carried long needles in his pocket.
"What do you want to see?" Desjardins asked.
"Everything," Colin said.
"That's pretty sparse," Colin remarked, studying the plot. "Not your usual pandemic."
He must have meant inland; behemoth was sprouting everywhere along the coast.
Desjardins shrugged. "Still has some trouble invading low-pressure habitat. Needs a few dice rolls to get a foothold."
"It seems to be doing well enough on the Strip."
"Superdense population. More dice rolls."
"How's it getting around?"
"Not sure. It didn't book a commercial flight." Desjardins pointed at the scattered blotches east of the Rockies. "These new hits just started showing up a couple of weeks ago, and they're not consistent with any of the major travel corridors." He sighed. "I suppose we're lucky the quarantine held as long as it did."
"No, I mean how does it transmit? Respiratory aerosols, skin contact? Body fluids?"
"In theory it could get around on the bottom of somebody's boot. But you'd probably need more than a dirty boot to carry critical mass, so the secondary wouldn't persist."
"Human reservoirs, then."
Desjardins nodded. "Alice says it'd be nice and comfy inside a body. So yeah, it'd probably spread like some kind of conventional infection. Then when a vector takes a shit or pukes in the grass, you've got an innoculation into the outside world."
"Who's Alice?"
"Just another 'lawbreaker. Shared the assignment." Desjardins hoped Colin didn't ask for details. Anyone that man got curious about might have reason to worry.
But Colin only pointed at the display. "Your vectors. How many got past the mountains?"
"Don't know. Not my case any more. I'd guess only a few, though."
"So who are they?"
"I'd say people who worked on the Beebe construction contract. Infected before anyone knew there was a problem."
"So why aren't they dead, if they were infected first?"
"Good question." Another shrug. "Maybe they aren't infected. Maybe they're carrying it some other way."
"In a jar or something?" Lubin seemed almost amused by that. "Johnny Appleseed with a grudge?"
Desjardins didn't know and didn't ask. "Wouldn't have to be deliberate, necessarily. Maybe just some dirty piece of heavy equipment that gets moved around a lot."
"But you'd be able to track that. Even a bunch of infected contract workers should be easy enough to track down."
"You'd think." Didn't seem to be much of a problem to the guys with the flamethrowers, anyway…
"Yet you couldn't find any candidates in the record."
"No living ones, anyway."
"What about the rifters?" Colin suggested. "That whole scene seems to be fashionable these days. Maybe there's a connection."
"They were all—"
— killed in the quake. But the bottom dropped out of his stomach before he could finish the thought.
What about the rifters?
The scanners at security had seen machinery in Colin's chest.
Desjardins, you idiot.
The rifters.
One of them was standing right at his shoulder.
A single petrified moment to wonder which road had led to this:
Let's-call-him-Colin had risen from the ashes of Beebe Station and was pursuing his own apocalyptic agenda. Johnny Appleseed with a grudge, whatever the fuck that meant—
Or:
Let's-call-him-Colin hadn't been stationed at Beebe at all, he just had a—a personal interest. A friend, perhaps, a fellow rifter sacrificed for the greater good. But maybe Colin wasn't satisfied with the greater good. Maybe Colinwanted closure.
Or:
Thoracic implants didn't necessarily equal an amphibious lifestyle. Maybe Let's-call-him-Colin wasn't even a rifter. He sure as shit wasn't an ordinary one, anyway. How many of those neurotic head cases would have been able to find Desjardins in the first place? How many could have broken into his home, laid him out, read his mind, threatened his very life without breaking a sweat?
Am I infected? Am I dying? Am I leaving traces for someone like me to sniff out?
Nearly a second had passed since the words had died in Desjardins's throat
I've got to say something. Jesus, what do I say?
"Actually—" he began.
He wants me to search Beebe's personnel files. What if he's in there? Of course he won't be, he wouldn't blow his own cover that wouldn't make sense—
"— I'm way—"
Whatever he wants he doesn't want me to knowhe wants it, oh no, he's being way too casual about this, just another possibility to follow up, right—
He won't push. He won't force it—
"— ahead of you on that," Desjardins finished easily. "I checked the rifters already. I checked everyone who had anything to do with Beebe. Nothing. Nobody's touched their bank accounts, no watch transactions, nothing at all since the quake."
He glanced up at Colin, kept his voice level. "But they were pretty much at Ground Zero when the Big One went off. Why would you think they'd survive?"
Colin looked back neutrally. "No reason. Just being systematic."
"Mmm." Desjardins drummed his fingers absently on the edge of the board. His inlays lit with visual confirmation: he'd opened a channel directly to his visual cortex, without—he glanced at the wall just to be sure—without sending an echo to any external displays.
"You know, I was thinking." Another idle tap on the panel; a luminous keypad sprang up in his head, invisible beyond his own flesh. "About why the primary vectors aren't dying as fast as the people on the Strip." His eyes darted subtly across the pad, focusing for the merest instant here, and here, and here on the characters. Letters brightened at his glance, began forming a command. "Maybe a nastier strain's developed out there." B—e—e— "Maybe the higher population density—all those extra dice rolls—maybe they just lead to a higher mutation rate."