There was a sort of clean, clear beauty in that. Thirst was the only thing that reliably killed the gray, the only thing that consistently cut it down and left it withered on the pavement. Fire would burn it clean, but the spores could survive. Desiccation, on the other hand, was the scourge from which even the gray could not recover, and desiccation was the death I had deserved.
Until this space, this clean-smelling space, and this needle in my arm. Someone was saving me. Someone was saving me, and I didn’t know why, and I didn’t deserve it.
“Has she said anything?” The new voice was female, older and slower than the first, filled with the weight of so many horrible things. It was a voice that had seen things it could not unsee, done things it could not undo (the dog, the black dog in the gray world), and it was closer to me than any human voice had been since Nikki had died.
The gray had taken her from me. The gray took everything, in time.
“Not yet.” The first voice again. “She was pretty severely dehydrated, and she’s malnourished enough that it’s a miracle she was still alive.”
“It’s a miracle that any of us are still alive, Cadet.” The female voice moved closer still as it spoke, until it was originating only inches from my face. “Since you are among the living, Dr. Riley, I suggest you open your eyes and start acting like it. Your future depends on it.”
“I don’t have a future.” My voice was . . . rusty, almost, like the gray had eaten pits in its surface. How long had it been since I’d spoken? How many days, weeks, months since Nikki left me for the soft world, and I had no more cause to open my mouth for anything but eating and screaming? “I buried my future in the gray.”
“Megan Riley. Civilian. Last known survivor of Project Eden. Two degrees, the first in molecular biology, the second in molecular genetics. Widowed early in the outbreak, when your spouse, Rachel Riley, succumbed to a R. nigricans infection. Am I ringing any bells, Dr. Riley, or shall I begin reading your daughter’s school records? Where is Nicole?”
“Please stop.” I did my best to shout. My voice was barely a whisper, soft and gray and featureless, like the great gray world outside.
“I would be glad to stop, Dr. Riley. Only open your eyes, and confirm that you are uninfected.”
Opening my eyes would mean facing the fact that the clean white room I had constructed in my head was not a reality. It would mean going back to the gray, to the impossible ubiquity of the soft, broken world. I didn’t know if I could bear that. But I knew I couldn’t bear her saying my daughter’s name one more time.
I opened my eyes. My pupils constricted in the glare from the lights overhead, an involuntary tear squeezing out of either eye. I didn’t blink. I didn’t dare.
The white room was real.
The walls were blank, featureless, devoid of any stains or rotten patches. I hadn’t seen anything so beautiful since I’d pulled Nikki’s smooth-polished skull out of the soft rot that had been her body. A mirror dominated one wall, reflecting back the scene in front of it: a skeletal mannequin of a woman in a white-sheeted bed, an IV connected to her arm, the bones of her own skull showing through the tight canvas of her skin like a palimpsest of the person she had been, before the gray world came and took it all away. I recognized and rejected myself in the same moment. I was irrelevant.
The woman standing next to my bed had short-cropped brown hair and wore Army green. Her face was hard but not cruel, the face of a woman who had taken a stand against the wolves of the world, and while she might not have won, she had at least acquitted herself admirably. There was a man on the other side of the cot, younger and thinner than the woman, occupying himself with the dials on the machine that controlled my IV drip. I couldn’t really see his face, because of the way he was standing. His cheekbone looked melted somehow, like wax.
I looked away.
The smell of bleach and cleaning fluid was real; either that or my overtaxed mind had finally decided to reject the world as it was in favor of the world as I wished that it had been. I turned my head toward the woman in green, who had been waiting patiently while I got my wits about me.
“Dr. Megan Riley?” she asked again.
I nodded minutely.
“I am Colonel Handleman of the Army of the Commonwealth of North America,” she said. “Do you confirm that you are Dr. Megan Riley, last surviving member of the Project Eden research team?”
So they were all dead, then: all those foolish men and women who had decided I didn’t need to know about the contamination in their superfruit. They’d been trying to develop hardier, easier-to-grow produce that could thrive in the world’s changing climate, produce that would shrug off things like droughts and flooding and early frost. Maybe they would have succeeded, if they hadn’t accidentally engineered a flesh-eating strain of hyper-virulent bread mold first. Science was not a toy, and it objected to being treated like one.
“I was Megan Riley,” I said carefully. “I’m not really sure anymore.” Can a thing still be itself when it’s removed from all context? Maybe I had died out there in the gray, and this was the afterlife. That would explain the clean white walls and the sweet smell of bleach. I was dead, and this was paradise.
“Your identity is enough, Dr. Riley,” said Colonel Handleman. “I’m glad we found you. It is my duty to inform you that you are under arrest for treason against the former United States of America, the former nation of Canada, and the former United Mexican States.”
Ah. I knew this had been too good to be true.
There were some questions after that — where had I been, what had I been doing, how much of Project Eden had I been aware of — but I could barely keep my eyes open long enough to answer them. I was exhausted, I was broken, and I was done. If they wanted to arrest me, let them. If they wanted to put me on trial for what my people had done, let them do that too. It was no less than I deserved. Maybe mine hadn’t been the hand that held the test tube, but I had been the one who approved each procedure and test. The team had falsified data, and they had died for their crimes. I had believed their lies. Who was to say that my crime wasn’t just as bad as theirs?
I don’t know how long I was asleep. When I woke up, I was still in the white room, with the smell of bleach hanging in my nostrils. There was another smell underneath it, a deep, earthy smell. I wrinkled my nose automatically, rejecting it. This was the safe place. This was the clean place. There was no room here for smells like that one, which made me feel like spiders were running across the soft folds of my mind, looking for places to spin their webs.
“Ah, good, you’re awake.” Commander Handleman sounded almost cheerful. Maybe having someone to try for treason had improved her day. “Open your eyes, Dr. Riley. See what I’ve got for you.”
I didn’t want to. But she had been willing to talk about Nicole before, willing to remind me (of the gray, the gray eating away at her, my little girl, her skull clean and polished and smooth in my hands) what had happened to her. She didn’t know the details. She didn’t need to know the details. Anyone who had access to my files would be able to figure out that my wife and daughter were the most important things in my world. Rachel had died early. If Nicole wasn’t with me, then she was dead too, and it was my fault, because I had been the lab manager for Project Eden. This was all my fault.