“I’m a natural,” said Kira. “Move the cotton.” He lifted the cotton ball, and Kira clamped down with a bandage, wrapping it tightly around his finger. “You are now officially the oldest person I have ever drawn blood from in the maternity clinic. Now, just take two of these and you’ll feel better in no time.” She leaned in and gave him two quick kisses.
“Mmmm,” said Marcus, grabbing her by the waist, “how many of those did you say to take?”
“Just two,” said Kira, “but I suppose it couldn’t hurt to take more.” She leaned in again, licking her lips, but he stopped her with his hand.
“No,” he said firmly, “as a medic I just don’t feel comfortable with it. Medication is nothing to play around with—what if I overdose?” He pushed her gently away. “What if I become addicted?”
Kira pushed back toward him. “You are such a geek.”
“What if I build up a tolerance?” he asked, his face a rictus of mock horror. “Two now and two later and suddenly two won’t be enough—I’ll need four or eight or twenty just to take the edge off! Do you think I can handle that many kisses?”
Kira moved in again, turning on her most sultry voice. “I think you could find a way.”
He froze, watching her come closer, their faces almost touching, then stopped her at the last moment with a finger on her lips. “You know, the best way to prevent an overdose is to vary the active ingredient. That blond nurse at the south clinic is great at drawing blood; I could get two from you, two from her.”
Kira snarled playfully, grabbing his collar. “Oh no, you don’t.”
“Medically speaking, it would be perfectly safe,” said Marcus. “I could even get two from you and two from her at the same time. I might get a little dizzy, but—ow!”
“I still have the finger poker,” said Kira, pressing the sharp pin against his side just hard enough to let him know it was there. “You are a one-phlebotomist man, Marcus Valencio. You got that?”
“I got it,” said Marcus. “Speaking of which, I think my meds are wearing off.”
“No more today,” she said, pushing him back to his chair and picking up the tubes of blood. “It’s time to find out what kind of man you really are.” She took his blood to a medicomp in the corner, switched it on, and started preparing a sample while it booted up. Marcus followed, handing her glass slides and plastic pipettes and other little tools exactly when she needed them. She liked working with Marcus; it reminded her of the easy, unspoken rhythm they had sorting medicine on salvage runs.
She finished the slide, popped it into the medicomp bay, and slid her fingers across the screen; the computer detected the blood and offered the basic information.
“Type O positive,” said Marcus, reading over her shoulder, “good cholesterol, good glucose; hmm, a very high hotness count, that’s interesting.”
“Yes,” Kira murmured, fingers flying across the screen, “but look at all those arrogance particles.” Marcus started to protest, and she laughed, tapping out instructions for a deeper scan. An option popped up for a “Full Blood Analysis,” and she tapped yes; she’d never asked for this much information before, and apparently there was a simple “everything on the menu” option. It made her wonder how life had been different in the old world, when computers were used for every aspect of life, and not just in the hospitals where they could generate enough electricity to use them.
Mere seconds later the computer offered a list of various electrolytes and glucose molecules and other little bits in the blood; it would take longer for a full analysis, calculating what, for example, the glucose density suggested about his liver health, but the computer would update those details as it went. The next set of notes to appear were genetic modifications; they had been so common before the Break that almost everyone on the island had at least a few. Marcus had the genetic markers for in vitro gene correction, meaning his parents had scrubbed his DNA for congenital diseases before he was even born. He had another marker in his red blood cells, signifying some sort of bone marrow modification, but neither Kira nor the computer could tell exactly what it was without a full bone sample. It didn’t matter either way; Skousen and the other researchers had already examined the gene mods as a possible source of RM immunity, but it was a dead end—if anything, it seemed to make the subjects more vulnerable to the virus, not less. Kira moved on and started taking 3-D photos of the blood, examining individual portions of it for anomalies, when the computer chirped a small alert, and a glowing blue rhombus appeared in the corner of the screen. She frowned, glancing at Marcus, but he only shrugged and shook his head. She looked back at the screen and tapped the alert.
A new section expanded across the screen, one brief sentence with a handful of pictures attached: 27 Instances of RM Virus.
“What?” Kira whispered. The number blinked, updating to twenty-eight. She tapped one of the pictures, and it flew up into a corner of the screen, enlarging to a 3-D representation of RM. It was a rough, fat sphere, highlighted in yellow to stand out from the background image. It looked putrid and menacing.
The number in the alert continued to grow: 33 Instances. 38. 47. 60.
“This virus is everywhere,” said Kira, flicking through the images almost as fast as they popped up. She’d seen the structure of the virus before, of course, as part of her early medical studies, but never like this. Never so much of it, and never in a live human. “This can’t be right.”
“I’m not sick, obviously,” said Marcus.
Kira frowned, and studied one of the images more closely. The virus loomed over the other data like a predator, vast and insatiable. “It’s not telling me this is abnormal,” said Kira, “it’s just telling me it’s there. Someone told the computer how to recognize the virus, but didn’t tell it the virus was a cause for concern. How common is it?” She looked back at the alert and saw a small link to the database. She tapped it, and a new box appeared, a long, thin rectangle down the full right side of the screen. When she expanded it, she found it was a list of similar references. She sifted through it with her finger, pulling up page after page of links. She clicked one, and found another patient’s file, their blood filled with RM. She looked at another and another, all the same. She almost didn’t dare to say it out loud.
“We’re all carriers,” she said. “Every single survivor has it in us, all the time. Even if we’re resistant to it, we can still pass it along. That’s why the babies die—that’s why it gets them so fast. Even in an airtight room.” She looked up at Marcus. “We can never get away from it.” She sifted through the images of the virus, trying to remember everything she’d learned about how it spread and functioned. Part of RM’s danger was that it didn’t behave like a normal blood-borne virus—it lived in the blood, yes, but it lived in every other part of the body as well; it could be passed through blood, saliva, sex, and even the air. Kira pored over the images, looking at the structure of the virus, looking for anything that would key her in to the secret. It was a big virus, big enough to contain every function of a very complex system—though they still didn’t know exactly what that system was.
Marcus rubbed his eyes, dragging his hands slowly down his face.
“It’s what I told you before—the top minds left in the world have been studying RM for eleven years. They’ve looked at everything.”
“But there has to be something else,” said Kira, flipping furiously through the list.
“Live studies, dead studies, blood scrubbers, dialysis, breath masks. There are even animal studies in here. Kira, they’ve studied literally everything they could possibly get their hands on.”
She kept flipping through study after study, variable after variable. And as she reached the end of the list, something dawned on her.
There