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For James A. Moore

1

Later, Maeve Sinclair will think of the girl with the pink balloon, and her heart will ache with a sting unlike anything she’s felt before. She’ll feel that sting forever, or for as long a forever as the world is willing to give her. In her mind’s eye, the little girl’s hand will always clutch the balloon string so fiercely, and Maeve knows it’s because the girl lost her balloon at the Fourth of July parade the year before. When you’re three years old, that’s the sort of thing that can scar you, and little Callie Ellroy was three last year when she watched her Mickey Mouse balloon sail into the blue and vanish forever.

It’s not Mickey this year, just an ordinary pink balloon, even a bit underinflated, as if Callie didn’t want to invest quite as much of her now-four-year-old adoration this time around. Yet she holds the string so tightly and smiles so brightly, showing all her crooked teeth and every ounce of the joy bursting within her, that Maeve is sure the little girl can’t help but love that balloon. A little deflated or not. Plain, ordinary, boring balloon or not. Her sneakers are the same pink as the balloon, and though Maeve can’t hear the words she speaks when she tugs her mother’s arm and points at her sneakers, the pantomime is enough to communicate just how much delight she’s taken from this moment of pink epiphany.

Maeve has watched Callie Ellroy grow. She can remember the moment five years ago when Biz Ellroy—short for Elizabeth—had rushed up to her, beaming, and shared the news that she was pregnant with the little bean that would become Callie. Biz had even picked out her name already.

At twenty-nine, the memory makes Maeve feel unsettlingly adult. She’d been standing in nearly the same spot where she stands today, watching a troupe of clowns toss candy from the back of an antique fire truck while the Conway High School marching band blatted on trumpets and thundered on drums in a rough approximation of “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” But she’d been twenty-four then, still young enough that older people hesitated to take her seriously. Now she’s on the verge of thirty, unmarried, no children, steadily employed but not in love with her job, and looking for a change.

Maeve gets a little shiver as she watches Biz holding Callie’s hand. The same antique fire engine goes by, probably the same clowns on the back, throwing the same stale candy. Only Maeve figures the fire engine is a little more antique now than it was then, and aren’t they all, really?

Time is fucking merciless, Maeve thinks. It doesn’t ever slow down for you, even when you need it to. Even when, for instance, you still live in your hometown and can never escape the certainty that there’s another life for you out there, somewhere. Maeve wants to work to improve people’s lives, but after four years studying global health and public policy at George Washington University, dipping her toe in the water of half a dozen D.C. internships, she felt lost. She came back to Jericho Falls and got a job working for CareNH, a White Mountains political action committee. The money sucks, but she loves New Hampshire. She loves her parents and her brother and sister. Over the past year, she’s foolishly allowed an old flame to reignite, and that makes it harder to leave and all the more important that she does.

The new job’s in Boston. A nonprofit called Liquid Dreams, which she thinks is a stupid name, but she admires the hell out of the company’s mission, fighting for clean drinking water in the United States and around the globe, and fighting against corporations trying to monopolize control of the water supply. It’s a fight worth having, and so what if her job is as an events coordinator and not impacting the company’s political efforts? She’ll be serving that admirable goal, and that’s what matters to her.

It’s time to leave Jericho Falls. She just has to tell her family. And she has to tell her … Nathan. Her Nathan. She guesses he’s her boyfriend, but that seems too concrete a word for the tentative way they dance around each other. Or, more accurately, the way she dances around him. Maeve is sure he’ll want to carry on seeing her, even if it means a long-distance relationship. Three hours in the car doesn’t seem that long to begin with, but Maeve already knows it’s going to wear on them, and the truth is she never really thought of her thing with Nathan as long-term, just like she never thought she’d stay home for seven years after college. Both things just sort of happened. She wonders if she ought to leave both of them behind—Jericho Falls and her relationship. Nathan’s sweet and a comfort to be around, but so were the plush animals in her childhood bedroom.

Today’s parade feels like an ending of sorts, and maybe a beginning, too. The mayor rolls by, sitting in the back of an old Cadillac convertible with his leathery wife, who’s never quite learned how to apply her makeup. Maeve feels a rush of love for the old doll and for her town, because in other places the mayor’s wife might’ve been replaced by a younger, blonder version, but in Jericho Falls, she looks just the way you’d expect her to look. The future is going to catch up to her town soon, and though Maeve yearns to be a part of the rush of the real world, it saddens her to think of Jericho Falls changing. She thinks, momentarily, that the mayor’s wife should ditch him for a younger, more attractive husband and then run for mayor herself. If the future has to come to Jericho Falls, Maeve wants it to arrive in heels.

All these thoughts spin through her head while she glances around the crowd. Her dad, Ted, munches an ice cream sandwich from a street vendor. He’s with Rue Crooker, maybe his best and oldest friend, so close that when the kids were little they called her Auntie Rue. Maeve’s brother, Logan, is over beside their mom, on the other side of the street, which is a good illustration of their lives since Ellen Sinclair finally had enough of her husband’s alcoholism and changed the locks on the house. None of it has been as ugly as Maeve feared, but it hasn’t been pretty, either. Her dad’s had a rough time with addiction, but he’s kicked the pills at least, and he’s trying, which is maybe why Ellen and Ted can stand across the street from each other and offer a smile and subdued wave.

Maeve likes that. They’ll always be family, thanks to the three children they share, so it’s nice if they can manage not to hate each other. The youngest member of Maeve’s family finally arrives, her twenty-one-year-old sister, Rose, who grins nervously as she approaches their mother and Logan while holding hands with her girlfriend in public for the very first time.

This is the Sinclair family today, doing their best to reenact a tradition begun decades earlier. The Jericho Falls Fourth of July parade, held at 11:00 A.M. on the actual goddamn Fourth of July, no matter the weather and no matter the stink some locals put up because they like the parade but they want to be on vacation somewhere nicer, somewhere with a great fireworks display, on the actual holiday. Other cities and towns cave to the pressure, celebrate a few days before or even after the Fourth, but not Jericho Falls. Fuck that. It’s another thing that makes Maeve proud of her town.

She’ll dwell on all of this later. She’ll turn it over in her head, wondering if there was something she could have done differently, anything that might have changed the outcome. If she had been paying more attention to her family, or the parade, or the crowd instead of being lost inside her head and worrying about breaking the news of her new job and impending departure to her mom, would she have been able to save lives?

Would she have been able to save herself?

Of course, she’ll never know.

The car comes from Kingsbury Road, which is perpendicular to Main Street. Over the squeal of a coterie of kilted bagpipers she hears another sound, someone’s music turned up obnoxiously loud, a 1970s pop confection blaring from car speakers, and she scowls at how inconsiderate people can be. This moment ought to be about the parade, about the town celebrating its history and its future and the very nature of Jericho Falls as a safe place, a nice place to live in a world where such places grow rarer by the day.

Biz Ellroy drops her bag of popcorn into the road. Somehow there’s a tiny lull in the bleating music, and in that lull Maeve can hear little Callie cry out, “Oh no, Mummy!” as mother and daughter release each other’s hands. Callie hops off the curb as Biz reaches for the fallen red-and-white striped bag, trying to rescue whatever she can, which is understandable when a little bag of popcorn costs six bucks. In that same lull, in the same sliver of a moment between bagpipe bleats, Maeve hears the roar of a car engine.

It’s a parade. No engines are roaring. Some are groaning, some are putt-putt-putting, as floats and antique cars and baton twirlers inch up Main Street. A big old Ford pickup truck tows a flatbed carrying a bunch of Little League players and a float that’s supposed to look like a miniature Fenway Park. The kids swing their bats at imaginary pitches while the pickup truck lurches and groans in its deep, pickup truck voice. But this other engine roars, and its roar is not coming from the parade, not from in front of Maeve and her family but behind them, over Maeve’s right shoulder. She’s about to turn and search for the source of that roar when she sees Biz drop her popcorn and Callie pull away from her mom and both of them go for the bag with that “Oh no, Mummy!”

Callie’s fist is tightly closed on the string of that pink balloon. You’d damn well better believe it.

Biz picks up the popcorn bag. Smiling, she takes a couple of kernels out and tosses them at her wild-haired little girl with the big blue eyes, and she steps back onto the curb, beckoning for Callie to follow.

The engine roars. People shout warnings and scream in panic, and some of them run or dive or hurl themselves out of the way as a sparkling silver BMW careens from Kingsbury Road onto Main Street, 1970s pop music crying from the open windows, not slowing for the people who can’t get out of the way in time. Not slowing for Mrs. Kestler, who taught Maeve science in middle school, or Geoff Strahan, whose brutal father trained him from birth to be a major-league baseball player, only to have him go to law school, come home to open his practice, and coach Little League.

Not slowing for other people, some of whose faces Maeve knows and some she doesn’t.

Not slowing for her sister, Rose, whose girlfriend, Priya, is knocked over in the rush to flee. Rose helps Priya to her feet, but it’s too late for them to run. Maeve’s father discards his ice cream sandwich as he breaks through the crowd. He’s screaming. Maeve is sure he won’t reach them in time, but somehow he does, hands outstretched. Ted shoves his youngest child and her girlfriend out of the way, the effort halting his own momentum, leaving him stranded for the last vital second before the BMW’s grille will make contact. Ted jumps as high as he can, avoiding the impact of the front end, but he hits the hood, the windshield, goes up and over the car and smashes down onto the pavement in its wake.

The car roars onward. Maeve screams for her father, runs toward where he has fallen.

People are running. Screaming. The bagpipers have ceased, but up and down Main Street, there are still high school musicians playing horrible screeching noises on instruments most of them will never touch again after graduation, and which some of them will never touch again after today … after this Fourth of July with its sweet-smelling breeze and glorious blue sky and the promise of a perfect night of barbecue and baseball ahead.

But at least those kids will be alive.

Maeve kneels by her father, sees his blood and doesn’t want to touch him, afraid to hurt him further. He’s breathing, and this is good. He is alive. She looks up, tracking the car’s trajectory. Across the street, she sees Kristie Burns, her best friend since the seventh grade, mirroring her expression. The BMW slews sideways, skidding on clothing and blood, bumping over someone’s legs, then seems to leap toward the curb as it takes aim at more spectators. Or maybe the driver is just trying to get around the Ford pickup and the Little League float. Kristie Burns is in its path, and as Maeve watches, it appears that she has locked eyes with the driver, who maybe guns the engine or maybe not, but in the last moment Kristie staggers backward three steps and falls on her ass and the BMW leaps the curb and strikes a fire hydrant, saving Kristie’s life. The collision is no symphony of tearing metal but a single whump and a kind of grinding whine as the car’s engine begins to realize it’s going to die.

Water pours out from under the crumpled BMW hood and pools beneath the car, spreading into the road, beginning to wash away a bit of the blood that has been spilled. So many people are shouting. Police sirens wail, but they could just as easily be a part of the parade as the signal that it has ended, that people are dead.

Maeve spots something overhead, drifting in the air. Little Callie Ellroy’s pink balloon.

She spins, searching the crowd, scanning the bodies in the bloodied road, and her gaze lands on Biz, on her knees on the asphalt, mouth open in a silent scream, eyes full of tears, holding a single pink sneaker in both hands.

In that moment, the driver’s door on the BMW swings open wide. A bare foot stretches out and touches the pool of water spreading from the shattered hydrant.

And the day gets so much worse.

The driver slips from behind the wheel and staggers to his dirty feet. He’s wearing blue cotton pajama pants and a T-shirt that looks as if it must have been white before all the bloodstains. He’s been shot at least twice, maybe three times if the reason he’s staggering is a third bullet wound in his left leg. The first two are to his torso—one bloodstain has its locus at his right shoulder, the other about four inches to the left of his heart. He’s dying, Maeve knows. One look is all it takes to see the shadow of death looming over him. But the driver limps away from the car, wild eyes scanning the buildings beyond the crowd. He begins to stumble toward the brick post office building, or maybe toward the alley between the post office and the bookstore café. There’s a parking lot behind them, and beyond that a hill slopes through a maze of short streets and then to the river.

He doesn’t make it to the river. He doesn’t even make it to the post office. People shout. Others are still screaming, trying to help the people he’d struck with his car, some of whom are beyond help. Distant sirens grow not so distant, more urgent, as if now that their purpose has turned dire, the sound reflects that. Most of the people who’d been on the sidewalk around Kristie Burns when the car plowed toward her have scattered out of the way, leaving only a few to help Kristie to her feet as the BMW ticks and steams and floods hydrant water from under its hood.

As the driver stagger-marches to the sidewalk, these last few scramble out of his way, maybe because he’s just done something totally insane, or because someone shot him and the bright red stains on his white T-shirt continue to spread. As he steps onto the sidewalk, a barrel-chested guy with a beard emerges from the frantic, grieving, stunned crowd.

“Mother. Fucker.” The bearded guy says it just like that, as if it’s two words. His hands are fisted at his sides, and the rage on his face is made all the more terrifying by the tears streaming down his cheeks. He isn’t just furious, he’s broken, and he’s going to break the driver to make them a matched set.

The bearded guy raising his fists triggers others to move toward the driver. One of them is Tim Mak, who brought Maeve to his junior prom when she was only a sophomore and then promptly abandoned her to be with his friends. Tim’s changed a lot in the intervening years, slimmer and more handsome, much better taste in clothes. But in this moment, he looks fierce in a way Maeve would never have imagined he might be. He looks dangerous.

It’s Tim who reaches the driver first. Blocks his path with a “Where the fuck do you think you’re going?” as the sirens grow louder. Police. Ambulances. Floats and other parade vehicles are inching out of the way, making room for the arrival of first responders. Tim Mak puts out a hand to stop the driver, with Kristie Burns looking on from a few feet away, still visibly shaken by her close call.

Tim plants a hand, fingers splayed, on the driver’s bloodied T-shirt. The driver reaches out and grabs Tim by the face, shoves him backward. As Tim takes one step back, Maeve is sure she sees the imprint of the driver’s hand flare red on Tim’s skin before it fades. But something’s happened. Tim retches, gagging, jerking his body. He coughs and tries to lift shaking hands to his mouth, even as black-red fluid streams from both nostrils and his left eye.

Maeve doesn’t feel as if she’s inside her own body anymore. She’s frozen, jaw hanging open, forgetting to breathe as she watches Tim Mak collapse into a heap of shuddering limbs, and then go still. Kristie stares for a second at Tim’s unmoving form and snaps out of her shock—or maybe immerses herself even more deeply into the maelstrom of emotions that burst across her features.

“You crazy fucking prick!” Kristie shouts. “What did you just do to him?”

It’s possible she doesn’t manage to get those last few words out, that Maeve’s brain fills them in because she expects them. Kristie rushes at the driver while she’s screaming, lunging for his throat. He knocks one of her hands away and grabs a fistful of her wild red hair, twists her around to drive her out of his path. Kristie tries to fight. Still clutching her hair in one hand, he grabs her wrist with the other and shoves her off the curb. She sprawls in the street, convulsing, and then she, too, goes still.

Maeve’s brother, Logan, starts across the street without a word. One second he’s with the rest of the family, and then he’s in motion. He doesn’t get far before Mom rushes forward, wraps her arms around Logan’s chest, and halts him in his tracks with a torrent of angry, fearful words. Rose is holding her girlfriend, Priya, who is sobbing and shaking. Maeve’s mother starts comforting those around her, telling everyone to keep back, to go home, to make way for the emergency vehicles.

As if Kristie hasn’t just died in the street. As if Ted Sinclair isn’t bleeding on the pavement.

Maeve has forgotten how to breathe. It’s chaos all around, and her heart is slamming in her chest. Across the street, as the water from the hydrant spreads farther, pooling around the mangled body of a girl in an American flag tank top, several other people rush at the BMW driver. Some are smart enough to run the other direction, but these three men take it upon themselves to stop him, maybe thinking they’ll make him pay for what he’s done.

An icy chill runs up Maeve’s spine. Hot tears course down her face. She shifts a few feet, trying to get a look at Kristie’s eyes, hoping to see a spark of life but knowing in her heart there’s not a glimmer. She thinks of a hundred summer days like this one, spent at the lake, out on Jack Spencer’s boat. She thinks of watching scary movies during sleepovers, Kristie’s eighth-grade determination to get her first kiss, playing soccer together and laughing as they realized neither of them were very good. All those memories lie dead on Main Street.

When the sirens and the shouts are abruptly drowned out by the roar of a black helicopter sweeping overhead, Maeve barely notices. In her subconscious, she accepts its presence, and a little flicker of awareness recognizes that it means something, that black helicopter, slicing the air, lifting and turning as it searches for a place to land.

One by one, the three men trying to stop the BMW driver reel away from him, bodies racked with seizure, coughing and gasping, black-red mucus streaming from noses and eyes. From her knees, bereft, alone, and feeling invisible, Maeve thinks she sees their skin flare red or flush pink where the driver touches them.

Instead of continuing toward the alley, the driver turns toward the crowd. Bloody and stumbling but somehow more focused, his lips curled in a sneer that says he’s made up his mind about something ugly, he lunges toward a group of people clustered too closely together for all of them to elude him. A middle-aged woman with a glorious mane of coiled black hair is nearest and cannot escape the hand he reaches toward her. His fingers close on her bare upper arm. She pulls free, but she’s already dying. Her skin is dark, but even so, Maeve is sure she can see the momentary handprint left behind.

She can’t watch it anymore. Far off to her left, the dispersing crowd has knocked over a popcorn vendor’s cart, and there is popcorn blowing all over the road and onto the grass and sidewalk. Scattered kernels blow like tiny tumbleweeds onto the pooling water under the BMW and float as if set adrift to race in a child’s dream. Maeve focuses on the popcorn, entirely losing track of the sounds around her. They blend into one larger noise, beneath all of which is the whine of helicopter rotors powering down, somewhere south along Main Street.

The first police car arrives. There’s an ambulance behind it. She sees them out of the corner of her eye, unwilling to tear her gaze from the popcorn regatta floating in the hydrant water. Until several kernels float up to and bump up against the dead girl in her American flag tank top.

Maeve flinches and rises to her feet. Her family’s otherwise occupied as she walks half a dozen paces and picks up a baseball bat that has fallen from the hands of one of the kids on the Little League float. The kids are long gone, having fled their miniature Fenway, and that’s for the best.

It’s possible she hears Logan call out her name as she begins to run, but Maeve doesn’t slow down. She doesn’t turn or hesitate. The BMW driver is a pale, middle-aged, ordinary man with sallow cheeks and dark circles beneath his eyes. He’s got a fistful of a young father’s T-shirt in his left hand, rucking it up to expose the guy’s tattooed back, reaching out his right hand to touch that tattoo. The young father has a curly-haired toddler in his arms, and practically throws the little girl at his wife as the seizures rack his body and he falls.

That’s the last one, though. The last one the driver touches.

Maeve steps up and swings the bat with all the strength and training of her varsity softball days. The driver turns toward her just as the bat is about to connect. When the blow lands, the aluminum bat rings true, as if she’s hit a homer, but the sound is accompanied by the crack of bone. His eyes are wide as he staggers backward, sways a bit, and then falls toward her, bouncing once as he hits the pavement. His neck is twisted to one side, and she can see the indentation on his forehead where the bat did its damage.

When he tries to rise, ordinary blood running from his nose, she hits him again, this time in the back of the head. But he’s been shot at least three times, been punched and shoved and kicked, and now he’s taken an aluminum bat to the skull, so he isn’t quite done yet.

The driver is on the pavement. The puddle of water stretching out from the hydrant beneath the BMW reaches him, flowing around him. He skids himself forward in the water, dragging his chest and face and then lurches one more time to his feet, head hanging askew, reaching for her throat.

Maeve grabs his wrist with her free hand, twists his arm away. He falls to the ground, but she’s still holding on, barely noticing him, staring instead at her fingers clenched around his wrist. Instinct had done it. She’s reacted faster than she could think, had grabbed him to avoid him doing the same to her, and though he’s on the ground now, it’s only after he convulses once and then dies, his gaze going flat and dull as doll’s eyes, that she manages to release her hold on him.

A scream cuts through the buzzing in her head. Her mother’s voice. The scream is her name, and she turns as her mother races toward her. Logan and Rose had been deemed more important, more in need of attention, as has always been the case. Her whole life, they’ve thought of her as more capable, less in need of their love and comfort. Now Maeve is listening to her own heartbeat, waiting for the cough and the seizures to come. She’s going to die like the others, she is certain.

But the seizures don’t come. Maeve shudders. Shock had dried up her tears, but now with her relief, they return. Her hands shake, but she feels good, she feels fine. Better than fine. Somewhere behind her, Kristie Burns lies dead. So many people are dead. Biz Ellroy is lying on the grass across the road, cradling a pink sneaker in her arms. The pink balloon is long gone. But the BMW driver is dead and Maeve is still alive and she feels herself about to shatter inside, fractured by a dozen conflicting emotions.

“Maeve, oh my God,” her mom says.

That voice—the voice of safety and reassurance, of comfort and warmth—is the root of her childhood. As often as she fought with her mother through middle and high school and has dismissed so much of her advice since then, in this moment she’s a little girl again and when she looks up and their eyes meet, her mother sees how much Maeve needs her.

“Oh, my baby,” Ellen Sinclair says, “that was so … You were so brave.”

Maeve cracks. A sob racks her body and she tries to speak, but no words will come. She laughs at her inability to summon language. She knows this is all part of the shock, but oh God, she wants to go home. She wants to check on her dad. He can’t have gone through all the things he’s endured just to die now, like this.

Her mom takes her hands, squeezes them, pulls her into an embrace. Maeve leans into her, leans on her the way she always has, even when she didn’t realize how much of her emotional weight her mother carried for her. Ellen kisses her girl’s forehead. Maeve lays her head on her mother’s shoulder, eyes open, and she sees her brother rushing to join them.

Police push through the crowd, hurrying over to the bodies of the people the driver touched. She spots Auntie Rue, a no-nonsense woman with a sleeve of purple tattoos and half her skull shaved. Rue snaps instructions at the officers, barking orders about quarantine and disease. She isn’t a cop, just a citizen, and doesn’t look like the kind of person the police would ordinarily listen to, but she speaks with authority, and suddenly they’re wary. They’re right to be.

Logan joins the hug. Maeve reaches up to touch his face, meets his eyes, so grateful for his kindness. As she touches him, she feels her mother jerk in her arms. At first she can’t make sense of it, but Logan steps back, his expression contorting in horror. He lifts one hand to cover his mouth, to stifle a cry, as their mother slips from Maeve’s arms and hits the pavement. Convulsing again, and then again, Ellen Sinclair rolls over, and Maeve sees the vile black-red sludge issuing from the corner of her mouth and dripping from her nose. Dark sores appear on her skin.

“Mom?” Maeve whispers as a vast hollow place fissures open within her, an empty chamber where emotion should be. She cries out this time. “Mom?” But there is no answer.

When Maeve’s sister shouts, though, it isn’t for her mother. Rose shouts her brother’s name. Maeve glances up and sees Logan in the midst of a shaking fit that sprays that hideous sludge from his mouth. His eyes are squeezed tightly shut, but squibs of that sludge are being forced out through his lashes. There’s a hint, a little red afterimage, the imprint of Maeve’s hand on Logan’s cheek, but when she blinks it’s gone, and so is he.

Logan is dead before he hits the pavement.

Her sister stares at her, stares at her hands.

Maeve sways from side to side, not knowing what to do, or where to run, or what she’s become. She glances at her father, who has propped himself up on one hand, wincing in pain but alive. The BMW driver, the man she’d killed, the man whose hands she’d avoided but whose skin she’d been touching while the last flicker of life left his body. The small-town cops pushing people back from the bodies, from the crime scene, have paused and watch her with the same stunned wariness as the rest. Auntie Rue takes a step toward her. Maeve stares at her hands.

A second black helicopter buzzes overhead. The remaining bystanders have been staring at her, but they glance up, tracking the helicopter, and as one they all hear the voices barking commands. People begin to clear a path. Through the crowd, she sees three figures in yellow hazmat suits accompanied by armed men in black body armor. All of them wear air filtration masks like they’re afraid of contamination. Of contagion.

She turns toward her father. He must see the decision in her eyes, because he shakes his head.

“Maeve, no,” he says, clutching his ribs, wincing in pain, blood on his face.

But Maeve has never been good at doing what she’s told. She sees those hazmat suits, the guns and the body armor, and she thinks of the bullet holes in the man she killed, the man who killed so many, and she can’t stay here.

So she runs.

People who saw her mother and brother die get out of her way. People who did not are already in motion, clearing a path for the black helicopter’s team. The police who saw Logan and Mom die don’t try to follow her until Rue shouts at them that they can’t let her leave, but by then, Maeve has broken into a run. She bolts through the crowd, across the park, away from Main Street, away from the river. She races through backyards on Kingsbury Road, and then she’s into the woods she’d spent most of her childhood wandering. Maeve knows every path, even the ones that are so narrow and overgrown they hardly look like trails at all.

She glances up. Sunlight streams through breaks in the canopy of the woods, and in those breaks she can see the mountains ahead. Her heart races, and she doesn’t allow herself to think of anything except reaching the foothills, getting lost up there. She won’t be able to hide forever, but she needs time to think.

Her hands itch. Her fingers feel strangely cold.

She thinks of her mom and of Logan, and her breath hitches in her chest. Tears stream down her face as she runs. All she wants to do is scream, to lie down on the trail and curl up and wait for all of this to catch up to her, to punish her.

Branches whip past her face. Maeve ducks and stumbles, then turns off the trail. She wonders if this is what madness feels like. If this is what it feels like to be a killer.

In the distance, she hears the buzz of a black helicopter, and she plunges into deeper woods, always staying on course for the mountains.

She thinks of Callie Ellroy’s pink balloon and feels the icy cold of her fingers, and a terrible knowledge stabs at her—she can never touch anyone again.

Not ever.

2

Rue Crooker stood in the middle of a street rapidly emptying of spectators, surrounded by broken, bloody bodies and the loved ones grieving over them. Armed men and women in black body armor wove between abandoned floats and spread out to encircle the scene while a woman in civilian clothes strode through, glancing left and right to survey the carnage. People in hazmat suits rushed by her, heading for the crashed BMW. The body-armored security detail approached the car with weapons leveled, as if they expected to be attacked from within.

One of them paused by the corpse of the BMW driver—the man who’d killed and injured so many—and went to nudge the body with the toe of his boot. A muffled bark from one of the hazmat suits made him freeze and back away. Whoever the driver had been, the person in the hazmat suit knew him. Recognized him. Had expected to find him here.

Of course they had. How else could a squad of Blackcoats show up so fast?

She went to Ted, went down on one knee beside him. “Hey, no,” she said as he tried to rise. “You need to stay right here.”

His eyes were glazed with pain and grief. He glanced over at the bodies of his ex-wife and his son, then cringed and looked away, unprepared. Five feet away, his daughter Rose wept in the embrace of her girlfriend. Ted cast a pleading glance up at Rue.

“Maeve,” he said.

“I know,” Rue replied, though she didn’t, really. How could she possibly guess what part of this horror had carved itself deepest? “Just wait. You need doctors to look you over.”

Ted seemed to agree, or maybe he was just numb.

Rue’s heart thumped like it wanted to break free. Flushed with heat, somehow she felt cold inside. So this is shock, she thought, observing the whole, wretched tableau that spread around her. Several of those struck by the car were still alive and in dire need of medical attention. Ted seemed in remarkably good condition. He had jumped right before the car hit him, which Rue thought might have saved his life. At the very least, it had saved him from a broken leg or two.

Sirens wailed. Police officers hurried through the remnants of the crowd. Several EMTs were on-site, moving from victim to victim, searching for those who were not already beyond their help. Someone shouted for an ambulance. Others called to the Blackcoats for aid but received no reply. The young civilian woman also seemed deaf to these cries. Even the hazmat team paid no attention to the people who’d been struck by the BMW, but Rue had expected that. They weren’t here for the broken, bleeding ones—they had come because of the man behind the wheel.

“Ted, just keep still,” she said. “Help is coming. I’ll make sure of it.”

He groaned and nodded, squeezing his eyes closed. There were tears on his face, but Rue thought they had sprung from grief instead of physical pain. She turned away, let him have his privacy.

She went to Rose and her girlfriend, Priya. Touched Rose on the shoulder. “Stay with your dad.”

Sniffling, Rose nodded, still in Priya’s embrace.

The hazmat team surrounded the dead driver. The civilian woman began to shout orders, apparently in command, and the Blackcoats closed in, beginning to surround the people who had been touched by the driver or by Maeve Sinclair. Rue whipped out her phone, tapped the screen, and began to record.

“Excuse me!” she shouted. “Excuse me, what are you doing? Who are you? How did you get here so quickly?”

The woman in charge raised a hand to halt the Blackcoat security team. The hazmat crew had already yanked out a body bag and started to transfer the driver into it without a single crime scene photo having been taken, without even a police officer approving their actions. They didn’t stop what they were doing, but whatever menace the Blackcoats had intended toward those mourning their dead had halted or at least paused.

“I’m going to ask again!” Rue said. “What do you think you’re doing?”

Popcorn containers and other parade debris blew along the pavement. A stroller had been left behind in the hurried exodus of onlookers. Someone had snatched up their baby and just run, and Rue didn’t blame them at all. She probably should have run as well, but she wasn’t wired that way. At the age of fifty-four, neither her knees nor her demeanor were inclined to do much running.

“Put that phone away. It’s illegal to record during a crisis like this,” the young woman said, not taking a step.

Her whole team seemed to be frozen. More sirens blared. Local police started to shout to one another. An ambulance drove up onto the lawn of a house on the corner of Kingsbury. Another black helicopter buzzed overhead and seemed to hover a thousand feet above the BMW. The woman put a hand to her ear, frowning, and Rue realized that though she might appear to be giving the orders, she was getting them from somewhere else.

Rue kept recording. She took a step closer. One of the Blackcoats turned his weapon on her.

“The phone. Now,” the woman said.

“Fuck you. If you’re any kind of law enforcement, which I doubt, there’s nothing illegal about me filming. And since you’ve got a private security detail with no badges or identification, I’d say you’ve got even less authority over me.”

The woman whirled her hand in the air and turned her back on Rue. On that signal, the entire response team began to behave as if Rue had turned invisible. The confidence in that disregard broke through the numbness and shock and made Rue afraid all over again. She wasn’t a concern—less trouble than a mosquito—which meant these people had a lot of power or had much larger worries, or both. Probably both.

“Attention, all civilians!” the woman shouted. “I’m sorry for your loss and your pain, but please stand away from the deceased. I repeat, you must step back from the bodies. I know you don’t want to be parted from your loved ones, but each of them must be temporarily quarantined. This will be a brief quarantine, and I promise they will be returned to you as quickly as we’re able to process and release them.”

Rue kept recording, but hardly anyone moved. Some of them understood immediately, horror dawning on their faces as they recalled the way the driver had touched these people, only to have them collapse in painful seizures and die. Others were too numb to put it together.

A police lieutenant jogged over to the woman and quietly demanded to know what she was up to, who she was. Basically the same questions Rue had been asking. The woman flashed some kind of ID, and Rue watched the cop blink in surprise and nod, backing away, hands raised as if in apology for interrupting. So whoever the fuck she is, she does have some authority behind her.

A Blackcoat called to her. “Vargas.” So now the woman had a name, which helped give Rue someone to hate. Vargas had a head of tight curls, dyed red, and Rue might’ve found her attractive under other circumstances. But not today.

Ignored, Rue glanced around at the people who had died after being touched by the BMW driver, or by Maeve Sinclair, who’d run off in the chaos. She refused to look at the bodies of Ellen and Logan Sinclair, but she did glance back at Ted. Stubborn as he was, and despite his own fifty-three years, Ted had managed to get to one knee and was trying to rise, one arm across his ribs, his face etched with pain. There were scrapes and bloody bruises on his arms and right cheek, but still he struggled to stand. Rose pulled away from Priya, reached for her father, and the two of them held one another, both shaking. Over Rose’s shoulder, Rue could see Ted’s eyes, which were flat and dull. Empty.

Bereft. That was the word. Of course he was bereft. Ted had slid into shock. Maeve had run off, vanished up into the woods of Mount Champney, the tallest peak along the Mekwi Range. Rue Crooker and Ted Sinclair had met years earlier but had become best friends their sophomore year in high school, thanks to a Siouxsie and the Banshees concert and their shared crush on a freckle-faced freshman girl neither of them would ever get to kiss. Now they were both divorced from their respective wives. Rue felt like her divorce had left her happier, but the same couldn’t be said for Ted.

Ted broke away from Rose and started limping toward the bodies of his wife and son.

“Sir!” a Blackcoat shouted. “I’m going to have to ask you to back away.”

Confused faces stared at the soldier, then at Vargas. Rue had thought her a civilian, but that seemed unlikely now if she were the one giving the orders. Whoever these people were, however, they weren’t completely wrong. The locals were grieving and horrified. Her friends and neighbors would need answers that Rue knew weren’t forthcoming. She saw a bearded man stand, both of his huge fists clenched, sweat stains on his Red Sox Nation T-shirt. He started toward the soldier.

“Wait!” Rue said, lowering her phone. She let the hand holding it dangle at her side, but didn’t stop the recording. Even if the only video was of the pavement, at least it would pick up the audio. “Please … listen. They’re right. You saw how these people died. This is some kind of contagion. Back away from the dead and don’t touch them until medical personnel have cleared them. Everyone, please just stand back, but don’t go anywhere. All of you will have to be checked out, too.”

Ted stared at Rue. She had seen him so drunk he couldn’t raise his head, and so high he couldn’t remember his own birthday, but she’d never seem him like this. He looked utterly lost.

“They died in, like, two seconds,” the huge-fisted man growled. “If I got infected by that, I’d already be lyin’ in the goddamn road.”

He had a point, but they couldn’t take any chances. Not with something so deadly. Rue began to reply, to plead with them to follow instructions, when she felt a cool shadow blot out the Fourth of July sun. She turned to see a towering black-armored soldier behind her, with Vargas standing beside him.

“Clear the area,” Vargas said, copper eyes glinting.

Rue glared. “I’m trying to help you.”

“I don’t recall asking—”

“These people don’t know you. They need to be comforted, and they need medical attention. They need to be quarantined. We need to be sure they—”

“I don’t know who you think ‘we’ might be,” Vargas said, giving her the disdainful once-over that Rue’s hair and tattoos prompted all too frequently. “But ‘we’ isn’t you. We’ll be quarantining the remains. Everyone else can go home and wait for the bodies to be released.”

Something snapped in Rue. The caul of shock that had hung over her tore away, her thoughts clearing. “You want them to go home? They were just exposed to what looks to me like the deadliest germ in the world, and I’ve seen some deadly fucking germs. Nothing kills on contact like that. Nothing. You want to send these people home, you’re either monumentally stupid or you already know they’re not infected. I’m going to guess the latter, since you people buzzed in here about a minute and a half after the dead guy in the Beemer. I get the idea you know exactly who this is and what just happened here.”

Rue pointed to Ted. “My friend just lost half his family and got hit by a goddamned car. Maybe you want to explain to him why that happened? Oh, and also … who the fuck are you?”

Vargas stepped in so close that Rue could smell her tropical-scented body wash. The woman had gone unsettlingly still.

“You seem to know what you’re talking about,” Vargas said, studying her more critically than before. “You don’t look like a scientist.”

Rue couldn’t decide whether to laugh or knock her on her ass. Instead, her spine stiffened. “Dr. Rue Crooker. I’m a biologist at Boston University, and you’re pushing folks around in my hometown when they’ve just seen people die in front of them. So maybe dial it back, Vargas.”

The smaller woman blinked, perhaps startled that Rue knew her name. It wasn’t much, but it was all she had.

“I think we’ll have to quarantine you, too, Dr. Crooker,” Vargas said, gesturing to two of the Blackcoats.

Rue had never put her phone away, never stopped the recording. Now she picked it up and held it between herself and Vargas, making sure the other woman knew she was on camera.

“I don’t think we’ll be doing that today.”

Which was when Ted took a few shuffling steps toward Vargas. With every second that passed, the bruising and swelling of his injuries seemed worse. “Take a look around,” he said. “You think we’re going to let Dr. Crooker go anywhere with you?”

Behind him, his daughter Rose broke a little further, her face contorted with loneliness and shock. “Dad?”

“No,” he said. “You girls stay back.”

Rue glanced across the street, between buildings, at the woods and the mountains beyond. Maeve had taken off in that direction. Finding her was going to be vital, but first this situation had to be contained.

The bearded man in the Red Sox Nation T-shirt stepped up beside Ted. “You see how many cameras are on you?”

Vargas blinked and for the first time seemed to notice there were at least half a dozen people with their phones out, recording what had been unfolding. Most seemed to be bystanders who had stayed behind to help the injured but were unencumbered now that more EMTs and police had shown up. One was a middle-aged woman who stood protectively over a dead man. Tears streamed down her face, but the look of determination in her eyes was unmistakable.

“People aren’t stupid,” Ted said, wiping at his eyes. “This might be a small town, but it’s a Fourth of July parade in America, and you come in here in your black helicopters and talking contagion. There’s going to be half a dozen news trucks here in half an hour or less. Now tell us what just happened, goddamn it. We deserve an answer.”

Vargas glanced from Ted to Rue and then turned toward the police lieutenant who’d backed down from her before. The man had been clearing the intersection, shouting for people to remove the floats that were blocking more emergency vehicles from arriving. Now he turned, said something to a pair of EMTs who were hustling a gurney toward their ambulance, bearing a man who’d been struck by the BMW and badly injured.

“Lieutenant,” Vargas called.

But as the policeman started toward her, another voice interrupted them, and the lieutenant almost collapsed with relief. Chief Kaminski had arrived.

“Ma’am, I’m Len Kaminski, chief of police. Obviously, we’ve got a lot on our hands here,” the chief said, waving at his officers to go back to what they’d been doing. “I’m told you wanted us to stay out of your business.”

“That’s changed,” Vargas said. “Place all these people under arrest for interfering with a federal investigation.”

Voices erupted all around her, but to Rue, all that noise suddenly seemed little more than a distant buzz. Tiny details resolved into sharp contrast. The last two letters on Kaminski’s badge had been worn away, as if the chief had scraped up against something. He had a little scar under his left eye and a few wiry white hairs in his otherwise dark eyebrows. His nostrils flared in disgust as he glanced around at the people with their phones out, and for half a moment, his gray eyes rested on Rue. Then he looked at Vargas.

“Lady, this is New Hampshire. Live Free or Die is our state motto. You come in here in the midst of the ugliest, most heartbreaking thing that’s ever happened in this town, no identification, and tell me to arrest people who just suffered loss and horror like this? You’re either that arrogant or that stupid, and I don’t really care which. Any idiot can see this is some kind of government bullshit gone haywire. You want to cover up the mess you made, you’ll have to do it with your own people, and face the media shitstorm that comes your way. I guess what I’m saying is, go fuck yourself.”

People in the crowd—Rue guessed people who hadn’t just watched their friends or spouses die—clapped and cheered. More phones had come out during this mini-speech, while Vargas’s fury visibly simmered.

“This whole town is about to be quarantined,” Vargas sneered as if the words were punishment.

“You were ready to send everyone home a minute ago,” Rue replied. “You know that whatever this is, none of us has it.”

Vargas responded with the most venomous smile Rue had ever seen. “Can’t be too careful, Dr. Crooker. If you want to make sure none of you get infected, I suggest you stop making my job more difficult.”

Rue flinched, wondering if she’d heard right. Not the words—those were clear enough—but the tone. Then she noticed the way the Blackcoats had shifted, several of them moving into position near Vargas, as if guarding her. Chief Kaminski noticed, too, and cast a nervous glance toward Rue, as if warning her to heed Vargas’s words. Their eyes met, Rue saw the policeman’s fear, and that was when she knew she’d heard Vargas’s threat exactly as it had been intended.

She thought about Ted Sinclair’s daughter, off in the woods, terrified and alone and maybe worse, and knew she ought to say something. Whatever this threat was, the dead people in the street were testament enough to how dangerous it could be. But someone would tell Vargas soon enough, or there’d be cell phone footage of what happened when Maeve hit the driver with that baseball bat, and then these helicopters and the soldiers in their gleaming body armor would be all over the mountainside hunting for her.

Rue thought it would be a good idea if somebody else found her first.

3

For the longest time, there were zero thoughts in Maeve’s head. Pain drove her, grief pumping her blood and keeping her legs moving. Eyes wide, searching the shadows between trees as if the forest might reveal itself to be part of a dream, she ran along familiar trails. Her feet remembered them, knew how to navigate the rocks and roots that jutted from the ground. She diverted onto a narrow side trail she knew most hikers avoided because of its steep incline and inhospitable terrain. Her escape turned from a run to a climb, knees rising, hands grasping edges of rock, head ducking beneath branches, until at last she hauled herself up onto a smooth ridge where the trail became a bit easier.

Only then did she pause, heart thundering, salt from her tears drying on her lips. An ocean of pain had dragged her under and threatened to drown her, but now she washed up onto this mountain ledge for just a moment. Long enough to begin to catch her breath. Long enough for conscious thought to return and reality to set in.

Mom’s dead.

Logan … Logan’s dead.

Her body seemed to fold in on itself, shoulders caving inward as if she were some sort of bird, eager to wrap herself in protective wings. She hugged herself, taking deep rasping breaths. She studied her trembling fingers, expecting to find them dappled with blood. But they were just her fingers, just her hands.

Over the sound of her heartbeat, she could hear the wind picking up, rustling the branches of trees all around her. Shafts of sunlight streamed through the lattice of those interlocking branches. God, it was beautiful.

So beautiful it hurt.

Emotion surged inside her, so powerful that she couldn’t hold it in. Maeve threw her head back and screamed at the sky, the trees, the mountain, and her own goddamned hands, these things that no longer felt a part of her. While the echo of her scream danced up and down the climbing trail, she thought of Medusa, the gorgon of Greek myth, whose hair was a nest of deadly serpents and whose gaze could turn human beings to stone.

“Logan,” she whispered. “I’m sorry.”

She remembered the way he had always picked the worst possible times to smile at her, when she was in a rage or brokenhearted or wallowing in a moment of self-doubt. The times when she didn’t want to see anyone, didn’t want anyone to try to make her feel better. Logan would never try to comfort her with words or to cheer her up when she had been working hard at radiating disdain and dismay. But in her lowest moments, he’d always had that smile that said he understood. That he was there for her if she needed him.

Maeve covered her mouth with both hands to keep from screaming out her grief again.

While they’d been growing up, the Sinclair kids had heard one constant refrain from their dad. One day, he’d told them, their parents would be gone and the only people they’d really be able to count on would be one another. Friends and colleagues and mates would come and go, he had assured them, but they needed to nurture their familial bond. Maeve had loved Logan, but for several years she had been promising herself that she’d make a greater effort to know and understand him. To be a better sister.

Instead …

I killed him. Grief thrust its fist inside her chest, clutched at her heart, and squeezed. Her breath hitched, and she hugged herself even tighter, her face contorting. She whispered his name so quietly that even her own ears could not hear, and then she mouthed other words, just her lips moving, unable to give voice to them.

Mom. What did I do? God, what did I do?

Her legs gave out. Somehow she found herself sitting between two slanted rocks, hip aching from an impact she hadn’t felt, elbow raw from a scrape her mind hadn’t noticed. Desperately alone, primal, lost in a way she had never conceived, she unleashed the scream she’d been trying to hold back, this one longer and louder, tearing her throat ragged.

As it echoed and she listened to her heart continue to beat—against all odds, because she should be dead now, shouldn’t she?—a sudden, sober voice surfaced inside her mind. What if they hear you?

“Logan,” she whispered, thinking for a moment—for a single, lunatic, superstitious second—that this must be the ghost of her brother haunting her, helping her, staying with her the way their father had always urged.

But it wasn’t Logan. Just her own voice, a calm sliver of her subconscious, smashing through the grief and the images that had burned into her mind—that single balloon, the BMW, that one sneaker, the blood—oh God, the blood—the car hitting her dad, him smashing into the windshield. The driver, reaching for the next person and the next. The baseball bat. Mom and Logan hugging her. Coughing. Falling. Black tears in their eyes.

“Hush,” she said to that stern voice in her head.

Just me, she thought.

But as she rose to her feet, steadied herself, and began climbing the trail again, she couldn’t shake the doubt that had taken root, because that voice didn’t sound like her. It didn’t feel as if it had come from her.

Maeve laughed softly, and the laugh became a sob, because she realized she might be going just a little bit crazy. Really, who could blame me?

Still, that stern voice had gotten its way. Grief still enveloped her—she was drowning in it, floating in it, but she had to swim if she wanted to live. Maybe she didn’t deserve to live, not after what she’d done. Would Dad and Rose hate her now? Would they want her to live or want her to die?

She could still feel the tingle in her fingertips of the touch that had killed two of the people she loved the most in the world, could still smell the sickness that erupted out of them. She’d poisoned them, destroyed them, and after seeing what happened to the BMW driver, she knew the same thing might happen to anyone she touched.

But she wanted to live.

So she picked up her pace and watched her footing, and her mind skipped forward to the next step and the next, and what she would need to do to hide and survive on the mountain. And she would need to hide, because they’d come after her—of that much, she was certain. That black helicopter had shown up so fast, it had to have been chasing the man in the BMW. Which meant that the moment they put all the pieces together, they’d be after her, too. They were going to kill her, or at least capture her, punish her. All the choices she had been on the verge of making in her life had just been obliterated. Her future had been rewritten. From now on, all she could do was think one step ahead, one hour ahead.

She had killed, but oh, lord, how she wanted to live.

4

At a quarter past noon, Walker pulled his battered old Jeep Wrangler up to the curb in front of his ex-wife’s house and killed the engine. The radio went silent, and he missed the music immediately. He had no particular love for 1980s pop, but it filled his head and blotted out the regrets and self-recrimination that tended to flood the hollow places in his mind when he came here. His ex’s house, yeah, but once upon a time it had been their house. The Walker family home. He and Amanda and Charlie had lived there together, at least during the periods when work hadn’t dragged Walker across the country or across the ocean.

He missed Amanda, but more than that, he missed the family they’d been. The family he’d taken for granted. In the gray light of an overcast early July day, the place seemed to breathe as if it were a dusty old museum dedicated to a better life.

“Shit,” he whispered, smiling as he chided himself. “This is what unemployment does.”

With a soft laugh, he got out of the car and started up the walk. He wasn’t actually unemployed, but for the past nine months, he might as well have been. Walker had fucked up on the job, at least the way his employers viewed it. His personal opinion differed. He had taken a difficult and potentially deadly decision out of their hands by eliminating their opportunity to study an ancient bacteria that might’ve killed millions. They’d wanted to research it, find a way to counteract it, just in case some enemy turned it into a weapon, and maybe turn it into a weapon for themselves. Walker had nearly died after being infected by it, and he had been unwilling to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Them being the United States Department of Defense. His employers never called themselves that, of course. Since he had worked for them, that special division had gone through half a dozen official titles, a whole alphabet soup of names that were all smoke screens to cover the truth—that they were part of DARPA and thus the DoD.

Having the bosses pissed at him all these months had been difficult. On the upside, however, he’d been able to spend a lot more time with his son, Charlie, who was fast careening toward his thirteenth birthday. The kid would be starting the seventh grade in less than two months, and that seemed inconceivable to Walker. People always talked about how the passage of time gathered momentum, and it had proven painfully, excruciatingly true. He felt as if he’d barely blinked, like Charlie had jumped into the pool during his first swim lesson years ago and emerged as this lanky, mop-headed kid on the verge of becoming a teenager. He told himself it was simply the nature of things, but he knew that feeling of accelerated time had been exacerbated by the fact that his work had kept him away from home so often, not to mention the small matter of his divorce.

The best he could do was try to make up for some of that lost time here and there before Charlie turned old enough to lose interest in hanging out with his father.

As Walker strode up the front path, a light rain began to fall. The air hung thick with humidity, the temperature hovering around eighty-five degrees, typical enough for northern Virginia on the Fourth of July. Once they were near the peak of Old Rag Mountain, the breeze would cool them down. Overnight, it would turn chilly up near the tree line. Walker breathed a bit easier just thinking about it.

He steeled himself to ring the bell, to see Amanda and the past she represented, but the front door opened before he even reached the stoop. She stood on the threshold with a smile on her face, wearing jean shorts and a burnt-orange tank top, hair in a ponytail, no shoes, a woman ready to have the house to herself and a strawberry margarita in her hand.

“It can’t be Ben Walker at my door,” she said. “On time? Unheard of.”

Walker had been on the receiving end of barbed attacks and acid wit from Amanda a thousand times, mostly deserved, and he knew what her razor-edge sarcasm sounded like. This wasn’t it. Whatever history they shared, today Amanda had decided they could both live with the changes time had wrought.

He smiled. “Sometimes I amaze even myself.”

Walker wanted to tell her she looked fantastic, that dressed the way she was, her skin tanned a lovely bronze, her hair back, she didn’t look a day older than when they’d met. It would’ve been honest and sweet and true, but he knew it would come out awkward, and he worried that Amanda would take it the wrong way, as if he were trying to rekindle something now that he had time to be around more and she had broken off with the artist she’d been dating for the past couple of years. He remembered the way she liked him to run his fingers along the soft skin at the small of her back, and knew it would be best for him to keep his mouth shut.

“Not much of a day for hiking,” she said, looking at the sky, blinking away a raindrop that struck her face.

“This’ll be here and gone pretty quick,” Walker replied. “Plus, most of our hiking will be tomorrow. This afternoon’s just about getting up there and making camp, catching a few fish, building a fire. Burning some marshmallows.”

Amanda smiled. “Sounds perfect.”

A moment passed. Then another. Suddenly the easy comfort between them fell away, lost between the old familiarity and the things they no longer knew about one another. Taking the conversation further, talking about work or family or their romantic lives, would be a step too far, and they had not quite managed to become real friends again. Maybe they never would.

“Charlie, you ready?” Amanda called back through the house. She gave a small shrug. “You want to wait inside?”

Walker smiled. If it was uncomfortable out here, how much more uncomfortable would it be in the house they had once shared? He would notice every change, but also everything familiar.

“I’m sure he’ll be out in a second,” he said.

Amanda looked relieved. She leaned against the doorframe, and regret suffused him in a way he rarely allowed. Walker had become expert at walling off such emotions, but this time it sneaked up on him.

“How are you?” he asked. “Really.”

“I’m doing all right,” she said. “Stressed about work, as always. Trying to keep our boy good and kind. He’s starting the seventh grade, which can be rough. Kids get mean around then, or maybe the mean shit just starts to hurt a little more when you’re that age.”

“He is a good kid,” Walker said. “He really is. And that’s all you.”

Amanda feigned modesty. “Not all. But maybe most.”

Walker remembered loving her. It was a nice moment. Then the familiar clump of impossibly heavy footfalls thumped down the stairs behind her, and Charlie appeared, enormous pack on his back, Washington Nationals cap on his head, at least two inches taller than he’d been during April vacation that year.

“Time to head out!” he said happily. He bent over a bit to support the weight of his pack as he pointed a finger at the Jeep parked by the curb. “But I get to pick the music.”

His mother didn’t have to ask him for a kiss. Charlie gave her a peck on the cheek, told her he loved her without hesitation, then came out onto the stoop as if he were a soldier presenting himself for inspection.

“I have Oreos in my bag,” he announced.

“Then I think we have everything,” Walker said. He glanced at Amanda. “Thanks for this. Enjoy your quiet time. Have an extra margarita for me.”

“Oh, I will.”

She watched them march down the front path to the Jeep, but by the time they had climbed in and Walker had started the car, he noticed she had gone back inside, the door tightly shut. A strange relief washed over him as Charlie buckled his seat belt and connected his phone to the car so he could play the weird combination of rap and country that tended to infiltrate his playlists.

“Are there really Oreos in your pack?” Walker asked.

“I’d never lie about the important things,” Charlie replied gravely.

A country song began to play—one of a thousand tunes about whiskey—and the utter normalcy and contentment of the moment set Walker at ease in a way he hadn’t ever expected to achieve again.

In his front pocket, his phone began to vibrate.

He stiffened, thought about letting it go to voice mail. For months, his employers had given him nothing but research jobs or training sessions for new hires. It was a holiday, and he had scheduled vacation days following the Fourth of July. Nobody should be calling him right now. His phone should not have been vibrating.

“Dad?” Charlie asked. “Is that your phone?”

Walker huffed quietly and reached into his pocket, sliding out his phone. The number was unfamiliar, but it was a Washington, D.C., area code. His thumb hovered over the screen, hesitating one last moment, and then abruptly the phone went silent. He stared at the screen.

A gust of wind rattled the Jeep and the rain picked up, spattering the windshield.

“Come on,” Charlie said. “Let’s get going.”

Fuck them, Walker thought. He didn’t like not knowing what the call had been for, but he and Charlie had planned this hiking trip for months. He put the Jeep in gear, and then the phone began to vibrate again.

“Ignore it,” Charlie said. “They don’t own you, Dad.”

But for someone to call, not leave a message, and call back immediately … that worried Walker. One foot on the brake, engine idling, he answered the phone.

“Who’s this?”

“Dr. Walker, this is Alena Boudreau. I hope you remember me. That’ll make this go more smoothly.”

An image of the woman swam up from his memories. Early seventies, fit, beautiful, with an air of drive and command that cowed most of the people she encountered. The first time he’d met her, in General Wagner’s office, she’d reminded Walker of British actress Helen Mirren. Her grandson, David, also worked for DARPA. Years ago, they’d done some work that he wished he’d read at that time—it might have saved him a lot of pain and terror in Guatemala later.

“I remember you, Ms. Boudreau.”

“Director Boudreau now,” she replied, her voice sounding tinny and distant on the phone, almost like a computer voice. “As of today, I’m running something called the Global Science Research Coalition. The SRC’s objectives will be familiar to you.”

Walker frowned. What the hell did this have to do with him? He glanced at Charlie, saw the way his son had begun to rip at the skin on his fingertips, a nervous habit he’d developed over the past year. Charlie’s face held no emotion, a numb mask, impatient but somehow still hopeful.

“Yeah, listen, congratulations on the new job,” Walker said, phone to his ear, turned away to watch the rain falling outside the driver’s window. “It’s a holiday, Director. I’m literally just pulling onto the road for a camping trip with my son.”

“I’m sorry,” Alena said. “I should’ve been clearer. I’m running the SRC now, and you, Dr. Walker, have been traded to my team.”

“I work for General Henry Wagner—”

“General Wagner has had a no-good, very bad day. He’s not in charge of shit right now. The SRC was born today, they gave me the reins, and they did that in the middle of a crisis.”

Walker didn’t want to ask. He knew he shouldn’t. The rain picked up, pounding the roof of the Jeep. He glanced at Charlie, who had begun to shake his head, his lips pressed into a white line of anger. Back on the front stoop of the house, Amanda had stepped out to see what had gone wrong, to find out why they had only pulled a few feet up the road.

“According to the GPS tracking in front of me, Dr. Walker, you’re about forty minutes’ drive from Davison Army Airfield. I’ll meet you there in three-quarters of an hour.”

“Director Boudreau—”

“Alena is fine, Walker. We’re going to be working together, after all.”

“I don’t work for you. Even if I did, I’m on vacation.”

In the passenger seat, Charlie began to mutter a stream of colorful cusswords.

“Wake up, Walker,” Alena said. “Meet the new boss, not as dim as the old boss. You’re needed, and I expect you to be there in forty-five minutes. I will see you there. Might as well just bring your camping gear. You may need it.”

The line went dead. She had hung up.

Father and son were quiet there in the car, engine idling, rain pattering the glass and hood. Walker expected Charlie to ask for an explanation, but the boy had grown up now, nearly thirteen, and he was smart enough to read the situation.

“Charlie…,” Walker began.

“This is bullshit.” He sneered the last word. Walker didn’t think he’d ever heard his son swear prior to the last two minutes, but he wasn’t about to admonish him.

“Yeah, it is,” Walker said. “I’m sorry, kid. They wouldn’t call me in like this if they didn’t really need me.”

Charlie winced, then blinked away the hurt in his eyes. “Oh, well, they really need you.” He huffed, just the same way Walker always did, then popped open the passenger door. He climbed out, dragging his backpack with him. One hand on the open door, Charlie ducked his head to fix his father with a look of blazing recrimination.

“I guess it’s a good thing I don’t,” Charlie said.

He slammed the door, turned, and marched back toward his house. Walker rolled the window down and called after him, but Charlie did not turn around or even slow his step. Instead, the boy picked up speed and ran toward the house. His mother greeted him at the door. She didn’t even ask, made no gesture in Walker’s direction. Instead, she just closed the door.

Walker didn’t hesitate for more than a second or two. There were a lot of questions in his mind about what had happened to General Wagner and how Walker himself had come to work for Alena Boudreau, but it was clear she was the one giving the orders.

Heart heavy, he hit the gas and aimed for Davison.

The worst part about all of it was that although Charlie’s words had stung, and although Walker hated having to cancel their trip, he was also curious and buzzing with anticipation. He’d been so long in the doghouse he had wondered if they would ever trust him again. Now they had a use for him. Now they needed him.

So does Charlie, he thought.

But he kept his foot on the gas.

Davison Army Airfield looked as if it hadn’t changed in decades. Squat buildings, one runway, another stretch of tarmac where half a dozen combat helicopters sat idle, waiting to be called into use. The first time Walker had found himself at Davison, it had reminded him of a dozen airfields the army had thrown up in a matter of days or weeks in hostile territory. The Green Zone in Iraq had one like it, and Walker found some comfort in that, as if it meant this place stood ready for anything, able to shift into action at a moment’s notice.

A guard checked him in at the gate, told him where to park. They were expecting him. The skies were gray and a light rain fell, wind blowing hard enough that it seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. A sleek silver plane sat on the tarmac, something he hadn’t seen before, sparkling new but somehow reminding him of the propeller planes in old newsreels, the first transcontinental flights. This one had no propellers. And he had a feeling it would get him wherever he was going a hell of a lot faster than the ones in the newsreels.

Nobody came out to greet him. A couple of soldiers stood outside a small hangar, sneaking a shared cigarette. The windows of the two-story control tower were opaque in the wan light. It was the Fourth of July, and he wondered if most of the airfield staff had been given the day to celebrate or if they had other duties to attend to.

Fortunately, Walker didn’t need a welcome party. He stood in the rain for a few moments, studying the black Mercedes that idled next to the plane. Its headlights were on, mostly lost in the gloom, but he couldn’t hear its engine over the noise of the jet. He started across the wet tarmac, cocked his head to try to get a look inside the Mercedes, and then the airplane’s door opened, stairwell lowering to touch the runway. Now that he was closer, he was fairly certain the plane must have been a new model Bombardier Challenger, but he wouldn’t have sworn to it.

A figure appeared, silhouetted at the top of the stairs.

“You don’t look like you’re in much of a hurry,” Alena Boudreau said, her voice carrying even above the engines and the rain.

She treated him as if he were some errant teenager, admonishing him for his pace, never mind that he had just left his son behind on a day that had been promised to the kid. He ought to have been simmering with anger and frustration, but instead, his thoughts prickled with curiosity and admiration. Alena wore the whiteness of her hair like a crown, was nearly always the smartest person in the room, brutal with her adversaries, and always behaved as if she could see through to your secrets, whether you had any or not.

Good riddance to General Wagner, he thought.

“Reporting as instructed, Director,” Walker said as he started up the stairs, hands on the railings, picking up his pace.

“I told you we’re not going to stand on formality,” she said, stepping back to allow him to board the plane.

“You did, yes. But frankly, I’ll wait until I find out what we’re up to here before I decide how cozy I want to get.”

Alena scowled. “Don’t worry, Dr. Walker. I’ve been known to get cozy, but never with my subordinates. It’s a good rule.”

He flushed. “That’s not what I—”

“There, that’s better,” she said, smirking. “I like you off-balance. Have a seat. We need to talk, and I don’t want to waste any more time.”

Walker felt the engines cycling around him. Cool air blew from overhead. “You told me to bring my camping gear.”

“You left it in the car. In a moment, you’ll want to go get it.” Alena reached inside her jacket and pulled out what appeared to be a phone but which unfolded into a full-size tablet, the sort with a liquid glass screen. “I’m going to show you something. Maybe you’ve already seen it. Thousands of people have, this morning, but I take it you had other things on your mind. By tonight, that number will be in the millions, thanks to the internet and the media’s lust for horrifying video clips.”

Walker frowned. “All right.” It was far from the first time he’d been called in because of something horrifying in an online video. After sitting on the bench for months, Wagner’s version of the naughty step, he was ready for any assignment, and since it had taken him away from his son, he figured it had better be damned important. The most horrifying things always were.

“First, the SRC,” Alena said. “Here’s the gist. You’ve worked for the Department of Defense under various cover organizations—”

“I work for DARPA, not the DoD.”

“And everyone in DARPA works for the DoD. Don’t waste my time, Walker.”

“Ma’am.” He nodded, not liking where this was going.

“We’ve had some questionable exposure in the last couple of years, first in Turkey and then with the Pandora Room. But you know all about those. Someday soon, you and I will have a talk about your actions, but not today. Right now, here’s what you need to know. To have a fresh start, DARPA has created a new false front for our more esoteric research and investigations. It has a global face. We’ve brought in some like-minded scientists in cooperative foreign governments to share data … at least, a little bit of data. As far as the world knows, we’re the Global Science Research Coalition, or the SRC. You report to me now. Otherwise, it’s going to be business as usual for you. All the niceties can wait until this is over and we sit down in my office like ordinary people. That’s all simple enough, I take it?”

Walker sank back into his chair. “You’re not going to tell me what happened with General Wagner, are you? Why he was removed? What he’s done to have what you called a ‘no-good, very bad day’?”

“No. I am not. General Wagner is still overseeing various projects for DARPA. He’s their responsibility, not ours.”

The engine continued to cycle. The plane seemed to thrum with urgency. Outside, the rain fell harder. From his seat, Walker had just the right angle to see the headlights on Alena’s Mercedes.

“Let’s see the video,” he said.

“This is Jericho Falls, New Hampshire, in the White Mountains,” Alena explained. “The events on this video took place at about fifteen minutes past eleven o’clock this morning. Not even three hours ago.”

She tapped the screen, opened a file, and turned it toward him as it began to play. It started with a Fourth of July parade, and he flinched at the discordant noise of the marching band going by. When the car plowed into view and the screaming started, she turned the volume down a bit, and he was grateful, but it was only when the man stepped out of the car that Walker began to understand why he was here.

“The woman who ran off,” he said while Alena folded up her liquid tablet. “Who is she?”

“Just anyone. Her name is Maeve Sinclair. The people you saw die there, at the end, were her mother and brother—”

Walker felt sick. “Jesus Christ. What the hell is this?”

“Moments after that video ends, Blackcoats show up. There are helicopters. All from a place called Garland Mountain Laboratories. I’m working on finding out more, but all I know right now is what I’ve just told you, and that the driver of that car was a man named Oscar Hecht, an employee at Garland Mountain. Obviously, he was infected with something—”

“Nothing I’ve ever seen,” Walker said. He felt a tightening in his chest, wondered how much she really knew. “There isn’t a contagion on earth that can be passed that quickly, particularly by simple skin contact, and even if there were, there’s never been a virus or bacterium that can infiltrate a body instantly, kill in seconds.”

Alena exhaled a long breath. She sat up in her seat, back straight. “Are you finished?”

Walker had always liked this woman. Admired her. She had a reputation for being fearless, brilliant, dedicated, honest, and fair, but there were other facets to that reputation, and he was seeing one of them.

“Yes. I’m finished.”

Alena stood. “To your insistence that there’s nothing like this, all I can say is that clearly, there is now. I’ve brought comm units for you, as well as some equipment that may be helpful, but supplement that with your own gear as you please. Go to Jericho Falls. Find out what the hell is going on, but most importantly, find Maeve Sinclair and protect her at all costs.”

A shiver went through him. He’d been so shocked by what he’d seen that he’d barely been thinking about the young woman who’d endured that horror, who must be terrified and grieving, maybe blaming herself. Who had run off into the mountains.

“The police will be searching for her—”

“Yes, and those Blackcoats from Garland Mountain as well,” Alena agreed, moving to the exit. She paused at the top of the steps. “As Oscar Hecht was dying, she touched him. Moments later, she touched members of her family and they dropped dead, which means whatever contagion he was carrying, she’s carrying it now. We have to assume everyone she touches is going to die. The police will be looking for her, and those Blackcoats, but they won’t be the only ones. This video is online. It’s already on the news channels. There will be others who want to know how Garland Mountain did this, who want to study Maeve Sinclair. Still others—and you know this, Walker, think about it—will want to be the one to personally take this woman’s life, just on the chance that this power, this ‘death touch,’ will pass to them as it did to her from Oscar Hecht.

“Go and find her, Walker. Bring her back to me.”

Walker’s stomach twisted with nausea. “Because we’re so different from whomever else is going to be hunting her? The SRC isn’t going to be just as interested in studying her, figuring out how to use this for ourselves?”

Alena only shook her head. “The difference is, with me, she’ll still be alive.”

She went down the steps, climbed into her car, and was gone before Walker had even retrieved his gear from the Jeep. Ten minutes later, he was in the air, wondering what the hell he was getting himself into.

As always.

5

Rue helped Ted up the front steps of the home he’d shared with Ellen when the two of them had still been married. It had been Ted’s childhood home, but he’d willingly moved out during the divorce, determined that his kids would grow up in this house. Ted had found himself a little two-bedroom cottage in the woods behind the old fire station, and it suited him just fine—the perfect place to drink or get high on Oxy or morphine or whatever he could get his hands on. Rue had tried so many times to convince him to get help, resisted all his efforts to push her away, until one day he’d told her he didn’t want to die, but he didn’t want to feel what it was like to be alive anymore.

That had done it. Something had broken inside him then, as if he’d heard himself speaking those words and cracked in half. Shaking, raging, he’d punched a hole in the wall of his cottage and then asked her to take him somewhere to get help. Rue had done it.

If Ted had managed to give up drinking at the same time, Rue thought Ellen might have taken him back after that. But a week after he’d gotten out of rehab, he’d reunited with his other oldest friend, whiskey. Said he needed the whiskey to help keep him buzzing so he’d stay away from the pills. The logic seemed absurd. His doctor said it would lead to further disaster, but so far it had been working.

After today, Rue figured all bets were off.

They’d gone to the hospital. X-rays showed three cracked ribs. He had a mild concussion. Lots of bruises and scrapes. He’d sprained his right knee, which remained swollen and blackened from smashing against the windshield. He would be in a lot of pain and discomfort for quite a while, but physically, he would recover.

She held Ted by one arm as if he were a hundred years old, escorted him up the front steps, used his key to get him through the front door. He gazed into some unseen space, some nothing world, and she wondered if his mind had gone completely numb or if his thoughts were about the son he had just lost, about how badly he’d spoiled his relationship with Ellen and how he’d never be able to make it up to her now. She wondered if coming home had been a good idea. There might be booze here. And even if he had kicked his pill addiction eight months ago, he’d still know how to get them if he really wanted them. That was the thing about broken people—there was always someone happy to help you shatter even further.

On the threshold, Ted seemed to wake abruptly from his somnambulism. His head snapped up and he glanced around, nearly knocking Rue into the shrubs to one side of the brick steps.

“Rose?” he said, his eyes red and rheumy, salty streaks on his face where his tears had dried. He still held his injured arm against his chest.

A massive oak tree spread a shady canopy across half the front yard. Rue remembered climbing that tree with Ted when she was a kid, sharing secrets and cigarettes. Now Rose sat in the shade of its leaves, twenty-one years old, grieving in silent agony in Priya’s arms.

It was Priya who looked up at Ted now. “Go on inside, Mr. Sinclair. I’ve got her. Just give us a few minutes and we’ll come in. I think she just needs…”

Priya tucked a lock of black hair behind her ear, as good as a shrug. Her expression crumbled, because the truth was she had no idea what Rose needed. Rue understood the look on her face because it mimicked the feeling in her own heart. What the hell was she supposed to do for Ted Sinclair?

“Thank you, sweetie,” Ted said. “Thank you.”

Priya wiped at her own tears and nodded. Ted shuffled into his house, Rue at his side, and he looked around the living room—at the two recliners in front of the TV and the magazines and coffee mugs and blankets thrown about the place, showing it was lived-in and loved and busy—and he brought a trembling hand up to cover his eyes.

Rue escorted him to the sofa and sat with him, one hand on his back as he took deep breaths. Slowly, he straightened up, reached out, and took her right hand in both of his.

“Thank you.”

“You don’t have to thank me, Ted. I’m just taking my best friend home.”

Ted tried to smile.

“You should have stayed in the hospital,” Rue said. “You know that.”

He looked at her as if he hadn’t heard. “My son is … Logan is gone.”

Rue had no reply to that. They’d put a brace on his knee and wrapped his torso tightly enough that he could barely breathe, trying to get his ribs to heal. But there was no cure for having watched your child die, watching the woman you still loved die. And what about Maeve? He’d lost her, too, or so it seemed.

“You should sleep, Ted. I still can’t believe the way you went over the top of that car. Jesus, that was…” Rue stopped herself. He’d been through more than enough already today.

Ted wetted his lips with his tongue and glanced over toward the ornate cabinet in the corner. He hadn’t lived in this house for a long time, but he definitely remembered where his ex kept the liquor.

Rue’s heart sank. The last thing she wanted to do was give him a drink, but she saw the shame and the plea in his eyes and reckoned that if anyone ever truly needed a drink, it was Ted Sinclair on this godforsaken day.

“I’ll pour you one,” she said, knowing how hard it would be for him to ask.

The gratitude in his eyes made her want to cry.

“What else can I get you?” she asked as she handed him a tumbler of Jameson Irish Whiskey.

“Information,” Ted replied, sipping the whiskey. Some of the color returned to his face. “What’s going on, Rue?”

“I don’t know any better than you do. I’m sorry, but—”

“You know a hell of a lot about a hell of a lot,” Ted said. “You saw what happened, what Maeve did, what that piece of shit in the car did in that crowd. I need to know what you think is going on here.”

He took another sip of whiskey, then stared into the glass a moment before downing the rest in a single gulp. Exhaling through his teeth, wincing in pain, Ted stood up and limped over to the closet by the door. He dug around until he pulled out a pair of weathered brown hiking boots, then kicked off his shoes and slid to the floor, not bothering with a chair. He hissed with the pain of every movement, flushing red as his cracked ribs grated.

“I’m not going to ask what you think you’re doing,” Rue said, running a hand over the stubble on the shaved side of her head. “Get into bed, Ted. The police are up there looking for her now—”

“I’m her father,” he said without looking up as he tried to lace his first boot with only one good hand.

“What about Rose?”

The question might have been unfair, given the circumstances. Rue knew that. But Rose sat out under the shade tree with her girlfriend, mourning and in shock but very much alive. Alive and safe. She needed her father as much as Maeve did.

“Can you stay with them?” Ted asked. “I know they’re twenty-one and they’re supposed to be adults now, but after this morning, I can’t leave them without someone to watch over them. I’m sure Priya’s parents will come, maybe stay with them both—Rose has gotten close with them, and she’ll understand that I need to do this. She’ll want me to do this.”

Rue didn’t share his certainty. “Of course,” she said, watching as Ted began to lace up his second boot, wincing at the pain in his knee. “I think you’re making a mistake, but I’m here for whatever you need. I’ll talk to the police, and I’m going to figure out what the hell happened at that lab. Whatever happened at the parade today, it didn’t start there. What’s happened to Maeve didn’t have to happen, and…”

She saw the way his face paled, and her words trailed off. Ted wiped at his eyes, hands trembling again. Rue knew he was in no condition to go up into the mountains alone. Hell, he shouldn’t even leave the house. He had refused opioids at the hospital, so all they’d given him for his pain had been the equivalent of a fistful of Advil. What little it might be doing to blunt his pain would wear off soon. Rue couldn’t let him go, but he would hate her for trying to stop him, just as she would hate him if the situation were reversed.

A rap came on the screen door. Rue and Ted both snapped around to see Chief Kaminski beyond the screen mesh, staring in at them. Len Kaminski had been chief for three years, and while the job would have aged most men, Rue thought Kaminski looked heartier and healthier than he had when he’d been a captain or a lieutenant. He’d lost beer weight, his face tan instead of ruddy, and while the graying of his hair had reached lightning speed, his eyes were clear and alert. The top job had given him renewed purpose, and Rue felt a wave of relief wash over her the moment he drew open the screen door, hinges squealing.

“Where you going, Mr. Sinclair?” Kaminski asked, like it was the most natural question in the world.

Ted blinked a few times, as if the words needed extra processing. “What kind of question is that?”

Kaminski ran a hand across his chin as if trying to decide if he needed a shave. “Let me start again. I need you to take a minute before you go running off and get yourself shot—”

“Shot?” Rue asked. “Did they shoot someone?”

“No, no, hang on,” Kaminski said. “Just hear me out.” He hooked his fingers into his belt. She had seen other cops do the same and wondered if they were trained not to stick their hands into their pockets, making it harder to draw a weapon or otherwise react in a crisis.

“I’ve called in the state police,” he said. “A dozen of them are already here, with more on the way. Between my officers and those troopers, we’ve got seventeen people up on the mountain now, making a sweep that starts right where Maeve ran into the woods.”

Ted shook his head. “She’s not going to stick close to town, Chief. My girls know these mountains. They camp and fish. If Maeve doesn’t want to be found, she’s going to head up the slope into deeper woods.”

“Fair enough,” Kaminski said, “but this is a methodical search. Let us do what we need to do.”

Rue held up her hands. “Chief, I’m sorry, but seventeen people is nothing up on Champney. Those woods go on forever. I know you don’t have a lot of personnel, and what happened at the parade … my God, it must be chaos over there still. But if Ted wants to go and look, and if he’s too stubborn to follow the doctor’s orders after the bashing he took, then he should go out looking for Maeve. And I’m sure we can round up plenty of people who will help.”

“You think so?” Chief Kaminski said, a new edge to his voice. “You think lots of people who saw what happened today are gonna want to comb through the woods looking for Maeve?”

Ted took it like a punch in the gut. Rue saw him recoil. He rubbed the back of his good hand across his mouth, the way he always did when the craving dug its claws into him and he really needed a drink.

“Jesus, Len—” she said.

“Fuck you, Chief,” Ted spat, face reddening, clearly not caring that the man carried a gun. “You didn’t see it happen. That son of a bitch drove right through the crowd, killed people with his car and then with his bare goddamn hands. I’m lucky to be alive. Maeve did what she did to save lives, to stop that lunatic, and then he … he fucking gave her whatever the hell disease he was carrying.”

“Yeah. Sure looked that way,” Kaminski said. “You’re living a nightmare day, Mr. Sinclair. Losing your ex and your boy like that. I can’t begin to tell you how sorry I am. My point is that most people were either there or have seen video, and speculation is running wild. Whatever sickness Maeve’s got in her now … well, that’s the reason most people aren’t gonna be rushing to join a search party.”

Anger prickled the skin at the back of Rue’s neck. She knew her face must have been flushing with it. “I’ve never seen anything like it, and this is my job. But I also know this town, and I’ve known Ted most of my life. People care for him and his family, and fear is not going to keep the people who really give a damn from helping him now.”

“Maybe not,” Kaminski said. “But it’s not just that. One of the things I came to tell you—”

The house phone began to ring. Half a second later, Rue felt her cell phone start to buzz in her back pocket.

“No need to answer,” Kaminski went on. “It’s an automated call from the town, letting residents know that the feds have put us under quarantine. Even the state police and EMTs who’ve come in to help are stuck here until the quarantine is lifted.”

Ted deflated, staring at his boots.

Rue doubted quarantine was necessary. The way Vargas and the other Garland Mountain Labs employees had behaved this morning, it was clear they were worried only about the driver of the car, the people he had touched, the people Maeve had touched, and Maeve herself. There didn’t seem to be any implication the contagion could be airborne. Regardless of Garland Mountain’s confidence, however, Rue approved of the quarantine. Whatever their lab had brewed up, Rue wanted to make absolutely certain nobody in Jericho Falls was unknowingly carrying that infection.

It relieved her to know that the government had stepped in, but she thought about Garland Mountain Labs and that Vargas woman, the Blackcoats and their helicopters, and she wondered just what the government’s role might be. The Pentagon had employed private military contractors in the past, a euphemism for mercenaries, and utilized them in foreign lands. The soldiers working for Garland might not be American military, but they were certainly authorized by the federal government.

“Len … Chief … what the hell were they doing at that lab?” she asked.

Kaminski glanced at Rue and scratched the back of his neck. “Normally, we’d have heard from the CDC, but the quarantine order came from Homeland Security. Make of that what you will. I don’t have a clue what the Garland Mountain folks were up to, but if it led to this…”

Ted took a step closer to him, sighing with discomfort at the pain in his ribs. “Maybe I’m not thinking straight. Inside it feels like a part of me is screaming all the time, even right now, while I’m talking to you.”

Rue felt her heart break a little for this man who had always been so good to her.

“That’s understandable. What you’re going through—”

Ted put his good hand on Kaminski’s arm. “Look me in the eye and tell me you don’t think Maeve’s in danger. Those helicopters and the soldiers they carried, they’d have killed the driver of that car if they’d reached him before he drove into the parade. I think they’d have killed Maeve if they’d gotten there in time and if there weren’t so many people with cameras.”

“You can’t know that,” Kaminski said.

“You’re right. I can’t. But you didn’t do what I asked. So look me in the eye and tell me you don’t think my daughter’s in danger. Tell me you don’t think they’ll kill her. And if you really don’t think that, then tell me you don’t think they’ll drag her back to Garland Mountain and put her in a cell and study her like she’s one of their specimens, because whatever this sickness is, I’ve never heard of anything this good at killing people. It’s in my daughter, Chief, and you know damn well they’re going to want it more than they’ve ever wanted anything.”

Chief Kaminski stared at him, breath coming in long sips of air, a terrible understanding darkening his eyes. He lowered his head. “Holy shit.”

“He’s right,” Rue said. “It’s one thing if your people or the state police find her first, Len, but if those other bastards get her—”

“We can’t let that happen,” Ted interrupted.

Kaminski paled. “You were about to go into the woods when I got here. Where were you headed?”

Rue wondered if Ted might hesitate, worried about trusting the chief, but maybe he had already realized what had only just occurred to her. They had nobody else to trust.

“My ex-father-in-law, Maeve’s granddad, had an old cabin up there. She and Rose loved it when they were little, but their grandfather passed ten years back. If she’s looking for a place to hide, that’s the only one I can think of.”

“Worth a look,” Kaminski said. “Glad you got your boots on. Let’s go.”

Some of the color returned to Ted’s face, along with a grim determination. He had a purpose. If he was out trying to help Maeve, maybe he wouldn’t have to think about the fact that his son and his ex-wife had died in front of him. Died at the hands of his eldest daughter.

“Go,” Rue said. “I already said I’d stay with Rose and Priya, and I’ll get on my phone and start learning everything I can about Garland Mountain Labs.”

Ted shot her a grateful look. She knew it masked his pain, hid away the internal screaming to which he’d just confessed. She also knew that he would need another slug of Jameson before he left, but there was strength in him, nevertheless.

He was going to need it.

Rose Sinclair lay on the grass in the shade of the tree that had watched over the family all her life, until today. As a girl, she’d held a strange fantasy in her heart, this idea that somehow the old oak tree with its sprawling branches wanted to shield and protect her, and not only her but Maeve and Logan, and Mom and Dad, too. It had a little magic in it, that tree, at least for her.

Today the magic had died.

She lay with her head on Priya’s lap, a warm breeze rustling the leaves overhead, and tried to find solace in the way Priya’s fingers stroked her face and pushed through her hair. There were raised voices in the house, and from somewhere not far away she could hear the heavy chop of a helicopter. Sirens wailed. A dog began to bark and then to whine, maybe a block away, and she wondered what had frightened it so. But not for long.

Her head hurt, a pressure that gripped her temples. Her eyes burned with dryness, now that she’d cried herself out. Down at the base of her brain, in that lizard part, she felt the urge to move, to get up and do something, to avenge what had happened to her mother and Logan, and to Maeve, wherever she had run. But she couldn’t get her muscles to obey her commands when her mind’s eye kept replaying the parade over and over, kept showing her the mental clip of the sick man staggering out of his car, those people dying, Maeve swinging the baseball bat … and what happened after.

Priya bent down and kissed her forehead, still stroking her hair. “I’m so sorry.”

The husk of a thing that had been Rose felt a flicker of life inside. It seemed scary to think about, the idea that she would have to live in the world again. Like this, in the shade of the oak tree, the solidity of Priya there to hold her, she could push it away, build herself a little bubble in time where she didn’t have to live in a world in which her mother and brother had died in front her, their bodies spirited away by some government agency.

In her mind, she could see her sister running between buildings, rushing into the woods, up to the mountain. Her face crumpled, and her chest ached.

“Maeve,” she said, shuddering as if with a chill or a fever instead of an anguish she’d never known. God, she wished her sister were there.

Priya said nothing. Only kissed her temple again. Stroked her cheek. Turned her face upward and kissed her lightly on the lips. A hot tear landed on Rose’s face, and her vision cleared enough for her to see that Priya had also resumed crying. Rose suspected they were both entirely sick of their tears, their grief, sick of themselves.

“I love you,” Priya whispered.

Rose twined her fingers with Priya’s. “Just seeing all of that … seeing those people die—”

Rose saw the hollowness in her eyes and knew they were both in shock. Priya might not have lost family, but she’d borne witness to something that would leave them both with trauma that would last forever. At twenty-one years old, forever might be a very long time.

The front door opened. Rose wiped at her tears and sat up. Side by side, backs against the huge oak, the two girls watched Rose’s dad and Chief Kaminski come down the steps and cross the lawn toward them. Rose expected her father to look as broken and disoriented as he had earlier, but the man who came out of the house carried himself quite differently from the man who had entered it. He still limped and winced in pain. His eyes remained oddly dark and the circles beneath them had deepened, but the straightness of his spine and the set to his jaw showed the anger that had taken root in him, and she could see he had purpose now. That was good. He so often looked for something to blur his pain or his sadness. Anger might burn that right out of him.

Later, she thought. Later on, when Maeve is safe … or when it’s over and she’s really gone, then he’ll break. But not yet.

The thought cut her deeply. She’d seen him drunk so many times, seen how lost he’d become when painkillers had become his life. Rose held Priya’s hand a little tighter.

“Dad?”

He went down on one knee in front of her, grinning to hide the pain in his ribs. “Chief Kaminski and I are taking a run up to the cabin. If anyone’s going to find her there, I want to make sure it’s us.”

Rose started to get up.

“No,” her father said, one hand on her wrist. “Stay here. Auntie Rue is in the house. You and Priya just sit tight, talk to Rue if you need anything, and the chief and I will be back soon, hopefully with your sister.”

Rose’s heart fluttered in her chest. Her dad was the only family she had at the moment, and she knew he needed her even more than she needed him. She wanted to latch on to him and not let go, but she nodded. “Okay. We’ll stay. But bring a jacket, Dad. Bring a pair of work gloves or something. Do not let her touch you, no matter what happens.”

Pain flared in his eyes as he understood, but he rose to his feet. “You’re right. I wasn’t thinking.” He told Chief Kaminski to hold on a minute and lumbered back inside, coming out with a light zippered sweatshirt and a pair of leather gloves.

“Take care of her for me,” Ted said to Priya.

“I will,” she said as the two girls rose.

Rose’s dad hugged them both, gingerly. Priya’s family still liked to pretend their daughter didn’t love a girl, but all the Sinclairs had welcomed her into their lives as if they’d been waiting for her, holding space open for her since the day she was born. Rose doubted she and Priya would stay together forever, or even through college—so few high school couples managed it—but secretly, she could see herself married to this girl someday.

“I love you,” Ted Sinclair said, to both of them.

Rose grabbed him by the shoulders, made sure he met her eyes. “Do not let her touch you. Don’t do that to me.”

“I won’t,” he promised.

Then he turned and climbed slowly into Chief Kaminski’s car. The engine coughed to life, the tires kicked up gravel, and half a minute later all was quiet again in the shade of that oak tree. In that quiet, it occurred to Rose that she had been selfish. Priya had called her parents to tell them what had happened so they knew she hadn’t been injured, but with all the sirens and helicopters, with the news, with people dead, they would be frantic about their daughter’s safety. They would want her home. She might be twenty-one, but she was still their girl.

“Pri,” Rose began.

The rumble of another engine interrupted them. For a moment, Rose thought her father and the chief had changed their minds, but then she spotted Bill McHugh’s ugly old Chevy Corsica. Red and faded and dented without being repaired, the thing seemed both ancient and ageless, but it ran perfectly. He might not have taken care of the outside, but he looked after the engine.

He skidded into his driveway and jolted to a stop. McHugh popped open his door and climbed out of the car. The way he looked over at them, forehead crinkling, eyes so sad, it was as if Bill McHugh had lost family this morning. He strode across his yard and into the Sinclairs’, looking like he wanted to scoop them up into his arms. Rose and Priya stood up and walked over to meet him halfway.

“Aw, Rosie, kid … I’m so sorry about your mom and Logan.” Mr. McHugh shook his head, his hands weaving slowly in the air as if in search of his next words.

“Thanks. Thank you.” She didn’t know what else to say.

He’d been their neighbor all her life. His daughter Cara had babysat each of the Sinclair kids at some point in their lives, before drugs had nearly killed her and a Colorado rehab center had saved her. She’d never come home from the Rockies. Rose hoped the dark vein of addiction running through the country hadn’t reached her there, but she knew it might, if Cara McHugh didn’t have the strength to fight it off. Most people seemed to think beautiful little hamlets like Jericho Falls were too remote, too idyllic, for the epidemic to take root. But people like Cara McHugh and Rose’s own father were living proof, and Chief Kaminski could have shown those doubters plenty of corpses if living proof wasn’t evidence enough.

Rose stared at Bill McHugh, somehow even hollower than before.

“Can you believe this?” the man demanded. “After what happened this morning, you’d think they’d need all the help they could get, but I went and volunteered to help them troopers search for Maeve, and now they’re telling me I can’t go.”

Priya stiffened. “What?”

“On top of that, state police say the town’s quarantined and nobody’s allowed to leave.”

Rose frowned. Why hadn’t her father told her that? “That’s kind of you just the same, Mr. McHugh. Thank you.”

Red-faced, McHugh glanced at the house. He grew a bit sheepish, as if realizing that raising his voice to a grieving, frightened young woman might not be the best way to show his support for the family.

“I’m sorry, Rosie. Please let me know if you need anything, all right? I’ll be just next door.”

She nodded to him. Priya took her hand, and they walked back to the shade tree as Mr. McHugh returned to his own property. They kept mum until they heard his front door bang shut.

Rose tugged her phone from her pocket. She had texted Maeve a dozen times with no response. She figured her sister had tossed her phone to avoid the SIM card being tracked. Their dad seemed to think Maeve would go to Granddad’s old cabin, but Rose doubted that. Smart as Maeve was, she would know that would be the first place he would suggest the police look for her. She felt like screaming. She knew why Maeve had to run, why she felt she needed to hide, and she loved her sister, but at the same time she found herself hating her instead.

Rose stood, brushing at the seat of her cutoffs. “I’ve got to go, Pri. I’ve been all over the mountain with her. If anyone’s going to find her, it’ll be me.”

Priya glanced up at the house. “I don’t think that’s the best idea.”

Rue had not come out to check on them, but Rose knew she would. The woman had always been such a good friend to her father—to both of her parents—even now, on the family’s most hideous day.

Rose took Priya’s hand. “We have to go now. It’ll take a little while to really lock down the town. Mr. McHugh leaves his car keys in the console between the seats. He never minded when Maeve had to borrow his car. I don’t think he’ll be angry with me, especially today. I’m gonna take his car and drive out to the end of Goodman Hill Road, hike in from there, and find Maeve.”

“Babe,” Priya said, a familiar caution in her voice. “People are dead.”

Rose winced. “Yeah. My mother’s dead. Logan’s dead. I don’t want Maeve to be dead, too. You honestly think anyone’s going to have a better chance of finding her than I am?”

Priya gave a tiny shrug, shaking her head. “My parents … they’re going to be furious if I go with you.”

Rose lifted her hand, kissed her fingers, and nodded. “I know. But I’ve gotta go. I’ll drop you off on the way.”

“No, you won’t. I’m not letting you go without me.” Priya gestured toward the house. “But what about Rue?”

The sound of Mr. McHugh’s rumbling Chevy engine hadn’t brought Rue to the door. Rose reckoned she was on the phone or half-asleep, not responding to that loud growl. Taking Priya’s hand, she walked over to the car and opened the door.

“Easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.”

6

For the first half hour, Maeve had done nothing but climb. After the parade, and the BMW, and the man behind the wheel, she had run away to the mountain. The woods had swallowed her up, as she had known they would. There were many trails on Mount Champney that were well groomed, perfect for hikers most of the year and cross-country skiers in the winter, but there were also dozens of less traveled paths. She’d crashed through the trees at the edge of town, headed uphill, and intentionally gone into the deeper woods, avoiding paths entirely.

Nearly an hour after entering the woods, the silent screaming inside her skull had quieted enough for her to begin to string thoughts together. Mom and Logan were dead. People would be after her. She needed time to think, but she couldn’t let anyone near her until she had gotten her thoughts in order. She would need a plan—a destination.

Now she had one, at least temporarily.

Maeve knew several ways to reach her granddad’s old cabin, including a dirt road that wound up through the woods, but that would leave her too exposed. Very few people still used the dirt road, but hikers sometimes parked on the shoulder to access the mountain trails. After getting turned around several times, she located the Jericho snowshoe trail, where her granddad had brought her and Logan and Rose as kids. Rose had been little, then, and when she was old enough to really take advantage of the cabin, Granddad had been too old. And then he’d died.

Shafts of sunlight shone through the trees, illuminating patches of the narrow trail. Covered with snow, it made a decent path, but in summertime it was too narrow and overgrown, and rocks and thick roots jutted from the ground. Maeve stumbled several times as she jogged up the trail but managed to keep her feet moving under her. The rich pine and maple scents of the forest filled her lungs, as if the mountain had taken her into its embrace. Mostly in shadows, accompanied by the sounds of her own exertion, she allowed herself the luxury of feeling safe.

In the distance, she heard the thrum of a helicopter’s rotors. It might have been a news chopper, but Maeve felt sure whoever might be up there, they were searching for her. She focused on the thump of her old blue Sperrys on the hardened ground, creating a pace and a rhythm, and that helped her not think about the parade and the car, the baseball bat and the blood, and the look of relief in the murderer’s eyes.

She hadn’t recognized it at first, but now the memory had crystallized. She could see those eyes, that last moment of his life, even after he’d lunged for her and she’d grabbed his wrist. He’d realized death had come for him and his rage had bled away, replaced by … gratitude? Maeve thought it might have been gratitude, yes. And she hated him for it.

Her mother’s face swam into her thoughts, and Maeve pushed it away. Her side hurt from the effort of the climb, but she picked up her pace. Blood rushed to her head, heart pounding in her ears, and that helped her not think about the things she didn’t want to think about. Helped her erase the gray-eyed image of her mom coughing, of the panic etched into her features as she fell. As she died at her daughter’s hands.

No. Maeve slowed her jog to a stiff walk, still hurrying.

The snowshoe trail hit a switchback, and she turned left and followed. During the summer, most people would have had a difficult time locating the trail. In the early fall, downed trees would be cleared and overgrown brush would be trimmed back. The few markers were so faded they blended easily with the surrounding woods. But Maeve knew what she was looking for. In some places, the trail appeared to simply end, but she always found it again.

A cough built in her chest, burst like a dog’s bark from her throat, and she blamed the pollen in the air even though allergy season had come and gone.

To her left, twenty feet from the trail, she saw the pile of rocks that her granddad told her had been a forest chapel in the nineteenth century. Now the rocks served as a rustic fireplace for winter hikers and snowshoers. People who knew where to find it would gather ’round with thermoses of coffee or flasks of whiskey, sing songs or roast marshmallows or snuggle up against the cold weather and remember a time when the dangers of the wild mountain woods could not be so easily left behind. Granddad had taken Maeve and her siblings there one late afternoon as the sun had set, cooked hot dogs on sticks, and talked to them about bears and wolves and other things that might be found in the forest when people were alone and foolish. Then he had escorted them home along the nighttime trail, and Maeve had marveled at the array of unsettling noises from among the trees. She had listened with wonder and terror, and she had never forgotten.

As she emerged from the trail into the grassy, rutted lot behind Granddad’s old cabin, she tasted the salt of new tears on her lips. Her phone buzzed again in her pocket. It had been going off regularly, vibrating with both calls and text messages. She knew she couldn’t hold on to it for long, but it remained a lifeline, a possibility, a way home if she had any hope of going home.

“Oh God,” she whispered, putting her hands on her hips and taking a breath as she studied the back of the cabin.

One of the back windows had been broken. Moss had grown thick on the roof. An old birch tree had fallen, white and thin and skeletal, against the south side of the cabin, but the leaves had kept growing and one of the branches seemed to have merged with the wooden structure. The mountain seemed determined to take back this piece of land, and with Granddad gone from the world, Maeve’s father hadn’t done anything to prevent it.

She ached with a yearning stirred by memories. There had been a bed here once, a place for her to lay her head, to cuddle with Rose back when she had been little, to make blanket forts with Logan and play board games and read the books that Granddad pushed on her and which she nearly always liked a bit more than she let on.

If only, she thought. If only she could go in there now and find Granddad waiting, find little Rose with a blanket, find Logan with the Scrabble board. If only they could catch fish down by the falls and fry those fish in a skillet with garlic and lemon and a pinch of this and a dash of that. If only Mom and Logan weren’t dead.

Maeve looked at her hands for the first time since she had run from the parade. She studied her palms, wondering why they weren’t soaked with blood, why they hadn’t turned red or black or purple as an ugly bruise, anything to show that they were no longer ordinary hands.

Her phone vibrated again.

With a deep breath, she slid it from her pocket. The last text had come from her dad. I’m coming, Maeve. I promise I’ll find you.

“Please don’t.” She whispered the words to herself, and perhaps to her father wherever he might be. Certainly not to God. If she’d ever believed in any sort of god, this had cured her of that delusion forever. What god would have stood back and watched such horror unfold?

Shit. He would come here. She knew that as surely as she’d ever known anything. Her father would think of the cabin right away. Maeve stared at the broken window and wondered if her dad might already be inside waiting for her—she wondered if he hated her now, if he might be coming here to take her home or have her arrested.

Of course he hates you. So does Rose. Of course they do. After what you did.

“Get your shit together,” she said out loud. Closing her eyes, she imagined ice flowing down through her, freezing her veins, cooling the heat of shame and grief, hardening her muscles and bones.

Maeve set off to the north side of the cabin. The pump had rusted, but it took less than a minute to get water flowing again. It began as a brown trickle, then spat and sprayed, and finally ran clear enough that she felt safe taking a drink. Hurrying around to the front of the cabin, she found the old key stuck between the step and the frame of the front stairs, where it had always been. The front door lock barely turned. The key jammed. Maeve put her shoulder in it, and the lock tore through rotted wood with a dry crunch. The door swung inward.

From off in the woods came the sound of an engine. Maeve glanced over her shoulder, listening as the engine growled, coming nearer.

A hunger gnawed inside her, and she had to fight the urge to stand and wait. If the engine signaled her father’s arrival—even if it was someone else on the hunt for her—at least she would not be alone. If they meant to punish her, hurt her, it would only be what she deserved.

The engine rumbled nearer. She wanted so badly for her father to hold her. Just throw his arms around her.

Maeve would touch him. Take his hands in hers. Rose would come, and Maeve would embrace her. They would cough, and black blood would drip from their eyes. They would jerk and seize and judder on the ground, in the dirt, and then they would die. She could see it happen in her mind’s eye, as if she had already lived those moments.

Maeve couldn’t breathe. It felt as if her insides were being clawed out. No, no, no, she thought, because she would not allow herself to hurt anyone else, especially not her dad or Rose. She would never touch another person if that was what it took to keep from killing. Never touch anyone, not in love or lust, not for simple joy or comfort. The reality of it began to suffocate her.

She coughed again, a new ache in her throat and chest. Her temples throbbed.

It’s not fair, a greedy little voice said in her head. Just wait for them. They want to comfort you. They want to hold you.

It didn’t sound like her own voice at all but like someone else, like a serpent whispering in a garden. Everyone had a selfish terror inside them, waiting for the worst moments of their lives to manifest. She told herself that she wouldn’t fall prey to it. Wouldn’t let fear make her small.

She ran inside and rifled through the dusty kitchen until she found an old plaid thermos Granddad had always used for his coffee. In her pocket, her phone buzzed again, and she pulled it out and tossed it onto the rickety little kitchen table. They could track it if they wanted to, but they would only track it to the place they’d already have decided to search for her. It buzzed again as she ran from the cabin.

In the yellow grass of the side yard, she filled the thermos from the rusted pump. The car roared louder, clear and carrying across the yard, the woods no longer damping the noise. Whoever it was had arrived at the cabin, but they hadn’t found her yet.

Maeve darted across the grassy lot and into the woods, rejoining the snowshoe trail. Every footfall sounded too loud in her ears, but by the time she heard car doors slamming shut back at the cabin, she’d already split off onto what Granddad had called the Jackrabbit Trail, and she knew nobody would find her here. Not quickly, anyway.

Fifty yards along, she came to a tree that had been split by lightning before she was born, both sides continuing to grow. From the split in the trunk, she had a view down the slope and into the cabin’s small clearing. A blue-and-silver police car sat silently on the dirt road in front of the cabin, windows dark. Maeve’s heart thrummed like hummingbird wings, but she fought the urge to keep running.

The driver’s door opened first. Chief Kaminski climbed out, gesturing to someone inside the car. He raised his voice, and some of the words carried on the breeze. “Stay put, Ted. I don’t need any more bodies.”

Ted.

The passenger door opened, and Maeve’s father stepped out. Her heart leaped. She could still see it in her mind, the moment the BMW had struck him, the way he’d jumped to avoid being hit and smashed into the windshield, been thrown up and over, landed on the pavement. But he was alive, and he was here. In pain, from the careful way he moved … but here.

He slammed the door hard enough for the sound to echo up the mountain. Some of his words were lost, but Maeve heard fuck you and my daughter clearly enough. Her left hand shook as she lifted it to cover her mouth, to keep her from shouting for him the way her heart yearned to. How old had she been when she had stopped needing her father?

Stupid question. Such a dumb fucking question. The child she’d been had not vanished but had been absorbed into the adult woman she’d become. Once, she had been a little girl who had climbed into her father’s lap every day when he came home from work. Those memories were fresh, and today they were sharp enough to cut her.

“Daddy,” she whispered. Whatever he had become, whatever demons he’d faced, he was still the father she’d always known.

His love for her would put him in danger, and she had lost too much today.

Maeve began to turn away, but something prickled at the back of her neck, an icy pain that radiated up into her skull. Wincing, she staggered and braced herself against a tree, stifling the groan at her lips. A bird took flight from the branches overhead, and she breathed through her teeth until the spike of pain had subsided. Frozen, she listened for approaching footsteps, but when she managed to look down at the road again, she saw Kaminski and her father entering the old cabin. The front door hinges creaked so loudly Maeve could hear them from up on the hill.

Her gut rippled with a sudden twist of nausea. She coughed and wiped at her mouth only to see a black smear on the back of her hand. It’s in me. The sickness he touched them with …

Maeve heard the static of a police radio back down the hill, but she couldn’t make herself turn and look for her father this time. She knew what would happen if she touched him, but it felt as if there were two voices in her head, deeply at odds, like the angel and devil on the shoulders of a character in some old cartoon. Part of her wanted the comfort her father’s embrace would bring, but another part—a hungry part—wanted to hug him for another reason.

An image flashed in her head of her father coughing and choking, of disease frothing from his mouth, of his throat turning purplish black as he fell to his knees, eyes rolling back in his head. Maeve cried out—she couldn’t stop herself, not with this horror in her mind. Tears burned at her eyes, guilt and grief and rage clawing at her.

There’s always Kaminski, said the voice in her head. You could take him.

Her hands itched with heat, fingers clenching with a need she refused to understand.

The echo of her own cry lingered in the air. She blinked, wondering if they’d heard it down at the cabin.

Maeve bolted, dashing up the Jackrabbit Trail, leaving her father behind for the second time that day, wondering if she would ever see him again, terrified of what might happen if she did. She hurled herself up the mountain, deeper into the wild wood. She coughed again, spat black sludge onto the underbrush, winced at the needles of pain in her skull, and wondered if what she was really looking for was a place to lie down and die.

Either way, she wasn’t going to hurt anyone else. Not ever.

No matter what the voices in her head might say.

7

Walker basked in the glory of the Buick’s air-conditioning, cranked as high as the vents would pump it out. His plane had landed at half past two at a small regional airport, where he’d been met by a typically nondescript DoD employee and handed the keys to a silver Buick Cascada convertible, seemingly fresh off the lot. Working for the SRC had accustomed him to rentals or beat-up loaners, dusty Jeeps and dented trucks. If the DoD guy wondered how Walker warranted this vehicle, he gave no indication, but Walker wondered enough for both of them.

The sky had been half-blue and half–ghostly white when the plane was in the air, but by the time it landed, that misty cover had spread farther and begun to darken. On the video from this morning, the day had begun with a beautiful blue sky, but as the clouds moved in, the day had turned gray and heavy with humidity. As he drove, Walker glanced out the window and said a little pagan prayer for rain.

A convertible. Jesus, these people.

He kept the top up.

The GPS took him winding along a valley, halfway ’round a lake, and through dense forest. Hawks wheeled across the darkening sky. Higher up, a helicopter sliced the air in unsettling silence. It should’ve made more noise, which identified it as either friend or enemy. Helicopters used for corporate or tourist purposes were never so quiet. They didn’t need to be.

Garland Mountain Laboratories appeared on his left, half a mile earlier than the GPS indicated. Walker hit the brake and turned onto a narrow road that looked as if it might tunnel into the side of a wooded mountain slope. The road veered to the right, through a dense screen of trees, and he caught his first glimpse of the fence. A quarter mile later, he tapped the brake and brought the Buick to a purring halt at a high, barbed wire–topped gate replete with security cameras. Two guards stepped out of the shack by the gate, one of them wearing an assault rifle slung across his shoulder. It looked to Walker like a SIG 556R, a serious weapon, but it only spurred more questions in his mind.

Who are you people? he thought as the guard approached.

Walker rolled the window down. “I’m Dr. Ben Walker from—”

“Global SRC,” the guard finished. “You’re expected, Dr. Walker. Please proceed to the end of the road, park in Lot C. Someone will greet you there.”

Walker studied the man’s face, the lines at the corners of his eyes, the lean features, the way his stance created an illusion of ease until you looked at the tension in his jaw and the way his right hand never strayed far from the service weapon holstered at his hip. Military, no question about it. The training, at least.

“Don’t you want my ID?” he asked.

The guard smiled as if the question were adorably quaint. “No, sir. We’ve got it covered.”

He signaled for the one with the assault rifle to open the gate, and a moment later it began to roll back with a metallic squeal. Walker drove through, keeping an eye on the two guards in his rearview mirror. Of course they had known he was coming, and presumably the SRC had sent some identification through, but still the guards should have confirmed his ID. Walker glanced back at the cameras by the guard station and wondered how many there had been on the road into the facility and how good Garland Mountain’s facial recognition software might be.

Lot C awaited him at the road’s end, as promised, nearest to the main entrance, a small lot marked for visitors and VIPs, but with fewer than half a dozen spaces occupied. Walker pulled the conspicuous Buick into the spot nearest the door. As he climbed out of the car, he saw a woman exit the lab and stride toward him. She wore a vest top, black trousers, and black boots that gave her away as something other than what she seemed. When she approached him, she did not offer a hand to shake.

“Dr. Walker, I’m Cristina Vargas, one of the lab supervisors. I’ll be your escort while you’re here, and I’ll be happy to answer any questions you have.”

“I don’t want to waste your time,” Walker replied, studying her eyes. “But I do have questions. Honest answers will speed us along.”

Vargas wrinkled her nose. “You think I’m going to lie to you?”

“My past experience has left me ill prepared for honesty from people in your position.”

“What position is that?”

“People who are hesitant to let me through the door.”

Vargas smiled at that. “All right, then. Come in, Dr. Walker. We’ll make this as painless as we can and get you on your way. You have more important things to do than hang around our lab all day.”

She brought him inside, through security and past multiple cameras. The guards he saw wore sidearms and eyed him with a steel that said they had used those weapons before in some earlier life. Walker nodded to let them know the message had been received and also to give them the same message in return.

The lab had been built into the face of the mountain. From the outside, it appeared to be only two levels, but when Vargas took him onto the elevator, the row of buttons confirmed his suspicion that the facility was larger than it seemed. Five levels in total, three of them underground. It must, he thought, have cost billions of dollars to build the place, and a lot of influence to do it quietly.

Vargas took him up to a small conference room on Level 2, where a bald and bearded white guy in a lab coat shifted uncomfortably in one chair, and a woman tapped away at a laptop. When Vargas brought Walker in, Lab Coat looked at his watch—he actually wore one—and gave a put-upon sigh.

“Please make it quick, Dr. Vargas,” the lab coat said.

“I’d appreciate that as well,” Walker said, drilling Lab Coat with a smile he hoped would set the man’s beard on fire. “Before anyone else dies from whatever the fuck you idiots let out of your lab.”

The bald-and-bearded Lab Coat, who looked a bit like Rasputin now that Walker gave it some thought, flushed red with anger, likely more color than his pale basement-dwelling life normally allowed. His colleague didn’t smile, exactly, but as she turned to look at Walker, the corner of her mouth lifted with a hint of amusement. A large woman with a tumble of natural curls and better fashion sense than Lab Coat, Walker recognized her immediately.

Dr. Katherine Isenberg had previously worked for DARPA. They’d crossed paths a few times, briefly, but he saw the flicker of recognition in her eyes and gave her a small shake of his head. She took the hint, swallowing any words of greeting. Walker preferred not to let the others know he and Kat Isenberg were acquainted, partly because of the other flicker he saw in her eyes, a glimpse of worry and urgency.

“That’s how it’s going to be?” Vargas asked, taking a seat at the table. She leaned back, studying Walker, steepling her fingers on her chest.

Nobody had offered him a seat, but Walker took one. “It doesn’t have to be. Maybe I jumped the gun. So let’s just get to it and see if I made the wrong assumption. Let’s start with names and job titles. We’ve got Dr. Vargas … who does what, exactly?”

Vargas fumed. “I’ve told you. I’m a lab supervisor.”

“For all of Garland Mountain Labs or for—”

Lab Coat rolled his eyes. “For one lab. Dr. Vargas is my supervisor.”

Kat Isenberg gave a small wave. “Dr. Isenberg. Deputy lab supervisor. And this is Dr. Jones, project manager.”

Walker wanted to ask about Dr. Jones’s projects, but while he had Vargas here, he had a more important question.

“Who funds Garland Mountain Labs?”

Vargas smiled. “Next question.”

“Okay. Now I know where we stand,” Walker said, leaning back in his chair. “My guess is Homeland Security, but Defense has to be aware, and given what little I do know about your operation, it feels like DARPA.”

Dr. Jones grunted. “You said you didn’t want to waste time.”

Walker hadn’t liked any of this from the outset—the lab, the sickness, the idea that anyone could kill just by touching someone—but he particularly didn’t like how close to home this felt. Whoever gave the researchers at Garland Mountain their marching orders, this was familiar territory, the sort of research DARPA did every day. But playing twenty questions with these people wasn’t going to save a single life if the questions went unanswered.

“Just tell me what you’re prepared to tell me about the guy in the BMW and what he could do,” Walker said. “Then I’ll do what I can to fix your fuckup.”

Dr. Jones made a tsking sound with his tongue. “People who live in glass houses, Dr. Walker.”

Walker bristled. “Meaning what, exactly?”

“We all have a job to do, that’s all,” Vargas said, kindlier than before. More concerned. “The man’s name was Oscar Hecht. He worked here. The media will have that information fairly soon. Red Hands is a tactile bacterial infection—”

“Red Hands? That’s what you—”

“Yes, that’s what we call it,” Jones interrupted. “Project: Red Hands. And yes, it’s the result of intensive research and experimentation. Given whom you work for, you’re in no position to lecture us. It wasn’t supposed to ever leave the lab, but Hecht infected himself and then ran from his own idiocy. A fool and a coward, and now he’s dead.”

“And he took a lot of other people with him,” Walker replied.

“Justin…,” Vargas cautioned.

Walker glanced at the man’s name tag for the first time. Dr. Justin W. Jones. He didn’t look like a Justin. Walker had preferred Rasputin.

Kat Isenberg tapped at the computer, nodding to herself. “Dr. Vargas, we’re set.”

Vargas exhaled. “Finally.”

Walker cocked his head. “You want to share?”

“The quarantine perimeter is closed. Between our people, state police, and officers from police departments in surrounding communities, every road now has a checkpoint.”

Something about the statement chilled Walker, but it took him a moment to sift his thoughts. He narrowed his eyes, studying Jones and Kat before fixing his gaze on Vargas.

“You have all the bodies here at the lab, don’t you? The remains are quarantined here. Everyone from the Sinclair woman’s family to Hecht himself.”

Vargas gave a nod. “That’s right.”

“This is a tactile contagion, you said, and from the clips I’ve seen, I will take you at your word. The only way to get this sickness is to be touched by someone infected with it, and aside from Hecht and Maeve Sinclair—whose exceptions I assume you’ll decline to explain—everyone touched with Red Hands dies less than a minute after contact.”

“That’s an exaggeration,” Jones said. He ran a hand over his beard, unconsciously grooming himself. “Some lived nearly two minutes.”

Walker wanted to punch him in the throat. He squeezed his eyes closed. When he opened them, he caught a strange expression on Kat’s face. She had glanced at her lab partner with a look of disdain, even disgust. When she caught Walker looking at her, she gave a shake of her head and mouthed the words I’m sorry. Vargas and Rasputin hadn’t seen—they were staring at Walker—but at least one person in this place had a soul.

“In other words,” Walker said, “you know there isn’t anyone else infected with this thing. I’d like you to walk me through exactly how you know that, how we got here, and what you’re planning to do about it.”

Vargas looked at him as if he’d lost his mind. The guy he thought of as Rasputin-in-a-lab-coat actually snickered, laughing at Walker rather than with him. As manager of Project: Red Hands, his work had cost lives, and he didn’t seem all that broken up about it. Kat Isenberg met Walker’s gaze, fidgety and frustrated, and he felt sure she would have talked to him if the other two weren’t in the room.

“I think we’re done here, Dr. Walker,” Vargas said, gesturing toward the door. “We look forward to helping you bring Maeve Sinclair home safely, for her own protection as well as the protection of anyone she might encounter.”

Jones stood. Kat Isenberg closed her laptop.

“This quarantine should comfort me,” he told Vargas. “You spending so much effort on making sure Sinclair doesn’t kill anyone else.”

“But you’re not comforted, are you?”

Walker shook his head. “I would be if I thought you cared more about the people who might die than you do about putting your genie back in the bottle.”

The authorities had put the quarantine in place mostly for show—you couldn’t have something contagious kill a bunch of people on a video the whole world had seen and do nothing. But the only person the masterminds at Garland Mountain actually wanted to confine to the area was Maeve Sinclair.

“Now, hang on,” Jones said, face going red. “If you can get her here, we can help this woman.”

Walker turned for the door. “You’d fucking better, Justin.”

Vargas hurried to follow him out and escort him to the elevator. In the lobby, the security guards nodded to Walker, and then they were outside. The clouds had thickened and darkened, and a few drops of rain spattered the ground.

“We’re doing all we can,” Vargas said. “We all want to keep people safe.”

“You’re doing a bang-up job so far.”

Walker headed for Lot C, where his convertible Buick loaner sat looking absurder than ever.

“What did you expect?” Vargas called. Hands stuffed into her pockets, she studied him with what seemed genuine curiosity.

“Excuse me?” Walker said.

“She’s had a bad fucking day, yeah, her life is a goddamn tragedy,” Vargas went on, “but what’s in Maeve Sinclair is our research, and she belongs here at Garland. The decision may rest with someone higher up, but did you really think we’d be eager to help you be the one to lay hands on her?”

Walker felt his fists clench. He smiled, but if Vargas had known him better, the smile would have made her nervous. “You think she belongs to you.”

“Of course. Who else? I told you, it’s our research—”

“She’s not research. She’s a human being.”

Vargas sighed heavily and rolled her eyes. “Grow up, Walker. This girl is death incarnate, and she’s fucking AWOL.” She waved him off. “Just go find her. We’ll fight over her later. If she offers to shake hands, maybe just blow her a kiss instead.”

She turned and walked back toward the facility entrance. Walker glanced around, surprised not to have an escort, but then he remembered all the cameras and the guards at the gate, and knew there were still eyes on him.

The cameras watched as he drove back to the gate, but it swung open without so much as a glance from the guard shack. They had known he was coming, and they knew he was leaving. Walker felt more conspicuous than ever in his silver convertible, and he sped up, the Buick surging along the narrow road beyond the gate, embarrassed and angry and filled with a new urgency.

When a dented red Hyundai pulled out from behind a tree to block the road, he barely had time to jam on the brake. The Buick skidded to a halt. The engine ticked and growled, and the wipers swished across the glass as Walker glared at the Hyundai, waiting for trouble. He’d lived moments like this before, and the next step nearly always included hard-eyed men with guns. Instead, the woman who stepped out of the Hyundai was tall and attractive, tattooed and grim-faced. She slammed her car door and walked directly toward him, and Walker knew then she had no intention of killing him. If she meant him harm, she would know better than to expose herself that way. If he’d had a gun, he could have put a dozen bullets in her.

Which reminded him that he shouldn’t have left his gun packed in his bag, in the trunk. He hadn’t expected to want it quite so soon.

As the woman approached the driver’s window, Walker hit the button to lower it.

The first tattoo his gaze lit upon seemed to be a purple octopus encircling her forearm, the last thin tentacle like a bracelet on her wrist. He’d have liked her immediately if not for the way she’d just endangered both their lives.

“Can I ask your name?” she said, one hand on the roof, ducking to look through his window. Not an ounce of fear.

He had both hands on the steering wheel. “This is a strange ambush.”

Her forehead wrinkled. “What?” Blinking, she stepped quickly back from the car, hands raised. “Look, I just want to know who you are. I spent fifteen minutes at the gate. Once the guard told me nobody would see me, he basically ignored me until I gave up. I saw you take the turn in my rearview mirror when I was leaving and I thought, no way are they letting this guy in. I’m pissed off, so I followed you back. Sure enough, I get to the gate and you’re nowhere in sight, which meant you were inside. So I wanna know, who are you that they stonewalled me but let you through?”

Walker felt the seconds ticking past, but he could see the pain and determination in the woman’s eyes.

“I don’t work for the lab,” he said. “They’re assholes.”

She didn’t smile. “Implying you personally are not an asshole.”

“I have my days.” He extended his hand through the window. “Walker. Global Science Research Coalition.”

“Rue Crooker,” she said, shaking his hand. “Concerned fucking citizen.”

Walker released her hand, glancing at the tentacles of her octopus tattoo. “Short version, my boss sent me to make sure this morning’s tragedy doesn’t get any worse. It’s incredibly dangerous. You should really be at home until—”

Rue gave him a look of profound disappointment. “See, I liked you until right now.”

“I’m sorry?”

“If you work for Global SRC, you know I’m not in any danger. The only people in danger are Maeve Sinclair and anyone who comes into contact with her.”

Walker smiled. A breeze kicked up and blew the forest smells of pine and cedar through his window. “You may not like me anymore, but I now like you a hell of a lot, Ms. Crooker.”

“Dr. Crooker.”

“Of course you are.” He tilted his head. “What sort of doctor might you be?”

“Biologist. I was there when it happened. Saw it all, and not on video. Also dealt with your friends from the lab—”

“They are definitely not my friends.” Walker hesitated, knowing Alena wouldn’t want to involve civilians, but this woman was already involved, and he had an assignment to complete. “You said only Maeve and anyone she runs into will be in danger, and you’re right. For her sake, I need to be the one to find her. I assume you didn’t drive over here and argue with the guards at the gate out of clinical interest.”

Rue simmered. “They brought all the victims back here. People want to know what’s being done with the remains of their loved ones and how long before they’re released.”

Walker put both hands on the wheel, felt the engine idling. “Yeah, but that’s not why you’re here. You came because you want answers. You’re a biologist, and this isn’t like anything you’ve ever seen. It’s something that shouldn’t even exist, and you wanna know what it is, how it does.”

“And I want Maeve to be all right.”

“You know her,” Walker said.

Rue took another step back from the car. For a few seconds, she seemed to be evaluating him, and then she nodded to herself as if deciding. Reached up to scratch at the stubble on the shaved part of her scalp.

“Maeve’s father is one of my closest friends. I’ve known the girl all her life. Her father, Ted, had a hunch about where she might go and headed up there with the chief of police, Len Kaminski. They’ll be back at the house by now, with her or without her.”

Walker swore under his breath, hands tightening on the wheel. “That could be very dangerous.”

Rue tapped the roof of the car. “Follow me. I’ll make an introduction.”

“You trust me enough to do that?”

She scowled. “Someone has to help this family, and you’re the only person I’ve encountered who seems willing. But don’t flatter yourself, friend. After today, I don’t trust anyone.”

8

Three-quarters of an hour after Maeve had started on the Jackrabbit Trail, she noticed a narrower trail on her left. Unlike so many in these mountains, this path had no marker, no sign, no name to offer a hiker the comfort of familiarity or the assurance that if they wandered off and became lost, they were likely to find their way.

She took a breath, a prickle of fear at the back of her neck. The trail wended into a thick tangle of forest, much darker than the path she’d been on, but it appeared to continue up the mountain. More importantly, she knew she had never hiked this trail with her family, had never lugged her fishing rod through that gap. If her father tried to guess where she’d go next, he might well think to try the Jackrabbit Trail, but he’d never imagine she would go off by herself into the dark unknown.

Which made it her only choice.

Maeve wished she could stop, let them find her, but that just wasn’t possible. She needed time to think. Right now, she couldn’t see any way out of this, but she nurtured a small hope that if she could just stop and rest, something would occur to her.

Protecting her face from branches, she plunged along the narrow trail, so thick with trees and bushes that they scraped at her like brambles. If they had a good tracker, the person would doubtless be able to follow, but she wasn’t going to make it easy for them.

Neither was the weather, apparently. Ten minutes after she’d started up the new path, stumbling on rocks and root braids that thrust from the dirt, it began to rain. The sun had been fading in and out all along, but it surprised her when she heard the pattering on the leaves overhead and then the thick rattling of heavier drops. Though it couldn’t have been much past 2:00 p.m., it felt as if night had already fallen.

Maeve welcomed it. If the storm went on long enough, all traces of her passing this way would be erased.

Maybe nobody will ever find me. Maybe I’ll die up here.

A racking cough bent her double and blurred her vision. Her chest had begun to ache, and she pressed both hands against her sternum. Her throat felt tender and swollen. Maeve coughed again, and she spat something thick and dark onto the rain-damp path. This couldn’t be what she feared—not whatever had killed her mother and Logan. The people the driver had touched died instantly. She had killed him; he had touched her, passed whatever disease had cursed him onto her, but she wasn’t supposed to be the one to get sick.

The trail widened a bit, turning northeast, up the face of the mountain, toward a ridge between Mount Champney and the neighboring Little Blackberry Mountain. Northeast felt like the safest direction. Off to the west were the real Jericho Falls, the waterfalls from which the town had gotten its name. The falls and the caves there brought out tourists and day hikers, and she knew whoever might be looking for her would assume she would strike out for the falls. A young woman on her own, up on the mountain, knowing there were caves where she could hide and people who might be willing to help her? The average middle-aged man wouldn’t bet money on Maeve seeking out the hard terrain, the darkest woods. Her father would expect it, but she had to gamble on him not sharing those thoughts. Even if he blamed her for what had happened … even if he hated her now.

Her gut gave a sour twist, and she began to cough. Something in her felt off. She thought longingly of her grandfather’s cabin, but she couldn’t go back there. She continued along the narrow, overgrown trail. The rain fell so hard it began to pool and flow in little rivulets along the raised roots. Squirrels darted through underbrush. Twenty paces farther, the branches grew so close together that the trail virtually disappeared.

She plunged ahead. A thin branch scraped her cheek, and she hissed at the sting. Raindrops ran down her face as she pushed through, tripped on a root, and stumbled half a dozen steps to land sprawling on the path. The fall knocked the wind out of her. A rock jutting from the ground smashed into her left breast, and she groaned and rolled over, arms across her chest. She coughed a little. The ache in her throat throbbed, but as her breathing evened out, she managed to turn over and rise up onto her knees.

The trail had turned parallel to the mountain. The rain had lightened up. Ahead, the path sloped downward to a break in the trees. Silhouetted in the gray light, perhaps two hundred yards ahead, a broken, jagged stone chimney rose from a sloped roof. Maeve shot to her feet in panic, ready to bolt, fearful that she had unknowingly doubled back toward town.

Something skittered through the trees overhead, but she heard no voices, nothing to indicate there were people around. With cautious steps, she started down the path toward that broken chimney, trying to orient herself. As the path sloped, she ran through all her past fishing and camping trips with her family, and moments before she reached the aging, moss-covered stone structure off the trail, she realized she had found the Moonglow Inn.

It stood on a stony precipice overlooking the glacier-carved river gorge for which it had been named. Three hundred million years earlier, the Ice Age had caused glaciers a mile thick to move across the land, forging mountains, slashing valleys and deep gorges, shifting stone, leaving tunnels and caves and beautiful rock formations behind. Maeve’s father tended to be a quiet man, but she believed he had a bit of poetry in him, because occasionally he would reveal a love for some beautiful place or story that had touched him.

Once upon a time, a trapper named Elwin Grey had been knee- deep in the river, looked up, and seen the full moon framed between the walls of the gorge, its light reflecting off glacial stone, and felt himself transported somewhere magical. Elwin Grey had named the place Moonglow River Gorge, and as more settlers moved in, the name had stuck. In high school, Maeve had written a paper about the native Abenaki people, who had surely had a name for the gorge before Elwin Grey’s magical evening, but she didn’t share that paper with her father. She didn’t want to extinguish that little bit of poetry in him.

The Moonglow Inn had its own story. Maeve had never been there before. Like most who’d caught a glimpse of it, she had only seen the corner of its sagging roof from down in the gorge. But her father had told her the story of a Scottish laird who had fallen in love with the view from that precipice and believed others would as well. He’d sold his Highland estate and invested his money and influence building the inn. For a time, Maeve’s father had told her, it had worked. Hunters and fishermen and bird-watchers came, people of wealth and breeding who wanted to explore the wild mountains. But the waterfalls to the west drew more visitors, more development, and no road could be built to reach the Moonglow Inn. By the time the Great War erupted in Europe, the Scotsman’s dream had already faded, and before the war ended, the doors had been shuttered. Several times, investors had purchased the property in hope of reviving it, but over the course of a century, it had never actually reopened.

The Moonglow Inn had become a memory. A ruin. A stone heap covered in moss, broken windows looking out over the gorge. One wing of the inn had collapsed and slid over the precipice into the gorge about eighty years earlier. Hikers would sometimes make their way there, Maeve’s father had told her, but it was far enough and spooky enough that the place did not draw vast numbers of partying teenagers the way it might have if it were closer to town.

The place was just empty. Crumbling. A dead shell of a thing, the hollow husk of a man’s lost dream.

It was exactly what Maeve had been hoping for.

With the rain pattering the leaves overhead and the wind gusting over the rim of the gorge, she left the trail and explored the façade of the inn. Some of the windowpanes were intact, but most had been shattered. Maeve pressed against the swollen wood of the front door, and the rusted hinges squealed. She put her shoulder into it and yanked up on the handle as she pushed, and it scraped against the stone threshold just enough to give her room to squeeze through.

Her nausea had faded, but she grunted as she squeezed through the gap and inhaled the moldy stink of the rotting wood. Her stomach churned, bile at the back of her throat. Maeve forced it down, but the moment it passed she began to cough again. Each barking seal cough sent a spike of pain through her skull, and she felt something trickling from her nose. Reaching up, she wiped away something she first thought was blood, but which she saw, in the wan light coming through the broken roof, was putrid yellow and oily black.

She collapsed to the floor in what had once been the lobby. The thick pine beams of the floor had turned soft where the roof lay open to the elements, but here it retained its solidity and strength. Where the huge stone fireplace rose to the ceiling, the fallen portion of the chimney had crashed through the roof and lay in a pile on the floor. The rain fell through the opening. Across the lobby, a staircase rose into shadows and cobwebs.

The stairs seemed to call to her. They looked protected from the wind and rain, dry and warm. She could curl up at the top of the steps and figure out what to do next. Another cough rumbled in her chest, but she took small sips of breath, fighting it, staving off the pain that came along with it. Maeve stumbled toward the stairs, wheezing, barking, head throbbing, that disgusting crap in her throat.

Her eyes were wet. She went to wipe at them with her hands, but when she blinked, the gray interior of the crumbling lodge turned a filmy red.

Through the veil of red that covered her eyes, the room around her changed. A fire roared in the fireplace. The dying echo of laughter hung in the air. The stink of booze filled the lodge. The whole world turned crimsons and scarlets and bright candy-apple reds, but mostly bloodred, because all around her, strewn across the lobby, were bloated corpses dressed in the finery of another era. Their eyes were stained a reddish black, clotted with dried fluid. Their throats were swollen and black, their exposed skin covered in deep red blotches that had bled and scabbed and begun to rot as if acid had eaten down to the bone.

Maeve tried to scream, but her throat was so raw that pain silenced her. Another round of coughing racked her body, and she dropped to one knee. She drew a ragged breath, managed to stifle the next cough, and stared at her hands, which were trembling and pale in the storm light.

Pale, not veiled by that red film that had affected her vision.

The moment passed. The fireplace no longer roared with flame. The inn had returned to the moldering, broken, abandoned gray pile it had been upon her entrance into the place.

Maeve wanted to rise, to run, even to weep, but she didn’t have the energy for any of those things. Instead, she lay on the floor, listened to the rain on the roof, and winced at the strange hunger that gnawed at her.

The itch returned to her hands and her fingers twitched while she lay there, yearning for something she refused to allow herself to imagine. Yearning for contact.

She closed her eyes for fear of what they might see.

Rose knew she ought to have come alone, but she was deeply grateful to have Priya with her. Without the comfort of her company, the warmth of her love, she’d have been alone with her grief. Images of her mother and Logan swam into her thoughts, and she shoved them out. Yeah, if she’d been alone, she knew she would have collapsed into helpless sobs by now. Full fetal position breakdown. Mom and Logan were dead, the two people who seemed to always look out for her the most. Now what, she was supposed to live with her father? Sometimes she loved him so much it hurt, but she couldn’t trust him to do what he said or be where he promised, and that hurt even more.

“Gorilla Rock’s just up here, isn’t it?” Priya asked.

Rose smiled, surprised that Priya would remember. She wasn’t much of a nature girl. They had overheard enough to know that Maeve had set out north and east from her granddad’s cabin, so Rose had parked Mr. McHugh’s old Corsica at the entrance to the Edison Campground and they’d hiked up the southern approach, hoping to intersect her path. Rose had halfway expected to be stopped by local or state police, but the quarantine didn’t stop people from moving around Jericho Falls—only from leaving it. There had been a number of police cars parked along the trailheads, where cops and others out searching for Mae must have started up the mountain. There’d been a single state police car at Edison Campground, but it was empty. Whoever had driven it over, they’d been deployed up onto the mountain. Most of the cops who weren’t part of the search must have been manning roadblocks on the main routes out of town or still helping with the cleanup downtown.

Maybe tomorrow there would be more searchers—National Guard or something—but for now, the numbers were limited. If they hadn’t found Mae by then, Rose wondered how long it would be before they decided other people were or were not infected. The federal government would be monitoring the situation, but they had proven to be colossal fuckups when it came to the containment of contagion in the past. In the end, the only thing Rose cared about was that there was nobody there to stop them from going up the mountain after her sister.

“We follow the markers for the Eagle View Trail and we’ll come to the fire pit,” she said. “Gorilla Rock’s not far after that.”

She took Priya’s hand and led the way. When the Sinclair siblings had been small, their father had taken them to Plug Pond to fish at least once a week during the summer. For him, fishing had always included drinking, but he’d had it under control in those days, or at least none of them ever seemed to notice how much he drank. It was just Ted Sinclair, catching fish, drinking beer, laughing with his kids.

She knew this part of the mountain well. Gorilla Rock had acquired its name over generations, first as a colloquialism, until someone had included it in a hiking brochure, and then the name became permanent. A piece of glacial stone, its broken edges formed what looked to be a protruding brow, shadowed eyes, a sloping forehead, so that it looked like the head of a brooding gorilla.

The first time Rose had climbed up to the rock, which stood twenty feet above the trail, she had found a depression in the back of the stone head. The way the ground sloped up to it, and the concavity in the rock, it was the perfect place for a girl to secrete herself away if she wanted to play hide-and-seek or just give her long-suffering father a heart attack.

She had been a mischievous girl.

Priya took Rose’s hand again, her brow furrowed as she marched through the trees.

The trail had been marked with spots of blue paint to let hikers know they were on the right track, but this route was so well traveled that it would have been hard to miss. The thought caused a frown to crease Rose’s forehead.

“Shit,” she whispered. “Shit, shit, shit.”

Priya squeezed her hand. “What is it?”

How could Rose explain the impact those blue paint spots had on her?

“This trail … it’s too well known,” she said, looking at Priya. “I’m so stupid. Maeve’s probably a mess right now, but she’s not stupid.”

Rose cursed herself again, silently now. Maeve would be terrified and lonely and shattered by guilt. But if she wanted to hide on the mountain, she would be too smart to travel the most familiar trails.

“You’re right,” Priya said. “She’s not stupid. She has to know she needs help. Do you really think she’s going to hide somewhere your father wouldn’t find her eventually?”

Rose looked at her, a rough heat rising in her cheeks. “You were there.”

Priya squeezed her hand. “Finding her isn’t enough, Rose. We’ve got to figure out what’s been done to her, how to help her, and we can’t do that if she’s—”

“The last thing she wants is for my dad to find her,” Rose said. “I’m sure she doesn’t want us to find her, either.”

Priya chewed her lip. “Then how are we supposed to find her?”

Rose looked up toward the mountain’s peak. “Someone’s going to. Which means it has to be us.”

Priya kissed her tears. “Then let’s focus. You said she wouldn’t have come here. Where would she go? The peak? I know there are caves up there. Or maybe she just doubled back and headed for the falls. There are houses there, cabins, plenty of camps where she could try to hide.”

“Maybe,” Rose agreed, “but I don’t think so. She’d have taken the Jackrabbit Trail from the cabin. If we start climbing from here, head straight up the mountain, we’ll cross it. From there, we’ll find some of the narrow trails that hunters and animals use. Not the kind of thing hikers would bother with. We find those and we search, and if we find any sign of her, there’s no point in shouting her name. Chances are, she’s not going to answer back. She doesn’t want us anywhere near her if she thinks she might … that she could kill us.”

Priya gave her a gentle kiss. “Lead the way.”

Rose felt a hitch in her chest as she turned and left the path, hiking up the mountain through the woods. A flood of images flashed through her mind. Bouncing on Maeve’s bed on Christmas morning, dragging her sleepy sister into their parents’ room to wake them, the two girls teasing Logan, who would always be seated halfway down the steps waiting for them, more excited than any of them to see what Santa had brought.

Logan, gone.

Years had passed since Maeve had left for college. The bond between the sisters had evolved and matured. In some ways it had grown stronger, but Rose had often thought how much less fun growing up had made her relationship with Maeve. No more blanket forts.

As a little girl, Rose had often woken in the night, terrified of the darkness inside her closet. The door never quite shut all the way, and the age of the house had warped the frame so that it swung open slightly when the wind blew outside and the gusting made the house breathe in and out. On those nights, Rose would tiptoe into Maeve’s room, climb into bed with her, warm and safe under the blankets with her big sister.

Maeve had never sent her out, never complained of being woken. No matter how old they’d become, Maeve had always opened her arms, hugged Rose, stroked her hair, and kissed the top of her head. It had been Rose, eventually, who had decided she was too old for such displays.

Maeve could hide as deep in the woods as she liked. No matter how afraid Rose might be, no matter how much she grieved, she was going to find her sister. Maeve had never turned her back, and neither would Rose.

“Hey,” Priya rasped, grabbing at the strap of her backpack.

Rose frowned, turning to look at her. They had hiked about twenty yards above Gorilla Rock.

“What’s the—”

Priya held a finger over her lips, neck craned, listening to the woods. All Rose could hear was the patter of the rain on the leaves and the path. Thunder rumbled in the distance.

“I don’t—” Rose started to say.

But then she did. A noise down in the clearing below Gorilla Rock, a padding of footfalls as if someone had dashed across the clearing, trying to make as little noise as possible. The noise went silent for a few seconds, and she was about to speak again when the sound of something in the brush carried up to them.

It might have been a lone hiker or someone searching for Maeve, but whoever it was, they were attempting to be quiet, and something about that made her skin crawl. She glanced up at Priya and saw what looked like a gleam of hope in her eyes, and only then did the other possibility occur to her.

Maeve.

Sliding and scrambling, slipping on the rain-slicked forest floor, she rushed down the slope, heedless of the noise she made as she crashed through branches.

She slipped. Cussing loudly, she flailed and tumbled the last few feet into the clearing. On her hands and knees, Rose looked up, glanced around, and ached with fresh loss as she saw the clearing remained empty.

“You heard it, right?” Rose asked, standing and brushing off dirt and pine needles. “Someone was here.”

“I thought I did,” Priya said, brows knitted. “Unless it was an animal. A deer. Maybe a bear, or a wolf—”

“Oh, that’s a cheery thought,” Rose replied. “Thanks for that.”

Quiet descended on the clearing for a moment. Even the rain paused. No birds called, no squirrels foraged. The two of them stood and listened, but if anything had been there, it was gone now. They were alone.

Rose felt hollower, lonelier as she turned and started to climb up the mountain again. Priya being there, strong and calm and brave, should have comforted her, but suddenly the presence of this girl she loved only made her feel her loss more keenly.

How many hours until dark?

Rose began to lose hope.

9

Ted Sinclair liked movies about the apocalypse. Sometimes he would daydream about what it might be like—what kind of person he might prove to be—if the world ever really began to fall apart around him. Not that Ted was eager for nuclear war or a zombie uprising, but he loved those stories because they were about ordinary human beings having their mettle tested by the crumbling of civil society. He liked to tell himself that he would rise to the occasion, that instead of seeking the comfort of oblivion he would step up, fight for survival, for himself and the people he loved. Ted could picture himself a hero, living wild, running some guerrilla war campaign against an oppressor. But in that lizard brain at the base of his skull, he could feel a different instinct. A tremor, an urge.

He wanted pills. A little plastic bottle rattling with lovely tabs of Oxy. Better yet, a dose or two of fentanyl. The pills might kill him, but first they’d get him so high that dying wouldn’t seem like such a terrible plan.

Which was exactly why he needed to stay far away from pills.

Alcohol, on the other hand, remained his very dear friend.

He stood in his living room, a generous tumbler of Jameson whiskey in his hand, and decided this wasn’t the apocalypse quite yet, but it felt close. Death felt intimately near, tangible and possible. Ted had always loved apocalyptic movies, but now he decided he would hate those films for the rest of his life.

Rue Crooker had let his daughter Rose wander off with Priya, and instead of raising alarms, instead of screaming to the world that the last healthy, living member of Ted Sinclair’s family had decided to go search an entire mountain range with her girlfriend, Rue had gone off to have a close-up look at Garland Mountain Labs. They’d been friends since childhood and he loved Rue, but he wanted to shake her. Had she really thought they would throw open their doors to her, let her see their research?

Ted sipped his third whiskey, letting its burn rush through him. He stared at Rue and at Chief Kaminski and at the stranger who sat on the arm of the sofa. Ted had told them all to make themselves comfortable, but death had come to this house and there was only so comfortable a stranger should make himself here. Today.

Whiskey blunted his apocalypse a little bit, but the end times had come to the Sinclair family. The rest of the world might be tuning in to CNN or Fox News or whatever, learning about the quarantine and Maeve Sinclair, the woman with the death touch. They might have watched the footage from the parade, entranced by tragedy, but they would all go on with their lives, and Ted had to stand in his living room with a stranger telling him what to do while his ex-wife and his son lay dead in some secret government lab and his eldest daughter ran away to the mountains to hide, while the youngest went in search of her.

And this Walker son of a bitch wanted Ted to sit here and just wait.

“I wish you could hear yourself, Mr. Walker,” Ted said. He knew he was glaring, knew his upper lip had curled with disdain, but he couldn’t help it.

“Dr. Walker,” Rue corrected him.

“Just Walker is fine,” the guy said.

“I don’t give a fuck!” Ted snapped.

They all stared at him—Rue, Kaminski, Walker—and Ted felt his chest rising and falling, felt the warm flush in his cheeks. He knew he must look like a drunk about to get into a bar brawl, and maybe he felt that way. Shit, no maybe about it.

“You really think I’m going to stay here while my girls are up on that mountain?” Ted demanded, glancing incredulously from face to face. “I don’t even know you.”

Kaminski had perched on the edge of the big old green-and-gray striped chair that remained the oldest piece of furniture in the house. He leaned forward, his face full of so much sympathy that Ted wanted to kick him.

“Ted, you’ve got a concussion, broken ribs, and cartilage damage in one knee. You’re not going to be much use crawling around those mountains. Between my officers, state troopers, and security officers from the lab—” Chief Kaminski started.

“Goddamned government thugs,” Ted snarled.

“No argument,” Kaminski said. “That’s what they are. But they’re up there with good police officers searching for Maeve. I’m going to radio up that Rose and Priya are on the mountain as well, but you know their priority has to be Maeve.”

“Because she’s dangerous,” Ted sneered.

“You know she is,” Rue said. She stood up from the sofa and approached him, put her hands over his as if she wanted to try to help him clasp his glass of whiskey, to take it away. Like he needed help. And maybe he did, the way his hands had started to shake.

“I guess I do,” Ted said, looking Rue in the eye. “I watched them die. Watched Logan and…” He shook his head, blew out a breath, refused to cry in front of a stranger. Not again, anyway. He shot a look at the presumptuous bastard sitting on the arm of his sofa. “Walker, you really think you can get her off the mountain safely? I can’t help feeling like no matter how good these cops are, the first one she comes near is going to shoot her to keep from dying the way my son and his mom did.”

“If she comes off the mountain on her own, she’ll probably come home, which means you’ll see her first,” Walker said. “If she stays up there, then I do think it’s best for her safety and everyone else’s if I find her first.”

“How do you plan to do that?”

“It’s not my first mountain or my first time tracking someone,” Walker replied. “I’ve got some gear and some connections they don’t have.”

Ted exhaled. “What do you need from me?”

Walker gave a slow nod. It looked almost like a promise, but Ted couldn’t allow himself to trust anyone.

“Any insight into her thought process would help,” Walker said. “The police are focusing on the area around the waterfall, banking on Maeve heading for somewhere she might regard as safe.”

“There’s some logic in that,” Ted admitted, glancing at Kaminski. “But she lit out from her granddad’s cabin heading northeast, and I think she’ll stay that way, either go straight up the mountain or to the west. Might not be as safe or as familiar, but she’ll stay one step ahead as long as she can, and then she’ll go to ground, find a place to hide. I’ve taken my kids fishing up there a hundred times, and we used to hike all over when they were little ones. We…”

A shudder went through him. Ted’s breath hitched and he held up a hand, knowing if he uttered another word he would erupt into a torrent of sobbing.

Kaminski put a hand on his shoulder. “It’s all right, Ted. I’m gonna take Dr. Walker up to the cabin, and he can start searching from there. The government goons want me to focus my people to the west, toward the falls, but that doesn’t mean Walker has to follow those orders. Maybe we’ll come across Rose and her girlfriend. If we do, I’ll bring them home. You just need to stay here, answer the phone if it rings, and hope she comes home on her own.”

Ted felt his legs weaken. The idea of staying here made him want to scream—these were his daughters, his last family, flesh and blood—but so did the idea of him not being here when one or both of them made it home to an empty house. It tore him apart. He wanted to collapse, but he’d been raised with more spine and dignity than that.

“You have anyone who can stay with you?” Kaminski asked. “Other family?”

Ted felt the thin smile on his lips. Other than Rue, he’d never been much for small talk with neighbors or friends, even the ones he liked. Shortly before Walker and Rue arrived, Ted had thought about calling his sister Dianna, but Di lived in Texas and they hadn’t done more than exchange Christmas cards or share a cursory phone call in going on a decade.

His brittle smile grew thinner still. “I’ll be all right.”

Rue had hung back, standing in the archway that led into the living room. She matched his own brittle smile. “I’ll stick around, if you’ll have me, Ted. We’re quarantined, anyway, and I know you’re not going to eat a damn thing unless I force you to cook something for us both.”

Ted stared. He wanted to be angry with her for letting Rose and Priya wander off, but he had known her so long and so well that her presence did ease his mind, at least a little. If not for Rue, he doubted he would ever have really understood what it felt like to have a real friend. It wasn’t watching a ball game or bullshitting or fulfilling some kind of silent obligation. Real friendship was about deciding someone else’s well-being was just as important to you as your own—or even more important. Someone who wasn’t your spouse or your child.

“How do you feel about a quick egg fry?” he asked, draining the last of his whiskey.

It was what they’d always made in high school, when they’d come home much too late from a party, usually a little drunk or a little high. He’d crack some eggs and throw whatever he could find into the frying pan with them. Grated cheese, leftover taco meat, shreds of deli ham, chopped vegetables, Tabasco sauce.

“Sounds perfect,” Rue said.

Whether Ted liked it or not, Kaminski was right. With his broken ribs and battered head, he wasn’t likely to be able to hike all over the mountain without injuring himself further. He would be of no use to his daughters today, but Ted had gotten used to the feeling.

He looked at Walker and Kaminski. “Go. Bring them back. Both of them.”

There were other things he wanted to say, words he didn’t dare speak aloud. Words about making sure that whatever happened, Maeve did not lay a hand on Rose.

Ted would never have admitted it out loud, but part of him considered Maeve already lost.

God, forgive me, he thought, even though he had never been persuaded there was a God up there listening.

Now, more than ever, he figured prayers fell on deaf ears. Or no ears at all.

Which left Walker, a virtual stranger, who had confidence and determination but also a haunted look in his eyes, as if he had faced horror before and not emerged victorious.

But Walker was all they had.

Rue watched with condemnation in her eyes as Ted poured himself another drink.

10

Kaminski drove the route toward the cabin mostly in silence, for which Walker felt grateful. The rain came down hard, windshield wipers squealing out a rhythm as questions cluttered his mind. The federal government had to be involved or Garland Mountain Labs would not have been able to get the quarantine order. So who was pulling those strings? The Blackcoats were mercenary security forces, not U.S. military, but someone had to be signing their paychecks. There were too many unknowns.

His pack sat on the floor of Kaminski’s car, nestled between Walker’s boots. Alena Boudreau had not sent him to New Hampshire empty-handed. The SRC might not have the flair of Q from the James Bond films, but DARPA existed specifically to develop science. Not all of it was about finding new and clever ways to kill someone. So he did have a thing or two in that backpack that might help him track Maeve, if he was lucky.

Alena had also given him a small black box containing two comm units—a primary and a spare. They were tiny things, like AirPods, but they came in handy. Once he slipped one in his ear, he would be able to communicate with Alena directly. By now, the cell phone towers around Jericho Falls would be jammed, but the comm units didn’t rely on those towers.

On the other hand, Alena was a long way from New Hampshire. It’d help if he had someone a little closer to handle some of the groundwork and keep him updated if he got into trouble. Walker glanced at Chief Kaminski and wondered if he could be trusted. More than that, he wondered if the chief would have time to help him, should the moment arrive when Walker needed that help.

His pack also held other, more standard gear. Flashlight. Night-vision goggles. And a gun.

Walker had a love-hate relationship with guns. He hated pulling the trigger, but he loved staying alive. Which brought him back to his frustration with the many unknowns he faced in his search for Maeve Sinclair. He didn’t like it. The assignment was to get Maeve Sinclair off the mountain alive, but to do that, he needed to do the same for himself.

As Kaminski turned up a narrow road that snaked through the forest, Walker studied the houses they passed, wondering what the people inside were doing. The quarantine forced them to stay in Jericho Falls and established a curfew that confined them to their homes after dark, but it seemed most people were nervous enough to stay inside during the day as well. Walker reckoned they were going to get cabin fever pretty quickly.

The rainstorm that had moved in over the past hour or two had turned the afternoon gray and gloomy, but there were at least four or five hours of daylight left. It was July, after all. Midsummer.

“You can show me where to enter the trail her father talked about?” Walker asked.

“The Jackrabbit Trail,” Chief Kaminski reminded him. “It’s the only thing that makes sense. We know she was at the cabin. From what Ted said—”

“I don’t love the idea of relying on him,” Walker said. “The guy’s an alcoholic and an addict. Never mind that he got his bell rung this morning. He’s also drunk right now, while both his daughters are lost on a mountain.”

He didn’t specifically say he thought Ted Sinclair was a bad father, but the chief didn’t have to be a genius to read between the lines. Not that you’re such a great dad yourself, Walker thought, remembering the look in Charlie’s eyes earlier in the day. And his words.

That was for later, though.

Walker felt a little sick at the thought. Charlie, it seemed, was always for later. He wondered if he had been too swift to judge Ted Sinclair or too slow to judge himself.

“You said you didn’t want him with you because he’d slow you down,” Chief Kaminski said.

“He would have,” Walker replied. “But with all respect for the man’s grief, I had to weigh how much help he might be against how much trouble. Better for everyone if he stays home. His ribs and his skull will thank me later.”

Kaminski slammed on the brakes. “Son of a bitch.”

They’d just come in sight of the late Granddad Sinclair’s cabin. Several police cars and a K-9 unit van sat out front, but Walker only spotted two cops. The pair of beer-bellied officers on the cusp of retirement had apparently been left behind to establish the cabin as base camp.

But it wasn’t the presence of the two cops that had startled Chief Kaminski. Two Blackcoats stood in front of the cabin near the aging police officers. Several other Blackcoats were walking the perimeter of the property, likely marking out trails and searching for signs of Maeve’s presence.

“Do these guys really think she’s coming back here?” Walker asked.

“She abandoned her phone at the cabin,” Kaminski replied. “She’s never coming back to this place. But you know the way swaggering dicks like them think. They look at Maeve as a scared young woman. Most of them probably figure she hasn’t gone more than a hundred yards into the woods and any minute she’s going to come back looking for some big, strong man to save her.”

Kaminski put his vehicle in park, killed the engine, and climbed out. One of the two cops hurried toward him, glancing at the Blackcoats with bristling resentment.

“The good news,” Kaminski went on, “is that the longer they think of her as soft and weak, the longer Maeve will be able to stay lost. Hopefully, that’ll buy you the time you need to reach her first.”

“Chief, I’m sorry,” said the officer who trotted up to the vehicle. The man huffed with exertion after jogging a dozen paces, so it was no wonder he hadn’t been assigned to a search party. “They showed up with federal ID. We had to let them look over the scene.”

“Don’t sweat it, Foley,” Kaminski replied. “If they’d found anything useful, they wouldn’t still be looking. Keep an eye on them, make a record of anything they try to remove from the site. Otherwise, let them alone. I don’t want you getting into a pissing match with these guys, Foley. They’ll end up killing you and burying you in a shallow grave.”

Foley’s eyes went wide, like he wasn’t sure whether or not his police chief had been joking. Walker wasn’t certain himself, but he said nothing until Foley had trotted away and Kaminski frowned thoughtfully.

“So where’s this Jackrabbit Trail?” Walker asked.

Kaminski kept his back to the cabin so neither his own people nor the Blackcoats would be able to hear him or see the small gesture he made, pointing in the general direction of the northeast tree line.

“It’s narrow, mostly overgrown. Might be marked, but most likely it’s not. You can’t miss the tree by the entrance—split by lightning some years back, but both sides are still growing.”

Walker nodded. “I’ll walk a little way before I head into the trees. Don’t want to draw attention. But there’s something you should know, Chief. You’ve got a lot on your hands, keeping the peace in town, keeping civilians off the mountain. You should be on the lookout for other people on the mountain, too—people who aren’t civilians.”

Kaminski shot a sidelong glance at the Blackcoats. “Tell me about it.”

“I don’t mean them. There could be others looking for Maeve,” Walker said. “Dangerous people who want the ability to do what she can do. Warn your officers. It’s not just one lost woman they need to be worried about up here. There’s worse than that.”

Kaminski massaged his left temple. “This gets better all the time. But thanks. I’ll pass it along.”

Walker opened the back door of the chief’s car. Making sure the cops and Blackcoats couldn’t see what he was up to, he dug into his pack and tugged out the black box containing the two comm earpieces. There were a dozen names for the little devices—earbuds, pods, comms, lobes, and others—but Walker had always thought of them as earwigs, the first name he’d ever heard for them. Once upon a time it had been necessary to hide such devices, but they were so readily available to consumers now that being seen talking to oneself no longer came off as crazy.

“Do something for me,” he said, holding out an earwig to Kaminski. “Bring this back to Rue Crooker. Ask her to turn it on and monitor. I may need someone in Jericho Falls who understands the science.”

Kaminski took the earwig, studied it in his open palm, and slipped it into his pocket. “Anything else?”

Walker put in his own earpiece, stuffed the box back into his pack, then took out his holstered weapon and clipped it to his belt. “Buy me whatever time you can.”

He closed the car door. The sound made two Blackcoats look over at him, but he was with Chief Kaminski, so they kept searching the grounds of the cabin.

“You want me to keep the state troopers and my own people searching around the falls, keep them away from this side of the mountain?” Kaminski furrowed his brow.

“It’d help.”

Kaminski glanced up toward the cabin. “I’ll do my best.”

With that, Walker started along the dirt road, back the way they’d come. He’d gone about thirty yards when he found himself around a curve and out of view. Darting into the woods, he started backtracking to the Jackrabbit Trail.

Maeve had a hell of a head start, but she was sick and scared and confused. Walker told himself he could find her. A quarter hour later, when he came to a place where footprints in half-dry mud had been obliterated with a stick, he actually believed it.

Staring at those footprints, he felt a little queasy and a shudder went through him, almost as if he could feel the sickness Maeve had left in her wake. Sickness, and something else, a skin-crawling sensation that made him glance yet again at his surroundings. A deep frown creased his forehead.

The trees on either side of the path seemed lower, denser, as if they might inch closer until they could strangle him. They were only trees, of course. But as he quickened his pace, the whole trail seemed tainted by that unsettling feeling. Walker thought perhaps it wouldn’t be as difficult to find Maeve as he’d first imagined. He also thought finding her might turn out to be an absolutely terrible idea.

But he kept following the trail.

Whatever had infected Maeve Sinclair, it couldn’t be allowed to roam free.

Viv Cheng and Leon Lewis had been assigned to Garland Mountain Labs within weeks of one another. Leon had been honorably discharged from a special ops group he was never allowed to mention, but he’d told Cheng as much as possible about his background. Cheng, on the other hand, had only been willing to say that she had done work for Homeland Security. Leon still wondered if that meant something covert or if she’d just been an ICE agent and been fired or quit. Of course, if she’d quit ICE as a conscientious objector or something, she wouldn’t be employed by White Oak Security. The firm provided private armed security for at least a dozen sites on American soil that the government didn’t want the public to know about. They couldn’t use official U.S. military, so they used White Oak, one of several firms that provided what had come to be colloquially known as Blackcoats.

Most of the time, Leon liked his job. He’d been in blood-soaked deserts and climbed over corpses in ditches, so he didn’t mind putting a bullet into someone for no reason other than that he’d been ordered to do so. But this felt different.

“You feel all right?” Cheng asked as they moved quietly along the narrow trail Ben Walker had chosen.

Leon snorted. “Do you? This feel all right to you?”

He regretted the words the moment they left his lips, but the old cliché about not being able to put the genie back in the bottle had never been truer. Cheng shot him a narrowed glance, and an uneasy quiet fell between them. Not silence. Up on the mountain, in the fucking woods, they would never find true silence.

Birds cried and wheeled far overhead, barely glimpsed through the branches that wove together to block all but shafts of daylight from hitting the trail. Gray, ugly light from a sky full of storm. Rain pattered the leaves and the trail. The wind kicked up and rustled a million leaves into a rough whisper that almost sounded like a voice. To Leon, it held a beauty he could not deny, the rustling of leaves telling him to breathe. To take it all in. Maybe telling him that this wasn’t the kind of hunting people were supposed to be doing up here, in the quiet of the wild.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Cheng asked at last without glancing over her shoulder again. “I don’t want to have to worry, Leon.”

“Relax, Vivian. I’m here. I’ve got your back. Walker’s one guy, and he may not like it, but we’re on the same team.”

Cheng halted, turned to scan his face. “Did you see the video clip? Sinclair touching those people, them falling down dead?”

“I saw it.”

“Just making certain. ’Cuz it sure as hell isn’t some D.C. scientist who’s got me on my toes. The Sinclair woman might as well be the bogeyman or the Big Bad Wolf as far as I’m concerned,” Cheng said. “I’ll be honest, man, it’s got me spooked. I’m looking behind every damn tree, worried she’s gonna jump out at me. I’d rather run into a bear than this bitch.”

Leon had seen the video, but he decided he and Cheng had viewed it very differently. Project: Red Hands wouldn’t be the first science experiment to have gotten out of control and killed a bunch of people. This wasn’t even the first time Leon had to work a containment job, keeping a fuckup quiet and limiting exposure. But the last time had been in Mosul, and the people they’d been hunting—the ones who’d invented the bioweapon—had been terrorists.

Who were the terrorists here?

Not Maeve Sinclair. He didn’t like the idea of hunting an innocent woman and certainly not on American soil. Hell, there wasn’t any terrain that felt much more American than this.

Cheng held up a fist. Leon stopped, listening hard. Sure enough, he could hear a voice drifting back to them, Walker talking on a phone or radio. The guy had paused, and Leon cursed himself for not paying enough attention. They couldn’t afford for Walker to realize he was being followed—not yet. Dr. Vargas back at Garland Mountain thought Walker had an in with the family, that maybe he’d even been in touch with Maeve Sinclair. Cheng and Leon had been tasked with following him, just in case he really did know how to find the woman.

Cheng motioned for them to continue and started up the trail. Slowly. Quietly.

Leon started checking the trees on either side of the trail, unsettled by her description of Maeve Sinclair jumping out at them. The woman had done nothing wrong. Garland Mountain Labs had been responsible for everything that happened in Jericho Falls that day.

But if they did manage to find Maeve Sinclair, and she made the slightest movement toward him, Leon Lewis intended to shoot her in the damn face.

Twice.

Walker never loved the idea of working for DARPA. They spent a good deal of their budget developing projects that kept him up at night. What got him through to the sunrise was knowing how many lives their science also saved. DARPA had given him more than one opportunity to stave off global catastrophe, and that counted for something. Of late, he’d developed a recurring nightmare about the mass graves that would be necessary if nature ever unleashed a true pandemic, and he told himself those nightmares were reason enough to keep working for the SRC. As long as he could keep the scales tipped toward saving lives instead of taking them, the work was worthwhile.

And, of course, he liked the toys.

More than once, he had squirreled something out of the DARPA labs that hadn’t been cleared for real-world deployment. Twice, Walker had been officially reprimanded for his sticky fingers, and once, the Department of Defense had threatened to imprison him if it should happen again. The threat had the desired effect, meaning Walker hadn’t stolen anything from DARPA in about eighteen months, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t occasionally raid the lab like a girl rifling through her big sister’s closet for the right outfit.

Today, however, the right outfit had been a loan from his new boss. Before sending him off on his flight north, Alena Boudreau had outfitted him with a set of TAGI goggles, newly developed by a DARPA scientist named Arun Lahiri. Walker hadn’t bothered to tell Chief Kaminski about them—he hadn’t wanted to get the chief’s hopes up—but he had slipped them on fifty yards along the Jackrabbit Trail and he’d been entranced ever since.

TAGI stood for thermal and gas imaging, which seemed a very boring name for equipment that broke every rule. Walker had used infrared and thermal imagers before, but TAGI took the concept much further, able to identify not merely the presence of a heat signature but minute thermal changes in the landscape. Maeve Sinclair had passed this way too long ago to have left her own heat behind, particularly with the rain that had been falling, but in certain places her passing had disturbed the mud and leaves and pine needles, causing the release of small amounts of heat and gases related to the decomposition of the leaves. A broken branch released both moisture and accumulated ethylene gas, and TAGI logged each of these miniscule changes. Walker could not see Maeve’s footprints, but it was evident that someone had come this way quite recently, and given what Ted Sinclair and Chief Kaminsky had said, Walker had to bank on it being Maeve. He would follow the trail as far as it would take him, and if he lost her, he would have to improvise.

He jogged along the path, careful not to catch his foot on a root or rock. As he moved, he tapped at his earwig. The comm unit came on line with a piercing electronic shriek. Walker swore, stumbled a bit, teeth bared. He reached up to dig the earpiece out, but the shriek quieted to a crackling noise and then nothing but the shush one might hear on the inside of a conch shell.

Frowning, he dug the earwig out anyway, studied it, then plugged it back into place as he picked up speed again.

“Call David,” he said aloud.

The line buzzed only once before David Boudreau answered. One of the smartest people Walker had ever met, David looked younger than he was, some of that youthful appearance stemming from the chip that seemed forever on his shoulder. His mother had died when he was quite young, after which he had been raised by his grandmother, Alena. At the time, she’d been a globe-trotting scientist and all-around troubleshooter, the kind of person who didn’t have room in her life for a kid. Instead, David had been her sidekick, learned the tricks of the trade, surpassed his grandmother in intellect but not in wisdom. He’d been mauled badly in a gruesome field assignment in the Caribbean, a precursor to Walker suffering a similar but less severe attack in Guatemala several years later. They both had scars, they both took too many painkillers, but Walker could still make himself useful in the field. David hardly ever left the M Street apartment in D.C. where he lived. But he didn’t have to leave to give Walker what he needed.

“I was wondering when I’d hear from you,” David said.

“Someone’s trying to block communications in the area.”

“What, you can’t say hello?”

“Hello, David.”

“Hello, Walker. Of course they’re blocking comms. Local phone service in Jericho Falls is out. Cell towers are being jammed. They don’t want residents discussing the details of the quarantine with the rest of the world. More importantly, they don’t want whoever’s up there on the mountain with you—or on the way there—to have an easy time talking to each other, never mind tracking the woman with the death touch.”

“Speaking of Maeve, could you skip ahead to where you tell me what you know? I’ve got signs of someone on this trail, but there’s no guarantee it’s her. What am I dealing with?”

“There’s a lot of chatter,” David said. “It’s only been about five hours and the parade disaster clip has had millions of hits online. We’re far from the only people who are going to be looking for her. I gather there are some already on location, but others will be on the way.”

“Satellite surveillance?”

“Of course. At least one vehicle entered via a fire road to the southeast. Bolt cutters were used on the chain. They didn’t bother being stealthy or trying to cover their tracks.”

Walker slowed to a walk, adjusting his goggles as he peered at a heat signature off to his left. It darted away, skittering up a tree—just a red squirrel, terrified and irritated.

“The quarantine restricts residents to the settled parts of town,” Walker said. “A single vehicle could just be libertarians flexing or a pack of teenagers acting out their rebellion fantasies. I would have been happy to tell the government to screw in a situation like this, when I was younger.”

“You’d like to tell them to screw now,” David reminded him.

Walker smiled. As he did, a sound came from behind him. He turned, goggles slipping a bit. As he adjusted them, a hawk took flight from the trees back along the way he’d come.

“Everything all right?” David asked.

“Just a bird. Our conversation is disturbing the local wildlife.”

Walker broke into a light jog, following what he continued to hope was the same path Maeve Sinclair had taken. But he hadn’t gone six paces when he faltered. To the right, a smaller path branched off. Calling it a trail would have been a generous use of the word, but the TAGI goggles showed plenty of disturbed leaf cover and small, snapped branches at the entrance to the path.

“You still there?” David prodded.

“I’m here. Tell me about my visitors,” he said.

“The guys who cut the chain? No idea. A Jeep. We’re working on backtracking it, trying to get IDs on the driver and any passengers. Meanwhile, you have other problems. At least two small aircraft have flown over in the past hour.”

Walker ducked to avoid branches as he forged his way along this rougher path. “Any thoughts at all about who I’m going to run into out here?”

“Let me get back to you on that,” David said. “Meanwhile—”

“Stay alive. I know.”

The conversation ended. The earwig gave a little squeal of static, but nothing as deafening as earlier. Walker picked up the pace. Wearing the goggles made him feel as if he had slipped into some other world, but the smell of the woods and the mountain air and the solidity of the trail beneath him helped to ground him. He ought to have allies up here. The cops and the Blackcoats and Walker himself ought to have been seeking the same resolution, but he could not allow himself to trust in that assumption. Right now, he could trust only himself, and that knowledge made the shadows in the forest around him seem darker, and the skittering of wildlife in the underbrush took on a sinister quality.

A low burring noise made him look up, and despite the rain and the looming gray sky, he could make out the small airplane coming in from the north. As he watched, a small figure detached from the underbelly of the plane. Dread began to tighten around his heart. Seconds passed, and then the tiny figure unfurled into a bone-white parachute.

He bolted along the path, barely paying attention to the heat and gas signatures picked up by his goggles. Chief Kaminski didn’t have enough people to sweep the whole mountain, so he sure as hell didn’t have an airplane or someone willing to jump out of it. The Blackcoats would have come in with choppers, and for the moment, they were also focused mostly to the west, at least for now. Which meant that ghostly parachute belonged to someone else—someone determined to find Maeve, who didn’t care that their arrival would be seen by some of those on the ground.

People like that were very, very dangerous.

He slowed his pace. Even if he left the trail, rushed through the trees, he would never be able to pinpoint exactly where the parachutist would land. On the off chance he guessed correctly, he would not reach the spot before the jumper could unbuckle their chute and set off into the woods. And then what? Walker began to think that leaving Ted Sinclair home had been a terrible idea. Injured alcoholic or not, at least Ted knew these paths and knew his daughter.

Focus, he told himself. Stick to the hunt. He could not allow himself to be distracted by the other hunters. Walker had known governments and spook agencies would send people after Maeve. David’s report about the Jeep confirmed it. He needed to find Maeve before anyone else did.

Or maybe not. Whoever found her first might not live through the encounter. Maybe he just needed to be the first one to find her and survive.

11

Maeve woke to find that the roaring dragons that chased her through her dreams were the grinding, buzzing engines of dirt bikes coming toward the half-collapsed Moonglow Inn. The sound echoed off the walls as Maeve sat up, heart thumping inside her chest. Her head ached and her throat burned, but she propped herself up and listened as one engine seemed to move farther away and the other drew nearer.

She told herself it must be kids. A couple of teenagers from town, ripping through the woods on their dirt bikes. Her first boyfriend, Rick, had gotten his dirt bike thirdhand. It had been his dad’s, then his older brother’s, and by the time he’d gotten the beast it had been beaten to shit, rusted, and had bald tires. Rick had restored it the best he could, but mostly he only cared that it would run and that it had tires that could tear up the mud and rocket him along the mountain trails, even the ones where dirt bikes weren’t allowed. Fifteen-year-old Maeve Sinclair had pretended to disapprove, but she’d loved that he liked to break the rules.

A bout of coughing broke her reverie. Dark spittle flew from her mouth, and a wave of nausea struck her. For a few seconds, she faded out as if falling into a trance. Or a fever. In those precious seconds, the dirt bike roared nearer, loud enough that it seemed to be breathing right outside the door.

“Idiot,” she whispered, stumbling to her feet. Dizziness washed over her as she started for the broken wall, and she staggered to the right, arms raised as if trying to walk a tightrope.

The rain began to fall harder, a curtain of noise drawn over the whole mountain. It had a buzz of its own, so as she reached the edge of the broken wall, it took a moment to realize the dirt bike engine had gone silent. Her chest fluttered with the need to cough again, but she stifled the urge.

The part of the inn that had slid into the gorge had left a ruined, ragged edge, but the broken wall ended a dozen feet from the cliff, so she could slip out into the storm without falling hundreds of feet to the rocks below.

The wind pushed against her the moment she left shelter. A gust swept through the trees as if it meant to brush her over the edge, but Maeve held her footing. The storm hid the sound of her footfalls. As she reached the front of the old stone building, she glanced around the corner.

The dirt bike lay on its side as if the rider had ditched it, but she knew that couldn’t be true. Somewhere off in the woods, the other dirt bike’s engine still roared in a rise and fall. The rain had arrived early, but rough weather had been part of the forecast. These riders were not in this part of the woods in the middle of a rainstorm merely for recreation. They were searching for something. They had a purpose, a target.

She scanned the trees in front of the inn. In the gray gloom of the woods and the rain, the figure near the inn’s façade had to move before Maeve noted his presence. She sucked in a breath as he took a step. The rider moved quietly, carefully, thinking to find her still inside the ruin of the Moonglow. Maeve watched as he reached into his coat and slid out a handgun. The gun glistened in the rain.

In the storm, all she could see was that he was white and needed a haircut and a shave. The rain had plastered his hair to his head, and he looked like he’d just been fished out of a pond, but the urge to go to him seized her.

He stepped inside the inn, the same way she had entered.

She scanned the woods, then stared at the toppled dirt bike. That other engine still roared out in the woods, and the last thing she wanted to do was to draw attention to herself, give her presence away, but she felt too sick to fight back or even hide very long if the rider was determined to find her.

Maybe he’s only checking this place because he figures you’d need shelter. He’s just guessing. He doesn’t know you’re here.

Maeve closed her eyes, felt the rain on her face and drizzling down the back of her neck, under her collar. She stepped out from hiding at the corner of the stone building, took another step, watching the darkness where the rider had vanished inside the inn, and then she bolted for the dirt bike. In her mind, she had already reached the bike, stood it up, straddled it, and kick-started the engine. Simple tasks. She counted them off in her head—lift, straddle, start up, give it some gas. Get the fuck out of here.

The driver darted his head out through the doorway. Silent, he watched her bolt through the rain. For the first time, she heard her own footfalls and knew they had given her away, that even with the rain and distant thunder, her boots on the trail had been too loud. If she’d gone quietly, she might have made it, but she’d wanted to rush, to get as far from here as possible, quick as she might.

He ran.

It took her only three more steps to realize he would intercept her, that she would never get on that bike before the rider could get his hands on her. In the back of her mind, a small voice tried to reason with her, tell her that maybe he wasn’t after her at all, that he only thought she intended to steal his dirt bike and wanted to stop her.

But the man kept silent, and his silence told her that he had no questions about her identity or her intentions. Maeve knew only one choice remained to her, the same choice she’d made hours ago. She veered into the woods and kept running. Numbness spread through both of her feet. The pain in her throat returned. She coughed and wheezed.

The dirt bike roared to new life behind her.

Branches snagged her clothes and scratched her skin. One whipped across her cheek, stinging only an inch from her eye, and she felt blood trickle down her face like hot tears. The trees seemed to blur. Somehow, off the trail now, her feet managed to miss the roots. She scrambled over a fallen tree, jogged to the right. Through blurred vision, she saw more gray light and knew she had started shifting back toward the gorge.

The engine roared louder. Her chest burned. Her legs, so tired from her hike already, quivered with every step, ready to collapse beneath her. In the midst of the trees, she came upon a ridge of massive rocks carried here by glaciers millennia before, nearly piled one atop the other.

She heard the dirt bike engine whine and glanced over her shoulder. The bike shot from the trees fifteen yards away. Maeve reached into a place inside of her that existed only for survival. Rage lived there, along with sorrow. She ran along the stone ridge, searching for a place to climb, telling herself she could outpace the rider, that he’d have to leave his bike on this side and if she could get on the other side before he managed, she could still get away. But of course she’d forgotten about his gun, and now that she remembered, she knew she couldn’t climb, couldn’t give him such an exposed target. She would have to keep running, make it to the edge of the gorge and hope there was some other way.

Abruptly, she came to an opening between two of those ancient, glacial stones and ducked into it without hesitation. As she ran, coughing up thick black spittle, she knew.

This is useless. Where could she go, weaponless and on foot, where this man could not find her?

The path between the stones ended. Dark, rainswept forest stretched ahead. Behind her, she heard the dirt bike roar into the passage, engine echoing off the walls. Just to her right was a fallen sycamore tree. It had blown down in a storm, its whole root system exposed. Branches had smashed against the stone ridge, several snapped off and others hanging by bark and fiber.

Maeve grabbed a broken branch, four feet long, thick as her wrist. The dirt bike engine roared over her left shoulder. She turned and swung the branch like she was aiming to knock the son of a bitch out of the ballpark. The thick, bare end of the branch caught him under the jaw. He came halfway out of the saddle, managed to keep one hand on the bike, which made him swerve straight at the fallen sycamore.

The front wheel hit a rut, twisted hard to one side, and the bike bucked the rider. He flailed as he flew through the rain. Maeve could only watch as a jutting, broken branch impaled him and he slumped over it, hanging like a scarecrow from the fallen tree.

She didn’t even have the strength to scream.

The driver gasped, sucking air. His left arm began to shake as blood spilled from around the branch and down his leg, soaking through his trousers. Bloody froth spilled over his lips as he continued to try to breathe, and he turned his head to stare at her. His mouth moved as if he wanted to speak, and Maeve realized she needed to know whatever he could tell her.

“Who sent you?” she asked, approaching him, trying not to get too close. “What’s happened at home? What are they saying … about me?”

As she took another step, his gaze shifted to her hands. Maeve had never seen such terror. He might have been dying, but what he feared more than anything was the idea of her touching him. In his fear, he began to snarl words at her in a language she thought might be Russian.

Tears welled in her eyes, slid down her cheeks, hot amid the cool trickles of rain on her face. Emotions warred within her. In their midst, one feeling burned the brightest, a gnawing she had felt earlier but which now seemed to inflate inside her. Her fingers flexed of their own accord, and she took another step closer, studying his scruffy beard and sodden clothes. Blood and rain dripped from his dangling feet.

Her aches and weariness seemed to diminish as she took another step toward him. The rider twitched and coughed, choking on his own blood. Somehow he mustered the strength to shake his head, to plead with her to stay away. Maeve lifted a hand, reaching toward him, basking in the breeze and the rain and relishing the thought of what it would feel like to take what she needed from him.

Like the driver at the parade had done.

Like she herself had done to her mother and Logan.

He would die, anyway. What difference would it make if she hastened him along? It might save him hours of anguish. In the back of her mind, a little voice pleaded with her to back away, but the other voice had grown louder. Like the drone of highway traffic or the whirl of a ceiling fan, it had become white noise, but she realized it had never left her. The presence shifted inside her skull, whispering, tempting her with promises. Touch him. It’s the only way. The sickness in you …

Maeve knew the rest.

Her hands shook. She stared at the man, watched the blood and rain sluice off his boots, and noticed the gleam fading from his eyes. No, the voice inside her said. Shaking, yearning, she reached for him. One of her hands caught the back of his shirt, and images seared through her mind, flickers of the death she’d witnessed and the ones she’d caused. Her mother’s throat had turned black. Her brother’s eyes had gone blank and dull, vacant and unknowing.

“No!” Maeve screamed. She threw herself backward, staggered. Her gut twisted, and she breathed through her nostrils, forcing herself not to vomit. Instead, she turned her back on the dying man. She started back through the passage nature had cut into the stony ridge, but the roar of the other dirt bike rose abruptly, as if it had just found the path that would lead to her.

Maybe it had—maybe the driver had found the first dirt bike’s trail.

She turned and rushed past the impaled man. As she darted into the trees, she spared a backward glance and saw that his eyes had glazed over. His body hung lifeless, all his muscles slack, and a part of her was relieved.

But the other part screamed inside the cage of her bones, enraged that she had let that life go to waste.

She staggered into the woods, numb with horror and guilt and fearful of the conflict between her head and heart. She ran as best she could, half listening to the dirt bike engine coming closer. Through the trees, she could see the edge of the forest and knew it had to be the gorge. She had to hide, had to be quiet. If the second rider couldn’t hear her, no way would he find her in this rain with no trail around. She turned left, heading north, sixty or seventy feet from the edge, searching for a felled tree to shimmy under or a cluster of low bushes to crouch within.

The sound of the rain vanished.

Though she kept running, the noise of her footfalls went away.

Even the growling engine went quiet.

Maeve stopped, breathing hard, the only sound the thump of her heartbeat in her chest. Her back felt strangely cold, as if winter had peered across the seasons all the way to July and caught her in its gaze. But she knew it wasn’t winter—it was something else. She turned to look and saw a figure wrapped in rough white cloth and draped in another layer that billowed around her, sheer and translucent. Red and black fluid dappled her shroud, stains peppered the cloth where it touched her body. Her hair had been shorn to mere inches and jutted at all angles, ragged and filthy. A leather mask had been tied across her face, cut and stretched to resemble a hawk or some other bird of prey, complete with jutting beak. The leather had been stained a deep crimson, the dark shade of blood that has begun to pool.

No rain touched her. The storm wind gusted the opposite direction from the unfelt breeze that billowed her funereal garments. Maeve stared at her, slowly shaking her head, backing away from the gnawing hunger she felt emanating from the thing in the woods, this thing that she knew had followed her. She would have screamed, but she knew that somewhere the other rider still hunted her.

At this thought, as if the vision could read her mind, the masked woman smiled. Her teeth were rotten and bleeding, her lips covered in sores.

The instant Maeve made the decision to flee, the noise rushed back into the world. The rain, the wind, her boots on the dirt, and that dirt bike growl, which now, thankfully, seemed farther away, as if the rider had lost her trail, if he’d ever had it to begin with.

She ran two hundred yards or more before she staggered and rested against a tree. Struck by a fresh bout of coughing, she spat blood and black bile. Little spots of blood welled from the pores on her arms, and the rain washed it away.

I’m dying, Maeve thought numbly, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world.

And maybe it was. Dying seemed like precisely the right thing to do.

12

Rue stood by the window and watched the street outside the Sinclair house, pulse racing. She felt sure she had seen a figure out the side window, looming just beyond a tangle of shrubbery, but when she’d rushed to the window for a better look, there had been no sign of anyone. She darted around the first floor of the house, peering through window after window, but spotted nothing out of the ordinary. Rue had never been paranoid, but she could forgive herself today.

She made her way back to the living room and peered out the front window, wishing she had someone to share her fears with. The only other person in the house was Ted, but he was lying down upstairs after too much whiskey and too much pain, and giving him something else to fear was the last thing she would do to him.

Once in a while, a car passed by. Two doors down, on the other side of the road, a kid played basketball in his driveway in the rain. Tall and thin, tank top and shorts soaked through, he moved methodically back and forth across the pavement, taking shot after shot and sinking most of them. The kid focused so much on his shooting that it was as if he didn’t notice the rain, and apparently he had the same attitude toward the quarantine. People in Jericho Falls weren’t confined to their homes. The older folks would likely be at the supermarket, stockpiling in fear, not knowing how long the quarantine might last. She figured most of the younger residents were going out of their minds. No cell service, no texting, no Wi-Fi. It had all been cut off on purpose. The teenagers in town wouldn’t have thought about landlines, but those had also been jammed.

“Quarantine,” she muttered to herself.

This wasn’t any quarantine Rue had ever heard of. She couldn’t call her boss, couldn’t call the governor’s office to complain, couldn’t see what people might be saying on social media. Anyone who wanted news would have to head to the town hall or the police station and find someone willing to talk. Rue had already made that trip once. The police station had been virtually abandoned aside from Len Kaminski’s aunt Carole, who always worked the front desk, and a young cop named Burlingame. The moment she saw that, Rue knew she had wasted the trip. Aunt Carole and Officer Burlingame proved capable of only two responses—“I don’t know” and “We’ll ask the chief when he’s back”—neither of which helped in any way.

The only place she could think of where she might actually get some answers was Garland Mountain Labs, and she wasn’t quite ready to make the trip over there again. With communications in town virtually silenced, all her nascent little paranoias had grown to full size. The world had already seen the video clip, so what were they trying to hide? If they weren’t trying to cover up the event itself, the moment Project: Red Hands got out of control, then why didn’t they want the locals talking to each other or to anyone else? Could it really all be about Maeve? Were they that worried that someone would hear from her or try to help her?

Or did they expect worse things to happen in Jericho Falls? Things they didn’t want the rest of the world to see?

The thought chilled her, settled deep into her bones. Rue watched the kid down the street shooting baskets and knew that whatever happened, she could not be like him, could not pretend the rain wasn’t falling, that they weren’t cut off, virtual prisoners of the devious pricks at Garland Mountain.

Something moved outside the window. Rue craned her neck to look sidelong across the front yard and saw a fat wild turkey ambling across the lawn. Another followed, and then a third. The little parade moved with an odd dignity as they crossed to the opposite side of the street and cut between houses before vanishing into the garden behind an old federal colonial. Growing up here, Rue had seen all sorts of animals in the wild, but turkeys had always been a particular fascination to her. They were contentious, inexplicably awkward birds. As a girl, it had occurred to her that she had never seen a turkey fly, and she wondered how they avoided predators if they couldn’t get into the air. She wondered if perhaps they managed to fly high enough to get into the trees, and it thrilled her when she learned she had guessed it precisely. They were silly-looking creatures, but she admired their resilience and their sense of self-preservation. Life, it seemed, was all about self-preservation.

Rue went back to the sofa and picked up the notebook she’d been scrawling in for an hour. She had been at the parade, heard the crump of impact when Oscar Hecht had driven his BMW into the crowd. Spectators had fallen, broken and bleeding, some of them dead. And then Hecht had climbed out of the car, and the horror had only grown worse. Rue had been turning it over in her head, trying to see it from a new angle. Before someone had started jamming the internet, she had watched grainy footage of the crash and aftermath over and over, focused not on the car or the victims Hecht had struck but on the people he touched. The way they died.

Too fast.

Thirty or forty seconds from contact to death, that had been all it had taken. She visualized the contagion taking place, the virus or bacteria passed from one person to another. Bacteria seemed more likely to her, but she didn’t want to assume anything yet. She had scrawled dozens of mathematical calculations in her notebook, jotting notes in the slanted script she had learned by copying her grandmother and which looked hopelessly old-fashioned on the page. One word stood out amid all the others—stood out because it had been circled a dozen times and underlined twice.

Accelerant.

Many scientists Rue knew were rigid in their belief that established science remained immutable, that the areas of existence still to be explained were open to discussion but that facts were simply facts. For instance, no contagion on earth could infect a host in mere seconds. The word for such a thing was impossible.

Rue had never liked that word. She tended not to think in terms of what might be possible or impossible but what was demonstrable. The world had seen video of a disease not only transferrable by contact but instantly fatal. Some of the comments online had suggested poison, and Rue had a whole list in her notebook, along with explanations for why she had crossed each one out. Poisons like arsenic and tetrodotoxin would take hours to kill someone who ingested them, longer if absorbed through the skin. Something like polonium would take days. Cyanide would do the job much more quickly, but still, the absorption rate would come into play. Consuming a liquid or inhaling a gas would be different, but nothing like that had happened at the parade.

Logic didn’t support poison as the answer. If somehow Hecht had been immune but infused with some kind of poison developed at Garland Mountain Labs, how had he passed that same condition to Maeve Sinclair? Bacteria seemed only slightly more logical.

Naturally immune? Rue had scribbled in her notebook. Carrier?

Desperate for some explanation, this one seemed to come closest. Garland Mountain had bioengineered some kind of killer bacterium that could be transferred in seconds, by touch alone, and Oscar Hecht had been immune, a carrier. In Maeve Sinclair, he had found another like him. The fact that she’d touched him while he was dying was sheer coincidence; Maeve would have been infected either way.

Rue managed to make all of that sound almost rational in her mind, as long as she didn’t let her thoughts stray to the tragic flaw in her logic. It was simple enough to believe Garland Mountain had made such breakthroughs, malicious mad scientist bastards that they were. But it was one thing to believe an infection could be transmitted so quickly, another thing entirely to swallow the idea that it would travel through the human body fast enough to kill in an instant. Absorbed through the pores, carried into the bloodstream, surfacing as suppurating sores, corrupting the lungs … she couldn’t call it impossible because she had seen it. The effect was demonstrable, and Rue had no doubt that if Maeve touched her now, she would die the same way and with equal swiftness.

It just wasn’t logical.

“It hurts my fucking head,” she whispered.

“What’s that?” a voice said behind her.

Rue jumped up from the sofa, turning around, one hand over her heart. “Jesus, Ted, you scared the life out of me.”

He smiled weakly. “There’s enough of that going around.”

Rue’s eyes widened at the poor joke, and Ted, realizing what he’d said, lifted a hand to cover his mouth. Grief clawed at the expression on his face, but he shook it off with a huff.

“Any word?” he asked, still muzzy from the whiskey.

There were dark circles under his eyes, and she couldn’t help wondering if there were pills of any kind in the house. All he’d taken for the pain of his injuries had been whiskey and ibuprofen, and the allure of a stronger painkiller had to be powerful, especially for someone with an addict’s memory of drug-induced bliss.

She pushed the thought away. Ted was stronger than that. He had to be.

“Nothing,” Rue said, closing her notebook.

Ted shook his head sadly. “I should have gone.” He shot her an accusatory glance. “I should be up there right now.”

“You’re not in any shape to do that, Ted. And there are dangerous people up there—”

“That’s exactly why I should have gone. My daughter is—”

“Maeve is one of those dangerous people,” Rue said. “She needs you alive. She needs you here when she comes home.”

They had been friends a long time, but Rue had never seen him like this. Tormenting himself. Hating himself.

“You’re a good man,” she said. “You always were. You’ve suffered loss today that most people can’t even imagine. Nobody expects you to—”

Ted threw up his hands. Tears came to his eyes. “Jesus, Rue, don’t you get it? I expect me to. I need to be a better father than this. Ellen would have expected me to be stronger than…”

He trailed off, wincing and favoring the side where he’d cracked three ribs.

“Who am I kidding? Strong people don’t become addicts. Strong people don’t have to tell themselves they can give up drinking whenever they want.”

Rue went to him, took his hands, forced him to look into her eyes. “You’re a sensible man, a good man, a good father. Addiction is complex, but I know this much—it had its claws in you pretty damn deep, and you ripped those claws right out. I saw the way it hollowed you out, Ted. But you came back to life.”

He smiled softly, still half-drunk, pale with pain and grief. “Nice try, Crooker. But I’m still a drunk.”

“One monster at a time, buddy,” she replied, tapping a finger on his chest. “One monster at a time.”

“You don’t think I’m letting them down? Letting Ellen down?”

“She’s gone,” Rue said. “She and Logan both. But her daughters are alive. Ellen would want you to do what was best for them, and you know it. I don’t have kids, but I know it must make you want to scream, just sitting around and waiting. But we’ve covered this. You were hit by a car. You’re a wreck. They could be anywhere by now. Just stay here. Be the sanctuary they will need when they come down off the mountain.”

“A whiskey-soaked sanctuary.”

“If that’s the way it has to be,” she replied.

Ted looked as if he wanted to argue, but instead he pulled her into a quick hug, rested his head on her shoulder a moment, and then turned away.

As he did, the doorbell rang.

Rue turned toward the sound, but Ted rushed by her, hurrying out to the foyer fueled by hope and desperation. She arrived in his wake, just as he opened the front door. Rue would have told him to be careful, all sorts of dark fears surfacing in the back of her mind, but the door already hung open and she looked over Ted’s shoulder at Chief Kaminski.

Ted stared at him. “Please tell me something good—”

“No news either way, I’m afraid. Not yet,” Kaminski said. He looked past Ted. “It’s actually Rue I needed to see.”

Ted visibly deflated. He turned and wandered back into the living room as if he’d forgotten Kaminski had arrived. Rue watched him go, tempted to get him another glass of whiskey, hating that temptation.

She looked at the chief. “What’s going on?”

Kaminski reached into his pocket and withdrew a small nub of black plastic. “Communications earpiece. You ever use something like this?”

Rue took it, brows knitting as she lifted it to the light and turned it over. “Not exactly like it, but I have AirPods for my phone.”

“Same basic idea. Walker asked me to give you this. Hoped you’d use it, monitor, wait for him to be in touch.”

She held it in her palm. “He wanted you to give this to me?”

“Said he might need someone with your science brain down here, in town. Seemed like a compliment to me.”

Rue closed her fist around the little plastic nub and shook it like a die. “I suppose. The kind of compliment that could get a woman killed. But I’ll help however I can. I don’t think this thing’ll do much good, though. The cell towers are jammed.”

Chief Kaminski smiled. “This one doesn’t need cell towers. I’m headed back up the mountain. Someone’s got to keep the damn Blackcoats from pushing my officers around. Meanwhile, give Walker a call. Maybe he can put a stop to this clusterfuck before it gets any worse.”

Priya would never tell Rose, but she had begun to give up hope. The day had started hot, but once the wind and rain arrived the temperature had dropped precipitously, and up on the mountain with the breeze and the clouds, soaked to the skin, she felt a chill settling in. The humidity made it hard to breathe. Her feet squelched inside her shoes. She would have sold both kidneys for a cup of coffee.

Half an hour earlier, they’d heard what sounded like a bear lumbering through the trees, and she had spotted a deer a few minutes later, but the animal had bolted. Other than that, the nearest living thing seemed to be the pilot of the helicopter that made regular sweeps over the mountain. Priya didn’t mention it to Rose, but the presence of the chopper reassured her. If they were still looking for Maeve, that meant she hadn’t been captured yet and hopefully that she was still alive.

She exhaled, tugging on Rose’s hand. “Sorry. Can we take a breather?”

Rose kissed her fingers. “Of course.”

Grateful, Priya sat on a large rock and scanned the trees around them. Water dripped off the leaves. Little streams ran along the path, pooling beside thick roots, finding a path down the mountain. Pine needles and leaves were carried away.

She looked up to find Rose watching her. “What?” she asked.

“You’re going to make me say it? That we’re wasting our time?”

Priya exhaled. It was one thing to think it, another to hear the words spoken aloud. “I’m not going to say that. I’m with you, no matter how long we’re up here. But I admit I’m worried about the rain. Even if we knew how to track someone, we’re just guessing.”

Rose turned to stare along the trail in the direction they’d been headed. “If she started on the Jackrabbit Trail, she’d have kept going east. That’d bring her to the gorge eventually, and she knows the gorge from fishing with my dad. She knows there are caves down there. She’s going to need time to figure out her next step, somewhere to sleep tonight, out of the rain. If it were me, that’s where I’d go.”

Priya felt a flicker of hope. Or maybe it was just that she had faith in Rose. “The gorge it is,” she said, rising from the rock. “You know how to get down there from here?”

Rose shrugged. “More or less.”

Priya saw motion out of the corner of her eye, a ghostly figure that seemed to separate from the trees without a sound. The white woman couldn’t have been more than five feet tall. The silver of her shoulder-length hair might have been natural or come out of a bottle, but either way, it added to her haunting pallor, as did the gleaming silver pistol in her hand.

“Hey, no,” she muttered, holding her hands out to make sure the woman knew they didn’t represent any kind of threat.

Rose stepped between Priya and the gun. “Who the hell are you?”

The little silver-haired killer ignored the question. “You’re Rose Sinclair. Your sister is Maeve, the woman from the video. The one with the death touch.”

They weren’t questions.

The killer lowered her weapon, but it hung at her side, deceptively loose. Just from the way she stood and the dull, dead light in her eyes, Priya knew the gun was far from dormant. It might as well have been a snake, coiled to strike.

“You can call me Agatha,” the woman said, with an accent Priya didn’t recognize. “I’m bored to tears, honestly. Sick of trailing you two. I’m glad to hear you’ve got at least some idea of where to look for your sister; otherwise, I would have been very angry.”

“What do you want with Maeve?” Rose asked.

Agatha lifted the big silver gun again, the barrel’s mouth giving them a dark wink. “Lead the way, Rose. If I get the impression you’re intentionally wasting my time, I’ll put a bullet through your pretty girlfriend’s head.”

“You do that,” Rose said, “and you’ll never get what you want from us.”

Priya grabbed a fistful of Rose’s shirt and whispered to her. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

The woman grinned, left eye half-hidden behind the silver hair the rain had plastered across her face. “Let me tell you something now that may help you later on.”

The gun barely twitched before she fired a bullet into the ground. It kicked up dirt and rainwater just inches from Rose’s left foot.

“I kill for a living, and sometimes for pleasure. It took more effort just now for me to avoid killing you than it would to put a bullet in your heart,” she said. “So let’s go, shall we?”

Rose touched Priya’s arm, encircled her wrist, and gave her a tug. The echo of the gunshot still rang in her ears as she turned to follow Rose along the trail, with Agatha—whoever she really was—keeping pace ten feet behind. Whoever she was, Priya had no doubt this woman intended either to capture Maeve or simply murder her, and there was no way she could let that happen. Rose had lost enough.

Contrary to her own advice, Priya had a feeling she was going to have to do something very, very stupid.

13

Walker slid the TAGI goggles down to hang around his neck as he trekked through the rain. Any hope he’d had of following Maeve’s trail had turned to mud, just like the ground underfoot. He had seen that parachutist floating toward the trees and he’d needed to make a split decision. Whoever had that chute would also be searching for Maeve, and he’d banked on them having more intel than he did, or at least a more efficient way to track her. It was a thin strand of hope to hang on to, but for the moment it was all he had.

Which troubled him.

Where are the satellites? he thought. American spy satellites could focus with such clarity that surveillance could count the whiskers in a man’s beard. In the rain and through the trees, that might be more difficult, but Alena should be able to get some satellite surveillance of this damned mountain, give him some help.

Walker wondered if he’d been set up to fail. According to her reputation, Alena Boudreau didn’t operate like that, but his doubts grew with every step. He had anticipated field support, more intel, more everything upon his arrival here. Instead, he had been dropped into town with zero guarantee of backup, and when he’d called in, the person on the line had been David Boudreau, Alena’s grandson. The assignment felt very quiet, very insular, and it had his thoughts awhirl.

Whoever the parachutist was, they wouldn’t have dropped onto the mountain without some sense of Maeve’s location. Walker figured they had their own satellite surveillance working for them or some other way to find her. Which meant they either weren’t American, or the Department of Defense didn’t know Alena had sent Walker onto this mountain.

Or both.

He didn’t like where this train of thought was heading, but he couldn’t stop its progress. He had gotten himself into hot water with his bosses, and they had benched him until they felt they could trust him again, which he had known might be never. His employers had been furious at him for dropping the only sample of a potentially deadly bacterium into the ocean, but mostly because they wanted that contagion for themselves.

Of course they had sidelined him. The fact they hadn’t court-martialed him or found some other way to lock him up could only be ascribed to their own self-preservation. He had saved a lot of lives, but even his friends had told him he would never be put into the field again, that nobody would trust him.

Yet here he was. In the field, alone, at the behest of a woman who claimed to have been put in charge of a new operation—the Global Science Research Coalition—just yesterday, and who needed his help.

How many times had Walker slipped something useful out of DARPA because nobody had been paying attention? Because, in that moment, it was an item nobody needed? That was him, Walker knew. Put into a box on a shelf or stored away in some climate-controlled warehouse like the Ark of the Covenant at the end of Raiders. And Alena Boudreau had sneaked in and snatched him off the shelf.

Soaked with rain, sick of trudging, covered with scratches, he knew the conclusion was inescapable. Alena had sent him up here because she didn’t have anyone else to send and because he was expendable. She’d also sent him because he had a history of rash behavior, and if he fucked up, she could say it wasn’t her fault, that was just Walker being Walker.

He trudged onward, growing more determined. One man, by himself, without a trail to follow, had almost zero chance of locating Maeve now, if she didn’t want to be found.

But that didn’t mean he wouldn’t try.

Walker slowed his pace, quieting his steps as he drew toward the area where the chutist had landed. From a distance, it was always difficult to gauge perfectly, but he felt he must be very close. Pausing, he closed his eyes and listened. Sure enough, he could hear the patter of the rain striking smooth nylon, and he started off to his left, slightly northward. Fifty feet through the trees and over a fallen oak, he saw the chute tangled in the trees. Whoever had arrived had dropped to the forest floor and run off into the woods.

He reached up to slide his goggles back into place and tapped the side to power them on again. Instantly, the new arrival’s footfalls were revealed. A smile lifted one corner of his mouth as he followed the trail of broken branches and the heat of the chutist’s passing. Given how quickly he’d closed the distance, he gauged he wasn’t more than ten minutes behind.

Walker inhaled the scents of the forest and the rain, and his mind went back to the way this day had begun. He should have been in Virginia, camping in the mountains, swimming in the river with Charlie. If he closed his eyes, even for a moment, he could see the frustration and disappointment on his son’s face. Charlie had grown up with broken promises and long absences that must have seemed like disinterest. Walker loved his son, but it wouldn’t have felt like love to Charlie. Quite the opposite. In the nine months he had been benched, he had worked hard to repair their relationship.

Walker’s own father had let him down so many times, in so many ways, that he always promised himself he’d never inflict that kind of hurt on Charlie. For years, he had told himself his situation was different. As a child, he had felt invisible in his own house. His father had been there in the flesh, but emotionally absent, usually halfway drunk and surrounded by a cloud of cigarette smoke. He’d been afraid of his own shadow, and his cowardice had filled him with such self-loathing that he’d gone off to Iraq to prove he could muster up some courage when his country needed him.

He’d died there.

Every time Walker lost himself in his work, every time an assignment took him away from home for weeks or months at a time, he told himself it wasn’t abandonment. Lied to himself to make it okay. Good thing I don’t need you, Charlie had said today.

Walker’s father had been frightened of shadows, but Walker himself only feared one thing—that Charlie had been telling the truth.

He hadn’t forgotten the exchange he’d had with Amanda this morning, either. It had been three years since their split, and he still remembered the smell of her hair and the way she had curled against him in the middle of the night, and the times he’d woken up with her nestled into the crook of his arm. There had been women since Amanda, one in particular. Seong didn’t want anything to do with him now, and that was all right. He understood the choice she’d made. Amanda, though …

Walker wanted to get off this mountain.

His earwig buzzed. He tapped it.

“I’m here.”

“Is this Dr. Walker?”

A woman’s voice, but not Alena’s. It took him a second to realize who it had to be. “Dr. Crooker?”

“Any luck in your search?”

Walker saw the bright flare above the path that indicated a branch had broken, and he frowned. The parachutist had gone this way, no doubt, but Walker did not want to catch up with him while talking to Rue. He slowed down, glanced both ways through the woods. If the chutist was close enough to hear his voice, he would hear the noise if the guy made a run for it.

“It’s a big mountain,” he replied. “I’m doing what I can, but if Maeve’s father has any other suggestions about where she might have gone, I’d love to hear them.”

Silence on the line. The wind kicked up and rain trickled down the back of his neck, drizzling along the small of his back. He shivered.

“Rue? You still there?”

“Yes. I’m just wondering if that’s why you went to all the trouble of getting me this phone. The town is quarantined, someone—I’m guessing government—has blocked all phone communications, but you decided I ought to be an exception to that. But you don’t even know me.”

Walker smiled to himself. “That is why.”

“Sorry? I don’t—”

“I’m having significant trust issues right now, Dr. Crooker,” Walker said. “I don’t trust anyone I know, including my current and former employers.”

“So you trust me because I’m a total stranger? How does that make sense?”

“I trust you because you’re a bystander. You’re in this because you live in Jericho Falls, and you were at that parade. You’re in it because Ted Sinclair is your friend and he’s suffered a tragedy that would crush any of us, and because you care about his daughters. I trust you because you stood up to the Garland Mountain people and didn’t take any shit, and because you’re a scientist, and if there’s anything this world needs to learn, it’s to trust our fucking scientists.”

A soft chuffing noise came over the line. It took a second for him to recognize it as a laugh.

“That’s funny?” he asked.

“You’re just coming up with reasons to convince yourself.”

Walker heard a rustling sound back the way he’d come. A squirrel or something, he was sure, but he had a sense this was larger than a squirrel. Please don’t be a bear, he thought idly. He didn’t have time to run from a goddamned bear.

“You’re right,” he said. “But those reasons are good enough for me.”

“What do you want from me?”

“I want you to leave Ted there. I know it’s awful to ask. Maybe you can get a neighbor to sit with him. But I need you to—”

“Abandon my best friend?”

“No. I need you to help him. I’m asking you to put yourself in danger for him.”

“What kind of danger?”

“The kind that leads to people dead in the street at a parade.”

“Jesus,” Rue hissed in admonishment.

Walker hurried on before she could be angry with him. “I’d like you to go back to Garland Mountain and stick your nose in as much as possible, find out whatever you can about Project: Red Hands and what they did to Oscar Hecht. What it’s done to Maeve. If I can find her, I intend to bring her in alive, but if there’s any hope of helping her, we have to be able to hold her and understand what’s happened to her. You have the skill set I need, Rue.”

“Walker, I’m a civilian. They wouldn’t even let me through the gate. I can’t just—”

“You have the knowledge base, and you’re really, really fucking pissed off. Am I wrong about either of those things?”

“No.”

Another rustle in the trees. Walker looked that way. His goggles picked up a bit more light than they had before, streaks of heat where there hadn’t been any before.

He started following the parachutist’s trail again, listening for his pursuers. “I have the authority to hire outside consultants and to grant emergency interim security clearance—”

“Is that even a thing?”

“I’m offering you a temporary consulting position with the SRC so you can get into Garland Mountain and get some answers.”

“You’re basically deputizing me?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t have any ID,” Rue said. “They won’t take me seriously.”

“When I was there, I spotted a familiar face. Kat Isenberg. I worked with her seven or eight years ago. She was with DARPA then, and I’m guessing Garland Mountain is under the DoD umbrella. Maybe she’s not the person I thought she was, but if she is, then she can’t possibly be comfortable with all of this. See what she can tell you, and see if she can get you into the lab.”

“That’s a tall order for a woman you worked with once, years ago.”

Walker scanned the trees ahead for a place to hide. A place to wait for whoever trailed him to pass by. “She’ll either want to do what’s right, or she won’t.”

“How am I supposed to get in touch with her? The phones are jammed.”

“The earpiece you’re using now should only have two numbers programmed into it, with voice commands for Alpha and Beta. Alpha is me. Call Beta and you’ll get the office of the director of the SRC. Whoever answers will be able to get a message to Kat. There’s no way communications aren’t working at Garland Mountain.”

“So I just call her up?” Rue asked. “What’s to stop her from just telling me to go to hell?”

“Humanity, I hope,” Walker replied. “I need to sign off, Dr. Crooker. I hope you’ll do this for me, but it’s your call. If you get in touch with Kat Isenberg, tell her I have faith in her. Also, try not to get killed.”

Rue swore. “I hope this wasn’t your idea of a pep talk.”

“I wouldn’t ask if I had someone else with your expertise on the ground down there.”

“Someone with my expertise who happens to be willing to do anything so her best friend doesn’t lose more of his children today,” she replied.

“I’m sorry it has to be you,” Walker said.

He ended the call. Rue might be fuming, thinking him an asshole, but she would do as he’d asked. Walker didn’t have time to be polite. He slipped the gun out of his waistband and held it down by his side as he stepped silently off the path and found a space between a pair of hundred-foot northern pine trees. The shadows in the woods had gotten longer and deeper, and in the gray light and the drizzle, it all felt like some strange otherworld. But this was no fairy tale.

None of the fairy tales he knew had guns in them.

Leon Lewis heard Walker’s voice ahead on the path—not the words, just the distant mutter. From the shift in tone, he knew when Walker began to wrap up the call, and he held up a fist to signal Viv Cheng to freeze.

They had been quiet enough, but Leon had started to think maybe Cheng had been right—maybe they ought to have hung back a little farther. In the rain, with the wind blowing, he doubted they’d made any noise that Walker had heard. They’d both been trained to move silently—like a fuckin’ ninja, Leon would have said, except he didn’t want to offend Cheng. She was of Chinese descent, not Japanese, but Leon liked to be what Aaron, his older brother, called “sensitive and shit.”

Cheng touched his shoulder, and he nearly shot her in surprise. Shot her or shat himself. Leon hadn’t realized how tense he had become over the past hour or so, shadowing Walker, but every muscle in his body seemed ready to snap.

With her usual scowl, Cheng motioned for him to continue forward. Leon hesitated until Cheng pointed to the ground and used two fingers to mime walking. Sometimes Leon could be slow on the uptake, but he got this right away, and he couldn’t argue with her logic. They were not on a trail. They had pursued Walker into a part of the forest without any path at all, and that meant that with every second they delayed, they ran a greater risk of losing track of him. Leon had invested a lot of time and sly ninja shit into trailing Walker, and the last thing he intended to do was fuck it up. Never mind that he might well be demoted or even fired.

He steadied his nerves, took a breath, and started forward. Head cocked, he listened to the rain and to his own nearly silent footfalls. Shit. Not a peep from Walker. He tried not to think about the fallout if he and Cheng blew this assignment. Instead of searching the mountain for Maeve Sinclair, they had been told to follow one person, a single individual who had some serious training on his résumé but had never been in combat. Walker might have seen some crazy shit, but he wasn’t special ops.

Leon quickened his pace. He heard Cheng make the little clucking noise with her tongue that always came out when she disapproved of something, but he kept on. Maybe he wasn’t quiet as a ninja in that moment, but he told himself that the rain and wind would cover it.

Thunder cracked somewhere far across the sky. It boomed and rolled, and he picked up the pace even more, scanning the path ahead for any sign of Walker. It might not be nighttime, but with a storm as gray as this and in the dark shadows of the forest, the dark seemed deep enough.

His heart raced. Shit, shit, shit. Where had Walker gone? Unless he had started to run, there was no way he could have gotten so far ahead of them in such a short time. He had been on the phone only two minutes ago. The call finished and then he’d started moving. Leon and Cheng had paused, but not for this long. Anxiety flooded through him. Had Walker diverted through the trees, taking off at a new angle? Maybe he’d learned something in his call that had made him alter his course, but without a path, it would be impossible to know where. Leon cursed under his breath, wondering if his sister could still get him the job she’d once mentioned, as an investigator for the law firm that employed her.

A rustle came from behind him, along with a strangling noise that sounded a bit like Cheng’s clucking tongue. Leon turned.

Walker stood behind Cheng, choking her with one arm across her throat. In his free hand he held a gun, the tip of its barrel nestled in the little concave space just behind her right ear, but his gaze locked on Leon.

“Who do you work for?” Walker asked.

Leon smiled. “We’re all here doing the same job, Walker. Don’t get crazy.”

Walker jabbed the gun barrel into Cheng’s skull, and she cried out.

“Specifically,” Walker said. “Who do you work for?”

Leon lowered his weapon, let it drop onto the damp leaves, and slowly held his hands out in supplication. “We’re on the same side. That’s what I’m trying to tell you, man. We’re White Oak Security.”

“Mercenaries, yeah, I got that part,” Walker sneered. “I want to know who your current client is. Who is paying the tab for you fuckers to sneak around up here? And what are they paying you to do that requires you to follow me?”

Leon’s mouth had gone dry. He found himself wishing he hadn’t dropped his gun. Not that he would have drawn on Walker while the guy had his weapon snug against Cheng’s skull, but he didn’t like losing the option bullets gave him. The knife clipped to his belt felt warm and familiar against his hip. It would be clean and shiny now, but it had been dipped in blood before. It would be a damn shame if he had to kill Walker, but better than having to go back and tell the boss he had lost the bastard in the woods.

“We don’t have clients,” Leon said. “We take orders. The boss doesn’t tell us who the client is.”

“Bullshit. You can figure it out.”

Cheng bared her teeth. “Yeah, sometimes we can. Right now, we know it’s government work, just like you.”

“Not like me.”

“Oh, Mr. Fucking Righteous,” Cheng said. She tilted her head away from the gun, but Walker followed with its barrel, kept it nudged against her. “You’re asking questions you already know the answers to. We’re following you because we have orders to follow you. The boss told us you were here, told us to shadow you in case you found the target before we did.”

Leon winced at the word. He saw Walker’s eyes narrow the moment Cheng uttered those two syllables.

“Target,” Walker echoed. “Maeve Sinclair is not a target. She’s a victim.”

“You gonna kill me or argue semantics?” Cheng asked.

Leon saw her legs tense, knew she would make a move. His fingers drifted toward his knife.

“I don’t have time for either,” Walker said. He drew back his hand, went to knock her on the skull with his gun.

Cheng twisted in his grasp, grabbed him by the throat, reached for his gun hand. As she moved, Leon unsheathed his knife, rushing toward them. Cheng wouldn’t need him. She had Walker cold. He watched her thrust her left leg behind his right and drive him backward. Walker started to fall. As he did, he grabbed a fistful of Cheng’s hair and dragged her after him. The momentum of his fall brought them both down. He yanked her over him, put a boot in her gut, kept her moving, hurled her at the trunk of a foot-thick birch with such force that the tree cracked and began to fall, branches catching on other trees on the way down.

“Son of a bitch,” Leon muttered as he took aim at Walker’s back, cocked back his knife hand, and snapped his wrist forward.

Walker wasn’t there when the knife sliced the air. He’d dropped to the ground. The knife glanced harmlessly off a tree branch and skittered into the underbrush, and Leon found himself looking down the barrel of Walker’s gun.

Cheng rushed at him from the left, had the drop on him for sure, but Walker jerked his gun hand up and fired. The bullet took Cheng in the shoulder, spun her around. Leon saw her blood spatter the leaves as she fell.

Walker slammed a boot down on the bullet wound.

“That placement was on purpose,” he told Cheng. “I can shoot you somewhere else if you want.”

“Christ’s sake, we’re on the same side,” Leon snarled.

Walker stepped back, covering them both with his gun. “The possibility of that being true is the only reason I’m not leaving your corpses out here in the woods. You just outright told me you intended to murder Maeve Sinclair. Those aren’t my orders, and I wouldn’t follow them if they were. Give your boss a message for me. I’m going to get that woman somewhere safe, where she can be treated. I’m putting myself in between her and anyone who wants to stop that from happening.”

Gun or no gun, Leon lunged for him, got hold of his wrist to keep the gun aimed up at the sky. Leon caught him with a punch to the gut, then the kidney, but Walker moved with the blows, and when Leon tried to hit him again, the bastard gave him a solid shot to the skull. Leon staggered, rattled, wondering if a man could be concussed by one fucking punch.

Other punches landed, all of them Walker’s. Leon caught a glimpse of Cheng, unconscious now and bleeding in the dirt. Then Walker brought his gun down on Leon’s head, and the lights went out.

14

Maeve huddled beneath the prickly branches of a pine tree, smears of sap on her arms and face. The earth moved, but this was no quake or tremor. She had felt this way before, drunk and lying in bed with the spins. Vertigo, or something like it.

Her vision blurred. Long minutes passed—she couldn’t be certain how many—before drops of rainwater plinked into her left eye and forced her to focus. She felt the pine needles sticking to her soaking-wet clothes and knew she had to move. Maeve rolled onto her belly and crawled out from beneath the pine.

Maeve.

The world tilted again. Her stomach convulsed, and she vomited with such force that tears came to her eyes. The stink of it wafted up at her, and she recoiled even as her stomach twisted again and once more she went rigid as vomit poured out of her.

She breathed through her mouth to keep from smelling it. Forcing herself to crawl away, she found herself out in the open again, in the rain, and she let the cold water cleanse her.

It’s rotting you from the inside, Maeve. Get up, you cowardly nothing. Can’t you feel it? You’re hungry.

And she was. God, she was. The inner voice might have been cruel, but she couldn’t deny the truth of its words. What troubled her was the voice itself, the way it resonated in her bones as if the words were music played through the pipes of an organ. Was this madness? Sickness?

How could she be hungry after being so violently ill?

She tried to rise, stumbled, and then managed to walk. Her vision wavered, the path ahead unclear. Her thoughts were muddled as if the rain and the wind had penetrated her mind. In high school, she and Kristie Burns had gotten so drunk at a party in the woods that they’d tried to walk home and had gone two miles in the wrong direction before they’d realized. They’d made it to a street on the outskirts of town, headed toward North Conway, and Alec Bergen had pulled over to check on them. Alec and Kristie’s older brother were best friends, and Kristie’d had a crush on him since she was in the sixth grade. That night, she had thrown up in the backseat of Alec’s car, a stink that would never come out of the upholstery, and afterward Kristie could never stay in any room with Alec for more than thirty seconds. But at least they had made it home safely.

For a few seconds, Maeve found herself back inside that moment, living that night, riding in the back of Alec’s shitbox Cadillac, an ancient rusted thing he’d gotten from his grandpa. She blinks, breathes in, smells Kristie’s puke—or her own—and then she isn’t in the car or in the woods but standing at the edge of a field.

Hungry.

There are soldiers in the field. Bulanovo, says that dark voice inside her. She feels sun on her skin, hears the clang of crude swords and the grunts of men. They’re starving, says the voice. Killing each other so they might no longer be hungry. Can we do any less?

Maeve staggers forward with legs that are not her own. She feels tall, though her arms are thin and her clothing ragged. The smell on her now is something else, something worse, something like the awful, gut-churning stench of the rats who’d died and rotted in the wall of her family kitchen one spring.

She walks toward the soldiers as they clash. Her hands are outstretched. Their nostrils flare and foreheads wrinkle when her stench reaches them, as if she is only vaguely visible to them until that moment when they smell the stink of death. That moment when it becomes too late.

Her long, spindly fingers reach out to brush an arm, a cheek, the soft curve of a throat. One by one, they fall, those she touches, and they buck and writhe as the sickness turns them putrid. They wilt and die behind her like flowers in a field of war.

On her hands and knees in the mud and rain, Maeve coughed hard enough that bloody spittle flew from her mouth. Coughing racked her body again, her fingers sinking into the mud, but she forced herself to breathe evenly, slowly, shuddering.

Blinking, she stared at the muddy ground, at her fingers, nothing like the long, wicked claws she had just imagined.

“What the hell was that?”

Trembling, hands on her knees, she managed to rise to her feet. The wheezing remained in her chest, the pressure in her head. The voice lingered as well, the malignant presence that had been taking root in her thoughts, inside her skull. As she thought of it now, a soft sigh of amusement that slithered in her brain. A tumor, she thought. Could cancer grow that quickly, put pressure on some part of her brain that might make her have such hallucinations, might breed this fear and paranoia? Or could it just be fever, exhaustion, dehydration?

Snarling, she bashed her fists against her temples. Sick as she was, she knew she had to find something to eat and fresh water to drink.

Hungry?

Serpentine, the voice continued to snake through her thoughts. An image swam up into her mind of the guy on the dirt bike, impaled, bleeding, and on the edge of death. Again her hands clenched, itching. They yearned to return, to touch the dying man, but even if she would have done such a thing, it was too late. The rider had died.

Find another, Maeve.

Again she smashed her fists against her head. She didn’t want to kill anyone else. Even if that meant the sickness gnawing at her would kill her.

A buzz filled the air, low but growing louder. The other dirt bike, she thought at first, before tracking the sound as coming from overhead and to the north. Hopeful, she looked up to find the sky almost completely hidden by the canopy of trees. Rain dripped from branches and leaves and pine needles. In the open places, gray light and still more rain slipped through, but she couldn’t get a glimpse of the helicopter, even as the noise of its rotors droned nearer. Heart thumping, she hurried through the trees, searching for a clearing. She could turn herself in, get help. They might not be there to help her, she knew—after what she’d seen at the parade, after the infection had poisoned her, turned her into a carrier, a killer, a contagious thing—they might not want her alive. But that would be better than the urge inside her now, the desire to find someone to touch, some warm life to end.

“Please,” she managed as she came to a place where slightly more of the gray sky showed itself above her. She screamed, “Please!” Maeve waved her hands back and forth, spotted the helicopter against the storm clouds. Too high. Too far. She waved harder, screamed louder.

She watched the chopper glide away until the trees blocked her view again. Adrenaline had masked her pain and discomfort for a minute, but now the ache in her throat and the throbbing in her skull returned. Her bones hurt as if they had been driven into her flesh. Maeve exhaled, coughed, and tried to clear her thoughts.

Instinct had made her head for the gorge earlier. She’d gotten sidetracked, but now she glanced around in search of the right direction. Whoever might be on this mountain looking for her, she could never trust their motives. Only her dad and Rose.

Descending into the gorge could be treacherous if you didn’t know the right path to take, but there were caves in the gorge. It could take them days to find her, even if they knew where to look. Down there, she would either be trapping herself or saving herself.

She set off north through the trees.

Inside, the voice still lingered. She felt its awareness of her, like eyes watching her from the dark, only inside her thoughts instead of hiding in the trees. For the moment, however, the voice had gone quiet, and she had no visions of spindly fingers brushing death across the skin of the living, or of them falling to the ground, lesions bursting on their flesh.

The silence hung heavy in her thoughts, as if something held its breath, waiting.

15

Rose had never felt so exposed in her life. She and Priya walked hand in hand where the woods would allow it. The bitch with the gun followed right behind them, but they held hands as if this were an ordinary hike, the two of them exploring the wilderness. They had kayaked on the river but had never climbed any of the mountains together, never even gone fishing. Their dad had taken Rose and Maeve fishing many times, and she wondered why she had never taken Priya.

Agatha bumped her gun against the small of Rose’s back, and she let out a kind of peep, a sound she’d never made in her life. Her face flushed with shame. Had she ever hated anyone as much as she did this tiny woman with her big goddamned gun? She didn’t think so. Even the man who had driven his car through the crowd at the parade had been sick and fleeing something or someone. And she couldn’t hate Maeve, even though her heart wanted to. Maeve would be suffering even more than Rose. After what she’d done, Maeve would be in agony.

But this fucking bitch? Rose burned with hatred for her.

“Talk to me, Rose,” Agatha said. “Where are we headed?”

“Where you wanted to go. There are dozens of ways to get down into the gorge, but only a few of them are both quick and safe.”

Agatha said nothing, just kept them moving with the specter of that gun.

“Can I ask you a question?” Priya said quietly.

Agatha’s footfalls were quiet, but now they grew quieter, as if she had fallen back to make sure she could shoot them both. “Go on.”

“How much do you get paid to kill someone?”

Rose stiffened. Her mouth went dry, but she kept walking. She squeezed Priya’s hand in warning, but the question was already out.

Agatha laughed softly. “Well, Rose, looks like your girlfriend is more interesting than I thought. But what makes you think I kill people for money, honey? All sorts of people will want what Maeve has. Maybe I work for my government—”

“I don’t think so,” Priya interrupted. “You’re a private contractor. That’s why you’re here alone. I don’t know if someone paid you to be here or if you’re looking at it as, like, an investment or something. But you work alone. And I was just wondering what it cost to hire you to kill someone.”

Rose felt the chill of the rain that soaked her clothes, felt the way they clung to her, but now she felt the dampness of the air as well, and it seemed ready to suffocate her. This wasn’t Priya, so what did Priya have in mind?

Agatha fell back another step or two. She laughed softly, muttered some profanity under her breath. “Let me get this straight—I have a gun pointed at you. In this moment, you have zero idea whether I intend to let you live through the day, and you’re looking to hire me to murder someone else?”

Rose glanced over her shoulder. Agatha’s amusement seemed genuine.

“Not necessarily to hire you,” Priya replied, growing sheepish. “I’m just, y’know, looking for an estimate.”

That did it. Agatha burst out laughing, stopped in her tracks. She kept her gun aimed at them, but the barrel wavered.

Priya plowed into Rose, letting go of her hand and practically sweeping her off to the left. Rose stumbled, but Priya kept her from falling, kept her moving. Panic alarms shrieked inside her, and she expected bullets to punch through the vulnerable softness of her back. Expected them, but didn’t wait for them. Her body understood what it took her mind deadly seconds to process, that they were running, trying to escape, that they were about to die.

Gunshots popped and echoed through the forest. Rose felt the shots in her chest, each one slamming into her with sound alone, like standing too close when the fireworks went off. She heard shrapnel blown out of trees, heard bullets hit the dirt. It took only seconds.

As she lunged behind a huge oak, Rose realized Priya had let go of her hand.

She spun in time to see Priya cock her arm back like a pitcher on the mound and let fly with a jagged black rock the size of a baseball. Agatha leveled her pistol and fired. The bullet punched through Priya’s right shoulder, spun her around, droplets of blood spraying the leaves around her.

Too late.

The rock Priya had thrown struck the left side of Agatha’s face. Her head whipped to one side as she staggered backward, caught her boot on a root, tried to break her fall with her gun hand, and cried out in pain as something gave way in hand, or wrist, or fingers.

“Fucking run!” Priya said, clutching at her bloody shoulder as she crashed toward Rose, smashing branches out of her way.

Rose was already running.

Though she tried to fight it, she succumbed to the temptation to look back. She saw Agatha on her knees, cradling her right hand against her body. Blood smeared on the woman’s cheek and stained the beautiful silver of her hair. The tiny killer looked fragile and pitiable, until the moment she turned her head and her gaze tracked them. Even from here, she looked disoriented, unfocused, but Rose felt seen.

Agatha might be down and bleeding, but still Rose felt hunted.

Maeve drifts in and out of the world. Outwardly, she struggles to draw breath, her throat so raw it seems lined with shards of glass, but another part of her feels exultant, ready to open her mouth and scream with pleasure. In that interior place, a shard of Maeve opens its eyes to find herself in a church of rough-hewn stone, torches blazing in sconces on the walls. She glides as if in the midst of a dance, inhaling the oily smoke from those torches and the sweat-stink of worshippers. Her hands dart out, caressing those who chant their prayers, and one by one she silences them.

Infects them.

Their lives are delicious.

Maeve follows a serpentine path among them, slithering contagion. She takes a withered old man by the hands and kisses him on the corner of his mouth, the adoring gesture of a favored granddaughter. She holds his wrinkled cheeks between her hands and watches the glint in his rheumy eyes go dark, watches the plague blossoms rise and burst on the sagging flesh of his throat and forehead, watches the bags beneath his eyes turn black and begin to blister with rot.

People scream in the church. Someone grabs a torch from the wall and brandishes it in her direction. She reaches out, and the haggard old woman thrusts the burning torch at her face. Maeve stops it with an open hand, grasps the oily flames, greasy smoke pluming up from her palm and fingers as they are engulfed in fire. The old woman shrieks at her, eyes wide with ferocity born of terror, yanks the torch from her grip, and thrusts it like a swordsman, right into Maeve’s face.

Her hair ignites.

As flames engulf her head, she grabs hold of the fierce old hag’s face, and the woman sags to her knees, topples to the stone floor, and cracks her skull open.…

In the real world, Maeve wept. Tears slid down her face.

Feverish, she staggered from tree to tree. The wind whipped against her, rain trickling down her back, mixed with sweat from her effort and her disease. Her left hand reached out again, searching for the next tree, but this time it found nothing to grasp. She lost her balance, stumbled forward.

Panic snapped her awake, reality burning almost as much as that dream-fire.

The gorge, she thought, and for an instant she imagined herself flying over the edge. Falling, falling, falling. She imagined impact.

But impact came too soon. Maeve sprawled on her side in the tall grass of a clearing. Rain pelted her, falling harder than ever. She had lost track of her direction, lost track of the gorge, yet it seemed of little importance now. Lying in the wet grass, she realized she must be closer to death than to salvation. Whatever she had hoped to do—hide, think, devise some escape or cure—the time for those hopes had passed.

I’m going to die.

The realization was not unpleasant. It settled into her, wrapped itself around her, and she embraced the idea. She’d killed the BMW driver, though she supposed she ought to be forgiven for that one. And her mother and Logan … the guilt clawed at her, but she knew no god would hold her responsible. But what about now? She felt the thing inside her, that hunger, the sickness, and the voice still whispered there. If she lived, she would surrender eventually, and someone would kill her.

This could only end one way.

Better to die now than to suffer or to kill again.

Maeve pushed herself up to a sitting position and drew her knees up toward her chest. She wrapped her arms behind her head, coughing, trying to get one unfettered breath of mountain air, the smell of rain. Maybe she should just wait there to die?

She smiled bitterly. It had been a foolish thought. Maybe? Where else could she go?

“Mama,” she rasped and began to cough.

A finger of jagged lightning stabbed the gray sky, silent, and habit made her count the seconds until thunder boomed, echoing off the mountain, the sound rolling into the distance. Four seconds. The storm had grown worse.

She glanced up to search the sky for more lightning. As she did, she caught sight of a squat building across the clearing, caught in the shadows cast by trees and storm. Warm yellow light glowed in the two small windows in front. Barely more than a cabin with a wide front porch, it had several picnic tables arrayed in front, and paths worn down to the dirt led from several directions right to the front steps.

Ranger station, she thought, just before she spotted the sign. Even in the storm, the yellow painted words were visible.

Maeve struggled to her feet. She pushed her hands through her soaking hair and squeezed some of the rain out, pushed the whole mess behind her head, away from her face. Somehow, though she felt like never moving again, she straightened up to her full height. She would turn herself over to them. Whoever might be chasing her, they would either kill her or cage her or study what had happened to her, maybe all three in some particular order, but it didn’t matter anymore. She just wanted this to end, and if the ending meant death, at least it would be faster than dying up here, sprawled on the ground in the rain.

She took one step toward the ranger station.

The front door opened.

The ranger didn’t step out, but he held the door with one hand and craned his neck, peering through the rain at her.

“Hey,” he called, “you okay? I spotted you from the window and I thought … You alone? Are you lost?”

Maeve gazed at the silhouetted figure in his pine-green uniform. She saw the other one behind him, a second ranger, an older man who grabbed him by the shoulder. The rain drowned out their conversation, but she watched the pantomime through the rain as the older man gestured toward her, face etched with concern, and the younger one, who had come to the door, looked hesitant.

The younger ranger took a step out onto the porch, the wind sweeping around him, plastering him with rain. “You the one they’re looking for?”

Even from forty feet away, even in the storm, she could see the change in him. A young guy like him, maybe Maeve’s age, did not take a job like this without thinking himself some kind of noble figure. When he had opened the door, he had looked the part, kind and caring. Now suspicion and fear clouded his features, and the fear reminded Maeve of this morning.

The look on her mother’s face as she’d died.

“No,” she whispered.

Maeve started to turn back the way she’d come, but her body seized as if she had been on a leash all along and now her owner had tugged it tight, calling her to heel. A cough erupted from her chest. Black spittle and bloody foam sprayed from her mouth, flecking the tall grass, and in the midst of wheezing, trying to catch her breath, a surge of black hostility flooded her mind. The anger burned her. Its venom tasted bitter in her mouth, and she sneered as she turned toward the ranger station.

The sneer vanished. Her face went slack, then pitiful and pleading, but none of those expressions belonged to her.

“Please,” she called. “Help me.”

No, she thought. But the voice that had come from her lips did not belong to Maeve, and for that moment—just those few seconds—she could not form her own words. The gift of speech had been stolen from her.

She wept, and the tears—at least—were her own.

The hunger came on her even more suddenly than the anger. It had been inside her all along, gnawing, yearning, but now it ripped into her with such power that she clutched at her gut and cried out.

“Son of a bitch,” the young ranger said, striding across the porch and starting down the steps.

“Frankie, wait,” the older one warned.

Frankie glanced over his shoulder. “Call it in, Abe. We can’t just leave her.”

In the doorway, his silhouette darker, taller, wider than Frankie’s, Abe just stood there and watched, worry carved into his features. Frankie strode toward Maeve, and though she did not lick her lips, the temptation existed. The satisfaction and anticipation of watching him approach made her flex her fingers.

No. I don’t want to, she thought.

The voice inside her disagreed. It wanted Frankie in a way that Maeve had never wanted anyone for anything, and that want radiated through her. She can see it in that moment, striding up to the porch and taking Frankie into her arms, caressing his exposed skin while black boils erupt and the cough chokes him, and she tastes his life on her tongue and in the folds of her brain, the tingle of it from toes to fingertips.

“You okay?” he asked again, approaching through the rain.

In her mind, she saw the sorrow and confusion in her mother’s dying eyes, and that seared into her brain, a clarifying image. Maeve snarled as she ripped herself out of its control and turned away. She started to walk, forcing herself, and wondered if she could manage to run.

Distracted by pain and mesmerized by hunger, she barely heard the engine over the rain. Only when the rangers both turned to the right, no longer focused on her, did Maeve notice the droning buzz that grew louder with each tick of her life’s clock.

The buzz belonged to the engine of a dirt bike.

She didn’t have to wonder if this might be the one she’d heard earlier, the twin of the bike ridden by the man who had impaled himself on a fallen tree. The rider saw her and changed course, rear tire slewing through mud. He bent his head low over the handlebars, rain sheeting across him, and he drove straight for her.

Her hands reach toward the rider as he approaches. The buzz of his engine continues, as if originating within the confines of her skull, yet the vision before her shimmers like heat above a roadway and shifts, and she is elsewhere. The tall grass is gone, the mountain and the storm vanish. At her feet lies the twisted corpse of a man whose face is covered with a mask, whose exposed skin is dotted with pustules and bleeding from pores. Though it may only be a part of his costume, by his clothing she believes him some sort of nobility, perhaps even monarchy.

Screams fill the room. The shrieking sweeps over her like the weight of the air just before a storm thunders in. She looks up and sees them coming for her, terrifying phantasms, beaked monstrosities, cloaked shadows, and it’s a moment or two before she recognizes these as merely costumes, like the one worn by the dead prince arrayed on the black marble floor. This is no tomb, as she’d thought a moment ago, but some kind of masquerade ball. It’s a party.

The walls are black. The drapes tied back from the windows are the finest, most elegant black velvet. Only the windows vary in hue. Each glass pane is stained a bloody scarlet, lit from without by tripod candelabras whose flames cast a garish, flickering red light within.

The costumed celebrants rush toward her, their hands outstretched as if to punish her for some crime. She feels a smile stretch her lips, feels her face crack at the corners of her mouth as she reaches out her own hands to greet them. For the first time, she notices those hands, wrapped in rough, yellowed cloth, stained with blood and black effluent. She notices the fingers, bone-thin or perhaps merely bone. Skeletal.

The masquerade envelops her, tears at the fabric that shrouds her body.

As they claw her apart, they begin to cough. To choke. Purple bruises turn to erupting blisters on their skin. Black blood weeps from eyes and ears, and they begin to drop, one by one.

We all fall down, she thinks …

The buzz in her skull made her blink. She reeled and fell to her knees, the sickness overwhelming her at last. Maeve stared down at her hands. For a moment she saw the mummified skeletal fingers, but her vision cleared with another blink and they were only her hands after all. Maeve Sinclair, flesh and blood.

There were three spots on the back of her hand. Small blisters, sores that had appeared within the past hour. Maeve coughed, unable to rise from her knees, and she spat a wad of black phlegm from her throat.

She looked up and found herself in that clearing again. The tall grass, the muddy trails, the rain soaking her clothing. To her left stood the forest ranger station, to her right the dirt bike bore down on her. The rider squinted against the rain, teeth bared. His dark hair plastered his scalp, made him look almost like a corpse himself.

Maeve thought this must be real. She felt the rain, heard the dirt bike’s growl.

She licked her lips, the hunger so bad she would have screamed if the pain in her throat would have let her. Maeve opened her arms as if to embrace the rider. The dirt bike roared toward her, and the rider reached inside his jacket, drawing out a handgun. One hand guiding the bike, he began to take aim, the engine snarling as it began to slow.

Something flashed in her peripheral vision. Brown against the gray light.

The young ranger hurtled through the rain, planted himself in the dirt bike’s path. The rider swerved, one-handed. The front tire went sideways in the mud, the dirt bike slewed, and the rider flew into the air to hit the ground perhaps twenty feet from Maeve. He tucked his body in, protecting his head and his gun hand, skidded in the mud, and started to rise almost immediately. Mud smeared half his face, and his right eye seemed to open behind a wet, dark mask. He looked at her as he reached up to scrape that mud away. His gun dangled in his right hand, also smeared with mud.

Maeve shuddered with anticipation as she staggered toward him, arms outstretched. As he wiped the mud off, the young ranger slammed into him.

The two men went down together. The impact rolled them off the path and into the grass. The wind picked up, the rain slashed down at an angle. The thick humidity of the earlier storm had abated, and Maeve felt a chill now, as if the hot July summer had fled the mountain and surrendered entirely to this storm. She watched the rider and the ranger struggle, saw arms flail and punches land, and then the crack of a gunshot filled the air, momentarily blotting out the shush of the rain and wind.

The older ranger shouted as he came down out of the little cottage they used for their station. He clutched a radio in his right hand, barking into it, reporting on events as they unfolded. With his left hand, he wielded an aluminum baseball bat that certainly wasn’t standard issue for the job.

Grunting with effort, the dirt bike rider tossed aside the young ranger’s body. In that green uniform, the deep red flowing from his gunshot wound soaked in just a little darker than the rain, but Maeve could smell the copper tang of blood in the air.

The rider began to turn, gun still in his fist.

Maeve knelt beside him, gripped his arm before he could take aim. Her other hand cupped around the back of his neck, and she bent quickly to give him a soft peck on the forehead. She tasted the rain and his sweat. He struggled to turn the gun toward her, but a savage cough seized him. He wheezed, trying to catch his breath, and she slipped the gun from his hand and let it hang from her fingers as she rose and started along the path to the east.

A tremor swept through her, part pleasure and part pain. A sound escaped her throat, and she noticed immediately that the rawness, the ragged feeling of broken glass, had vanished. She felt as if she could scream now, as if she might sing. Warmth suffused her. The cold and pain, the sickness, had been leeched from inside her and into the man whose life she had just taken.

She dropped the gun into the tall grass and kept going, feeling strong. Alive.

“Stop!” the older ranger shouted from behind her. “Come back here, lady. You can’t just walk away from … Jesus Christ, what did you do to Frankie?”

Maeve hesitated. Rotated her head to look at him. He reminded her of Jeff Bridges, the actor who always looked like he’d just woken from a bender. As strong and healthy as she felt, her fingers still twitched. A little knot of hunger growled in her chest. A longing that had quickly grown familiar to her, as much a part of her as the beat of her own heart.

“Run,” she whispered, halfheartedly. Then she shouted it. “Run!”

She forced herself to turn away and take her own advice. Tall grass whipped at her. The soft, rain-soaked ground squelched underfoot as she ran for the trees.

The old ranger barked after her, screaming commands as if he thought she might actually obey them. A little voice deep in her brain told her she ought to do exactly that. She recognized it as the voice of the original Maeve, the one who had ceased to exist this morning. The other voice, the louder one, the darker one, demanded that she turn around, go back, and get the old ranger and eat his life. Consume him. Infect him.

But Maeve strode on. She forced herself to quicken her pace, running from the old ranger as much as she ran from the voices in her head.

Up ahead, the woods were dark. The trunks of trees looked almost like a shadow army, waiting in the rain.

Two of those dark forms shifted, and Maeve assumed she must be hallucinating again, until the first one stepped out of the trees and she saw the black, glistening armor, and knew that her troubles were not over. The soldiers had come for her.

Relief swept through her, despite the roar of that new voice. The one that yearned for life, lusted for death.

The two black-clad soldiers aimed their guns at her and began to shout her name, ordering her to raise her hands above her head. There was nowhere for Maeve to run.

A smile curved her lips, but it was not her own smile. That grin belonged to something else.

16

When Walker heard the whine of the dirt bike coming to him through the trees, he hesitated. The sound might mean anything, but in a summer rainstorm, with the town under quarantine, he figured it had to be someone hunting Maeve Sinclair. He crashed through the trees in the direction of the engine’s growl. Thirty feet ahead, he saw gray light through the branches and realized he’d come to a clearing.

The engine noise changed to a high whine, became muffled, and then coughed out. Walker frowned as he realized there were voices coming from the clearing. He picked up his pace, ignoring the snapping branches and the clomp of his boots. Being overheard was a calculated risk. He drew his gun, fingers tightening on the grip as he scanned the woods.

The gunshot seemed so loud that the sound of rain vanished for several seconds. Walker didn’t slow down, but his steps were more careful as he rushed to the edge of the clearing. He sought cover behind a massive oak. A gust of wind shook raindrops from seemingly every leaf overhead. He wiped at his eyes and stared at the scene playing out in the clearing.

The ranger station. An older, bearded man in uniform came out the door with a radio in one hand and a gleaming silver baseball bat in the other. In the clearing, two men seemed to grapple while a woman strode purposefully toward them.

No, Walker thought. They’re done grappling.

One of the men was dead, the source of the gunshot, no doubt. The details resolved themselves in his head. The dead man wore a ranger’s uniform, which made the other man the dirt bike rider. A killer, searching for Maeve.

As for the woman, he’d seen a photograph of Maeve, but soaked with rain and at a distance of fifty yards or more, she could have been anyone. Then he watched as she reached for the fallen rider’s arm, turned away his gun hand, and kissed his forehead.

Seized by a coughing spasm, the rider began to die. Walker had witnessed the phenomenon on video, but it seemed different in person. Lonelier, both for the dying and the killer.

Maeve started to cut across the clearing. The old ranger came running after her.

Walker stepped out of the trees. He was off to her right, barely in her peripheral vision, and he thought he could catch up with her pretty damn fast with the noise of the rain covering his pursuit. The old ranger spotted him, turned toward him, pointed his baseball bat at Walker like Babe Ruth calling his home run. Then the old ranger tipped to one side, reeling as if drunk—or shot. He tried to stand up straight, but a second bullet blew half his skull across the tall grass.

Walker dove into the grass as something buzzed past his head. Might have been a horsefly, but he had a feeling this insect had been hotter and shinier. He pushed left through the grass and lifted his head enough to see Maeve. The two Blackcoats were right in her path, and instead of running or trying to hide in the grass, she had begun to jog toward them, hands in front of her as if one of the Blackcoats might be her long-lost lover.

For a heartbeat, Walker focused on those hands.

Bullets strafed the grass around him, and he understood only one move lay available to him. Taking a breath, he bent low and hustled through the grass. They would see him coming, or at least see the grass bending, so he darted back and forth, managing a jerking serpentine pattern. They didn’t want to kill Maeve—he told himself that and hoped it was true—but they also weren’t going to be thrilled with the idea of being touched by her.

Taser, he figured. They would tase her or shoot her with some kind of tranquilizer dart. Or they would just murder her out of terror.

Walker stood up, took aim, and put two bullets in the chest of a Blackcoat. The shots knocked the guy off his feet, but he wore body armor, so the odds were good he would be back in action momentarily.

Rushing through the grass, he put Maeve between himself and the other Blackcoat. This was the gamble, but it wasn’t much of a risk. If this guy didn’t have orders to take Maeve alive, Walker wouldn’t reach her in time, anyway.

He ran. Full tilt. Grass whipped at him. He heard the standing Blackcoat shouting to the one he had shot, telling him to get up. Panicked.

Walker liked that panic. It bought him priceless seconds. Invaluable territory. Slightly bent to compensate for Maeve’s height, he closed the distance. Fifty feet away from her. Forty. Thirty. At twenty feet behind her, Walker dodged to his left, every inch of his chest awaiting the bullet his body knew was inevitable. But he spotted the Taser in the Blackcoat’s hand just as the fucker pulled the trigger on it. The prongs struck Maeve in the abdomen. In the rain, sparks and smoke spurted up from the contact points, but instead of stopping her, the shock seemed to speed her forward. Maeve threw her head back in pain or joy or some combination of the two, and she lunged for the Blackcoat with the Taser.

He’d expected the Taser to do its job. Now he started shouting for his partner. “Franco! Shoot her! Jesus, Franco, shoot—”

To his credit, Franco tried. Pressing one hand against his chest, where Walker’s bullets would have hurt like a bastard, body armor or no, Franco got onto one knee and leveled his gun. This time, Walker shot him in the face.

He winced as the bullet whipped Franco back, lowered his gaze as the man crumpled to the ground. For all the training he’d had, all the danger he’d thrown himself into over the years, he had intentionally taken human life only a handful of times, and they still haunted him. He wished the other Blackcoat had not said Franco’s name. He would rather not have known. Walker thought about Charlie, back at home, and wondered how it would make him feel to know his father had just killed a man.

“Maeve!” he called. “Maeve Sinclair, stop. Back away from him!”

She ignored him, if she’d heard him at all. She reached for the Blackcoat. He grabbed her wrists, tried to push her away, but she tore one hand free and grabbed at his face. Her fingers splayed across his forehead, palm covered his eyes and nose. The Blackcoat backpedaled, shoving her away at the same time to put as much distance as possible between them.

The guy stood there, hands out in front of him, staring at them. He’d discarded the useless Taser but still had his weapon. His eyes were wide as if he were waiting, like he might simply explode.

He shuddered. His free hand came up to cover his mouth, and he might have coughed behind that hand. When he lowered it, blood smeared his lips and blotches began to form on his face. Walker thought he might be crying.

The man seemed to remember his weapon then. He lifted it, took aim not at Maeve—who had just killed him—but past her, at Walker. In his last seconds, he meant to vent his rage and take someone with him.

Walker dove to the right, dropped into the tall grass, and landed ribs-first on a rock the size of a football. The rock smashed into his side and drove the air out of him. Pain slammed through him as he rolled over, clutching his side and wheezing. Gun in hand, he rose to one knee and forced himself up.

Mind fuzzed by the pain, trying to clear his head, he took aim at the place the Blackcoat had been, only to watch the man collapse and die before a bullet could be fired.

Maeve remained on her feet. She moved through the windswept grass and the pouring rain, hands still outstretched.

Only this time, those hands reached out for Walker.

Leon Lewis returned to consciousness with a sudden flutter of his eyelids and a painful throb in his skull. Fucker hit me harder than I thought. He sucked in a gasp so deep it made him wonder if he’d stopped breathing for a moment, but he was pretty sure Walker hadn’t hit him hard enough for that.

“Asshole,” he grumbled, pushing himself up.

He looked around to get his bearings. The day had turned darker, or maybe that was just the combination of the storm and the trees. Walker had knocked him out, but he must have rolled a bit when he’d fallen, because now he found himself backed up to a massive pine, like he was the ugliest present under the tree on Christmas morning. The rain dripped off the pine needles, but the tree shielded him from the worst of it.

Cheng hadn’t been so lucky.

He swore again, rising as he stepped out into the rain. Leon searched himself for his phone, his comm unit, his gun, and couldn’t find any of them. Walker had paused long enough to toss them into the woods, apparently. Of course he had.

“Asshole,” he said again.

He tried to shake off the shroud that unconsciousness had left in his mind. Had the bastard given him a concussion? Leon thought maybe he had. But a concussion wasn’t going to kill him. Cheng’s bullet wound, on the other hand, might well be the end of her.

She lay on her side in the rain. Her gear was black, of course, so it was hard to tell how much blood she might have lost, but Leon could see the wound in her shoulder—practically the armpit. One of the vulnerable places in White Oak’s body armor design. He knelt by her and checked the pulse in her neck. It was weak, but there, which meant the bullet hadn’t struck the axillary artery, or she’d have bled out completely by now. Her chest rose and fell, so she was still breathing, but that didn’t tell him how long she might stay that way.

“Viv,” he said, giving her a shake.

Nothing.

Leon shook her again. “Vivian,” he said. “Cheng, you still with me?”

Her eyelids twitched and opened blearily but then closed again, which made up Leon’s mind. No way was Cheng walking off this mountain, and he couldn’t carry her all the way. He started searching her body and wasn’t at all surprised to find no phone and no gun. She didn’t like to wear the earpiece comm, however, and Walker wouldn’t have known that. Leon undid the Kevlar vest on her body armor and patted several inside pockets until he felt the small bump.

Relieved, he slipped it out and lodged it into his own ear, then tapped the button. “Oak Tree, this is unit thirteen. Anyone copy?” Static exploded in his ear, and then he heard a burst of cross talk. “Oak Tree, this is thirteen. Do you copy?”

“Go ahead, thirteen.”

Leon exhaled. “Cheng’s down. We need dust-off. Can you track and retrieve?”

Several seconds ticked by as the woman running logistics on this operation tried to track their location using the comm unit. Leon wondered if he’d lost the connection.

“Oak Tree?”

“Okay. I’ve got you, thirteen,” she said. “How bad is the injury?”

“I’ll do what I can, but tell them not to stop for red lights.”

There were no red lights, of course. An evac team would be sent up, either on a chopper or some kind of ATV. In this weather, he guessed the latter.

“Half an hour or more,” she warned.

Leon looked at Cheng, already figuring out how he could pad the wound, but the question of whether she had another half hour came down to how badly she was bleeding. There would be nowhere to tie a tourniquet, so it all came down to applying pressure to the wound.

“We’ll hold on,” he said, not at all sure Cheng would.

That was it. Evac was on its way. He ended the call, unzipped a pocket, and pulled out a small med kit. Cheng bared her teeth as he shifted her body, working the Kevlar body armor off, but he needed access to the injury. When she cussed him out by name, he felt a flicker of hope, though she didn’t open her eyes to do it. With a small pair of surgical scissors, he cut away the blood-soaked fabric around her shoulder and pulled it back to look at the entry wound. Cheng continued to bleed, but while the flow seemed steady, it wasn’t a gusher. No spurting blood, no massive pool beneath her. In either case, she’d have died before the evac team arrived.

“Okay,” he said quietly. “We got this.”

No exit wound, though, which presented a small problem. If there had been, he could have glued the bullet hole to stop the bleeding until a surgeon could get in there and do it right. But with the bullet still lodged in there, he didn’t want to risk it. They had been taught to do some field dressing of wounds, but he had only halfway paid attention. He wanted to bash his skull against a tree for being so thoughtless. Instead, he racked his brain to remember what he could. Pressure was the key.

“Don’t move around,” he told Cheng. “The bullet’s still in there. You don’t want to make it worse, cause more bleeding.”

Her eyes opened partway, and he could see the disdain in them. Leon managed a smile. Of course, Cheng knew as much about this as he did, probably much more. Viv Cheng would have paid way more attention when they were teaching field triage and all that shit. Right then, she was probably thinking he should have been the one to get shot—at least she would do a better job of patching him up.

“Sorry, partner. I’m all you’ve got,” he told her. “We’ll both be happier when—”

Leon heard an engine. He blinked in surprise and glanced around. The sound came from over his left shoulder, directly from the southern approach to the mountain. Relief flooded through him, but it only lasted a moment. No way could an evac team have gotten to them so quickly. It had been just a few minutes since he’d called for help. And now that he listened more closely to the rumbling engine, he knew it didn’t belong on any ATV. This was something else, small enough to maneuver along some of the wider hiking trails but too big to come up through the trees to reach them.

“Who … the hell is that?” Cheng managed to ask.

Leon didn’t hesitate. He knew he didn’t have time for anything but movement. He used the knife to strip off the sleeve he’d already cut through on Cheng’s shirt. Ripping open a packet of gauze, he pressed it to the wound. Blood soaked through instantly, and Cheng snarled in pain.

“I’ve gotta go, Viv. You know I do,” he said. He folded up the sleeve he’d torn off and pressed it to the wound under her armpit. “Don’t try using your free hand to hold this on. Just keep your arm clamped down. That should put enough pressure to stem the blood flow. You need to stay alive for maybe twenty minutes. Don’t fuck it up.”

He said the words with a gallows humor, but neither of them smiled.

“Someone else is after her,” Cheng managed, her voice thin and reedy.

“We knew it would happen.” Leon’s job had just changed. There were plenty of Blackcoats up on the mountain searching for Maeve Sinclair. But the engine he’d just heard belonged to someone else. Russians, Saudis, maybe some cartel hit squad. Who the fuck knew? The important thing was that he had his orders. Whatever it cost, he absolutely could not let an outsider get to the target first.

He took Cheng’s comm unit out of his ear. Tapped it to make sure the GPS locator was working. Tucked it into her hand. Whatever happened to him, the evac team would be able to find her.

“Cheng, listen—” he started to say.

Her eyelids fluttered and he thought she might have gone dark again, but she exhaled loudly, almost a sigh. “What the hell are you … waiting for?”

She held her bare arm close to her body, as tightly as she could. Leon stood. For a second or two, he watched the rain fall on her face and wondered how long before she passed out again and how much blood she had already lost.

Then he started running, following the Jeep’s engine.

Rue drove through Jericho Falls as if there were nothing out of the ordinary going on. Several people walked their dogs on rainswept sidewalks. There were a few other cars on the road, all of them with headlights on to cut through the gloom of the stormy afternoon. But this wasn’t the Jericho Falls that Rue had known her whole life. An orange neon Open sign glowed in the front window of Al Forno Pizza, but only because someone had neglected to turn it off while abandoning the shop. Barrio Taqueria and the Red Hen Market had their lights on, and there were people inside—quite a few people, actually—but nearly everything else had closed down.

The icy knot in her chest seemed to get heavier, like a cannonball inside her, weighing her down. As dreamlike as the scene around them had become, she felt its reality, and that made it worse. A metallic taste in her mouth troubled her, and she thought she might be sick.

Is this shock?

It occurred to her that the things she felt might not be shock but instead the fading of shock. The morning had been the worst minutes of her life. The BMW, the screams, people dying in the street, Ted losing his son and ex-wife, Maeve running off after what had happened to her.

Poor Ted, she thought numbly. She had seen her best friend hit by a car that morning, and now it didn’t even make the list of the top traumatizing things she had witnessed. The hits kept coming.

At least she might be able to do something to help. She could try, anyway. Better than hiding like everyone else. Better than staying home and hibernating or getting drunk like …

Rue shuddered. The thought that had bubbled up—better than staying home and getting drunk like Ted—made her feel horribly guilty, and yet she couldn’t shake her disappointment in him. She loved him and she understood him, but she had spent her whole life hoping he would be better.

She took a left at the Speedway. It was hard to tell in the rain, but the gas station was open. The place had a run-down look that verged on postapocalyptic. Faded sign, old pumps, and a little market that looked more like a seedy liquor store. She was out on the southern edge of town. Another mile or so and she’d reach whatever roadblock had been set up.

Instead, she took a left on Pumpkin Patch Lane. A charming name for an old farm road. Up ahead, the lighted sign of the Candlelight Inn gleamed. When Rue had called the SRC, she had spoken to a youngish-sounding man named David, who had sounded more than a little surprised that Walker had enlisted her help. The next thing he’d said still echoed in her thoughts.

“That’s Walker, though,” David had told her. “Always improvising.”

Rue hadn’t liked the way he’d said it, but her misgivings hadn’t changed her mind about helping. If anything, it had made her more determined. It certainly seemed as if Walker had been sent to do a job and not given the backup and the tools to do anything more than improvise, even if his employers scoffed at his history of improvisation.

David had put in a call to Kat Isenberg and then called Rue back to say the woman had agreed to meet her.

“How can I be sure she’s not setting me up?” Rue had asked. “Or that the people at Garland Mountain weren’t listening in? I mean, I could be in real danger, right? Just showing up at this meeting?”

“Absolutely,” David had agreed. “Nobody’s forcing you, Dr. Crooker. Whatever you might learn, it won’t help Walker find Maeve Sinclair.”

“But it might help keep her alive if Walker does bring her down off the mountain.”

“It might.”

Rue pulled into the parking lot of the Candlelight Inn. Kat Isenberg had told David it would be open, and she was right. If not for the rain, Rue felt sure there would have been at least half a dozen motorcycles in the parking lot. The Candlelight did not draw tourist trade. Once upon a time it had been an actual inn with rooms for travelers, but those days were half a century gone. Instead, it was a combination bar and restaurant, a place with the greatest buffalo wings Rue had ever eaten and an array of artisan calzones that made her stomach rumble, even today. No pizza, just calzones.

The Candlelight needed a paint job and had two cracked windows in front. Even on a gorgeous sunny day, it would have been forbidding—hell, it looked halfway haunted—but today, in the late-afternoon rain, it looked like the last place anyone who didn’t know it well would want to enter. Scientists from out of town, for instance.

Rue hurried through the rain between a pair of Ford pickups that looked like the before-and-after shots in a marketing campaign. She could smell the rust on the older one as she passed.

As she pushed through the door, the jukebox was blasting an old Black Crowes song. Bikers crowded the bar area, laughing and drinking in a way that made her think of long-dead Viking warriors in Valhalla, especially on a day when these guys had left their motorcycles at home. A popcorn maker crackled in the corner of the bar, the smell of oil and butter and stale beer filling the place as Rue walked into the restaurant portion of the inn. About half the booths and tables were taken, a fair accomplishment on an afternoon like this. People were having an early dinner, some of them families, others groups of friends with frightened eyes, everyone trying to figure out what would happen next.

At the back, near the restrooms, a heavyset fortyish woman sat in a shadowed booth. She wore a red raincoat still dappled with droplets, her hair pulled back in a ponytail. She looked skittish, glancing around nervously, her back to the wall like Michael Corleone, wanting to see anyone who approached her.

Rue slid into the booth across from her. “Ben Walker told me you might be a decent human being.”

Isenberg rolled her eyes. “That sounds like Walker.”

It seemed to break the ice, but only a little. The woman’s gaze flickered over Rue’s tattoos, the shaved part of her scalp, and then she met Rue’s gaze with a new curiosity.

“Who are you, really? I don’t have time for games.”

“Dr. Isenberg, we need your help,” Rue said. “You know this isn’t a game.”

The woman paled. She glanced around the room again, her expression desperate. For the first time, Rue realized that Kat Isenberg wasn’t just being secretive.

She was terrified.

Maeve felt like a passenger in her own body. Distant thunder boomed, and her insides trembled with the noise. Her eyes could still see, she could smell the rain and the sodden earth, but to her it seemed as if she existed now in the back room of the house in her head. Like she had been locked in the kitchen while someone else took over the front room, filled up the foyer, waited with the front door flung wide. Waiting for someone to arrive.

Someone had.

“Maeve, listen to me,” the man said, one hand out like some kind of referee. In his other hand, he held a gun by his side, like he’d forgotten it was there. But he hadn’t forgotten; she could tell by the way he held himself, relaxed but also ready, like a bullwhip about to be snapped.

“My name is Ben Walker. I want to help you. The longer you stay out here in the open, the more danger you’re—”

She lunged for him.

Not that she wanted to. Maeve Sinclair existed in the back of the house, locked in the kitchen at the back of her mind. The person whose presence filled the front of the house in her head … that was who lunged. The hunger, she thought. As if the hunger might be a person, a sentient, thinking being.

“Maeve!” he snapped.

The man. Walker.

The hunger turned toward him. Maeve stumbled after him through the rain and the tall grass. The sky hung so low and dark that it might as well have been winter instead of midsummer.

Her hands reached for him again. Maeve saw something in his eyes that made her blink and hesitate. She felt the hunger in her gut and heart and at the base of her skull, but the urgent kindness in his gaze made her want to fight it.

“I’m sick,” she told him. A cough erupted from her throat. It staggered her, made her pause. Walker flinched, took half a step back.

He raised his gun, kept his gaze on her hands. “I want to help you,” he said again, “but if you come after me again, I’m going to shoot you in the leg. If you keep coming, I’ll shoot the other leg. I don’t want to, but you’ve gotta keep your hands to yourself so I can get you out of here.”

Maeve lowered her head, wavering on her feet. She took a choking breath and stepped forward. The hunger clawed at her insides, whispered in her head, but she fought against it. She had fed already, but the gnawing wouldn’t abate for long.

Another step. She reached out.

The gunshot kicked up a muddy clod of dirt by her feet.

She braced herself, ready to jump at him. Her gaze locked on his. Those kind eyes had gone cold, and the part of her that was still just Maeve felt glad. It’d be easier to take him without that kindness she had seen in him.

The rain grew oddly loud, as if the rest of the world’s noise had vanished. Maeve licked her lips, could practically feel the life that would flow into her when her fingers touched Walker. The gun worried her very little. Would a bullet kill her? She supposed it might, but the hunger understood nothing of fear.

Enveloped in the gentle shush of the rain, she smiled.

Walker wiped rain from his eyes.

Maeve took the moment, bent her knees—

Voices cried out in the rain. Shattered the gentle quiet.

She stumbled, hearing her name, hearing the anguish in those voices.

Walker scrambled backward a few steps, gun hand sweeping in an arc, just in case he needed to shoot someone else.

Maeve saw two shadows hurrying toward her through the rain. One clutched at her shoulder, moving slower than the other. The hunger flickered inside her, a little tremor of excitement.

Then she recognized them. Priya. Rose.

A smile touched Maeve’s lips. Her little sister had come for her, despite what she had done. The beautiful pain of the moment made her want to cry.

But the hunger came first.

Maeve turned toward her sister and reached out her hands.

17

When Rose saw Maeve fighting in that clearing, alive and sopping wet, smeared with mud, her legs went weak with love and gratitude.

Her sister. Alive.

The current running through her all day had been loss and loneliness. Rose loved Priya, but she needed her big sister to love her and tell her everything would be all right. That they could grieve together and life would go on.

Relief overcame caution. Rose shouted her sister’s name and ran toward her, but when Maeve glanced over, something about the look on her face made Rose falter. Her eyes had a glint of red, and her hands …

Her hands.

Rose slipped in the mud, stumbled several paces in reverse. The woman in front of her no longer had the face of the girl Rose had sometimes hated and always loved, sometimes looked up to and always envied. Logan and Mom were dead, her dad was a drunk, and now Maeve … she didn’t even know the person looking back at her with her sister’s eyes. The person who reached out for her now with killing hands …

Maeve’s palms were open, fingers slightly crooked as she reached out. All the sadness spilled out of Rose in just a few words.

“Maeve, no. It’s me. Please…”

A rock struck Maeve in the chest, big enough and with enough force to make her grunt and halt her approach. In the tall grass, in the rain, she shifted her gaze away from Rose—and a second stone caught her in the mouth.

Maeve shouted in pain, her eyes ablaze with it, and she shook her head. When she glanced up at Rose and Priya again, her focus seemed to clear. Her eyes saw them, knew them, as if Maeve had been gone from her own soul and now had come home.

“What the fuck?” Maeve groaned, blood on her lips and chin. Her hands went up to cover her mouth. “I think you broke my teeth!”

Priya looked pale, held her wounded arm against her body, but she had a third rock in her good hand, ready to attack again.

She advanced on Maeve, pointed a finger. “You look at me right now, bitch, and tell me you’ve got your head on straight. You were in some kinda fucking trance there, and I need to know you’re out of it. You try to touch Rose again, and I swear to God I’ll—”

Priya cut herself off mid-sentence, as if she’d been the one hit with a rock. Rose saw her head turn, and she followed her gaze. The stranger strode toward them in the rain, the grass shushing as he waded through it. The gun in his right hand seemed to have turned darker.

The stranger was tall and broad-shouldered. He looked rugged, like he’d done his share of work outside, and his dark hair needed cutting. He stopped a dozen feet away, watching as Maeve spit out a broken tooth and a mouthful of blood.

“You all right?” he asked her.

Maeve glanced at him in disgust. “Just fucking peachy.”

“I meant are you going to try to kill anyone?”

Maeve winced, gingerly touching her lips. She looked at Rose with fear in her eyes. “Whatever it is … it’s passed for now.” She turned to the stranger. “But keep that gun handy.”

“Hang on,” Rose said, moving toward them.

The stranger slid the gun into the clip on his belt. “No time for hesitation. We’ve got to get some cover. It’s a bad idea for us to be out in the open like this.”

He started walking toward the trees. Rose, Priya, and Maeve all watched him go.

“Maeve,” Priya began, cradling her wounded shoulder. “You have any idea who this guy is?”

Maeve shook her head.

The stranger paused. “My name’s Walker. Happy to give you my CV when we’re not so exposed, but let’s start with, ‘I’m the only person on this mountain I can guarantee is not trying to kill Maeve Sinclair.’”

Maeve narrowed her eyes. “What about locking up Maeve Sinclair? Cutting her open like a lab rat? I’m betting that’s a popular motivation for folks today.”

“No doubt,” Walker replied. “And it could come to that. But if it’s between your freedom and more people dying at your hands, which one are you gonna choose? Maybe you can be cured of this thing and maybe you can’t, but we all know you can’t run from it for very long.”

Rose had never seen Walker before now, but she hated him already.

Mostly because he was right.

Ted sat on the recliner in front of his living room TV, a tumbler of Jameson in his hand, pondering the skill set he’d developed thanks to alcoholism. Even with his head muzzy from booze, he could still look at the level in the bottle and predict with stunning accuracy how much he could drink and still wake up the next day with his memories intact.

Ted studied the glass in his hand. “Shit.”

He sat up and set the tumbler on the coffee table. He hated to see it there, glistening amber, but he could always drink it when he came home.

Not that he didn’t want it. The beautiful burn, he called it. Jameson went down anything but smooth, but whiskey always gave him a weird sense of history, and the kind of connection to the earth he felt when he sat by the ocean at night and watched the waves roll in, or on a day when the rain and wind churned up the sky the way it had this afternoon.

He laughed at himself, relishing the just-the-right-amount-of-drunk he felt. “You’re a fucking poet,” he said to the empty house. “The bard of Irish whiskey.”

The laughter almost choked him. His face contorted, and he knew the tears would come if he didn’t do something to stop them, so he forced himself to stand up. Wavering on his feet, he cast a regretful glance at the lonely bottle and then turned his back. If he could go through this day and stay off pills, stay away from all the shit he’d once used to dull his emotions, he could turn his back on a half-empty bottle.

The irony wasn’t lost on him. But whiskey had never dulled his emotions. It sharpened them. Exacerbated them. Sometimes clarified them.

If he stopped early enough.

Ted turned, grabbed the tumbler from in front of the TV, drained the last inch and a half from the glass. “Goddamn it!”

He’d flung the tumbler before he realized it had left his hand. The glass flew across the room and shattered against the fireplace mantel. Glittering shards exploded in all directions. Unsatisfied with that destruction, he reached for the bottle, gripped it by the neck, cocked his arm.

Pain spiked through him. His skull, his wrist, his ribs. All the strength went out of him, and he lowered the bottle, let it slip from his fingers to the carpet.

Jesus, that hurt.

Of course. He hung his head, cradling one arm with the other. His ribs were an orchestra of little pains that together made a symphony. He hadn’t been honest with Rue about his injuries, about how much pain he was in. The whiskey had helped, but he knew what would really help.

Not a chance, Ted thought.

Disgust curdled inside him. Self-loathing had become his frequent friend, but never more than today. He was useless. His wife had died. His son, once upon a time his baby boy, whom he’d cradled against his chest. The boy he’d tossed into the air and spun on the grass, letting him know Dad would always be there to catch him, always be there to give him a safe, soft landing.

Dead.

And his girls …

Flushed with the warmth of the whiskey, he glanced around and spotted his phone on the coffee table. Unsteady on his feet, he took a moment to clear his head and then picked up the phone. It took him a full ten seconds of tapping at the screen before he remembered the assholes who had quarantined Jericho Falls—the people he was sure were responsible for all the horrors of the day—were jamming cell signals and internet.

Knowing it would do nothing, he opened Find My Friends. The phone kept searching for Maeve and Rose and Logan … and Rue. The four people he could track with the app. Kept searching … but found nothing.

He couldn’t find Rue.

He couldn’t find Maeve.

He couldn’t find Rose.

Ted stood in his ex-wife’s living room, though maybe his again now that she’d died, and hugged himself tightly. Nobody else around to do it. He shivered as the whiskey drove heat out of his body. He needed another glass to get him warm.

Blinking, gutted, lost, he looked down in surprise to find the bottle in his hand. The cap remained sealed, but that could be easily remedied.

For his pain. All varieties.

“Where the hell are you, Rue?” he whispered. He didn’t add when I need you, because she had always been there when he’d needed her, even when he didn’t deserve her friendship. Even now, she was out there trying to help him. Trying to help his daughters.

That guy had come, Walker. Then Chief Kaminski had shown up with the fancy earpiece, and Rue had gone off to try to get answers about Garland Mountain Labs.

Ted straightened up. Rolled his eyes. “Jesus, you idiot.”

If he wanted to find Rue, there was only one place he could be sure she would turn up eventually.

He dug into his pocket, confirmed his car keys were there. A bottle of Aleve sat on the coffee table, and he knew he ought to bring it with him, but the bottle already in his hand contained all the painkiller he would need.

Jameson in hand, he went out without bothering to lock the door.

Started up his car, backed out of the driveway, and then drove off in search of some way to bring his daughters home safe and sound.

This is what a good father would do, he thought.

Steering wheel in one hand, bottle in the other.

18

Walker had been in worse situations—which, looking back over his life, told him it might be time to take stock of his choices—but he’d hardly ever been in those situations alone. Now he hustled through the woods following a trio of young women, one of whom could kill them all if the urge swept over her again.

So you’re not alone, Walker thought, grimly amused. He would have been far better off by himself, or if he only had to worry about Maeve Sinclair.

He watched the three women, saw the way Priya held her left arm against her body, and wondered how much more exertion she could take, how much blood she had lost.

Maeve had taken point, with Priya and Rose following about ten feet behind her. They might love her, but neither of them were foolish enough to want Maeve in a blind spot. She seemed aware of her surroundings, able to carry on a conversation, but her gaze shifted constantly, twitchy as a junkie, and when Walker had tried to talk to her, she had kept glancing at shadowy spots among the trees as if she saw something there none of them noticed. She had dark bags beneath her eyes and splotches on her neck and arms, but her energy never flagged. The rest of them were tired, but Maeve forged ahead with a steady stride, blazing a trail for them.

Walker never let his right hand stray too far from his weapon. It wasn’t at all safe for Rose and Priya to be so close to Maeve, but the younger Sinclair had made it clear she would not abandon her sister, and Priya refused to go anywhere without Rose.

He picked up his pace, catching up with them. The time had come for decisions to be made. Rose and Priya heard his heavy boots and turned, both wearing fearful expressions.

“What’s wrong?” Priya asked. “Are they coming?”

“Not yet. But they will. We need to talk about that.”

Walker passed them, carefully approaching Maeve. He called her name twice before she seemed to notice. When she turned toward him, he saw something strange in her eyes. Not sickness or malice, and not the hunger he’d seen in them in the clearing by the ranger station. This was something else—cunning and old—something sizing him up.

Then she blinked and sighed in relief, and she was simply Maeve.

“We need a plan,” he told her.

“I agree.”

While Rose and Priya caught up to them, Walker kept his focus on Maeve’s hands and saw the others doing the same thing. She noticed.

“I’m okay,” she said, standing in the rain. She looked at her sister. “I won’t be. It hurts, and I’ve been hallucinating. The sicker I feel, the stronger the urge to … touch someone. I’ve done that a couple of times, both in self-defense. But I won’t lie—I didn’t care when I did it that it was self-defense. Afterward, I feel better for a little while, but the urge is still there.”

They stood in the rain, watching each other for a reaction.

“Should we be afraid?” Rose asked gently.

Even in the rain, Walker could see that Maeve had tears in her eyes. And why not? That morning she had killed her mother and brother with just a touch, and now her sister wanted to know if Maeve might kill her, too.

“Of course you should,” Maeve said, voice quavering.

Another few seconds passed wordlessly, and then Walker moved over to Priya and started working to expose her wound. Rose had been wearing an open, pink-and-black linen shirt over a black tank top, and she volunteered it now, for Walker to staunch and bind Priya’s wound.

“Let’s start with this,” Walker said to Priya, tearing the shirt into strips. “Who shot you?”

Priya and Rose told him the tale of a diminutive silver-haired killer named Agatha. Priya thought she must be an assassin, while Rose thought she worked for a rival government who didn’t want the United States to be able to use Maeve’s affliction in combat or espionage.

Walker thought about the parachutist he’d seen and wondered if that might have been “Agatha.” Both theories about this killer seemed reasonable, but in the end, it didn’t matter who had sent her or if she had arrived in hopes of getting Red Hands for herself. All he knew was that she didn’t work for whoever employed White Oak Security’s Blackcoats and she didn’t work for Garland Mountain Labs or the SRC. For a moment he considered backtracking and trying to stop this Agatha person himself, but he’d broken the TAGI goggles when he’d smashed to the ground back there in the clearing at the ranger station. Even if he’d still had them, they might not have been entirely useful in this rain.

No, he had to stay with Maeve. She’d been his assignment.

Walker examined the wound and bound Priya’s shoulder. The bullet remained lodged in the wound, which had to be causing Priya a hell of a lot of pain. She needed a doctor—a hospital—but the wound had started to clot and scab, so she would survive as long as no infection developed.

There were a lot of other ways Priya might die before tomorrow, but that bullet wouldn’t do it.

“Your turn,” Priya said. “Tell us what you know.”

Walker didn’t hesitate. Alena Boudreau had needed to work fast and had been uncertain whom she could trust. Walker had been given a very long time-out, so he had been perfect for the job. He understood that much. What he had not expected was to be dropped off in Jericho Falls and essentially left to his own devices. Garland Mountain was working for someone with a hell of a lot of sway in the federal government, or they wouldn’t have been able to get away with this quarantine.

He laid it out for Maeve and the rest as best he could. Garland Mountain. DARPA. White Oak. Agatha. But he left out his concern that Alena Boudreau and her new agency had sent him no backup, no satellite surveillance. It worried the hell out of him. What had the old woman gotten him into?

“Beyond this Agatha and the Blackcoats, there are some people in a small Jeep, according to my contact,” Walker said. “We have to assume they’re after Maeve as well. And apparently people on dirt bikes—”

“Two,” Maeve said, dropping her gaze to watch the rain pelt her shoes. “There were two of them. Both are dead.”

Nobody seemed in a hurry to ask for explanations, so Walker finished wrapping and padding Priya’s wound as best he could.

“You three—you’re family, or near enough,” he said. “I’m nothing to you. I know that. You don’t have to trust me, and you don’t have to do what I say. That’s all up to you. But I meant what I said before. Of all the people out here trying to find Maeve, I’m the only one I can guarantee isn’t willing to let her die or get cut open for some scientist to study.”

The wind picked up. They all seemed to shiver, but Walker thought it might not have been the wind or the rain that gave them a chill.

Rose cocked her head. “So this is like a Terminator moment? ‘Come with me if you want to live’?”

“Basically,” Walker replied.

“That’s great and all,” Priya said, “but how are you planning to get us out of here? If there’s some kind of rescue team on the way, now would be the time to tell us.”

Walker kept his eyes on Maeve. Her gaze kept shifting from open and anguished to cold and dispassionate, as if she couldn’t decide how she felt about any of it. He told himself it was shock and confusion, but he made sure he could always see her hands, just in case.

“Nobody’s coming. Not yet, anyway. I’m going to get in touch with my people and see what they can do. I believe Garland Mountain Labs is working for the Department of Defense, and honestly, ending up in DoD hands may be our best option, but with my employers overseeing your treatment.”

Priya laughed derisively. “Please. You want us to just hand Maeve over to the people trying to kill her?”

Maeve shook her head. “The people in black are here to capture me. I think it may be a dead-or-alive situation. All Walker’s saying is that he wants them to guarantee the ‘alive’ part.” She looked at him. “That right?”

He nodded. “There’s no way for you to sneak off the mountain. And even if you can hide, you won’t be able to hide forever.” Again he glanced around at their faces, saw the fear and pain and anger there. “What we need is time for me to try to work it out, to get a guarantee of your safety, and try to get you put into the custody of the SRC instead of letting White Oak hand you over to Garland Mountain.”

They all looked at Maeve, but her gaze had drifted. Her fists opened and closed. Raindrops ran down her forehead. Walker and Priya turned instead to Rose.

“What the hell are you looking at me for?” Rose demanded.

Maeve laughed softly. She rubbed her hands together as if warming them, and everyone took half a step away, ready to fight or run.

“There you go,” Maeve said, taking note of the reaction. “They’re looking at you because nobody’s in the mood to let me make decisions for myself. I can’t be trusted.” Maeve shot a hard look at Walker. “They’re right not to trust me. So are you. But if the goal is to hide until you can get some guardian angel to make them promise not to kill me, then the only place we have any real chance is the gorge. I was trying to make it there before, but I got … turned around.”

“All right,” Walker said. “Let’s go.”

Rose pointed through the trees. “Maeve’s already leading us in that direction.”

They started off again, with Maeve in the lead and Walker bringing up the rear. He felt the gun clipped to his belt. As long as he had Maeve in view, he could end this at any moment. He only hoped she didn’t make it necessary.

He heard the distant buzz of a helicopter, but after he’d listened for a couple of minutes, he felt sure the pilot was flying a search pattern, not headed directly for them. Carefully, keeping Maeve in sight, he dropped back farther and tapped at his earwig. It beeped quietly, waiting for someone to pick up the signal on the other end. Long seconds passed before the beeping ceased.

Static and then a voice. “Hello, Dr. Walker. Update?”

Not David Boudreau. Not Alena.

“Who is this?”

“I’m sorry,” said the voice. “My name is Joel Sutherland. I’m Director Boudreau’s assistant at the SRC. I’m the one fast-tracking your new salary and benefits package. I will not, however, get you coffee when you come to the office.”

Dead serious. Dry.

Walker blinked, his boot skidding in a bit of rain-soaked mud. “Joel, are you being funny?”

“Apparently not,” Joel replied, even more drily. “I understand if you’re not in the mood. People with guns, strange diseases, bad weather, dead people.”

This guy, Walker thought, unable to decide if he wanted to murder Joel or be his new best friend.

“Do you have an update, Dr. Walker?” Joel asked.

“For Alena, yes. Put her on,” Walker replied.

“I’m afraid she’s not available. Before you protest, she’s in a high-level meeting at the moment that I believe relates to your current assignment.”

“Okay, Joel. Then listen. I’ve contacted the Sinclair woman. Her mental state is in question, but she has not threatened me or the other civilians with us.”

“Other civilians?”

From his tone, it seemed the apparently unflappable Joel was flappable after all.

“We’re searching for cover. Time for Alena to show me what a good choice I made, taking this job. Whoever’s backing Garland Mountain and their storm troopers, she needs to get them to back off so the SRC can take charge. Maeve will voluntarily place herself into the SRC’s custody, but only SRC.”

Joel whistled. “Nicely done. You must have an honest face.”

“Do you maybe not understand the urgency here?” Walker said, the words clipped, angry.

“I do,” Joel replied evenly. “There’s a tug-of-war going on. Director Boudreau was briefly given the authority to do precisely what you’re asking. Less than an hour after she was given that authority, it was revoked.”

Something snagged on Walker’s arm, but he plunged onward. A few scratches were the least of his concerns. Maeve might be the most dangerous person on the mountain, but there were other dangers. Bureaucracy could end up the one that got them killed.

“Elaborate,” Walker said.

“Her authority was overridden by the undersecretary at the request of General Henry Wagner at DARPA. It seems General Wagner is presently on-site at Garland Mountain.”

“Wagner.” Of course it is, Walker thought.

Inside DARPA, the focus was always on science. The human race seemed to have developed a consensus that everything that could be learned about the world had already been learned, but science disproved that thought every day. Archaeologists dug up history that could be understood differently by modern minds. Biologists discovered new biospheres. Virologists encountered mutated bacteria. Astronomers learned more about the universe every time they opened their eyes.

Every waking moment, the world’s governments and corporations were in a race to make the next breakthrough, and that competition heightened when the breakthrough in question might be used to kill people. DARPA wanted to make sure they were the first to get their hands on new dangers facing the world and the first to weaponize those discoveries. Of equal importance, their job was to anticipate the ways in which enemies might use such developments against the United States and create ways to counter those aggressions.

There were ethical, honorable ways to go about this work.

And then there was General Henry Wagner, who seemed like a benevolent enough creature until you dared to question his motivations or his definition of acceptable losses. Walker could remember sitting in a meeting with Wagner and several other DARPA officials, discussing the deaths of three researchers. They had been researching the use of the gene-editing tool CRISPR to create cheaper, more effective, and more precise biological weapons and had accidentally been exposed.

General Wagner had sighed and sipped his coffee. “You want to make an omelet, you have to break some eggs,” he’d said as he reached for a cinnamon danish.

“Fucking Wagner,” he said now. “Joel, can you get me on the phone with him?”

“Right now?” Joel asked.

Walker wiped rain from his face, pushed his hands through his soaking hair. “Yes, right now.”

General Wagner felt at home in the sublevels of Garland Mountain Labs. He’d spent the lion’s share of his career in secure facilities at the Department of Defense and within DARPA, dealing with the dichotomy between their public and private faces. The upper levels at Garland Mountain—the public face of the lab—weren’t precisely a façade. Accounting, human resources, security, and conference rooms were all housed on those levels, along with dozens of corporate research projects that might involve sensitive or proprietary information but did not require government security clearance. Those levels looked like a thousand different office buildings General Wagner had been inside, a hundred pharmaceutical companies. Glass offices, low-walled cubicles, computer screens, freshly polished conference tables.

No matter how ordinary those upper levels seemed, however, the whole place felt like a mask. People milled about on their ordinary errands, and perhaps they were fully intent upon those tasks, but General Wagner believed they must think, even on their most mundane days, about the work going on beneath their feet.

The real work, he thought, glancing around sublevel 2.

Garland Mountain’s lower levels were designed as a hexagon. Each level hosted six separate laboratories, inside each of which was a fully self-contained research operation. The main elevator bank thrust up from the hexagon’s center. Circling this axis was a wide common space throughout which the designer had placed chairs and sofas, coffee tables, workstations, and other spots where the research teams from each of that level’s six labs could socialize for either business or pleasure. They were encouraged to take breaks, to consult other teams whose members shared the same security clearance, to share excitement and frustration. The first CEO of Garland Mountain Laboratories, Arun Lahiri, had believed that such an environment would be good for both morale and progress, and the results had seemed to confirm that belief.

Hank Wagner didn’t go for that happy bullshit.

Too many chances for people to share classified data.

In Garland SL2-Alpha, researchers were instructed not to socialize with staff from other labs. They worked, General Wagner was sure to make clear, for the Department of Defense. They had been vetted and achieved the top clearance level available to those civilians below the level of project director. As such, they were ordered to steer clear of other Garland Labs employees both on the premises and off. SL2-Alpha staff were to treat everyone else as if they were invisible. The researchers on other projects in the complex thought SL2-Alpha put “asshole” as the top requirement when hiring. General Wagner knew some of the staff working on Project: Red Hands had been bothered by this reputation, but he didn’t give a damn. If they wanted to whine about it, they could be replaced, and they all knew it.

Now, more than ever, he needed them all to keep their mouths shut. There were well over one hundred hired guns from White Oak out there searching for a civilian, with orders to bring her in dead or alive, as if this were the Wild West. The parade video had racked up tens of millions of hits, and the media were on the story like a pack of rabid dogs. Homeland Security was doing its best to spin the whole thing, dropping hints about a possible terrorist release of a fatal bioweapon. That was enough to keep people away, but not to keep drones out of the sky.

And it wouldn’t last.

The faster they found Maeve Sinclair and locked her into a sterile room at the back of SL2-Alpha, the sooner he could get to cleaning up the whole mess.

General Wagner sat at a desk in a glass-walled office on the upper levels of the complex, far above the secure lab where Project: Red Hands had been painstakingly researched and crafted, and where it had gotten out of control, all thanks to a biologist named Oscar Hecht, who’d started hearing voices and lost his marbles.

“Sir?”

Wagner narrowed his eyes to stare at Cristina Vargas, not willing to acknowledge that he had stopped paying attention.

“I’m listening, Dr. Vargas.”

Vargas nodded. “I’m not sure what else to tell you at this point. We’ve got an autopsy room prepared, the surgery suite is ready if it becomes necessary, and the staff is confined to Alpha until further notice. If you can deliver Sinclair to us, we will learn whatever we can from her, no matter what condition she’s in.”

“And then?” General Wagner asked.

“That will be up to you, sir,” Vargas replied. “Project: Red Hands has produced results—”

“Results you don’t even understand,” General Wagner sniffed. “All the brilliant minds on your team, and you can’t explain why Hecht became infected.”

“He infected himself, General,” she said, brows knitting.

“I’ve traded bullshit with presidents, Dr. Vargas. Don’t test me. You have a lot of data, a lot of research, and you have dozens of different plague cocktails in your fridge. What you don’t have is a clue about what triggered the thing to work on Hecht. Yes, he purposely injected himself with something that killed every lab subject you’ve tried it on—”

“We’d never tried it on a human subject.”

General Wagner held up a hand. “Until Hecht did it to himself. But until you can explain to me why it worked on Hecht and not on the animal subjects, and certainly not on Cheng—”

“You ordered that test, General.”

Wagner shot to his feet, pounded his hand on the desk hard enough that the papers spread across it jumped. Vargas barely blinked, and it irritated him that he couldn’t make her flinch.

“Enough!” he barked. “I’m not here to argue with you. That’s not how this works, Dr. Vargas.”

“Obviously,” she muttered, sitting back in the chair.

Half an hour ago, White Oak Security had brought in one of their Blackcoats after the woman had been badly injured during the hunt for Maeve Sinclair. General Wagner had known nothing about her except her name—Vivian Cheng—and that to be employed by White Oak she had signed all the waivers necessary for them to run their test and claim they’d been trying to save her life.

Instead, the injection had killed her.

If they couldn’t replicate what Hecht had done to himself, the whole project rested on getting Maeve Sinclair into this lab. Vargas insisted that they could learn much more if she were alive, but General Wagner knew that was a preference, not a requirement.

A knock on the glass door.

His aide, Sergeant Hannah Loring, shot him an apologetic look through the glass. She held a slender silver phone in her hand. General Wagner rolled his eyes but waved for her to enter. He had told her that he didn’t want a call from anyone unless they were high enough up the chain to give him orders.

“What is it, Sergeant?”

Vargas vacated her seat to make room for Sergeant Loring in the small office. For her part, Loring ignored the empty seat and stood not quite at attention. She held the phone down by her hip and spoke quietly.

“It’s Director Boudreau’s office, General,” Sergeant Loring said.

“Didn’t I say—”

“You did, sir. But I’m told Director Boudreau is prepared to abandon any claims or protests, with a single condition that she will only share with you directly.”

General Wagner rolled his eyes. He’d known Alena Boudreau for more than twenty years and knew this had to be part of one scheme or another. The woman had a moral compass that had made her a pain in his ass dozens of times, but she was a hell of a scientist and she got results. More than likely, she wanted to get some kind of guarantee from him about the Sinclair woman or score some promise from him about future cooperation.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake. Give me the phone.”

Sergeant Loring handed it over. General Wagner sighed as he put the phone to his ear.

“Alena, listen—” he began.

“Pardon me, General,” said a male voice. “Please hold for Director Boudreau.”

The office boy put him on hold. He wanted to throttle the prick. Alena making him wait like this was just like her. Wagner glared at Sergeant Loring, irritated that she hadn’t made sure Alena was on the line already before putting him on.

He heard a click, the call being transferred, but it wasn’t Alena Boudreau’s voice that came on.

“Hello, Hank.”

General Wagner stiffened. “Who the hell is this?”

“You did this, General. Your people got sloppy and let this malicious little bug slip out, and a lot of people died because of it. Because of you. They’re still dying. Now you’re gonna kill this woman or get her killed for something you did, for your mistake.”

The general swore softly. He recognized the voice. “This isn’t your business, Walker. You’re on paid leave until I tell you differently. I don’t know who the hell you think—”

“I don’t work for you anymore. I work for the SRC now.”

Fucking Alena, General Wagner thought. He wanted to spit.

“I’m on the mountain,” Walker continued. “I’m going to get Maeve Sinclair, and I’m going to bring her down. I want your guarantee that no harm will come to her and that you will withdraw all searchers until this skirmish between you and Director Boudreau has reached a conclusion.”

Wagner stared at Loring and Vargas. Neither of them could hear a word, and curiosity blazed in their eyes. He smiled thinly and turned his back to them. They would still be able to hear, but it felt more private this way, more personal.

“Maybe my team shares some blame,” General Wagner said, “but so do you, Dr. Walker. You remember your assignment in Greenland. You and Hector Montez got all kinds of praise for your work there and for the germs you dug out of the permafrost. But you two assholes weren’t as careful as you thought.”

“What are you—”

“Heard from Montez lately, Walker?” Silence on the line. General Wagner sneered. “That’s what I thought. Montez came back with a little infection. Nothing contagious, at least at first, but enough to panic us. Enough to start us down a line of research that’s like nothing I’ve ever seen. I’ll tell you this much, the idea of weaponizing sickness is a hell of a lot older than any of us imagined.”

“Is Montez alive?”

“You must be a great friend to have,” General Wagner said, twisting the knife. “Montez went off duty while you were in Iraq, almost a year ago. He’s been dead seven months. And as far as your guarantees, you can fuck yourself. I’ve no interest in making her suffer any more than she already has, but if it comes down to her safety or the security of the nation, that’s an easy choice to make. Bring her in, Walker. If she behaves, she’ll be safe. If not, I make no promises. As for you, you’re done. You and Alena Boudreau both.”

He waited for a reply, but this time there was none. Walker had ended the call.

General Wagner dropped the phone onto the desk and smiled.

“Sergeant, pass the word along. We’re not just looking for Maeve Sinclair up on that mountain. We’re also looking for Dr. Benjamin Walker. The woman I’d like alive if possible. But if anyone feels like shooting Walker, I’ll throw them a goddamn parade.”

19

By the time they reached the gorge, Maeve had grown hungry again.

That was a lie.

She kept trying to tell herself again must be the correct word—after all, her symptoms had subsided along with the hallucinations. Seeing Rose had done that, as if Maeve had been slowly sinking into some interior darkness, losing herself, and Rose had reached down into the madness and hauled her out.

For a while, the whispers in her head, the illusions, the sickness seemed to have gone away. But the truth she could not hide from herself was that the hunger had never really left her. It lingered, hiding down inside her, a small twinge in her gut instead of the gnawing emptiness it had been.

Now, though, the gnawing had begun to return. And with it, the whispers. The presence that she felt in her mind, like a tumor putting pressure on the inside of her skull.

“Hey,” Rose said, “you all right?”

They were at the edge of the gorge, at a place known as Walter’s Descent. There were no stairs and no signs to identify the spot, nothing but a small cairn of rocks that hikers had built and a little spray of blue paint that a casual passerby would barely notice. The way down from here would not be easy, but it ought to be safe enough, even for the wounded Priya, whose love for Rose had earned a bullet wound. Maeve knew she ought to feel worse about it than she did. Not that she felt no guilt—just maybe not enough.

Regret, though—she had plenty of that for all of them.

“Maeve,” her sister said.

“The rocks will be slippery from the rain,” Maeve said, glancing around as if the treacherous descent had been the thought on her mind, instead of which one of them she might kill first.

No. She squeezed her eyes shut. Rose loved her, in spite of everything. Her too-serious sister with the rare, braying laugh and enormous, vivid blue eyes, always full of wonder … Maeve would throw herself into the gorge before she would hurt Rose.

She loves you? said the presence in her mind. The voice. The hunger. Maeve yearned for contact, for someone to love her and put their arms around her, to comfort her with an embrace, let her sink gratefully into someone’s forgiveness.

She won’t touch you. They fear you. Look at their eyes. You’re a monster to them, when all you want is life. Warmth. All you want is the cure.

The rain pelted her face and the wind kicked up, making her shiver as she gazed at the people who had come for her. The presence filled her, not just her thoughts but her bones, her blood. Like the sickness that had begun to rise again, making her skin itch and bleed, lodging a cough in her chest, the presence wasn’t just inside her now but around her, as if she radiated disease and hunger. And malice.

Priya stood next to Rose. Beautiful Priya, delicate on the outside, took no shit from anyone except her family. Spent so much time trying not to upset them that she had no energy left to appease the rest of the world. Tough inside.

Priya, Rose.

Walker.

Him. The hunger gnawed at Maeve, and she smiled to cover up the predator’s growl that wanted to come out.

Rose approached her. Maeve flinched away, and her sister froze. They stared at one another for a second or two, wariness blooming anew in Rose’s eyes. She’d seen that flinch and understood it, knew that Maeve didn’t want her getting close and knew why.

She didn’t come any closer.

“Eventually,” Maeve said out loud. Only it wasn’t Maeve who’d said it but the thing inside her.

For the first time, the presence had made it all the way to her voice.

Rose paled. Even in the rain, she visibly blanched. “You go first.”

Maeve nodded. As she turned away, the tears came. A sob built in her chest, tearing at her throat, but unlike the dreadful hunger, she managed to keep it down. Crying, fighting the thing inside her, she started down Walter’s Descent. She coughed, and it came out a cry that nobody could mistake for anything but anguish. Yet as the others followed, no one inquired. What could any of them say?

The trail wasn’t much of one. Hands out for balance, she slipped a bit here and there, mostly because of the Sperrys she’d worn that morning. They were soaked, her feet squelching. Walter’s Descent was a switchback trail, some of it rock-flecked dirt, some of it bare rock. There were jagged formations and places where hikers had lodged fallen trees to create steps. In a few places there were cairns and paint spots. In one spot, a third of the way down, someone had drilled into bare rock and implanted an iron handhold.

Priya had more trouble than the rest of them, but only in places where she needed to use her hands to keep from falling. She kept her left arm pressed against her chest most of the time, but the one time she had to use it, Maeve overheard her talking to Walker and it was clear the bleeding had started again.

They moved in relative quiet, and Maeve was glad of that. Had any of them attempted to speak with her, she feared what words would come out of her mouth. Her voice could not be trusted now, and neither could her vision. Ten minutes passed, then twenty, and with the exertion of the descent, she grew weaker. Sicker. Her tears dried, but the cough worsened and the pain she’d felt before deepened.

The edges of her vision turned red. Images tried to crowd into her mind and many times she shook her head to refuse them. More than once she paused and held on to the rocks, fearful that she would sink into a vision of the past—one of the moments of mental slippage that felt so much like memory. Horrific, impossible memories of hunger and sickness and murder.

Hollow.

Gnawing.

Hunger.

Resisting the lure of that slippage felt like trying to stay awake behind the wheel of a car. She coughed hard enough to make her sway on her feet. Leaned against the rocks to make sure she didn’t unbalance in the wrong direction and fall out over the gorge. The hidden place might have been carved by ancient glaciers, but it was far from smooth. The rock slabs jutted out, and there were a hundred places she might strike on the way down if she fell. Edges that would break her, shatter bones, stave in her skull.

Maybe that’s best, she thought, leaning against sheer stone.

“No,” she whispered.

In that other voice.

Her eyes had closed. When she opened them, she saw a figure in the rain about twenty feet away, a tattered shroud, blistered skin taut over bones, tinted red, eyes bleeding black.

No, the hunger whispered to her. No, said Death.

Breathless, fear like ice along her spine, she lifted a hand to cover her mouth, and fresh tears slid down her face in the rain. Did the others see it? Had it come for them or only her?

Maeve stood up straight, away from the wall of the gorge. The urge to throw herself over, to break and bleed and be gone, tugged at her more powerfully even than the gnawing hunger. The presence tried to claw at her, as if to anchor her to the stone, to keep her alive, but her mind flashed forward to what came next—to the moment when she lost herself to the hunger and reached out to whomever was near.

It wouldn’t matter who, in the end. The need would override any love, any hesitation. Walker wanted to save her, but no sense of self-preservation would save him from the yearning that made her begin to tremble, even now. That red hunger had a much stronger sense of self-preservation than Maeve herself had.

The red hunger.

The wraith … it was inside her. Its memories.

No, she thought. But now she had allowed the thought to blossom in her mind, and it took root. The hunger did not belong to her.

Back along the trail, Rose dropped down from one massive rock slab to another, canted the other direction. She glanced at Maeve, and her eyes narrowed with concern, but then she turned to reach up, offering Priya a helping hand.

Maeve fought it. Her hands shook, and then her whole body. The urge to wait, to reach for them, whichever one of them caught up to her first …

Red streaks like poison ran under the skin on her arms. Maeve stared at those streaks and at the sores where it almost looked as if she’d been burned, black divots in her flesh. She wondered how they could all even look at her, as sick as she seemed.

Maeve began to cough so hard that her throat bled again, and she sprayed red and black onto the rocks. The rain thinned it, began to erase it, but not before the others had seen it. They stared at her.

Walker passed Priya and Rose, moving quickly, dropping down from one stone slab to the next. He drew his gun. Rose shouted at him to put it away. Fifteen feet from Maeve, Walker paused to glance back at Rose.

“I just want to make sure I’m between you and her,” he said.

Maeve laughed softly. Or something inside her did. “You and your gun,” it said.

Walker narrowed his eyes, studying her. “That’s right.”

The gunshot came out of nowhere.

Chips of stone and dirt kicked up from the trail only inches from Walker’s feet. Priya cried out as Rose grabbed her and slammed her against the wall of the gorge, shielding her. Walker pressed himself against the same slab of stone and turned to Maeve.

“Take cover!” he barked at her, eyes wide as he tried to figure out what to do next.

Maeve knew they were pinned here. Based on the angle of the shot, the shooter had fired from the same side of the gorge they’d come from, but farther to the south. That meant they hadn’t found the entrance to Walter’s Descent but were trying to make their way down into the gorge by a more precarious route.

Maeve stepped toward Walker. He stared at her.

“Take cover, goddamn it!”

Maeve coughed. She scratched at her left arm, tearing open one of the purple blisters there. It stung, but not too badly. The wind buffeted her as she leaned out away from the wall of the gorge to get a better look.

Three more gunshots in quick succession. One bullet took a chink out of the stone that jutted a few feet away from her, back the way they’d come. Rose shouted some profanity, still shielding Priya.

Maeve licked her lips. Tasted blood and something sour. Something awful.

Walker saw the look in her eyes. Took aim at her chest. “Don’t do it. Fight it, Maeve.”

She grinned her bloody grin, but there was very little of Maeve in it. She felt her lips part, felt her teeth bare. Maeve fought it—forced her eyes closed.

With her eyes closed, she sees that revelry again. The obsidian room, the bodies lying about her on the floor, covered with those plague sores, a pretty blond girl on her knees, vomiting something solid, a piece of her insides coming up. Her hands reach out in the glow of the red-glass windows—

Maeve opened her eyes. “Back up.”

Her voice came out a rasp, but Walker must have seen something in her face. Maeve wondered if he saw her there or the presence. The hunger.

He backed up. Kept the gun trained on her as she shuffled past him.

“Rose. Priya. Get out of her way,” Walker said.

Maeve hung her head. Shuffling past them, she paused a moment, hunger ripping into her. Her right hand strayed toward the back of Priya’s neck, shaking with the effort to stop herself.

“Mae-Maeve,” Rose said through trembling and tears, using the nickname only she, as the little sister, had ever had the privilege to use. And hadn’t used for fifteen years, at least. “Please … don’t.”

Maeve pressed her eyes closed again. This time, instead of a glimpse of the hellish past, she saw this morning’s nightmare. Mom. Logan. Dad broken in the street.

Her scream tore something loose inside her.

Maeve ran along the trail. When she hit the turn they’d all taken, she leaped upward. She hit the rocks ahead, jagged, slippery stone slabs, slicked with rain. Maeve did not fall. The shooter up on the wall of the gorge fired again, and the gunshots echoed all around.

The thing inside her was ascendant now, but for the first time, they worked in concert. Hunger weakened her and strengthened her at the same time. It overrode fear and hesitation. Even without sickness, Maeve could not do the things she did now, but the red hunger, the death she carried inside her—it could.

She crawled and climbed, leaped and scrabbled from rock slab to hard-packed soil. Her hands and feet found purchase, fingers thrust into cracks, and, spiderlike, she ascended.

A ferocious gust of wind tried to scrape her off the wall of the gorge. Maeve barely noticed. Instead, she zeroed in on a glimpse of silver, and then her gaze locked on the small, lithe woman with the gun. Her silver hair blew around her in the wind. The rain had lessened, the sky a bit less gray, and Maeve thought she saw the glint of the woman’s eyes.

Or that might just have been the gun.

Agatha, she thought.

Agatha, the red hunger replied.

They both remembered the story Rose and Priya had told about the petite assassin. Maeve had listened to the story, and anything Maeve heard, so the death inside her also heard. Agatha had come to kill her, certainly, but would this assassin just shoot her through the head or wait until Maeve got close enough so Agatha could take the death touch from her the way Maeve had taken it from the BMW driver?

Maeve thought the latter.

So did the hunger.

Which meant Agatha would let her get close before she tried for a kill shot. The hunger shifted into the front of her mind, drove Maeve down into a dark little box at the base of her own brain where she could still see what her eyes could see, but her limbs were no longer hers to control. The hunger clawed and burned, but the burning was the fire of a furnace. An engine. She clambered up the rocks, fingertips finding cracks, knees scraping and banging, shoes scrabbling.

Agatha hid most of herself behind a stone slab, leaning out, arms steadied so that she could take aim. The little killer radiated confidence, so sure of her aim and her willingness to pull the trigger that even the uncanny speed and agility of Maeve’s ascent hardly seemed to rattle her. Until it did. Agatha blinked and wiped rain from her eyes, furrowed her brow and resettled her aim, and Maeve could see the moment when she understood there was more than sickness here, more than just the germs bred in a lab. Impossibly, Maeve quickened her ascent and saw a ripple of fear in Agatha’s eyes.

She pulled the trigger out of fear instead of precision. Defending herself instead of attacking. It threw her off, just slightly, and Maeve’s speed did the rest. A bullet grazed her left hip, carved a bloody furrow, but then she lunged the final ten feet. Agatha squeezed off three more shots, but she did it while in motion. The killer tried to get out of the way of Maeve’s scraped and bleeding hands, and none of her shots struck home.

The rest of the bullets never left her gun.

Maeve clapped her hands on either side of Agatha’s face and rode her down onto the rocks, straddling her. The killer tried to bring her gun around, even knowing she had only seconds to live, and Maeve batted it from her hand, bent and kissed Agatha oh so gently on the mouth. As Agatha began to cough and her throat turned black and blisters boiled up on her skin, Maeve pushed the woman’s silver hair away from her face and watched her die.

Inside, she cried.

Inside, she screamed.

But not really. She wanted to grieve and to feel disgust for the way the presence that had taken up residence inside her reveled in Agatha’s death, but the infusion of life felt too good. She shuddered with the pleasure of it, suffused with a sense of well-being, a lightness and a strength she had not felt even a minute before.

As she sat astride the woman, there in a cleft in the side of the gorge, the red hunger subsided. Maeve felt its presence fade, and she regained control over her body. She still trembled with the aftereffects of the meal she’d just had, but now she trembled in horror as well.

A sob escaped her and she hung her head, eyes closed, not wanting to move but not wanting to look at the woman she’d just murdered.

Drowning in self-loathing, she heard voices shouting and she remembered the others. Rose and Priya. Whoever the fuck Walker might be.

Maeve climbed off the corpse of the killer and turned to look down into the gorge. The others had stopped three-quarters of the way down. Walker had his gun aimed up toward her, though Maeve couldn’t imagine he could reliably target her from that distance. She glanced up at the rim of the gorge, only twenty feet above her head. Much closer to her than her sister and the rest. It would have been so easy for her to go up instead of down, to keep running, but where would she run?

No. Her only hope waited below. There were people who still loved her, though she didn’t know how that was possible. If she kept running, someone else would find her soon enough. Walker had told her that many of them would be like Agatha, they would want her dead or not care if she lived. For whatever reason, he seemed to want to keep her alive. Treat her fairly. Help her.

“Maeve, please!” Rose shouted up to her.

“Hurry!” Walker called, his voice carrying. “They’ll be coming.”

Maeve stiffened. They should do something to hide the body, make it harder for the Blackcoats to track them, but Walker was right. All those gunshots, and now the shouting, would quickly bring other hunters to this place. It might be moments from now, or minutes, but it would be soon. They didn’t have time to delay.

It would have been better if she could have left the others, gone off on her own again, but right now her best chance lay with them. Her only choice was down.

She moved swiftly, but not as swiftly as before. The red hunger still lurked within her, but in truth it had become her. In her bones. In her blood. In her guts and her heart and lungs. In her hands most of all.

Maeve felt the strength in herself, the ravenous need, the cunning and betrayal, and wondered if she might no longer be human.

But if not that, then what?

She clambered down the side of the gorge. The others waited at the bottom, warily watching. A moment before, Maeve had felt sated, trembling with satisfaction. Now, already, it had begun to fade. As she descended toward those upturned faces, she felt a twinge of hunger return.

20

Walker steadied his aim, moving the gun to track Maeve as she scrambled down the wall of the gorge. The others had frozen, and Walker didn’t blame them. Over the years, he had seen many impossible things, he’d been trapped underground in a place so steeped in evil that he’d inhaled it with every breath, but the way Maeve moved now, swift and agile, limbs thrusting at unnatural angles … seeing that made him want to run. If it unsettled him so deeply, he could imagine what it did to those who loved her.

His aim didn’t waver.

“Stop right there, Maeve,” he called when she was about twenty feet above them.

One hand on an outthrust rock, she pirouetted, her left foot barely catching a foothold. Maeve looked down at him as if the others had vanished. Her eyes narrowed. They had a red tint that hadn’t been there before. It might have been a thin caul of blood covering her eyes, or it might have been the eyes themselves.

She hung there, staring at his gun, and waited.

The last of Agatha’s screams still lingered in his head. Rose and Priya seemed frozen, waiting to see what would happen next.

“Circle around us,” Walker told Maeve, gesturing with the barrel of the gun. “Get to the floor of the gorge as fast as you can and then back away. Give us room to come down. If you get too close to anyone, I won’t have a choice. You get me?”

“I get you,” Maeve said. But it no longer sounded like Maeve. Her voice had a low, whispery quality, the way a snake might sound if it learned human language.

Maeve scuttled around to their left and kept descending.

Walker glanced at the others. “All that noise is going to bring people running. We’ve got minutes, but probably not too many. So move it, but don’t let Maeve anywhere near you.”

Priya and Rose went quickly. Unlike Maeve, they were still on Walter’s Descent, and the trail became easier to traverse near the bottom. The rain had subsided to a drizzle, but they were still soaked and the rocks were slippery as they hustled.

Priya still held her left arm close to her body. Pale from blood loss and shock, exhausted, she struggled to stay upright. Rose steadied her as best she could. Walker lowered his weapon but kept glancing down at Maeve to make sure she had followed instructions.

“That’s not her,” Priya said. “You don’t know her. That’s not Maeve.”

“She’s sick. Infected,” Walker said, pretending he didn’t know what Priya meant. They had both seen Maeve’s eyes and heard her voice. The changes in her were obvious even to someone who’d only met her today.

“Whatever she does, you can’t kill her. Don’t shoot her,” Priya said.

Rose pushed the wet hair away from her eyes and looked at her. “I know you’re trying to help, babe, but please…” She shot a hard look at Walker. “If she tries to kill one of us, you shoot her.”

“Rose,” Priya said, “you don’t have to—”

Rose kept her gaze locked on Walker. “You saw her. She’s something savage now. Rabid. This morning … she didn’t know what she was doing. Now she does. If she comes for us, you stop her.”

Walker gave her a single nod. As they started moving again, he watched the way Maeve waited for them at the bottom and he wondered. She moved jerkily, pacing back and forth like some kind of junkie in need of a fix. Priya said the woman down there wasn’t Maeve, and Walker couldn’t escape the feeling that in some vital way, that might be true.

A dozen feet from the end of the trail, he lifted his weapon again, tracking Maeve.

“Start walking,” he told her. “Lead the way. Find a cave or some kind of shelter. We need cover as fast as possible.”

So many things buzzed in his head. General Wagner had people crawling all over the mountain. Agatha had been a solo operator. The two dirt bikers had been, what, Israeli or Russian? Then there were the people in the Jeep that David Boudreau had told him about. No sign of them yet. But all the noise from the gorge would draw Wagner’s Blackcoats at the very least, and he had to assume his little group was running out of time to find a place to hide.

Alena would have gotten his message from Joel by now. She would be doing her best to get him evac from this disaster, get Maeve safely off the mountain. But Walker had been stranded before, and he knew he couldn’t count on the cavalry arriving in time. He had to think of something.

The Moonglow River churned along the bottom of the gorge. They’d come down the west wall and emerged on the wide swath of inhospitable terrain that ran beside the river. The moment Walker reached bottom, he picked up his pace.

“Keep your eyes open,” he said to everyone, including himself.

Maeve had turned south toward town and gotten a good thirty paces ahead of him, but he wasn’t worried about her running. When she had murdered Agatha, she had been much nearer to the top of the gorge than the bottom. If she had wanted to run, she could have done it then.

He hurried after her, anyway, wanted to keep her in sight. Quick glances at the rim of the gorge, both ahead and behind, made him feel more like a target than ever. There were a thousand spots up there that a halfway decent rifle shot could have taken any one of them out. He listened for a helicopter or an engine. The Blackcoats had to have heard the gunshots, if not the screams. They would be coming soon.

He hoped Rose and Maeve were right about finding a place to hide down here. Massive stone slabs lay scattered along the bottom of the gorge like some ancient giant had been playing with blocks and forgotten to pick them up. In some places, hiking trails ran along the rough terrain of the riverbank, and in others they had to clamber over the slabs. Walker hesitated the first time he reached a place where he needed both hands, unwilling to be without his gun, but the urgency thrumming in his bones left him no choice. He holstered the weapon again and kept going.

The river rushed past, swift and deep, no more than forty feet across here. They could swim if they had to, but they’d be dragged downstream a ways before they reached the other side. Walker glanced over his shoulder. Priya’s injury made it more difficult for her, forcing Rose to lag behind to help her over the obstacles in their path. Walker wished he could speed them along, but there was nothing to be done about it.

The gorge turned slightly leftward. Walker skidded down a slab at the water’s edge. His left boot splashed into the river, but he caught himself just in time to prevent a full dunking. Both hands on the rock, he scrabbled up and over.

A deep shadow to his right drew his attention, and he saw the cave there, narrow but dark enough that he couldn’t be sure how far it went back. Once he’d noticed that one, he realized there were others. The way the glacier had left these stones piled in its wake, thousands of years ago, it had created plenty of gaps.

Why hadn’t Maeve stopped to investigate them? Why hadn’t she shown Walker there were places to hide?

He slid down the opposite side of a slab and hit a narrow trail of tufted grass and weeds. His gaze ticked up to the rim of the gorge again, his heart pounding, skin prickling with the vulnerability of their exposure. The rain had all but stopped now, and for the first time he realized the sky had begun to clear. He hadn’t noticed because the breaks in the clouds revealed not blue but the slate shade of dusk, sliding toward the indigo of sundown. The storm might be passing, but night was about to fall. Somehow the hour had grown late without him realizing. It must be nearly eight o’clock by now.

That could be good, in that they would be more difficult to track at night.

Or bad, in that they could easily fall and shatter bones on the stone slabs inside the gorge.

Shit. Shit, shit, shit.

Too many thoughts in his head.

He came to another huge slab. Walker glanced back at the others, saw them sliding down the last big stone he’d mounted, Rose still helping Priya, and he leaped upward, scaling the slab ahead. He scanned the trail ahead, the stones, the edge of the river.

No sign of Maeve.

“Down here, Walker.”

He turned toward her voice, nearly lost balance again. His boots skidded and he dropped to his knees on the slab, just managing to keep from falling. On hands and knees, he stared into the shadowed crevice between the gorge wall and the slab beneath him.

Red eyes stared back at him. Bleeding red, rimmed with sickly black. If she hadn’t been standing in the shadows, face etched with sorrow and regret, Maeve Sinclair would have looked like a murder victim instead of a killer.

Walker dared not move. She only had to reach up and touch his face and the countdown to his hideous death would begin. He wanted to reach for his gun. Felt its weight against his abdomen, handle jutting into his stomach.

She must have seen the fear in his eyes, because she took a step backward and spread her arms, hands out at her sides like Christ on the cross.

“Go ahead,” she said. “Draw your gun. Please.”

The way she said that last word broke his heart. He had never heard such desperation and surrender in his life. She might have been nearly thirty years old, but the pain in her made him think of her father, Ted, and that made Walker think of his own son.

Charlie, he thought, wishing he had never taken this assignment. Wishing Alena had never called. With staggering clarity, it came to him that someday he would make a promise to his son, break it, and run off on an assignment from which he would never return. All Charlie’s life, Walker had been disappointing him, but the idea that he might not be there to field the resulting resentment, that he might leave Charlie with no way to resolve his righteous anger, broke him.

Thinking of that ultimate abandonment, he felt a kind of fear he’d never known. His breath hitched in his chest. He raised his hands, sat back on his haunches, and stared into those bleeding red eyes as he drew his gun and took aim at Maeve Sinclair’s heart.

This woman, who exuded death, smiled at him as if he’d just given her the sweetest gift.

“There’s a cave down here,” she said in her own voice, not that serpent’s whisper that had come from her lips before. A cough erupted from her chest, but she calmed it and smiled again, black blood smeared on her mouth. “We can hide here.”

Was she herself again, now that she’d taken Agatha’s life? And if so … for how long?

Walker glanced to his right, heard Priya and Rose talking quietly as they began to scale the last slab, back the way Walker had come. Priya sounded desperate, worried she wouldn’t be able to make it much farther.

“Before they join us,” Maeve said, drawing his attention back to her red grimace of a smile, “I want you to listen to me.”

Walker gave a tilt of his chin. “Go on.”

“I’m still me, right now,” Maeve said, her voice cracking. “But I’m … I’m not alone in here, Walker. There’s something else. I thought it was the disease at first. It’s so strong, I get so feverish and disoriented, so I thought it was just that. But it’s more than that. I get so hungry, like it’s tearing me apart inside. You have no idea, Walker. Oh, my God, it feels…”

She became lost in the memory of that feeling for a moment, and Walker felt like he might puke. What the hell had the bastards at Garland Mountain created? What had General Wagner set loose?

Walker exhaled. “Maeve?”

She wiped at her mouth. Swallowed hard, visibly. “If I can’t control it, you’ll know. I’ll be … different. Like when I went after Agatha. If there’s any chance I’m going to hurt my sister, you shoot me.”

Walker frowned. Rose had said the same thing, but Priya had been the one to argue that Maeve didn’t know what she was doing. “What about Priya?”

The smile twisted the corners of Maeve’s mouth. She looked as if she might scream or laugh or both. She had said she was in control of herself, but Walker could see that had been a lie. This thing inside of her might not be holding the reins at the moment, but she must have been barely keeping it down.

“If you let me hurt my sister, I’ll make sure to kill you next.”

“Fair enough,” Walker said.

To his right, Rose helped Priya across a bit of grassy trail beside the river, and they reached the massive slab atop which Walker knelt. Night had deepened. They’d be able to see Walker from that spot, but Maeve would still be hidden from them until they crested the slab.

“We can’t stay out here in the open,” Walker said. “Get inside the cave. I’ll bring the others in.”

“Okay,” Maeve said, backing away, turning toward what he now saw was a gap between the next slab and the wall of the gorge. In the gloom, he could see that inside the cave, the floor sloped downward.

Maeve stopped and looked back at him. “Once we’re hidden away, I need to ask you something.”

Walker put his legs over the side of the slab and began to skid down after her. “Why don’t you just ask me now?”

Maeve stood just inside the darkness. Only her hands and face were visible to him, her eyes narrowed. When she spoke again, he worried there might have been a hint of that snake’s hiss in her voice.

“Have you ever read Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death’?”

Walker said he had. Then Priya was right behind him, on the slab where Walker had perched only moments before.

Maeve’s eyes gleamed red in the darkness. “Good,” she whispered. “I hope that will make this easier.”

She retreated into the shadows of the cave and was gone.

Walker had no choice but to follow.

Rue Crooker sat in the corner booth in the shadows at the back of the Candlelight Inn, wondering if anyone could hear their conversation. Whisper, she thought, studying Kat Isenberg. They spoke softly enough, she supposed, and the booth felt isolated, hidden away like the kind of table gangsters would choose in an old mob movie. Still, the conversation itself made her feel as if every ear in the place must be tilted toward them.

“You’re talking about mythology,” Rue said, brows knitted. “Folk-tales.”

“I’m not saying this right,” Isenberg replied. She let out a long breath. “History’s a distillation, okay? Everything we know as ‘facts’ where history is concerned is just a distillation of information taken from a billion different sources. Artifacts and written records are a part of that, and we assume they’re reliable, but think about evidence in a criminal case. Witness testimony is not always reliable. Even someone’s journal recounting events is tainted by their personal perspective. Now add hundreds or thousands of years of distance between the writing of that journal and its discovery. How reliable is that journal now?”

Rue leaned over the table, picking nervously at the edges of the coaster beneath her beer glass, and spoke just loudly enough for Isenberg to hear her over the old Amy Winehouse song pumping out of the overhead speakers.

“You’re saying history books are no different from a teenage girl’s diary?”

Isenberg’s nostrils flared with anger. “That is not what I said, Dr. Crooker.”

Rue held up both hands. “I’m sorry. That came out as flippant, and it wasn’t meant to. I understand what you’re saying, and I don’t disagree.”

Mollified, Isenberg went on. “The point is that mythology is one of the things that intersects with history. Folklore, legend, and let’s not forget religion. Actual events blur into myth on every level, including personal myth, the way so-called heroes and monarchs self-mythologize, even today. Maybe there was a guy named Jesus who walked on water or turned water into wine, or maybe not. Maybe Vlad Tepes really had visiting diplomats’ hats nailed to their heads if they didn’t remove them in his presence, or maybe not. Maybe JFK and Bobby Kennedy had regular three-ways with Marilyn Monroe, or maybe not. You following me?”

Rue smiled. “More or less. But none of those things comes close to what you’re talking about. Unless you want to talk about Vlad Tepes being a vampire. That’s more in line with—”

Isenberg pointed at her. “How do you know he wasn’t? Truly. How do you know?”

Rue shrugged. “I guess I don’t.”

“I’ve seen things you wouldn’t believe,” she went on. “Including some files from an assignment your friend Walker was involved with in Ecuador or Guatemala or somewhere. I can’t remember which. The point is, ask Walker about bloodsucking monsters who can’t stand sunlight.”

Rue rolled her eyes. “You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me.”

The group at the nearest table grew hushed and shifted a bit, and Rue realized she’d been too loud. The two of them waited a few seconds for the susurrus of voices around them to return to its former dull roar, and then Rue leaned forward again, hands around her sweating beer glass.

“Can you just get to it, please? How did we get here? What is going on at the lab? How do we keep anyone else from dying?”

Isenberg exhaled. “I can’t answer that last one. But maybe you’re right. I need to back up.” She took a long gulp of beer and steadied herself before continuing.

“The moment all of this turns on is the vanishing of an entire civilization in the Indus Valley, around 1500 B.C.E. In a couple of ancient cities in what would now be Pakistan, comparatively advanced civilization just stopped cold, as if one day everyone in the region decided to wander off into the wilderness and died.”

Rue cocked her head. “You know they died?”

“We do,” Isenberg said quietly, glancing around to make sure they weren’t overheard. “Four years ago, we found them.”

“Holy shit,” Rue whispered.

“There are coded files on this at Garland Mountain,” Isenberg said. “DARPA has them, too. I’m going to guess Walker’s boss knows all of this by now. There are written records, clay and stone tablets discovered with the mass graves in the Indus Valley that tell the story. It started with a builder called Pandya Ko. He was digging clay for bricks and cut himself on something that gave him an infection.”

Rue nodded. This, at least, sounded like science.

Isenberg exhaled. Hesitated. “I’m playing this through in my head,” she said. “You aren’t going to believe any of this until you see the files at the lab. If I can get you in.”

“You’d risk that?”

Isenberg shrugged. “I’m not sure what other choice there is. If someone doesn’t stop them, this is going to get bigger and so much worse.” She closed her eyes as if she couldn’t look at Rue while she continued her story. “The basics? Pandya Ko heard voices in his head. Or one voice, anyway. The infection in his blood spread and he grew sicker, and then he touched his sister, who had come to care for him, and she died.”

“Sounds familiar.”

Isenberg opened her eyes. “Yeah. But try this part. Pandya Ko said the voice in his head came from the god of death. That it had been born in the blood of ‘the first war,’ and thousands had worshipped it and killed in its name.”

Rue stared at her. “You say that as if you believe it.”

“You haven’t seen the tablets. Read the translations. I’m not saying I believe it, but Pandya Ko did, and so did the village elder who executed him and who then acquired the same killing touch. That village elder, who went mad with disease and hunger and told all who would listen that he had to feed the death god. The name he gave it in his own language, on those tablets, translates to Red Hands.”

“Project: Red Hands.”

Isenberg nodded. “Exactly.”

Rue slid lower in her chair, staring at her beer. She picked up the glass, took a small sip, and then followed that with a much larger one, downing half the glass.

“There’s more?” she asked.

“A hell of a lot more,” Isenberg confirmed. “The mystery of all those people vanishing, though of course they didn’t vanish. Red Hands passed from person to person—there are six named in the story—over the course of weeks. It spread so much and so fast that whole populations fled into the mountains, and Red Hands followed. The hunger grew and the sickness spread. The story ends with conjecture. Whoever carved out this history in that ancient language believed the host basically imploded from the infection’s hunger. From its need. Hundreds of people died, maybe thousands, as quickly as if an asteroid had impacted Earth, only it did no damage to the landscape. Everyone just dropped dead.”

“Ashes, ashes, we all fall down,” Rue rasped. “Jesus. This is what we’re dealing with?”

“So it seems.”

Rue shook her head. “It makes no sense. Something like this doesn’t just vanish from the world and then resurrect itself centuries later. It’s not like there was a vaccine for it, and then idiots decided not to vaccinate their kids. This thing was gone.”

“Not gone,” Isenberg said. “Just buried. Dormant. And we…” She paled, had to breathe through her nose for a few seconds as if she fought the urge to vomit. “We didn’t just dig it up by accident. We found the tablets in 1997, and we’ve been looking for it ever since. Not just the remains of someone who’d died from being touched by a host but the active bacterial contagion that infected the first one. A research team in Greenland located that—among other killer bacteria—over a year ago, a place where we believe a similar but much older ‘meltdown’ occurred, buried under the ice. Oscar Hecht was a colleague of mine. The project was his. I noticed his behavior changing, we all did, but we thought it was just overwork. He put a lot of pressure on himself, and a lot came down from above as well.”

The two of them fell quiet. Rue felt a chill settle deep into her bones. She thought the feeling would fade after a few seconds, but it lingered as she sat there, thinking about an ancient world where such a thing as a death god could exist. Not a god, perhaps, but some impossible hybrid of human and disease. Infectious bacteria were alive, after all, and the driving force of that life was to endure, to bloom into contagion.

Like all life, bacteria only wanted to propagate more of their species.

To infect.

And a deadly contagion existed only to kill.

“Sentient, malevolent disease,” Rue said quietly. “That’s not possible.”

“You prefer ‘death god’?” Dr. Isenberg lifted her beer to take a sip, but her hands were shaking so badly she had to use both of them to set the glass down again. “You can call it what you like. Believe whatever your science or religion allows. But it’s real. And it’s out there.”

Rue put both hands flat on the table, steadying herself. “You know what this sounds like, right? Someone able to walk across a battlefield or through a village, just touching people and they drop dead?”

“Of course I do,” Isenberg replied. “Poe became part of our research.”

Hard as it was for Rue to wrap her mind around the history Isenberg had shared, this went a step too far. She had first read Edgar Allan Poe’s fiction while in college. Her father had loved early American authors. Rue had tried reading Hawthorne and Melville in high school and been so bored that twice she had fallen asleep with her face holding her place in the book. Her drool had caused the pages of Moby-Dick to stick together, which was fine because she had never attempted to read it again.

She’d liked Poe, though, at least enough so that she could have an interesting conversation with her father about his writing. They’d always had so few interests in common that it made for a nice change, prompting her to delve further into the author’s work. Her father had died two weeks before she’d graduated from college, and after that, she had never read anything by Poe again.

But she remembered his tale about wealthy nobility partying their asses off in seclusion, walled away from the rest of the world while the Great Plague ravaged Europe.

Isenberg kept glancing toward the door. She checked the clear plastic watch on her wrist, radiating urgency and unease.

“We have a lot of theories,” she said. “We’ve discovered evidence to support some of them. For instance, we believe the implosion of the final host mentioned on those tablets led to some kind of sporophyte vegetation growing up inside the body’s remains. We’ve found traces that support this theory. Spores might have blown anywhere or been carried by rodents.”

“Rats,” Rue said, seeing where the theory must be headed. “You think you can trace the plague back to this source with nothing but a single artifact as evidence?”

Isenberg slid her beer to the middle of the table, done with it and apparently ruffled by Rue’s tone. “Who said we only had a single artifact?”

“And Poe? You have evidence to back that up?”

Isenberg faltered. She glanced away, then abruptly began to slide from the booth.

“Dr. Isenberg,” Rue began, reaching out a hand to stop her. She needed this woman—not just her information but her insight into Garland Mountain Labs. If she was going to be able to do anything to help Ted and his surviving children, Rue couldn’t let Isenberg just walk away.

But the woman fixed her with a hard look, flinching from her touch.

“The Poe connection is more than us fantasizing. We’re not inventing things that aren’t there,” Isenberg said quietly. “It’s fiction, obviously, a story. But like so many other stories, the author based it on something out of real life, a tale he’d heard or a piece of history he’d run across. A story of the era of the plague.”

“How can you know that?” Rue asked.

“We didn’t,” Isenberg replied. There were shadows beneath her eyes, haunted by memories. “Oscar Hecht told us. He had … I guess you’d call them visions. And that voice in his head. Whispers about a time when death became a human thing that walked on two legs and hungered for the lives of others. You think I don’t know how crazy this sounds? You think—”

“I was there,” Rue said quietly, hoping her low voice would quiet Isenberg’s rising tone. “I watched Hecht get out of the car. I saw him touch people and saw how ugly their deaths were. I don’t think I can make myself believe Red Hands is some kind of prehistoric deity, but Poe’s Red Death being some kind of parable about an infection that kills on contact and drives the host to madness? I saw it with my own eyes. The question isn’t whether it exists; the question is: What the hell do we do about it?”

Dr. Isenberg stood beside the booth, there in the shadows at the back of the Candlelight Inn, and hung her head. “That’s what we all want to know. It’s all we’ve been working on. Bringing Maeve Sinclair off the mountain is one thing, but making sure it doesn’t spread further is—”

“You’re serious.”

Isenberg stared at her. “What?”

Rue narrowed her eyes. “Your bosses were developing this for a reason. It’s what DARPA does. Your research was about finding the best way to use Red Hands to kill U.S. enemies. However this ends, you know that will still be their plan.”

The knowledge darkened the shadows on Isenberg’s face. “Whatever research I’ve done, it’s always been meant to keep innocent people safe, not get them killed.”

Rue wanted to call her out, remind her that there were innocent people everywhere, not just in her home state or country, but now was not the time.

“Get me into Garland Mountain,” Rue said. “Let’s see what we can do to stop all of this and stop them from killing anyone else.”

Isenberg nodded, but Rue knew neither of them really believed the killing had come to an end.

21

The assholes in the Jeep spoke German. Maybe it wasn’t fair to call them assholes, but given the day Leon had been having, anyone who made it more difficult qualified as an asshole in his book. Exhausted, hungry, soaked to the gills, he forgot nearly everything he had ever been taught about stealth. Still, somehow, he managed to get within forty feet of the Jeep without tipping the Germans off to his presence.

It surprised him, hearing them speak German. He had expected Israeli Mossad or Russians. Any outsiders who were already in the mountains searching for Maeve Sinclair before the quarantine had taken full effect had to have responded immediately when the video of the parade massacre had first gone viral. That meant only individuals or agencies who would see the video and understand its implications and who could get someone there quickly enough to slip into the woods before the flyovers and patrols above and around the mountain. He wondered how anyone thought they would get the woman out, even if they could find her, but that wasn’t his problem.

BND, he thought. The German spy agency was so well organized, so damned smooth, that they hardly left a trace. When things turned ugly and violent, or diplomats died mysteriously, the world thought CIA or Russian FSB or Mossad, even MI6, but BND mostly kept their heads down, their operations quiet and efficient, and their reputation intact.

They’re our allies, Leon thought. It troubled him more than a little. Here was a cell of BND agents operating on U.S. soil. There were three of them in the Jeep—two men and a woman—and they were trying to determine their next move. The engine idled, quiet for a Jeep, and the female agent held a tablet in her hand, tapping the screen as the two men argued in low voices. Leon didn’t speak German, but he heard Maeve Sinclair’s name, and that was all he needed to know.

When the Jeep started moving again, he gripped his weapon. He couldn’t let them get to Maeve before the Blackcoats, but he wouldn’t be able to keep up with the vehicle for long. The question was whether he could kill all three of them before they put his lights out. He steadied himself, checked to see how many ammunition magazines he had, and started to slip through the trees, waiting for the sound of the engine revving.

Instead, the Jeep rumbled quietly as the driver pulled it into the trees. Branches snapped, the vehicle bumped over some rocks, and soon it was parked among the trees just off the trail, not hidden but not inviting investigation. The rain had slowed to a light sprinkle, not loud enough to cover the noise of an attack, so Leon crouched and watched from cover as the Germans abandoned the Jeep, checked their weapons, and started to hike through the woods. They had some intel about Maeve’s location, Leon realized, and wherever she was, they couldn’t bring the Jeep in after her.

That was good.

As long as they were on foot, he could keep up with them. He would wait for the moment with the best chance of taking all three of them out, and then he would kill them before they could reach her. His job wasn’t worth dying for. Being a mercenary was far from the same thing as serving his country in uniform. But he understood just enough about the contagion inside Maeve Sinclair to know that he didn’t trust anyone with it beyond the Department of Defense. And maybe not even them.

The Germans set off through the woods.

Leon followed.

The gun in his hand felt heavier than before.

Inside the cave, Walker felt much more vulnerable than when they’d been out in the open. Even at the bottom of the gorge, they were safer than they were down here in the dark with Maeve—or whatever malevolence lurked inside her.

You don’t believe that story, he told himself. The Red Death. Sentient murder god. Living infection. You cannot possibly believe that.

The way Rose and Priya had looked at Maeve when she struggled to express the torment within her, the hunger tearing her apart, Walker knew they didn’t believe her, either. Rose had suggested mental illness, a complete psychotic break to go along with the contagion and fever raging inside her. But the difference between Walker and the others hiding in that cave was that he had met evil before. He’d seen the anguish of those who’d done the worst thing imaginable without any control of their actions.

He’d seen sin and he’d faced monsters.

Walker did not want to believe the things Maeve had told them, but unlike the others, he had no reason to reject those claims. Sherlock Holmes had said that once one eliminated the impossible, whatever remained, no matter how improbable, must be the truth. In Walker’s experience, the things Maeve claimed were a full and terrifying explanation of everything.

He didn’t want to believe any of it, but he did.

Which was why he put Maeve at the back of the cave. After sharing her secrets and her theories, she had grown unsettlingly quiet. She had stayed quiet while Rose had very carefully bound her wrists with a zip tie from Walker’s pack. Priya had spotlighted her with his penlight—the only illumination they had in here—and Walker had kept his gun aimed at her, but Maeve had not resisted.

Sometimes she seemed to be talking to herself, as if frustrated with their reaction to her story. But then even that noise faded, and now Walker could only hear the rasp of her breathing, and he wondered how much of what she had said was something more than fever and nightmare. He had seen two versions of Maeve with his own eyes, and it worried him that he couldn’t tell which of them might be ascendant right now.

Rose was at the entrance to the cave, listening for voices or gunshots or any sign that they’d been discovered. Walker had set the penlight down on the rocks, aimed at Maeve, so he could watch her out of the corner of his eye while he tended Priya’s wound.

It didn’t look good.

The bleeding might have stopped by now, except Priya had continued to exert herself, climbing down Walter’s Descent, then scrambling through the gorge. Walker used additional strips of the shirt they’d torn up earlier and kept fresh pressure on the wound, glancing at Maeve from time to time. She had remained silent as he worked on Priya. The penlight illuminated just enough for him to make out her body, propped against the wall of the cave. Her shoulders were slightly hunched and the glow of the light cast strange shadows across her face, but her eyes had a dark gleam that did not come from the flashlight.

Priya moaned as he released the pressure he’d been holding on the wound. Walker tossed aside the bloody wad of shirt fabric and reached for the penlight. He hesitated a moment, not wanting to leave Maeve in the dark for fear that when he shone the light on her again, she might have vanished. Or moved nearer to him. He shook it off and turned the light on the wound, leaning closer.

“Looks like the bleeding has stopped again. That’s good. Let’s try not to rip it open again.”

Priya shivered as the nighttime chill of the cave settled in. Walker had a light sweatshirt he would offer, but not until the wound had more time to close up.

“You’re wasting time,” Priya said. “We can’t stay here.”

Walker took the penlight, barely hearing her, and turned it toward Maeve. Had her lips curled back into the merest suggestion of a sneer? Walker thought they had.

“You hearing me?” Priya wheezed. “We have to move.”

Walker cocked his head, listening for movement from the front of the cave. Rose would shout if trouble came, but he didn’t like the stillness. He hoped Rose was just allowing herself a few minutes to rest and recover.

“We need more time,” Walker said.

Priya needed more than the rest of them, but Walker’s main concern was what he would encounter when they finally reached Jericho Falls again. Alena might be trying to wrest control of the SRC from General Wagner, but that kind of internecine conflict never ended well. The best thing for Maeve, and for all of them, might be to wait it out and see how things stood when the conflict between Alena and the general concluded.

“We’ve got till morning, if that,” Priya said. “You know by daybreak they’ll be down here, sweeping the whole gorge with soldiers, helicopters. We’re dead if we wait that long.”

Walker nodded slowly, penlight in hand, turning it all over in his head. Priya’s thoughts echoed his own, but he hadn’t wanted to lay it out so bluntly. He had not counted on the light-headed young woman with the bullet wound and no military experience to decipher just how desperate their situation had become.

“I’m working on it,” he told Priya. “You should rest while you can.”

She had dark circles beneath her eyes, and even in the darkness of the cave, she looked pale and sickly. Not sick, not yet. But she was in rough shape.

Quiet laughter unfurled in the darkness, echoing off the walls like the hiss of serpents.

Walker turned the penlight on Maeve. When the light hit her, she didn’t blink or flinch, didn’t close her eyes against the glare. She tilted her head, birdlike, studying him. When she spoke, her voice sounded different. New.

Not new, he thought. She sounds old. Her voice held the rasp of crumbling parchment paper. A shudder went through him. Walker had experience in the presence of malevolence, but that only made the fear cut deeper.

“You should set her free,” Maeve rasped. “All that noise you made, the gunfire, the shouting … they’re out there hunting you now. Hunting me. Put me out for them to find. I’ll touch them instead of you.”

Walker felt his throat go dry. The voice hardly seemed to come from Maeve’s lips. It was as if the darkness itself were speaking. He raised his gun hand, made sure she could see the barrel as he aimed again at her chest. If he’d had any doubt before that something else had taken up residence inside this woman, that doubt had vanished.

“We’re not going anywhere.”

Priya shifted, tried to sit up, and groaned with the effort. “Maeve, no. We won’t let you put yourself—”

“That’s not Maeve,” Walker interrupted, penlight and gun both steady.

Priya swore. “You can’t tell me you believe—”

“It’s not her,” Walker said. He glared at Maeve.

She only smiled and tilted her head the other direction as if he were life’s greatest curiosity.

“Maeve?” Priya asked, her voice softer, weaker, less hopeful.

Keeping both gun and light on Maeve, Walker shuffled backward toward the front of the cave.

“Rose,” he whispered hoarsely, hoping his voice would carry. “Come here a minute.”

Until he heard the scuff of her shoes on the floor of the cave, he wasn’t sure she had heard him. But then Rose appeared, hands sliding over the cave walls to either side, guiding herself through the darkness toward the glow from that penlight. The only light they had.

The light flickered. Walker shot a dark look at Maeve, wondering if the thing inside her could be responsible.

“I heard voices,” Rose said. “I think someone passed by, but it’s quiet out there now. They’re moving fast, if that was them, and it almost had to be, don’t you think?”

He did. The Blackcoats were making a sweep, but unless they brought in a ton of heavy equipment, huge lighting rigs, they wouldn’t be able to even find, never mind search, every crevice and cave until morning. Even if they had brought thermal imaging equipment with them, it would take hours.

“I felt them,” Maeve said. “There were five of them. All very strong.”

Rose’s eyes widened. In the glow of the penlight, Walker saw the way she looked at her sister, as if trying to figure out what Maeve had become and how she could destroy that monster without destroying her sister. Walker did not want to be the one to tell her such thoughts were impossible.

“Not sure if you can hear me in there, Maeve,” he said now that they were all together. “We’re going to wait one hour. It’ll be darker and drier by then, and with any luck, the Blackcoats will have made camp. They’ll be waiting for sunrise, when they can be more thorough.”

He looked at Rose. “We can’t still be here in the morning.”

“Where do we go?” she asked, glancing around the cave in confusion. “In the dark, the rocks will be hard as hell to navigate. Someone’s going to smash their skull open or break a leg, at least. Priya’s in no condition to make the trek down the gorge to town, never mind that none of us wants to be out there in the dark with Maeve.”

“That’s not very nice,” Maeve said, almost sounding like herself, just for a moment.

“Our choices are limited,” Walker told her. “I’d rather take risks than wait for an ugly certainty.”

Rose glared at him. “You called your boss. You said help would come.”

“I still think it will. I just don’t know if it will come in time.”

Priya shifted. “So what’s your plan? No offense, Walker. You look pretty strong, but you couldn’t carry me that far even on a paved road.”

“I’m not going to carry you,” Walker said. “The river is. It’s going to carry all of us.”

Rose gaped at him. “You’re out of your mind. Priya can’t use her left arm. There are huge rocks in the middle of the river and places where it drops off, stretches of white water—”

“No, he’s right,” Priya said. “Whatever it takes, we can’t just wait around.”

“We could all die!”

“If we stay here too long, we will die. The Blackcoats will kill us.” Priya glanced at Maeve. “Or she will.”

Rose stared at her sister in despair. “So instead we float down the river with her? Walker can’t keep a gun on her if he’s halfway drowning.”

Maeve began to shift in the glow of the penlight. She bent over, coughing, and moaned. When she glanced up again, a sheen of greasy sweat covered her face. Her eyes, however, had cleared.

“I won’t hurt you, Rose,” Maeve said, the words coming out as a growl, as if she had to fight to utter every syllable. “If you’re afraid I won’t be able to help myself, I understand. You should go without me. Go ahead, and I’ll follow if I can.”

Rose seemed to consider it. Priya said nothing, but it couldn’t have been lost on her that Maeve had surfaced long enough to promise never to hurt Rose, but she’d made no such guarantees about the rest of them.

“I’m not going home without you,” Rose said at last. “I can’t.”

“It’s settled, then.” Walker looked at Rose. “Keep watching the entrance. Listen for trouble. One hour, and we’ll go.”

She nodded, took one more look at her sister, and stumbled off into the dark. Walker turned the penlight to help light the way for Rose, careful to make sure none of its glow made it out to the cave opening.

Something shifted in the dark, the air inside the cave suddenly heavy, the way it felt just before the sky burst open with rain. His skull hurt and he winced, listened to Priya whisper something about her own pain.

Walker heard Maeve breathing right behind him. Her breath cold on his neck.

In his mind’s eye, he could see those pale hands, hideous with plague spots, reaching for his throat. When he turned, the penlight followed, and he found himself inches from her, face-to-face. She exhaled at the same moment he inhaled, taking her sickness into his own lungs. It couldn’t be passed that way, he knew that, but still he felt panic race through him, and he thought of Charlie. I don’t need you, Charlie had said. But Walker needed his son, needed to live, to make it right.

The gun shook in his hand. He cursed himself for being too confident, for having survived horrors he’d thought were worse than this, not understanding that the worst horror would be the one he couldn’t come home from.

The barrel of the gun hovered inches from Maeve’s forehead, just above the bridge of her nose. He swallowed hard, forced himself to take another breath despite the terror and revulsion.

Her hands were still bound behind her back. Maeve made no effort to turn and touch him or to free herself. Against the wall, Priya called her name, pleaded with her not to kill them. But now Walker saw the anguish in Maeve’s eyes and knew she continued to fight the infection inside her, continued to fight the monstrous hunger there.

“If you have to kill me, or if someone else does it,” Maeve said, “make sure they burn the body. Leave nothing but ash.”

Priya said her name, tried to get her attention, to plead with her to listen.

“I will,” Walker said.

Maeve turned from them both and walked deeper into the cave, hands still bound behind her back. When Walker heard her begin to choke and cough and cry, he turned the light away to give her what little privacy he dared.

She cried softly for several minutes before she fell quiet again.

A little while later, the whispery laughter returned.

Walker waited and held tightly to the gun.

22

Rue sat in the passenger seat of Kat Isenberg’s old Prius, staring out the window in frustration. She plucked the little comm piece from her ear, tapped it, saw the little light turn green, and slipped it back into place. She’d been trying to reach Walker for the past forty minutes, called a dozen times, but all she could summon up with that phone was a harsh buzzing that sounded only vaguely like a cell phone ring. No answer. No sense at all that Walker knew she was trying to reach him or whether he might still be alive.

Tucked between her legs, in the space between her crotch and the car seat, her own phone vibrated, just once. With the quarantine, cell service had been blocked, but something had gotten through—maybe some kind of emergency notification? It felt like a jolt of reality, a shout-out from her ordinary life—the one that contained her work, her colleagues, her family, and a dating app that she’d been ignoring for weeks. A hole seemed to open beneath her, as if she could sink down through her seat and find herself back in that ordinary life, in a world of familiar things and the beauty of the mundane.

She tugged her cell out from under her thigh and saw a missed call from Ted Sinclair. Ted, whom she’d left at home to sleep and drink and grieve. Her friend, whom she’d abandoned, but only so she could do whatever possible to save him from further grief. The phone shouldn’t have worked at all, but she knew half the population of Jericho Falls would still be making attempts to call or text, and folks from outside would be trying to call in. Ted had tried to reach her, and the connection had been made for the millisecond it took to get her phone to ring once before the jamming signal had interrupted.

Rue tried calling back and got nothing—not a buzz or a ring—just the Call Failed notification that had plagued phones all over Jericho Falls since the communication blackout had begun.

She set her cell on the dashboard, but she made no further attempt to call Walker. What would be the point? Either he couldn’t answer right now or he wouldn’t. Rue had started along her own path, and what happened next did not rely on Ben Walker. She had managed to get a guy named Joel on the phone at the SRC and told him she had a way inside Garland Mountain, that she hoped to help find a way to cure Maeve or at least control her contagion. Rue neglected to mention that it could take years.

“You ready to go?” Dr. Isenberg asked.

They had pulled onto the shoulder of the road, half a mile or so from the turnoff that led to Garland Mountain Labs.

Rue watched her in the dashboard light, this beautiful, brilliant, and deeply troubled woman.

“You sure you’re up to this?”

Isenberg smirked. “Not at all. But I worked on Red Hands from the beginning, and a lot of people have died. People I’d see in shops and cafés in Jericho Falls, people who were kind to me and my coworkers and who had no idea what we were doing might kill them. I’m going to carry that for the rest of my life. So you can call this next part just more of me being selfish, I guess. If you and I can help Maeve—either cure her or at least keep her own government from killing her—then I’ll do whatever I need to—”

A car whipped past them, so close it nearly scraped the paint off the Prius. Isenberg squeezed the steering wheel and swore to a messiah her faith didn’t believe in.

“Fucking asshole!” she added, almost a punctuation.

Rue’s heart raced, but before she could join in the righteous flinging of profanity, she spotted the back of the passing car in the glow of Isenberg’s headlights. The offender drove a silver Chevy Malibu with WR7 as the first three digits of the license plate.

Ted. And there was only one place he could be headed.

“Drive,” Rue said. “That was Ted Sinclair. We have to stop him.”

Jaw set, hands tight on the wheel, Isenberg tore away from the roadside as fast as the old Prius could carry them. Every pothole made Rue think they were driving an enormous tin can, but the car moved faster than she would have reckoned. It helped that, as fast as Ted had been driving, he didn’t realize anyone was following. Isenberg took a curve with reckless abandon, but she kept the car from skidding off the road. Far ahead, the Malibu’s taillights flared bright red as Ted slowed to turn down the narrow path that led up to Garland Mountain Labs.

“Shit, go!” Rue snapped.

Isenberg floored it. They were on a straightaway, and it took only seconds for them to catch up to the place where Ted had hit the brakes. The Prius juddered and squeaked as if it might quit on them, but Isenberg managed the turn doing about thirty miles per hour. Rue saw Ted’s taillights ahead, realized they’d closed half the distance, that they would be able to catch up to him, and for a heartbeat she felt relief. He’d be at least a little drunk and out of control, and there would be no telling what he might do when he reached the gate. But they could catch him, calm him down, explain the plan to him. You should have gone to his house, explained it to him already, she thought, but too late.

Too late in so many ways.

The Prius skidded to the right, the road muddy from the storm. Isenberg spun the steering wheel, but she overcompensated for the skid. The headlights found only trees ahead of them. Rue braced herself, had a moment to wonder if she had an airbag on the passenger side. Isenberg kept her cool, tapped the brakes, straightened out so that the car aimed directly for the trees as if that had been her intention all along. The tires gripped the road again. Isenberg steered back onto the road. The left side of the car thumped through ruts and took out some underbrush. They scraped an oak tree, shattering the driver’s-side mirror.

But they were back on the road.

“Holy shit,” Isenberg said, her breath ragged. “Holy shit.”

Rue blinked, still braced for impact, stunned that they hadn’t wrapped around a tree. She exhaled, shaking, and then saw the taillights far ahead of them. Isenberg accelerated again, but they had lost their momentum.

“We’ll never catch him,” Rue said.

She looked at the dashboard. Her cell phone had slid off at some point while they were fishtailing and hoping not to die, and she felt a pang at its absence. It would have done her no good, but she thought of that missed call from Ted. If he had been able to get through to her, this would all have gone so differently.

“Slow down,” she said quietly.

Isenberg kept chasing, though she knew she couldn’t catch him.

“Kat, stop the car!” Rue said.

The Prius bumped through potholes as Isenberg hit the brakes. The engine gave a little electric sigh as they came to a stop, and Isenberg shot her a confused look.

“What are we doing, Dr. Crooker?”

Rue didn’t like the way the woman had said her name, but now wasn’t the time to point out that her anger was misplaced.

“We can’t catch him. Pull over and we’ll sit here for five or ten minutes,” she said. “It does us no favors to arrive right behind a guy who is obviously about to make a scene.”

Isenberg pulled the car to the side of the road. Rue thought of a lot of ugly ways things could be going up ahead, from Ted ramming his Malibu through the front gates at Garland Mountain to the guards shooting him while he tried to jump the fence.

“How crazy is he right now?” Isenberg asked. “Scale of one to ten?”

As Rue spoke, she felt as if she were betraying her best friend, even though all she wanted was to help him.

“He’s a recovering addict and a currently functioning alcoholic.”

“Goddamn,” Isenberg said.

Rue nodded. “Yeah. My sentiments, too. I’m sure Ted’s been drinking. When Oscar Hecht drove into the parade crowd, Ted went up and over the hood. Hell, he went over the whole car. Cracked ribs and more. He’s in no shape to fight anyone and no shape to climb fences.”

“So you think he’s just going to go up and politely ask them not to kill his daughter?” Isenberg said.

Rue didn’t hold her tone against her. Isenberg had lost track of the fact that these people were like her family, that Ted might as well be her brother—hell, she loved him more than most people loved their brothers.

She turned in her seat. “Here’s how it’s going to go. Ted will go up and tilt at windmills. He’ll shout and scream and make a scene. But he doesn’t own a gun and he’d have no idea where to get one in the middle of all of this, so nobody is going to shoot him. They’ll either turn him away or they’ll let him into the public part of the complex and have some kind of PR hack sit with him and try to calm him down, reassure him, maybe even attempt to send him away. If they don’t let him in, that’s bad for us. We might not get in, either, because they’ll be extra prickly. But if they let him in—”

“If they let him, he’ll be their focus,” Isenberg said. She turned to focus on Rue. “Ted flew by before you could tell me what the guy at the SRC said. Maybe now’s the time to share?”

They had jumped right into a car chase, so Rue’s mind had been elsewhere.

“Right,” she said. “The short version is they don’t know much, but they know Walker caught up with Maeve. He’s also with her sister and others.”

Isenberg nodded in relief. “That’s good. That’s something.”

“Yeah. I just wish I could’ve told Ted that.” Rue sighed. “Anyway, there’s more. Apparently, there’s a tug-of-war going on over how to handle this. The SRC’s director is arguing the case in D.C. that it’s best to quiet things down and cover them up. Make it disappear without just murdering a bunch of people, which it seems your boss is totally fine with. The good news is that this Joel guy hinted the whole thing may be shut down in an hour or two, but there’s another wrinkle.”

“The bad news?”

Rue felt queasy, remembering the chill she’d gotten when Joel had shared the last of his thoughts with her. “The general overseeing Project: Red Hands—”

“General Wagner.”

Rue nodded. “That guy. There’s apparently some doubt in D.C. as to whether he’ll obey an order to stand down.”

Isenberg shifted the car into gear. “I’ve been in plenty of meetings with the general, and that wouldn’t surprise me at all.”

“So where does that leave us?” Rue asked.

“The same place you are every morning when you wake up,” Isenberg said, sadness in her eyes. “Hope for the best, and prepare for the worst.”

Isenberg pulled back onto the road. She drove as if they were ordinary visitors on an ordinary day. Rue tensed as they approached the front gate but saw no sign of Ted or his Malibu. Isenberg pulled up to the guard booth and rolled her window down.

“Evening, Carlo,” she said to the guard, brandishing her ID for him to scan. “I’ve got a guest tonight. Dr. Crooker from Boston University.”

The guard scanned her ID and craned his neck to look inside the car. Rue leaned in so he could get a good view of her, flashing her B.U. identification to make his job a little easier, as if they had nothing to hide.

“Weird time for it, Dr. Isenberg,” the guard said.

“On the contrary,” Isenberg replied. “We’ve got a crisis on our hands. I can use all the help I can get.”

Rue wanted to ask about Ted, but she knew that was a terrible idea. If he’d made trouble, the question would draw the wrong attention, and if he’d turned off into the woods somewhere along the road and hadn’t come up to the gate at all, she’d be sending up a warning flare, so they’d be on the lookout for him.

The guard, Carlo, slid the door to the booth closed and made a call. He turned his back halfway toward them, glancing over his shoulder as he spoke, but in less than a minute he faced forward and slid the door open.

“Go on ahead, Dr. Isenberg. But as you’ve got a visitor, please park in the visitors’ lot, and stay with Dr. Crooker at all times.”

Isenberg clucked her tongue. “Even in the public areas?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“That’s weird.”

The guard tapped a button inside the booth. With a loud buzz, the gates clicked and began to swing open.

“It’s a weird night,” he said.

Rue held her breath as Isenberg tapped the accelerator. They drove through, and the gates swung closed behind them. Isenberg turned into the visitors’ lot, which was vacant except for a familiar silver Chevy Malibu.

“That answers that,” Isenberg said as she pulled into a spot and killed the engine.

“It can’t be that easy,” Rue said.

“Maybe they decided having Ted around could help them if and when they bring his daughter off the mountain.”

Rue let that simmer for a moment. She hoped the explanation could be that simple. Was it possible her fear and paranoia about Garland Mountain’s hunt for Maeve had been unfounded? Ted had been drinking earlier, but she supposed it was possible he had sobered up by now.

“I guess we’ll find out,” Rue said.

Isenberg looked at her. “We’re not going to breathe a word about Ted Sinclair once we’re inside. I know you’re worried, but even if they rolled out the red carpet for him—and we both know that’s unlikely—you can’t let them connect you to him. Not if you want to see the research.”

Rue sank back in her seat. “Maybe this was a bad idea. You do this research for a living. It’s not likely I’ll see anything in it that you haven’t already.”

“It’s not just about that. I’m so immersed in the project that I can’t see the forest for the trees right now. Walker wouldn’t have asked you to get in touch with me if he didn’t think you could be valuable.”

Rue laughed softly. “It’s not as if he picked me from a pool of biologists available inside the quarantine area.”

“True,” Isenberg said. She put a hand on Rue’s shoulder, locking eyes with her. “He got lucky. People in Walker’s job are trained to seize opportunity in the field and to improvise. You were opportunity, and he’s improvising. Maybe you’re right and you won’t see anything that’s going to help Maeve or help get this thing under control, but I’ve got a lot to show you, and if all you can do is pass along what you learn to Walker, that might still help him.”

“And Maeve,” Rue said, nodding to herself. “And Ted.”

Isenberg popped open her door. “Exactly. So are you coming inside?”

Rue stared at Ted’s Malibu for a few seconds, wondering. Walker would save Maeve or he wouldn’t. Ted would be all right or he wouldn’t. People were dying, others were crawling all over a mountain looking to commit murder, and she’d been told the most outrageous story today, been asked to believe something absurd and terrifying. If only she hadn’t seen people choke and die with her own eyes, hadn’t seen people sicken with plague at the touch of a hand … then she would’ve been able to tell herself it was all a hoax.

But the Sinclairs were like family to her. They had each been kind to her in a world far too short on kindness. Ted loved her. If it had been her being hunted up on that mountain, he would have done the same foolish thing he’d done tonight.

Rue opened her door and stepped out, leaning back in to peer at Dr. Isenberg. “Even if I’m out of my league, curiosity alone is enough to lure me in.”

Isenberg climbed out, slammed her door. “Let’s go.”

Rue fell into step beside her, and they walked together toward the gleaming façade of Garland Mountain Labs.

“Not a word about what curiosity did to the cat?” Rue asked.

Dr. Isenberg kept walking. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

The exchange was lighthearted. Meant to be funny.

Neither of them laughed.

23

The gun felt heavy in Walker’s hand. He did not want to kill Maeve—had come up here to do the exact opposite—but if she went for Rose or for Priya, he would pull the trigger on her.

Maeve’s wrists remained bound behind her, and her back was against the cave wall, but still Rose kept a safe distance between them.

“Look me in the eye and tell me you’re still in control,” Rose said.

Maeve closed her eyes. “I’m still here,” she said. Sweat glistened on her face. The sores on her skin had deepened. The circles under her eyes were so dark they looked like bad mascara the morning after a party gone wrong.

Rose hugged herself as if she were trying to fight the urge to embrace her sister. “That’s not the same thing.”

“No,” Maeve agreed. “It’s not. But it’s the best I can do without lying to you. All I can say is that if we’re going, we should go as soon as we can, and once we’re outside, you should all keep your distance.”

Walker liked the sound of that. If the hunger inside Maeve wanted to take them, if the disease wanted to infect them, this was not the advice it would give.

“Good enough for me,” he said.

Priya shuffled forward. Her face looked thinner and older. Pain and blood loss were wearing her down. “We can’t expect her to swim with her hands tied.”

Walker thought about the thing inside Maeve—the inhuman agility and strength she’d revealed. Maybe it would keep her alive, even with her hands tied, but Priya was right. He couldn’t take that chance.

“She’ll never get up the rocks out there, either,” Rose pointed out.

Walker hadn’t let his thoughts get that far, but she was correct.

“Fair enough,” he said, studying Maeve, thinking about how to free her without touching her hands. “I’ve got a little knife in my pack. But you’ll have to stay absolutely still. I can’t risk—”

Her eyes were dark, her expression humorless. “I’ve got it,” she said. “I just didn’t want to give you a reason to shoot me.”

With a grunt and a twist of her shoulders, she snapped the bonds from her wrists. They all stared for a few seconds, letting the knowledge sink in—she could have done that whenever she liked. Unnerving as it was, Walker took it as a good sign. If Maeve didn’t have at least some control, she would never have stayed bound.

“You first,” he said. “Now let’s move it.”

He motioned with the gun. When Maeve started forward, hunched to avoid bumping her head on the ceiling of the cave, he waited until they had ten feet of separation before following. Priya and Rose moved as if to go ahead of him, but Walker ushered them back. He had the gun, and he intended to put himself between the civilians and the malignant thing inside Maeve. She still had some control, but it seethed in her. He could almost feel it radiating from within her.

Gun in hand, he duckwalked through the cave. Up ahead, Maeve stepped out into the gorge and began to climb the massive rock that hid the cave entrance. His earwig squawked, a little burst of static. He winced and reached up to tap the earbud. It had been useless while they were in the cave, no signal at all. There seemed little point in using it now. Updates from Alena’s office or from Rue Crooker wouldn’t do much to protect them from the Blackcoats. In a minute or two, he’d be neck deep in the Moonglow River, and whatever information they might have for him would have to wait. If all went well, they would be in the clear by daybreak. If not, chatting again with Alena Boudreau’s personal assistant wouldn’t be the thing that kept them alive.

“It’s gotten cold,” Priya said quietly, not far behind him.

“The mountains at night,” Rose replied as if that explained it all.

Walker hadn’t noticed the chill, but now he felt it. His clothes had dried in the hours since they’d entered the cave, but they clung to him, damp and clammy, and as the night wind slithered down the tunnel, it felt far too cold to be July. New England could always bring the unexpected.

Stepping out of the cave, Walker felt grateful to stand upright. He aimed his weapon at the top of the rock that blocked the entrance just in case the thing inside Maeve lay in wait for them, but there was no sign of her, which troubled him nearly as much. The cool air washed around him, and for the first time he realized just how much it had gotten under his skin, being trapped in the cave with Maeve and her passenger. Her infection.

“Quickly now,” he whispered over his shoulder as Priya emerged from the cave. “Watch your step, but don’t slow down. We have no idea what’s waiting for us.”

He clambered up the rock, peering down at the edge of the river. The burble of its passing seemed louder in the dark. The sky had mostly cleared, but the crescent moon cast only a ghostly gleam on the terrain around him, not nearly the brightness it would have when full.

Still, it was enough.

“Maeve,” he whispered, pulse quickening. Worried.

To his left, back the way they had come before nightfall, he heard her voice rasp, “Here.” Relieved, he skidded down the massive stone and started up the next one, even as Rose helped Priya to climb up to the perch he had just abandoned. Priya grunted in pain, huffing with effort, but Rose would have to help her. Walker’s responsibility was Maeve.

He dropped down from the next rock. Maeve watched him but made no move to approach. The two of them stood like gunfighters ready to duel. Only Walker had a gun, but Maeve had become her own weapon.

“All quiet?” Rose whispered as she dropped down from the rocks to stand beside Walker.

He nodded. Rose tracked the tension between him and Maeve but turned to help Priya slide down to the rocky terrain alongside the river.

“Go,” Walker said, gesturing for Maeve to get into the river ahead of the rest of them. They’d discussed it in the cave. Stay in the river unless you have no other choice, he had told them. Wait until you reach the bridge in Jericho Falls to get out. Don’t drown. Whatever you do, don’t let Maeve touch you.

Rose pushed past Walker. He held his breath, not liking how close she was to her sister.

“Be safe,” Rose told her. “I can’t lose anyone else.”

Maeve nodded.

“Wait. Please, hang on a second,” Priya said, even paler in the glow of the moon. “I don’t hear anything. I don’t see anyone. This is crazy dangerous. Can’t we just walk—”

Walker heard a single, distant pop, and the night broke open.

The brightest flare he’d ever seen soared up into the darkness over the gorge and burst into silent brilliance. The others squinted against the searing glare, but Walker knew what was coming next.

“Into the water!” he shouted, grabbing Rose and propelling her toward the river.

Gunfire erupted all around them. Bullets struck the rocks on the bank barely inches in front of Rose, and Walker realized his error. He lunged after her, grabbed the back of her shirt, and dragged her down, using his body to shield her. He couldn’t save them all, but she had been closest to him.

Bullets smashed into stone. Shards flew. Some plinked into the water. Maeve kept walking toward the river as if she wanted to be hit.

“Go to Priya,” Walker told Rose. “The two of you get back to the cave entrance.”

“We’ll be trapped,” she said, eyes wild with terror.

Walker pulled Rose to her feet, ducked low, and got her moving back toward Priya. He didn’t have to shout at them to go. They were already moving, scrambling over the first of the two massive stone slabs, exposed in the flickering, dying light of the flare.

Someone shot a second flare, erasing his hope that they might escape notice.

Walker took aim, scanned the ridge, tried to use the new brightness to his advantage. He saw one of the snipers and opened fire, but at this distance it was nearly hopeless, and he had no idea how many of them there were, or who they were.

Blackcoats. Had to be.

Mercenaries. Trained for this.

But none of them had been shot. Not one bullet had connected.

They’re not aiming, he thought. Trying to take us alive.

Alive was good. Alive got him home to Charlie. Alive meant the Sinclair sisters didn’t have to die.

In the new brightness, he saw Blackcoats rappelling down the walls of the gorge. Up on the rim, others were hustling along, trying to reach a place to descend. He put it all together, realized this was the way he would have done it himself. The gunfire and screaming at dusk, when they’d come down Walter’s Descent and Maeve had murdered Agatha, had told the Blackcoats where to search for them. The Blackcoats had come, searched the gorge, and then stationed themselves along the rough mile or so of the area where they thought the gunfire had originated, knowing that Walker couldn’t risk waiting until morning. That he would have to make a break for it.

He’d had no choice. And General Wagner had known it.

But they wanted Maeve alive, maybe the rest of them, too. Maybe those were the general’s orders.

All of this went through his mind in seconds.

Then a bullet struck Maeve in the chest, and all of Walker’s calculus changed.

She started to scream, and the voice that tore from her throat sounded like nothing human.

When the flare went up, everything changed. Leon had followed the Germans eastward. They’d moved swiftly, with a grace and quiet he forced himself to match. Several times he had to pause, catching his breath as he listened for noises that would let him pick up their trail again. He feared he would lose them eventually, and then he would have abandoned his wounded partner for no reason and lost himself on the mountain for good measure.

Then the flare.

The Germans froze when they heard that first pop, craning their necks to look up at the forest canopy. Tired and focused on stealth and speed, Leon barely heard the pop, but the Germans stopped so abruptly that he took two more steps before he could halt himself. They seemed like the loudest steps he’d ever taken, but even if the Germans heard him, divine intervention arrived in the form of the flare, which burst across the sky like the fireworks that had been going off around the country all week.

Gunshots echoed across the mountain. Burst after burst. Pop after pop.

“Damn it!” the German woman shouted, in English, with no foreign accent. “They couldn’t have waited another ten minutes?”

She barked orders in German, pointing through the trees. The two men with her unslung the rifles from their backs and bolted through the woods toward the place where the flare had originated. The woman raced after them, tugging a phone from her pocket.

“This is Virgo-One,” she said, once more in English, breathing hard as she dodged between trees and leaped rocks and bushes. “We’re out of time. The word is given.”

Leon followed. She and the other Germans had given up any attempt at stealth now, but as loud as the gunfire might be, whipcracks echoing through the woods, he did not want to risk giving himself away. He moved as fast as he could, caught his foot on a fallen branch but recovered his momentum, and held tight to his gun while he ran.

The men were German. She had talked to them in German, given them their orders in that language, but the woman didn’t sound German at all. So who the hell is she? He caught a glimpse of silver hair sticking out from beneath her black watch cap, and now that she was running all out, he noticed for the first time the effort she put into movement, as if it were a burden. How old was she, this woman who’d brought killers onto the mountain to hunt Maeve Sinclair?

Leon hurt all over. His whole body ached, his legs felt like deadweight, and his heart raced along alarmingly fast. It had been the longest day of his life, and now it had gotten a hell of a lot longer and a hell of a lot more dangerous.

But maybe all of this—the flare, the gunfire—meant it was nearly over. Maybe there would be answers coming soon. The thought sent an anxious tremor through him. While he’d been tracking the supposed Germans, his focus had been simple. He’d thought he’d understood the situation and how he had interpreted the mandate of his mission. Now he wondered if he had understood anything at all.

He brushed past a massive pine tree, put one boot on a fallen oak and sprang over it, surprised to find himself on a rough trail. Not well traveled, by any means, but more of a path than he’d been on for the past half hour. Moving in the dark, with just wan moonlight, it had been slow going. Running after the Germans had been a gamble. Here, though, he could see the winding trail where other boots had trod in the past, enough to indicate the smoothest passage.

Gunshots continued, another flare burst in the sky ahead. The echoes were strange, though, an odd acoustic muffling that the trees could not explain.

He heard the crack of a rifle up ahead, much closer. Then another shot, and a third.

Leon slowed, chest burning with exertion. He got control of his breathing and slipped back into the trees, wishing he could stay on the trail but knowing it would be unwise. Those rifle cracks were so close they could only have been from the Germans. The mountain crawled with his own people from White Oak Security, and Leon figured some of those shots being fired came from his comrades’ weapons. But White Oak personnel weren’t the only people up here searching.

He caught his breath, slinking through the trees until he could see a vast, open space ahead where the forest came to an end. The meager moonlight showed the edges of a broad chasm, and he remembered the gorge that had been on the mission map. This had to be it. Now the strange echoes made sense. Someone had found Maeve Sinclair, and they were fighting over the right to claim her—or her corpse.

Leon slunk through the last line of trees. He spotted the two German snipers ahead of him, for that was surely what they were. They had taken a position on the ridge, side by side, and were aiming along the gorge. One of them pulled the trigger. The rifle shot made Leon flinch, but he peered to his right along the gorge, and now he saw what they were shooting at. Black-clad soldiers came from the woods to the south, joining others who were stationed there. They were shooting into the gorge; Leon figured they were keeping their targets pinned down there. He saw two dark figures go over the side on ropes, rappelling over the edge.

They had to be his Blackcoats. White Oak Security.

The Germans were shooting at them.

Somehow, through some miracle of luck and fumbling accident, Leon found himself in precisely the right place at precisely the right time. Maybe he wouldn’t be the one who found Maeve Sinclair, but he could still save the lives of some of his buddies. Hell, it might be Luther Baskin down there or Angela Todd. Johnny Kennedy, the funniest asshole on White Oak’s roster, the big Alabama bastard they called Prez.

As Leon raised his weapon and took aim, he let out a long breath and smiled to himself as he thought about saving Prez Kennedy’s life and all the tequila those assholes would buy him when they learned what he’d done.

He felt a breath on his cheek, warm in the cool night air.

Then the cold kiss of the gun barrel against his temple.

Leon saw her then in his peripheral vision. Silver hair, black watch cap, wrinkles around her eyes. Much older than he’d realized. God, she had to be sixty at the very least.

“My name’s Alena,” she said. “What’s yours?”

The Red Death’s influence came in waves. The tiny bit of Maeve that could still pursue rational thought had developed theories about that, ideas involving proximity to the living and duration since the last time she’d passed the infection to another. None of that mattered now.

Her head throbbed, spiking with pain that she knew could be alleviated if only she would stop fighting, give the Red Death what it wanted. Yes. Not the hunger or Red Hands or whatever other label she might have given it—this wasn’t just a presence, it was a consciousness. A living malignance, a disease that could override an infected host and spread the contagion within it, with purpose. Woven into the host body—into her body—so that the only cure for her own suffering was to communicate it to others. The pressure valve on her sickness was to share it. To spread the Red Death … in order for her to live.

The air in the gorge grew hot. The brightness of the flares turned the stone walls into red glass, or perhaps she existed now in two places—the solid world around her and the blur of memory and hunger that existed inside the Red Death. She saw through its ancient eyes just as it saw through her own. Gunfire echoed all through the gorge. Voices shouted to her to get down, to hide. The bullet wound in her left side pulsed, little dribbles of blood spilling out, the stain on her dirty tank top spreading.

Another bullet tagged her shoulder, and she jerked slightly.

She was no longer alone. The figure she had seen lurking nearby her, the one she had seen in her visions, the voice in her head, the insidious presence that made her skin crawl, made her feel as if she were coated with a thick film of gutter swill … it wasn’t gone. Not vanished. The Red Death was just Maeve now, and Maeve had become it.

Bullets struck the rocks nearby. Some plinked into the water. Others smashed stone, sent chips flying.

Maeve turned to see that Walker had taken cover. She saw him reloading his gun. Behind a large stone slab, back toward the cave entrance, Rose poked her head out, screaming for Maeve to wake up.

“Snap out of it, for fuck’s sake!” Rose screamed, her face contorted in fury. She looked like Mom when teenage Rose hadn’t cleaned her room for a month. The thought made Maeve smile and then laugh, and she knew her mind had broken.

It felt nice.

Better.

Shouts from overhead made her twist around to stare at the Blackcoats gliding down into the gorge on ropes. They shoved off the wall, dropped swiftly, and the first to reach the ground unclipped themselves from the ropes, reaching for their weapons. Idly, it occurred to her that they were going to kill her, and that would be all right.

But they would also kill Rose and Priya and Walker.

And they worked for the motherfuckers who had infected Oscar Hecht.

She ran toward the soldiers who had dropped into the gorge about fifty feet away. Others were still rappelling down the rock walls. Maeve smiled to herself as she leaped from stone to stone, closing the distance between them with inhuman speed. Inhuman. She embraced the word and the savagery that went with it.

Soldiers saw her coming when she’d crossed half the distance already.

Somewhere behind her, Rose and Priya and Walker would be watching, or maybe they would be in the midst of their own fight. A tremor of shame for what she had become passed through her, but she pushed it away—too late for that.

Bullets strafed her from above, chipping away at the rocks behind her. Too slow to catch her. The hunger of the Red Death ached in her bones, no longer a gnawing in her gut or a whisper in her skull but part of her now. Or simply … her.

The first two soldiers to unclip from the ropes let their guns hang from the straps around their necks, reaching for Tasers instead. They had time to take aim and fire, the Tasers stinging her. They were eager, ambitious, and they had thought to capture her alive.

In gratitude, she smashed their skulls against the stone wall of the gorge.

“Holy—” a Blackcoat shouted, a dozen feet to her right. The woman shouldered her weapon, pulled the trigger, interrupted herself so that she never finished that sentence.

Maeve wondered what the next word would have been. There were so many possibilities.

Instead, bullets sprayed the gorge. The woman’s eyes were narrowed with purpose. Instead of fear, the Blackcoat had determination, and Maeve admired that. A bullet tore through her right side, cracked bones, skidded along her rib cage, and exited out her back. Another tore off her left ear.

Then Maeve landed on the Blackcoat, ripped off her face mask, and spit in her eyes.

She threw her head back, screaming in triumph and ecstasy as infection raced through the Blackcoat’s body. Bloodstream. Lungs. Skin. Brain.

The Red Death sprang up from the shuddering, dying woman and turned to look up at the other soldiers as they descended.

They were coming for her.

She eagerly awaited them.

24

Walker could have made the river. He knew it. The water ran deep and fast; more importantly, it ran south and away from this shitshow. If he ran, dove, swam underwater for as long as he could hold his breath, and if they didn’t have a sharpshooter with a scope talented enough to pick him off when his head bobbed above the water downriver … he could survive this.

Gun in hand, he tried and failed to catch his breath. He’d been under fire before. Nearly died multiple times. Inhaled the presence of evil. Climbed down a mountain with a demon trying to murder him. Been in an ordinary firefight, caught shrapnel from a terrorist’s roadside bomb, watched a woman’s bones crack and shift under her skin while she turned into something inhuman, and heard a nest of tiny, winged serpents whisper his name. But this was the first time his own government had tried to kill him, and it really pissed him off.

Go, he thought. For Charlie’s sake.

“Walker!” Rose screamed.

He spun to see her glance around the side of the slab that blocked the cave entrance. Walker wanted to shout to her that she and Priya needed to get inside, but he would only be telling Rose something she already knew. She was a grown woman.

“Give me a goddamn gun!” she shouted.

He frowned. As if he had a gun to spare.

Rose shouted again, something different about her voice this time. He glanced back and saw her pointing, looked up, and saw two soldiers coming down into the gorge right above him. One of them had a weapon aimed straight down at Walker. The show-off thought he lived in a James Bond movie, that he could actually manage to track a steady aim while bouncing off the rock wall.

The Blackcoats overhead shouted something at Walker, ignoring Rose and Priya because they were unarmed. Walker put his hands up as if he meant to surrender. The show-off barked orders down at him. A third flare burst into the air above the gorge. The second had faded almost to nothing, and now Walker got a good look at these two guys who were coming for him and he scowled. The jackass showboating while he rappelled couldn’t have been more than twenty-two.

Walker shot him in the ass.

He’d been aiming for the leg, but in the midst of his fear and desperation, he found room to laugh as the Blackcoat shouted in pain, arched his back, and tumbled off the wall. The rope had a safety line that snagged him ten feet from the ground. He jerked and bounced on the line, upside down, eyes rolling in pain. His hands dangled underneath him, gun drooping.

“Careful,” Walker called up to him. “You’re gonna drop that.”

He jumped up and tore the gun from the Blackcoat’s hands.

The second one kept shouting his partner’s name—Puglisi—and trying to get a clear shot at Walker, who stayed under Puglisi like the guy was his umbrella. Puglisi bled on him, swore at him, called angrily to God to damn Walker for shooting him in the ass and how could being shot in the ass hurt this goddamn much.

Walker didn’t have an answer for him, but he used the time wisely.

Holstering his sidearm, Walker opened fire with the HK the Blackcoat had so kindly brought to him. Bullets had been chipping away at the rocks around him for minutes now. More Blackcoats were coming down into the gorge. The moments when he could reasonably believe they had any way out of this disaster were ticking away, but he kept firing. In his mind, he pictured General Wagner burning in hell. He hoped it existed, hoped the general found his way there.

“Rose!” he shouted over his shoulder. “Priya! We’re going into the water! It’s the only way!”

“You’re fucking crazy!” Rose called.

Up to his left, bullets chipped stone. Several of the Blackcoats had gotten into position where they might actually kill him. He had stuffed himself between a slab and the wall, with Rose and Priya sandwiched between the next slab and the cave opening.

He should have run the seven or eight steps and launched himself into the river. He knew that. His son waited at home, and he had spent enough years nearly making Charlie fatherless while trying to save some other kid’s parents or some other parent’s kids.

Maeve had been his assignment, and he had been determined to get her off the mountain alive, but he peered around the corner of the slab and saw her along the riverbank. She had a Blackcoat by the collar and smashed his face against the wall again and again, crushing his skull and pulping his face.

Is that even Maeve? Or is Maeve already gone?

More of them dropped toward her. Walker exhaled. They were so focused on her that he might have been able to get away, but if he left Rose and Priya to go home to his own son, he wouldn’t ever be able to hold his head up. There was only one way to make it home to Charlie.

He took aim and pulled the trigger again, wondering how many Blackcoats he would have to kill.

His earwig buzzed. David Boudreau, he figured. Or Joel, or Rue Crooker.

“About goddamn time,” he muttered as he tapped the plastic nub in his ear. “Whoever this is, you’d better have a way out of this.”

“Hello, Benjamin,” a soft voice rasped. “I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to get back to you.”

“Alena?” Walker snapped. He took aim and shot another of the Blackcoats descending toward Maeve. “That was the world’s longest fucking meeting. Tell me you got the DoD to override General Wagner!”

“Oh, I did,” Alena assured him. “But our friend the general has stopped answering his calls. He’s ignoring the chain of command.”

Walker sighed, ducking behind the slab again. He looked up, searching the dying flare light for any movement overhead. The Blackcoats were more interested in Maeve than they were in him or Rose and Priya, but that wouldn’t last forever.

“Fantastic,” Walker growled. “Now what the fuck are we supposed to do?”

“Keep your head down.”

“What the hell is that supposed to—”

“Dear Benjamin,” Alena said. “I’m afraid I haven’t been entirely forthright with you.”

As if that had been a cue, a fresh round of gunfire ripped through the gorge, but these bullets were coming from the north. Blackcoats rappelling down the wall took heavy fire. Some were shot and others tried to take cover behind ledges and outcroppings. Walker looked up at the western rim of the gorge, saw a Blackcoat jerk backward, clutching his chest, and tumble over the side.

“Alena,” he said.

No reply. His earwig fuzzed with static.

The call had ended.

The fight continued.

Rose helped Priya back into the cave. The bullets could not chase them in, but the sounds followed, echoing and ricocheting loudly enough to hurt their ears. In the darkness, the mouth of the cave glowing with the flickering red light from the flares drifting down into the gorge, they held each other. Rose could feel Priya’s heart beating against her chest, warm breath on her neck. She cupped the back of Priya’s neck and clasped her even more tightly, as if the two women could merge if only they loved one another hard enough.

Rose sank into Priya’s arms, wishing she could stay there, but instead she pulled away.

“No,” Priya said, grabbing her wrist, eyes blazing. “We stay here. It’s not us they’re trying to kill. They don’t care about us. We stay here until they find us or until the sun comes up and it’s all over. Do you understand me?”

Rose did understand. She averted her eyes. “Maeve…”

“You can’t save her!” Priya snapped, wincing at the pain in her wounded shoulder. She released Rose’s wrist and took hold of her face instead, forced Rose to meet her gaze. “She’s been dead since the parade—since that asshole infected her. You know this. She’s too sick to carry this for long. One way or another, she’s as good as dead. But you…”

Priya’s sternness collapsed into a sob. She pressed her lips together in a tight line. “You’ve lost so much. You and your dad, that’s all you have left. And me, Rose … you have me. Just stay here with me, quiet. Just hold me till it’s over.”

Rose had never wanted anything more in her life. For a few seconds, she even thought she might do it. But as she inhaled the scent of the one she loved, images burst through. Memories of her mother and Logan. Of her dad and Maeve.

Maeve.

Grief opened under Rose like a gravity well, yet she knew her anguish must only be a pale shade of the pain Maeve felt. The horror and guilt and regret. And Maeve had that sickness rotting her from the inside, eating away at all the things that gave her identity. That gave her life.

“I’m sorry, love,” Rose said quietly, the words almost obliterated by gunshot echoes. “You’ll be safer here. I’ll be back for you.”

Priya sighed, breath hitching. Tears spilled from her eyes, shimmering in the red flare light.

Rose kissed her, lingering, and then pressed her forehead against Priya’s for a few moments before she pulled away and stepped out of the cave without a backward glance.

Screams and bullets soared through the gorge. Rose slid along the side of the stone slab that blocked her view, lay flat against it, and crawled up far enough to get a glimpse northward. She spotted Walker immediately, sheltering behind the next slab to the north. He leaned out, assault rifle in his hands, and opened fire on two Blackcoats who were still descending.

Rose climbed up a bit farther. She heard screams and managed to peer over the top of the slab, where she had a view of the floor of the gorge and the broad swath of rocks and slabs that made up the riverbank. She saw Maeve there, fighting, half a dozen dead men strewn around her as if she were building herself a fort out of corpses.

One of them moved.

Not dead yet.

Gun out, taking aim.

Rose screamed as the Blackcoat fired. Bullets stitched across Maeve’s back, punching her forward. She arched, let out a plaintive sound that carried through the gorge in spite of the barrage of gunfire, and then she sprawled onto the ground amid the scrub grass. In the guttering light of the bloody-red flare, Rose could see her sister’s body jerking, legs twitching, as if she were trying to move, trying to rise, trying to keep fighting.

A fresh pair of flares soared into the air over the gorge, tiny red suns that cast their crimson glow over the grotesque panorama playing out below. Rose blinked, felt little breaths escaping her body, lay on that stone slab and stared at Maeve. She remembered what her sister had told her, the way Maeve had described the visions she’d had. “Like little glimpses into someone else’s hell,” Maeve had said.

The flares colored the night red, and Rose knew she was staring into her sister’s hell.

Rose pushed up onto her feet, standing atop the slab. Gunfire echoed around the gorge, but it seemed far from her now, as if she were already a ghost and such crude violence existed in the land of the living.

“No!” Priya screamed, stumbling from the cave. “Rose, don’t—”

But Rose had already dropped over the edge of the slab. By the time Priya scrabbled up to the perch she’d vacated, Rose had already clambered over the next one. Walker had been hiding behind it and must still be somewhere nearby, but the aperture through which she viewed the world had narrowed to include only Maeve.

Rose ran to her, hoping for the impossible.

The men who’d shot Maeve turned toward Rose with their guns, and she ignored them, calling her sister’s name. When she reached Maeve’s body, already thinking of it that way—her body—she halted, staring down at the blood pooling on the dirt and scrub grass. The Blackcoats barked at her to back away, to put up her hands or she would join her sister, and that sounded all right with Rose, but somehow she managed to raise her shaking hands. She tasted salt on her lips and only then felt the warm stripes of tears on her cheeks. There had been so many tears that she idly wondered if it was possible for a person’s tears to run dry.

“Maeve?” She knelt beside her sister.

The gunmen screamed again. Shifting position, taking aim, growing shriller the way some men did when they weren’t being obeyed.

Rose saw all of this in her peripheral vision, her conscious mind only vaguely taking note.

Maeve groaned. She struggled to roll onto her side, shuddering, blood burbling from her lips. As Rose reached toward her, Maeve managed to shake her head, eyes full of sorrow. In their lives, they had shared the joy and anger so many sisters felt, closeness that outsiders could never understand, mutual hostility that made for fragile reunions, laughter over jokes no one else would find amusing, the pain of watching their parents’ marriage decay and collapse.

“Don’t,” Maeve said.

Dying.

The men with their Kevlar armor and their guns kept shouting. One of them took a knee, aimed straight at Rose’s head, roared at her to back away from the body.

The body, and Maeve wasn’t even dead yet. Rose had thought of her that way, but this felt different, offensive. Intrusive. Rose did not want Maeve to be the body, but this man, this hollowed-out, blackhearted bastard, had the gleam of excitement in his eyes. Thrilled to lay claim to the body.

Rose met his gaze. There were others around, more than she’d realized. Beyond these two were three more, two of them women. Others rappelled to the floor of the gorge just thirty feet to the north.

Maeve would not live.

Rose knew that.

But she’d be damned if the people who had created the infection that killed her would ever lay a hand on her.

Rose heard Priya crying out for her. She wished she could tell herself Priya would understand, but knew she never would.

Rose did it, anyway.

Slid forward and put her sister’s head into her lap.

The Blackcoat’s finger tightened on the trigger. Rose flinched as gunshots cracked the air close by, but it was the Blackcoat who jerked backward. His gun flew from his grip, and then a second bullet struck him in the left cheek and he fell dead to the ground. Two other Blackcoats died, bullets tearing into them, and the rest lunged for cover.

“Rose, what have you done?”

She didn’t turn, but she knew the voice belonged to Walker. He had been there, behind the stone slab, fighting. He’d been shooting at the Blackcoats at the rim of the gorge and the ones coming down the walls, trying to keep their bullets away from the Sinclair sisters. But Rose didn’t care about bullets anymore.

She caressed Maeve’s face, wiped her tears and blood. Rose would have forgiven her, but there was nothing to forgive. Maeve had been wild with grief, needing someone to blame for the deaths of their mother and Logan, and Rose had wanted to hate her. Now she only wanted Maeve to feel loved, to know she was not alone in the end.

Rose watched the light dim in her sister’s eyes and then go out. Maeve’s head lolled to one side, her body going slack.

Then Rose’s hands began to itch and grow warm. She felt a twinge in her gut.

Was that a whisper she heard, inside her skull?

Rose thought it might be.

No. You can’t have her.

Maeve had never been pregnant. She didn’t know what it might feel like to have life grow within her. She imagined the thing inside her as more like cancer—not a single tumor but tendrils of it, vines of black rot sending shoots through her bones, wrapping around her arteries, rooting in every muscle. Life, though. Sentient, the way a fetus might be. And like a fetus, it had been growing stronger and maturer, developing into something aware and full of purpose.

It scratched and gnawed inside her like a wild thing in a cage, desperate to be free to hunt and feed so it might grow stronger. So the ghost of death might walk the world again and spread its poison far and wide.

It had flourished inside her, lived and breathed in her. It had killed in her, but it wouldn’t die with her.

Her wounds pulsed with the heat of blood leaving her body. Her vision dimmed as if light and color were fading from the world, but she stared up at Rose, lips moving as she tried to form words of regret and of warning, all such sentiments far too late to help any of them.

Too late, a voice echoed in her mind, and what remained of Maeve Sinclair could not tell if it was her own thought or that of the Red Death. Farewell.

“Rose,” she tried to say aloud, and Rose looked at her.

Death felt like mercy, so Maeve did not mind it overmuch, but the hunger began to slip out of her. The malevolent disease slithered from her flesh and into Rose, and Maeve fought that as hard as she was able.

She blinked. Beyond her sister, she saw the withered crimson figure again, looming over Rose as if the two were allies now. Or as if it had claimed Rose as its own.

Maeve closed her eyes. The Red Death told her goodbye yet again, in more insistent tones, and she felt it struggle to break free from the anchor it had planted inside her. The hunger had tethered itself to her, and now Maeve refused to release it.

As she slid down into the dark and final comfort of death, Maeve still fought.

Not my sister, she thought. Not Rose. You can’t have her.

Then all went quiet inside her, and Maeve Sinclair was no more.

Alena Boudreau didn’t like to shout and she didn’t like to fight, but she had found herself more than willing to do both when necessary. She cherished science and the thrill of discovery, but both had proven to be rife with dangers and secrets, and the world teemed with assholes willing to commit atrocities to acquire such things. That dilemma led to violent conflict and deceit. Because she was director of the Global Science Research Coalition, no one would expect her to be in a position to give orders that required human beings to be shot.

No one except those who understood the work they really did.

The work that DARPA did. The work the Department of Defense did. Every minute of every day, all over the world, there were a thousand ways to ignite catastrophe, epidemic, mass extinction, or global destruction. Humanity had built itself a delicately balanced house of cards. It would take very little to bring it all down.

If, from time to time, preventing such catastrophe meant resorting to violence, Alena Boudreau had learned to live with that.

“Just stand there and nobody will shoot you,” she said, gesturing at Leon Lewis, unable to hide her irritation. He didn’t look convinced, and maybe the gun in her hand had something to do with that, but tough shit. She hadn’t come here to coddle mercenaries and worry about their feelings.

Static crackled in her ear. She shook her head, tapped the earpiece. “Walker, you still there?”

Most of what she heard over the connection had been gunfire, hard to distinguish from the sounds picked up by her other ear. Gunshots echoed up and down the gorge, from rim down to river. But they were quieting now.

“I’m here,” Walker said. “I think Maeve Sinclair’s dead.”

“Shit!” Alena snarled. Leon Lewis flinched, watching her gun hand as if she were some kind of explosive device that might detonate if she became too unstable. She figured that wasn’t far from the truth.

“There’s more,” Walker said.

He kept talking, but she snapped at him to hang on. “We’re pulling the plug up here. Stay alive another minute or two, would you?”

Alena walked to the rim of the gorge. She had kept mostly to the tree line to avoid Blackcoat snipers. The two Germans she’d brought with her were former BND counterintelligence agents who had signed on to the SRC less than a week before. The moment she’d been named director, Alena had begun to reach out to colleagues and allies with whom she had worked over the years. If the SRC were to present to the world that they were a global coalition, they had to look the part. But not all her employees were going to be scientists.

None of those new hires had been officially logged or even vetted by the DoD as of yet. Alena had been engaged in a chess match with General Wagner, and she had been careful not to reveal her strategy. When DARPA had begun moving pieces around the board, shifting Wagner’s responsibilities, creating Global SRC and naming Alena its director, she had suspected the general would try to hold on to his pet projects and wall them off, even from his superiors. There had been lies, obfuscation, his allies covering for him all through the shadowy corridors of government, but Alena had allies, too. And Walker … well, Ben Walker had been a stroke of luck. General Wagner had punished Walker not for breaking the rules but for taking away an opportunity to create yet another deadly bioweapon, when Garland Mountain had been developing one for him all along.

General Wagner had sidelined Ben Walker. With the secrecy necessary to her task, Alena hadn’t been able to recruit many experienced field agents, but the general had left Walker on the bench, and she had been more than happy to put him back in the game.

A buzz in her ear. She tapped the comm unit. “Tell me.”

“The order’s been given, Director Boudreau. General Wagner will be informed shortly, but White Oak Security has been ordered to stand down.”

“Thank you, Joel.”

Alena did not smile as she signed off. There were too many dead for her to feel any sense of triumph. She went to Paul Dietrich, the senior of the two German agents she’d hired, and put a hand on his shoulder.

“Nearly done now, but don’t lower your guard,” she told him. “I don’t trust anyone tonight.”

Dietrich nodded. The other German, Oskar Lubitsch, spoke little English, but he didn’t need a translation to understand. Alena raised the small pair of night-vision binoculars that hung from a strap around her neck. South along the ridge, she watched as the Blackcoats from White Oak Security lowered their weapons. They looked confused and a little bit lost, turning to their unit commanders.

When the Homeland Security agents emerged from the woods behind them, Alena held her breath. She’d made sure the order had come from White Oak’s operations director before Homeland Security moved in because she thought that would avoid any further loss of life. The last thing she wanted was another hundred corpses on the mountain. Even so, she tensed as the DHS agents trained their weapons on the Blackcoats and forced them to disarm.

She braced for more gunshots, but none came.

Lowering the binoculars, she glanced over at Leon Lewis. “I haven’t forgotten you, Leon. Come take a look at this.”

He moved tentatively, eyeing the Germans, watching her carefully. Wordlessly, he took the binoculars and looked south, just as Alena had. She knew what he would see.

“Your operation’s over,” she told him. “Time to stand down.”

Leon exhaled with obvious relief and passed the binoculars back to her. “Okay. So what now?”

“Now you get to go home,” Alena replied. “Though if I were you, I’d think hard about my line of work. White Oak took on a client willing to send you to kill American citizens, including government employees. Maybe you’re okay with that sort of thing—”

“I’m not,” Leon said quickly, brow knitted in thought.

“You didn’t seem the type, to be honest,” she said. “The dust on this will settle, Leon. One way or another, it will be swept under the carpet, and some other atrocity will take its place. When things calm down, come and see me. I’m going to need people with at least a spark of conscience.”

He looked at her a long moment, then nodded and turned away. Leon Lewis began walking along the rim of the gorge, off to join the rest of his unit, but Alena had a feeling he would not be with them for long.

Alena tapped her comm again. “Walker, you still there?” Static. She frowned. “Walker?”

“—hurry.”

She swore, lifting the binoculars and rushing to the edge of the gorge so fast that Dietrich grabbed the back of her jacket to keep her from stumbling over. The night vision blurred as she turned, trying to get it to focus, searching for Walker.

“What is it?” she asked. “They should be surrendering.”

“It’s not the fucking Blackcoats,” Walker said. “It’s Rose Sinclair.”

Walker felt like he’d be hearing the echoes of gunshots for the rest of his life. His eardrums throbbed in the aftermath. The Blackcoats moved in around Rose, barked at her to move away from her sister’s body. They didn’t seem to really understand what had happened, what it meant that Rose had been holding on to Maeve but hadn’t gotten sick yet herself. Maeve had died, just as Oscar Hecht had died.

“Get away from her,” Walker ordered, advancing toward the Blackcoats, sweeping his weapon in an arc, trying to warn them off.

There were over a dozen of them along the trail now, but most of those had come down the wall of the gorge some yards to the north. Of the ones still alive, there on the rocky bank of the Moonglow, only four were close enough to Rose that she might lunge for them, and Walker saw the murder in her eyes. They must have seen it, too, because although they had lowered their weapons moments ago, they raised them again.

“We told you, girl,” one of the Blackcoats said, “get away from the body.”

“Lower your weapons,” Walker snapped at them. “Back away!”

The red glow of the flares had begun to fade and waver. Soon they would have only wan moonlight to see by. Walker took three careful steps on uneven ground, aimed his weapon at the Blackcoat who had spoken. The others turned their guns on him.

Rose slid closer to them, taking advantage of the distraction. Her eyes had their own red glow, and he knew that glimmer had nothing to do with the flares. It broke Walker’s heart to see the predatory sneer that contorted her face. He thought of Ted Sinclair and all he’d lost, and in his heart, he cursed the man for not being up here on the mountain himself, injuries be damned.

“Don’t do it, Rose,” he said.

Guns shifted back toward her.

Walker took another step, stared hard at the Blackcoats. “Listen to me. You guys are done. This is over, and you need to withdraw right now. Nothing else needs to happen here. My team is going to lock this down. Nobody else needs to be hurt.”

Rose spun around and marched toward him, screaming out her pain and fury. Instinct made Walker pivot and aim the gun at her, center mass. He flushed, hating himself in that moment, but he didn’t turn his weapon away.

“Stay there, Rose. You don’t need to hurt anyone else.”

She spat on the rocks a few feet from him. Walker flinched, wondering if her body fluids were infectious.

“You tried to help, but Maeve is dead, anyway,” she said, and he could almost hear her heart shattering as she spoke. “They murdered her. Truth is, they murdered her twice, and they took my mom and Logan.”

She grinned. Something like tears dripped at the corners of her eyes, but these tears were dark streaks of red or black. Hard to tell in the flickering, hellish light of the dying flares.

“You think I’m going to let them just surrender?”

Rose lowered her head, then turned and stalked toward the nearest Blackcoat, the one with the big mouth. His eyes widened as she raised her hands, the reality finally hitting him. His gun twitched at his side. As he staggered backward, he brought the weapon up again.

Walker couldn’t watch another member of the Sinclair family die.

He took aim and shot the Blackcoat in the chest. The guy stumbled and fell, and the others reacted. One of them fired at Walker, barely missing.

“Stop!” Walker shouted, tossing his gun to the ground. “He’s wearing body armor! I was getting his attention. Just walk away. Fucking run away before she kills you!”

They must have seen the wisdom. As the other Blackcoats down in the gorge came toward them, those three began to retreat, shouting at their fallen comrade to follow. Bursts of static came from their comms, voices calling out names.

The fallen Blackcoat scrambled to his feet. Shaking, he backed away, gun pointed at Rose just in case she lunged at him.

Rose quickened her pace. Her muscles tensed. Walker saw the way she moved, the way she coiled, and knew he was too far away to stop her even if he dared to touch her.

Then Priya was there.

Eyes wide and pleading, cradling her left arm, she came around the side of the slab that had sheltered her from bullets and rushed at Rose and the Blackcoat, free hand up in front of her.

“Rose, no! Let it be over.”

Rose took a step toward her, left hand reaching for Priya’s throat. Priya recoiled in shock, and Rose faltered. Behind her, the last Blackcoat ran to join his comrades, boots pounding the path until he’d reached the safety of numbers. They all turned to watch, a Greek chorus of hired killers.

Rose stared at her hands. Black tears slid down her face. “I’m sorry.”

“Let them help you,” Priya told her. “Please.” Priya started toward her, gently, warily. “I need you.”

Rose jerked backward, stared at Priya. She shook her head and hugged herself tightly, determined to keep her hands to herself. She turned and walked to where her sister lay dead. Rose fell to her knees, huddling down as if against a cold winter, though it remained midsummer.

Then she looked up at Walker. “Whatever you think you can do, you’d better do it fast.”

The last crimson flicker of the flare’s light burned out, leaving only the moon.

But Rose’s eyes still glinted red.

25

One New Year’s Eve during his college days, Ted Sinclair spent the night in jail. He’d been drinking in a bar with friends, thanks to an amateurishly made fake ID and a doorman willing to look the other way in exchange for ten bucks and a promise not to cause any trouble. It wasn’t the fake ID or the underage drinking that had landed Ted in jail, however—the blame for that rested squarely on the shoulders of a girl named Kristina Lawson. Ted and Kristina and four other friends had been seated at a round table in view of the bar. An absurdly handsome guy with creamy brown skin and the kind of fashion sense that would forever be beyond Ted had been seated at the bar and sent Kristina two drinks in a row. She smiled shyly at him, wagged her fingers in thanks, and played hard to get … until the moment Chrystina Campbell got up from the table and sashayed over to the guy at the bar to suggest he buy a drink for a girl who’d appreciate it.

What ensued would forever be called the Battle of the Christinas—it seeming fair not to use the correct spelling for either of them. They had been frenemies before the bar fight, but after fists had flown and fingernails had broken, the friend part could never be recovered. Ted had tried to intervene, been shoved into a pair of drunk bikers, and abruptly the scrap between the two young women turned into a full-on bar brawl.

Bruised and aching, nose broken, at least one rib cracked, Ted had curled up against the back wall of the jail’s holding cell, grateful the blood clotting his nostrils prevented him from smelling the metal, lidless toilet that sat out in the open, never mind the dozen other men crowded into the cell. It came as no surprise that New Year’s Eve was a busy night for cops breaking up drunken brawls, never mind arresting drunk drivers and petty thieves.

Tonight, he missed that piss-stained holding cell. At least back then he had known someone would come to get him, that he would be charged and released.

More than thirty years since then. How the hell did all that time pass by so fast?

Tonight, Ted found himself in a cell again, but this time nobody was coming to get him. He could always blame the booze, but the whiskey hadn’t drunk itself.

Half-drunk, drowning in grief and worry, he’d climbed into his car and driven to Garland Mountain Labs with some barely formed idea that they owed him answers and that he could force those answers out of them with the sheer power of his alcohol-fueled righteousness. He’d parked in the lot, stormed to the front door, and been greeted by a guy named Justin Jones, who was the facility manager or something like that.

Ted wanted his daughters, and he’d been certain Garland Mountain not only knew where they were but could retrieve them. He also wanted the lab to admit responsibility for everything—for the horror at the parade, the deaths of his ex-wife and son, the hideous thing that had infected Maeve.

He’d sobered up just a little—enough to know what an idiot he’d been.

Security guards had grabbed him the moment Dr. Jones had allowed him to cross the threshold into the building. They’d halfway carried him to an elevator, descended a level or two, and muscled him into a chamber that looked as if it had been designed by Apple engineers. An iRoom. MacJail. The walls were off-white, softly illuminated by recessed bulbs. The furnishings were a pair of sleek white chairs and a dormitory-narrow bed with tightly fitted sheets and a square pillow.

A narrow pocket door in the corner opened into a tiny bathroom. In the main cell—because it could only be a cell—white plastic cups were racked beside a white plastic sink, providing a water supply. Each wall had a section where the surface formed a pattern that approximated something that might be considered art, though of course there were no windows. The space might have been sterile, but it would not have been entirely unpleasant if not for the locked door and the fact he didn’t have the option to leave.

For the moment, Ted was a prisoner. He didn’t know how long they would keep him here, but the presence of that bed didn’t bode well. It suggested that the people who had designed the security holding cell for Garland Mountain Labs had anticipated a time when seizing an intruder would not necessarily lead to calling the appropriate authorities. If they had called the police to report him, nobody would be expecting him to sleep there.

He’d alternated between sitting in one chair or the other, then pacing to try to sober up, but he had yet to so much as perch on the bed, no matter how strong he felt the urge to lie down. Arms crossed, back aching, ribs and knee shrieking with pain that reminded him of the impact of Oscar Hecht’s car. Had his body cracked the BMW’s windshield? He couldn’t remember now, but he thought it must have.

Images of Logan and Ellen paced around the edges of his mind like wolves just at the edge of the firelight, ready to attack once the fire burned down. He couldn’t think of them now, though. His daughters needed him.

Maeve had needed him, and instead of being the father he should have been, he’d let shock and pain and grief take control. And addiction, he thought. Don’t forget that.

His tongue pushed out, moistening his lips. A sheen of sweat covered him, though the climate in the MacJail had been set to the perfect temperature. Whiskey would help, but he and the whiskey both knew it wasn’t sufficient. Like a husband always in the shadow of his wife’s first love, the whiskey knew it would never be enough. He wanted painkillers. Morphine. Heroin. If he had been locked in here before he’d done rehab, Ted knew he would have been crawling out of his skin, would have hurt himself, would have done anything to get out of here.

He stood up from the chair, flushed with fresh anger.

Maeve still needed him. Rose had gone after her because Ted had been too weak or too selfish or too broken—the “too” didn’t matter. Rose had put her life in jeopardy because Ted hadn’t been the father his daughters needed.

For heroin, he’d have done anything to escape.

“What about for your daughters, Ted?” he said aloud.

Do they mean less to you than addiction?

He rushed at the door, planted his hands on the smooth surface, and started kicking. The door shook in its frame. He had tried to smash the lock, tried to pry the door open, to no avail, and even as he kicked and pounded against it, he knew he would only succeed in bruising his hands and scuffing his boots.

Helpless, furious, he kept pounding.

Ted opened his mouth to shout for someone to come talk to him, listen to him. Anything. Set him free, let him keep looking. Keep him locked up if they had to, but don’t leave him alone.

“Just tell me!” he screamed. “Tell me they’re still alive!”

Every impact of his boot or his fist sent shock waves of pain through him. He felt cracked ribs shifting, felt something behind his knee tug and tear. Ted didn’t care. There were two kinds of pain, and when you’d experienced both it was easy to see that only one of them mattered.

He hauled his boot back again, took a breath to shout, and in that slim, quiet instant, he heard something outside the door. Ted pressed his ear against the door. Out in the corridor, boots thundered past. Urgent voices barked sharp commands. The door vibrated against his cheek.

Something had happened. No alarms blared, but those sounds were an alarm all their own. Ted couldn’t tell if it boded well for Maeve and Rose, but one thing seemed certain—inside Garland Mountain Labs, the shit had hit the fan.

Justin W. Jones had lived his share of bad days. He’d held his mother’s hand while she closed her eyes for the last time. At the age of eleven, he had stood on his front lawn and watched his father drive away, knowing in his gut the son of a bitch would never return and hating himself for wishing it weren’t true. While pursuing his Ph.D., he had kissed the woman in charge of the lab where he’d spent three years and intended to spend at least two more. His first inkling that he’d misread their intimate rapport was her fist smashing his nose.

Today, though. The worst day of his life. No contest.

Justin strode along the corridor with six Garland security guards in their crisp tan uniforms. All of them wore sidearms and grim expressions. Several managed to keep a cold glint in their eyes, and he wondered if they were simply good at hiding their emotions or if they truly were unruffled by the path events had taken. People were dead, more were dying. The security team might not know the nature of the contagion that had escaped the lab, but they surely knew those with upper-level clearance considered it catastrophic. How those few stayed so calm, he would never know. And Justin couldn’t ask them. He only knew their names from the ID badges they wore. Before today, they might as well have been masked storm troopers, for all he had given a crap about them.

Now he needed them to care about their jobs. Needed them to care very much. Maybe even care about him.

At the end of the corridor, he bent to press his eye to a retina scanner. The light above the door pinged green, and the door unlocked. He shoved it open and marched through with the security team in his wake.

On the other side of the door was another corridor, the mirror image of the first except that its walls were glass. To the left, the glass looked down into the central axis of the private lab space. To the right, the glass made up the windows of smaller labs, offices, and small conference areas.

“Dr. Jones, should we expect resistance?” one of the guards asked.

Justin glanced back at her, a flutter in his chest. “Be ready for anything.”

They reached the end of the glass corridor. The last door on the right stood open. He could hear a voice shouting from inside the large office. Seven steps from the doorway, he wanted to turn and run, but there would be no running from any of the colossal fuckups of the past couple of days. Justin hoped he could live through it, and fortunately the best chance of that had just been handed to him by his contract manager at DARPA.

He knocked on the open door, and the three men inside looked up. Justin didn’t wait to be invited in, just stepped through the door with the security team following. They spread out to either side of him, taking up half the office.

General Henry Wagner sat behind the desk in his on-site office, what he’d often called his home away from home in the many months that he’d been working in tandem with Garland Mountain Labs on Project: Red Hands. The two men from White Oak Security who stood behind him at attention were the only Blackcoats who hadn’t been detailed to search for Maeve Sinclair, which was fortunate.

“Justin,” the general said, even the name a scowl of dismissal. He scanned the faces of the security team, and though he must have known the answer, he asked the question, anyway. “What the fuck is this?”

At six foot four and on the high side of 250 pounds, General Wagner was an intimidating presence. He scared Justin far more than the two stone-faced Blackcoats. If the general had leaped up from his desk and started bellowing, as he’d done more than once in Justin’s presence, things might have gone even worse. But Project: Red Hands had turned into the worst thing that had ever happened to Justin W. Jones, a storm of black clouds, crashing thunder, and death-strike lightning. The path to blue skies ran right through General Wagner—ran right over him, if Justin were being honest—and so fear would have to be forgotten.

“I’m sorry, General,” Justin said in a quiet voice that cracked as he spoke. He cleared his throat, lifted his chin, put more authority into the words. “I’ve received direct instructions from DARPA director Steven Delacruz that you have been relieved of your authority in this matter and at this facility.”

Wagner’s upper lip curled in disgust. “Oh, have you? And to whom has that coward handed the reins?” The general smashed his hands down onto the desk. Through a sneer, he rose from the chair, towering over the rest of the people in the room. “Never mind. I know the answer to that.”

“I’m sorry, General,” Justin said.

“You have no gift for lying, Jones,” the general said. He glanced back at the two Blackcoats, perhaps considering making a fight of it, but then he looked at the security team again. “This is your mess. I’ll make certain that’s not forgotten. When the cleanup begins, I promise you will be swept away with the rest of us.”

Justin stiffened. He stared at the Blackcoats, realizing they planned to do nothing to aid the general. Wagner himself simmered with anger but did not appear ready to die in a useless gunfight over an order from his own superiors.

“I guess we’ll see, General,” Justin said. “But either way, we won’t be the ones doing the cleanup. Whatever happens next, at least there’s that small mercy.”

General Wagner came out from behind the desk. The Blackcoats stayed where they were as the security guards surrounded the general and escorted him out of the office.

“I never asked for mercy,” Wagner said as they led him away.

“Probably for the best, then, that no one’s offering it.”

Justin hung his head as he walked behind the security team. The procession made him think of his youth as an altar boy, and that rang painfully true. Penitent then, and penitent now. But in those days, he had been far more likely to be forgiven.

All he wanted now was for it all to be over. Whatever his penance, whatever the cost to bring this to an end, he would gladly pay it.

All of her adult life, Rue had looked different from most people. The hairstyle and color, the tattoos, were her way of letting the way she felt on the inside make its way to the surface. As a girl, she had considered herself quite ordinary-looking. Not ugly, not pretty, just unremarkable. So often, she had felt invisible, ignored by a world to which she had much to offer. Peacocks could spread their feathers, show the full kaleidoscope of their colors, strut with pride. More than anything, Rue wanted to be seen. She wanted to be a peacock, to be fully herself, to show all the colors inside her. She didn’t need to be admired for them, but she refused to stay invisible.

Tonight, she had regretted that choice for the first time in her life.

“Stop panicking,” Kat Isenberg said, reaching over to take her hand. “Take a breath, be still, and focus on the work.”

Rue tried to take her advice, took a deep breath and let it out. They were inside Garland SL2-Alpha, the one lab inside Garland Mountain that was not under the auspices of the lab’s director but those of the federal government. General Henry Wagner held the top spot, overseeing SL2-Alpha. Dr. Cristina Vargas was the lab supervisor, with Dr. Isenberg as her deputy, and a guy named Justin Jones was the project manager specifically overseeing Red Hands. None of them were in SL2-Alpha tonight. The shit had hit the fan, and they all had more important things to worry about. Red Hands had been born in this unit, and the research had blown up into absolute catastrophe for them.

Any other night, Rue would never have made it into SL2-Alpha, never mind into the restricted access sublevels of Garland Mountain Labs. But this wasn’t any night, and she had Kat Isenberg with her. With Dr. Vargas absent, Kat was in charge.

“You’re going to be fired,” Rue said to her now, quietly, as Kat bent to peer over her shoulder. Kat had typed in her password to give Rue access to all the Red Hands research. It was not only a breach of security but would likely be considered a federal crime.

“Possibly executed,” Kat replied, and Rue couldn’t tell if she was joking. “Just do the work. Let me worry about the fallout.”

It hadn’t surprised her that Kat had gotten her into Garland Mountain. Without Vargas there to recognize her, and with the pressure and chaos unfolding, Kat’s authority had been enough. But when they had gotten onto the elevator at the center of the facility’s hexagon and Kat had used her ID to select a classified sublevel, Rue had been certain that a voice would come over an intercom or an alarm would go off, and the two of them would end up in plastic handcuffs or something similar.

Instead, several other people had gotten onto the elevator, looking harried and anxious, even a little afraid.

“What’s going on?” Kat had asked.

A skinny thirtysomething guy with his beard and hair shorn down to about an inch—the sort of thing someone did when they didn’t want to ever have to fuss with their appearance—looked at Kat with an angry spark in his eyes.

“You oughta know,” Skinny replied. “It’s your project that’s causing all this bullshit.”

“Jason,” one of the others cautioned.

Skinny Jason rolled his eyes. “Please. It’s just the truth. Dr. Isenberg is a grown-up. She can handle a little truth.” He cut a sidelong glance at Rue, his expression full of disapproval of her as well, though it seemed more for her association with Kat than for her appearance.

“I can, actually,” Kat said. “So share it with me?”

Skinny Jason tsked and fixed her with a glare. “We’re all in the dark here. Aside from your people and maybe a handful of supervisors, we don’t even know what you’re all doing to fix this. All we’ve been told is that Dr. Hecht was infected and he took off and infected a bunch of other people, and now they’re all fucking dead. Great job, government scientists.”

Rue saw the way the words hurt Kat, the way her eyes crinkled as the sting set in.

“Hey,” Rue said. “There’s no need for—”

“Who the fuck are you?” Skinny Jason asked.

Kat didn’t give her a chance to answer. “She’s a consultant we’ve brought in to try to resolve this quickly.”

Skinny Jason reappraised Rue. “Well, I hope you’re smarter than this batch.”

The elevator door had opened and they’d all gotten off at sublevel 2. Others were moving through the common area that surrounded the elevator bank. Some carried boxes or metallic containers in their arms and were waiting for the elevator to go back up. Several of the labs around the hexagon on sublevel 2 were dark inside, the doors closed and presumably locked. Rue had wondered but said nothing.

Inside Garland SL2-Alpha, two research assistants were still working when Kat used her ID to unlock the door, ushering Rue inside. It had been from those assistants that they’d learned General Wagner had arranged for the COO of Garland Mountain to order the rest of the labs shut down and the research teams sent home if they lived inside the quarantine zone. Others were to evacuate if they could find somewhere else to stay.

“It’s like last call at the bar,” one of the assistants said. “They don’t have to go home, but they can’t stay here.”

Wagner had also sent Dr. Vargas and several others from SL2-Alpha over to join the Blackcoats. Maeve Sinclair had apparently been located. It would only be a matter of time before she would be brought in, dead or alive, and Vargas had been tasked with overseeing the process of getting her back to Garland Mountain without allowing anyone else to be exposed to Red Hands.

“General Wagner asked that we let him know as soon as you returned,” the other assistant said, reaching for a phone.

“Don’t do that,” Kat had said.

The two assistants shot her twin looks of concern. General Wagner had given them an order. They were scientists, but they worked for DARPA, and Wagner was the top of their hierarchy. Could Dr. Isenberg countermand his order?

“The general—”

“Is only going to get in the way of the work we have to do, right here and right now,” Kat said.

The assistants both hesitated.

“Hi,” Rue said, getting their attention. “I’m a new face and a new name, but all four of us have the same goal here—trying to make sure nobody else dies. If not a cure, we need a counteragent, something that will save Maeve Sinclair’s life if we can manage it. If not, then something that will inhibit infection in others. You wouldn’t be a part of this project if you weren’t all brilliant. I don’t know about you, but I don’t trust your General Wagner to use that brilliance to save lives instead of using it to help cover his ass. You want to call him, get him down here to give Dr. Isenberg her marching orders? Be my guest.”

“Actually,” Kat said, “you two should go with the rest. The way things are going, you’ll be safer outside than inside.”

The two assistants had stared at her. The standoff lasted all of three seconds before they gathered their things and departed.

Rue had spent the past couple of hours poring through the work Dr. Hecht had done on Project: Red Hands before he had purposely infected himself. The bacterium presented as unlike anything Rue had encountered before, and yet there were elements that were familiar, strands that mirrored the structure of other germs. Like linguists managing to translate a few specific phrases in an ancient, unknown language, she thought she and Kat could use those few strands to unravel the rest of Red Hands and find a cure. Or if not a cure, at least a treatment.

If they had the time.

“That was a big sigh,” Kat said. “I don’t like the sound of that.”

“I think we can do it,” Rue replied. “If General Wagner will let us. If we can work it out before they drag us out of here.”

A buzzer sounded inside the lab. Rue glanced up to see that Kat had stepped back and was looking out toward the door.

“Um, I think you need to see this,” Kat said.

Rue swore, thinking she had jinxed them with her own words. She rose and followed Kat through the lab, out to the glass wall at the entrance, beyond which they could see the common area and the elevator bank. Men and women in white shirts and dark jackets hustled through the common area.

“Who the hell is this now?” Rue asked.

Kat shook her head. “Not a clue.”

A woman arrived at the entrance to SL2-Alpha. She gave them a little wave, then knocked at the door to the unit. Only then did Rue spot the three bold yellow letters inscribed over the left breast on her navy-blue jacket.

DHS. Department of Homeland Security.

“Holy shit,” Kat said. “General Wagner must be furious.”

Rue smiled. “For better or worse, something tells me General Wagner isn’t your boss anymore.”

The DHS agent knocked again, looking less pleasant and less patient than a moment before.

“For better or worse,” Kat echoed.

She buzzed the agent in.

26

Maeve drifted in a red limbo, a space that might have felt like sleep if not for the taste of blood and sorrow on her lips. She thought her eyes were open, but could see only a kind of crimson fog. Or perhaps it might have been a cloud, and she was flying through it. A sound reached her, someone shouting. Metal clanged against metal, perhaps swords clashing or armor turning away a dagger strike. There came a roar that might have been a black bear or …

Or an engine. It had to be an engine.

Sleep now, darling.

Only when she heard the words did Maeve realize she did not float there alone. She tried to move, sit up, tilt her head to seek out the shape that lurked just at the edge of her vision, but she found herself paralyzed. Now that her companion had spoken, she felt it there in the fog beside her, crawling toward her. It crept below her, behind her, slipped up and whispered in her ear.

You’ve been so very ill. Rest now. The time of pain and hunger has passed.

Something sharp touched her scalp, a finger, joined by others. As it caressed her, ran its fingers through her hair, Maeve tried to scream. Her lips would not move. The terror trapped itself inside her, a tumor no surgery could remove, and it grew with every heartbeat, building pressure that had no release.

Her eyes widened. God, she wanted to cry, but like her scream, the tears would not come. The red fog began to darken, to blacken.

“—touch her. Those wounds are weeping. Put your hands up, and don’t go near her.”

A voice. Not the one that whispered to her, not the one that enveloped her in sorrow. A different voice, this one angry.

“None of us are that stupid,” yet another voice replied. “Look at her. Jesus, her throat is so bloated. You ever see anything like this?”

“You’ll all be quarantined,” the first voice said. And then, as if to a third someone, beyond her hearing, he said, “Get him out of here. Get them all out. Nobody without a hazmat suit comes within fifty yards of her. Tell Vargas not to approach. She can supervise from up on the ridge.”

Maeve had been cold until now. She hadn’t realized just how cold until her bones began to grow warm, heating her from within. Floating in that fog, she began to feel the weight of her body for the first time. Pain cramped her chest and clawed at her throat, and she wanted to talk, to cry out to the whisperer that he had promised she would feel no more pain.

Go away, he told her. You’re a fool to fight this. You can’t trap me here. I’m hungry, my darling, and I will grow with that hunger. Infection has taken you. There’s no room left in this flesh for you.

The fingers caressing her face pushed through her skin, began to tug at her face as if the whisperer meant to strip her down to muscle and gristle and hide beneath the mask of her life. But the tugging ceased and the intrusion worsened. She felt the whisperer sliding into her, lifting her face, pushing in beside her as if he had raised the edge of her comforter and slipped beside her in bed in the middle of the night.

Then she knew him. Saw him, and saw herself. One of them dead and the other hideously alive. This was no withering, gnawing hunger. What inhabited her now breathed malice, flexed predatory sinew. Sickness fled her. The pain, the heat, the desire … once upon a time, human beings had carried in their souls an intimate knowledge of evil. Most of the world had breathed it in so often, seen it in the eyes of others enough times, that they could no longer recognize it for what it was. How it felt.

Only a flicker of self remained inside her, a thing that recognized itself as Maeve Sinclair. Recoiling from the filth that polluted her, she regretted not surrendering to death. The whisperer had warned her, tried to send her away, and she had fought him.

Rose.

Out there somewhere, her sister had been infected. As the hunger, the Red Death, had clawed its way into Rose, Maeve had twisted her thoughts around the presence within her and held on with everything she had, all the things that made her Maeve. Dying, the infection had passed from her to Rose, but Maeve had grasped hold and refused to relinquish it.

Now they were here—Maeve and the hunger. The whisperer. Lost in red limbo. And she understood what a terrible mistake it had been.

As the last spark of herself, the last shard of Maeve Sinclair, winked out, she felt the comfort of a sheet being drawn over her corpse.

They would come back for her body, the hunger knew.

The hunger, after all, was all that remained inside the corpse of Maeve Sinclair. It stirred, and deepened … and it waited.

Walker bumped around in the back of a Jeep, head muzzy with exhaustion. His eyes burned. He ought to have felt relieved it was over. He sure as hell ought to have felt safer in the back of the Jeep than he had with a bunch of Blackcoats shooting at him, but this didn’t feel like safety, and he could not allow himself to think it was over.

So much for mission accomplished, he thought.

Maeve Sinclair lay dead back in the gorge, a bunch of researchers and DHS agents overseeing the quarantining and transfer of her corpse.

Alena Boudreau sat next to Walker, the two of them knocking shoulders as the Jeep rattled along a trail that would lead them off the mountain. They were about six miles from Garland Mountain Labs. In the Jeep, on the trails, then the road, it might take them fifteen minutes to reach the facility. Walker wondered if he could manage to avoid smashing Alena in the skull for that long. Sure, she was a seventysomething-year-old woman, but she’d also sent him on this assignment with only a fraction of the information she ought to have given him. If he had known what she was up to behind the scenes, that the cavalry would be coming, Walker would have done things differently. Maeve might still be alive.

In the front passenger seat, Priya nursed her wounded shoulder, which had already received some first aid from a medic. Walker didn’t think it was physical pain that made Priya turn her face from the driver and swipe at her eyes. The driver pretended not to notice her tears. In the backseat, Walker and Alena said nothing. No words that might embarrass Priya, nor any words of comfort.

What could they say?

Priya loved Rose. Walker had seen the love between them, the desperation, the fear for one another. Either one of those young women would do anything, sacrifice any part of themselves—even all of themselves—for the other. But Priya sat silently crying in the front seat of the Jeep, and Rose rode in the vehicle ahead of them—a boxy yellow hazmat ambulance that hadn’t been made for this terrain. It bumped along, just ahead of the Jeep, a lonely, terrified, grieving young woman in the back.

Walker could not have stopped Rose from touching Maeve. If he’d spotted her moving toward her sister earlier than he had, what could he have done? Shoot her to save her?

Even so, it haunted him.

“You’re awfully quiet,” Alena said.

Walker turned to stare at her, the seat crinkling beneath him. In his mind, the picture of Maeve Sinclair falling, the bullets punching through her, would not be erased.

“You used me,” he said quietly, glancing at Priya, hoping the rumble of the Jeep would blot out much of what he said. “Wagner put me on the sidelines. You made your move, brought in your people. You needed someone capable of finding the woman, someone who could lock her down, keep the situation from getting worse without letting her fall into Wagner’s hands. His project blew up in his face, and you saw your chance.”

“General Wagner has been running black box operations even his superiors didn’t know about,” Alena said. “When subordinates expressed safety concerns, they suffered retribution. Wagner ordered Red Hands tested on CIA prisoners in an off-book facility in Romania. Oscar Hecht was the perfect partner for him. There isn’t a line Wagner won’t cross, and Hecht felt the same way. These are men who don’t play by anyone’s rules. Hecht is dead, and thanks to him and Wagner, so are a lot of other people. So tell me, Benjamin, what have I done that has so upset you? I offered you a job, and you accepted.”

He could see the vein in her temple pulse while she spoke. Her passion and dedication in her work were the stuff of legend, but he’d never heard she was ruthless.

Walker shook his head. “Alena—”

“Director Boudreau, if you still work for me.”

He locked eyes with her. “Alena,” he repeated. “The people we work for do a lot of unpleasant things. Ugly things. Most of the time, there’s a reason for that ugliness, a higher purpose, and I believe in that higher purpose. But you left me in the dark and used me—”

“I didn’t know who I could trust.”

“—and as a result, people are dead who might otherwise be alive.”

He stopped himself from mentioning Rose Sinclair. Priya had to be listening to all of this now, even in her shock and sadness. Rose might not have become the carrier of Red Hands if Alena had been open with Walker about what was really going on, and he didn’t want to hurt her further with an if. That word could be the most painful in the English language. Life and death were full of ifs, and they never saved anyone an ounce of anguish.

“We’ll talk more when this is over,” Walker said, nodding toward the back of Priya’s head so Alena would understand his reticence.

She raised an eyebrow. “It’s already over, Walker. It’s under control.”

Walker went silent. The Jeep bumped through several potholes and ruts, and then pulled out onto the road. Just a few minutes and they would be at Garland Mountain. He looked through the windshield at the yellow hazmat ambulance ahead of them, and he thought of Rose.

It’s under control, Alena had said.

Walker wished he could believe that.

Driving up to the rear gate of the Garland Mountain Labs complex, they passed two Humvees heading in the opposite direction—Blackcoats withdrawing. Dismissed. Walker glanced at the driver of the second Humvee as they went by, saw the angry line of his lips pressed together, and felt as if this whole thing might really be over.

The guards at the rear gate took one look at Alena’s ID and waved them through. The Homeland Security agent behind the wheel of the Jeep didn’t bother with a parking space; he drove right up to the paved walkway by the heavily fortified rear doors and killed the engine. Alena thanked him and climbed out. Walker went around to help Priya. She gave him a dark look, as if she blamed him for her injuries, maybe for all the day’s horrors, but she accepted his aid in climbing from the Jeep and leaned on him for support as she started up the walkway.

“It’s an exodus,” she said, nodding toward the many people and cars in the parking lot.

Lab coats, T-shirts, suit jackets—something like twenty people were loading plastic containers and metallic cases into their cars, presumably files and research, and were leaving Garland Mountain like rats leaving a sinking ship.

Walker helped Priya shuffle a bit faster along the walkway, trying to catch up with Alena. “You’re letting all these people leave? You don’t know what research they’re taking with them.”

Alena reached the door, showed her ID, and the guard inside buzzed them through. She yanked the door open and held it for them. Her blue eyes sharpened.

“They’re not our concern. Better they be out of the way, somewhere safe.”

Priya hesitated to enter the building. She held back, taking long breaths, and Walker worried that blood loss had finally caught up with her and she might collapse. The aboveground levels of the Garland Mountain complex were sprawling, and he knew they must have some kind of medical facility inside.

“You okay?” he asked. “Do you need me to—”

Priya turned to glare at Alena, who still held the door open for them. “I want to see Rose.”

“She’s already here,” Alena replied. “They’re getting her settled in a containment room. You’ll be able to see her very soon.”

“I don’t trust you,” Priya said.

Alena smiled thinly. “Fair enough. Trust is currency. We shouldn’t give it to people who haven’t earned it. Give me a chance to try.”

After another moment’s hesitation, Priya nodded, and Walker escorted her through the door and past the guards, who buzzed them through an inner door and into an industrial-looking lobby area, much more utilitarian than the gleaming reception area at the main entrance. Across the lobby, a pair of techs in hazmat suits were spraying some kind of orange-tinged foam onto the walls and floor of an open elevator, making it clear which direction they had taken Rose. Nobody else wore hazmat suits, and nobody stepped forward to try to disinfect Walker, Priya, or Alena, so the Garland Mountain team still felt the sickness couldn’t be transmitted except by Rose’s touch. But Rose had touched the walls, railings, or doors inside the elevator, so they weren’t taking any chances.

“This way,” one of the guards said, gesturing to the left, where a set of steel doors buzzed to let them in. The guard pulled the door open and held it as they went through.

Perhaps in a kind of protective gesture, Walker went ahead of them, so whatever waited on the other side, he would encounter it first. Priya had taken a bullet many hours before and still managed to shuffle along behind him. She needed further care before she collapsed completely, but he knew Rose would be her first priority. Alena came last, but Walker knew she wasn’t going anywhere.

Three figures approached them along the corridor, one of them a ginger-haired Homeland Security agent with her hand resting on the butt of her gun. She stalked slightly behind the other two, walking as if she had found herself in a combat zone. But the two men who preceded her were the ones who caught Walker’s full attention. One of them was the arrogant lab coat he’d thought of as Rasputin when they’d met almost twelve hours before. The man’s name tag floated in Walker’s memory—Justin W. Jones.

The other guy shouted Priya’s name and rushed along the corridor toward her.

Ted Sinclair.

Walker stepped aside to let Ted get to Priya. Bleary-eyed, disheveled, Ted paused with his hands outstretched. He’d been about to pull Priya into a hug, but now he saw the bloody field dressing on her shoulder and the blood soaking through her T-shirt, and his face crumbled.

“Oh, Pri,” Ted said.

“It’s okay,” she said, sliding her right arm around him and leaning her head against his chest. “Just be gentle.”

Alena, Walker, Dr. Jones, and the ginger DHS agent stood awkwardly in the corridor as the two of them wept together. Priya had been tough, holding her grief and fear inside, but now she let her tears flow. Walker had been nurturing a lot of ugly thoughts about Ted Sinclair over the course of the day, but as he watched the tenderness and love with which Ted comforted Priya, he softened. Ted might be a drunk and an addict—hell, Walker could smell the whiskey sweating out of his pores—but he was a good enough father that his daughter’s girlfriend put her faith in him, leaned on him like this.

Walker decided he wasn’t in any position to judge another father.

“They’re taking care of Rose,” Ted said, holding Priya at arm’s length. She might have been a grown woman, almost done with college, but he wiped her tears away as if she were his child. “I know she’s infected. Dr. Jones explained what’s happening. They’re searching for a cure, and in the meantime, they think they might be able to make the infection … stop, or…”

Ted looked at Justin W. Jones, searching for the right words.

“Dr. Isenberg might be able to force the infection into dormancy. Suspend the symptoms,” Jones said, glancing at Walker and Alena. “It’s a long shot, but if it works … well, it won’t keep Rose from being contagious. She’d have to remain quarantined. But it would prevent her from getting any sicker in the meantime, giving us more time.”

Alena pushed past Walker, staring at Jones. “This is something you were developing after Oscar Hecht was infected?”

Jones thought the question over. “Not exactly. But they were able to use Hecht’s notes to build on.”

“Let me guess. You had Hecht researching how to control the infection,” Walker said, glaring. “Turn it on and turn it off, so it would be a more effective murder weapon.”

Priya shot him an admonishing glance. “It doesn’t matter. The only thing we care about is whether or not it will help Rose.”

“And Maeve,” Ted added. He glanced at Walker. “They brought Rose in, but Dr. Jones said they had to be more careful with Maeve. That she’s on the way.”

Walker flinched, his stomach twisting into a knot. He glanced at Priya, saw the sorrow and pity contort her features, watched Ted Sinclair as he read the look that passed between them.

“What?” Ted said, shaking his head. “No. Dr. Jones said—”

Alena stared at the lab director with a sneer of disgust. “Dr. Jones is a fucking coward.”

Walker put a hand on Ted’s arm. “I’m sorry, Ted. I said I’d get her off the mountain—”

Ted pulled away from Walker, lips pressed tightly, trembling. He started to speak and then only shook his head again. In less than twenty-four hours, he’d lost a son and a daughter and their mother, the woman with whom he’d shared a life and three children. The only one left was Rose.

This time, Priya was the one to comfort him.

A long minute passed in the silence of grief. Finally, Alena went over and put a hand on Ted’s arm. “Mr. Sinclair, why don’t Dr. Jones and I take you to see Rose now? We can’t be in the room with her at the moment, but we can speak to her through glass.”

Ted stood a bit straighter and nodded. Alena gestured to Dr. Jones, and the four of them started down the corridor, back the way Jones and Ted had come, apparently to find an elevator that wasn’t in the midst of being sterilized. Walker watched Priya, thinking she might turn and give a wave of farewell, but she had more important things on her mind.

“Dr. Walker, yes?” the ginger DHS agent said.

“That’s right.”

“I’m supposed to take you down to sublevel two. Apparently, they’re waiting for you.”

Walker cast a final glance at Ted Sinclair. Whiskey or no whiskey, it said something about the man that he hadn’t drunk or drugged himself into a coma after the day he’d had. Walker silently wished him well, then turned to the DHS agent.

“Lead on.”

A knock on the glass door. Rue jerked upright in her chair, knocking over Dr. Isenberg’s nearly empty coffee cup. A little brown dribble spilled onto an array of paperwork before she’d snatched up the cup. She muttered a quiet profanity as she glanced over at the door to see Ben Walker on the other side of the glass. Rue burst into a smile of relief and victory, but Walker didn’t reciprocate.

“Oh no.” Rue stood and hurried to the door. “Please, God…”

As she opened the door, Kat Isenberg came up from the back of the lab, summoned from her work by Walker’s knocking.

“Dr. Crooker,” Walker said, clasping her hand and then reaching out to shake with Isenberg. “Kat, I won’t ask how you are. I can only thank you.”

“I’m glad to see you, Walker,” Isenberg said.

Rue searched his eyes. “I tried you so many times on the stupid earbud.”

Walker blinked as if he’d forgotten about it. He dug the plastic nub from his ear and tossed it into the trash can by Isenberg’s desk. “I was in the gorge, then in a cave since sunset, until a little while ago. Once I found Maeve—”

“You did find her? Oh, God, from the look on your face, I thought the worst. Kat and I have made some progress,” she said, all in a rush. “They were already working on ways to modulate the symptoms, manipulating the bacterium. It’s pretty harrowing, honestly, when I think about what they were trying to accomplish, but once Kat and I started looking at that research specifically with an eye toward diminishing the severity of the symptoms instead of—”

“Rue,” Walker said.

“The point is, we think we can slow it down. Right now, it wouldn’t help the newly infected much. It might buy them a couple of hours of pretty agonizing life, but it wouldn’t save them. But we’re looking at Dr. Hecht’s samples from after he infected himself, testing on them, trying to see what we can do for Maeve—”

“Rue, stop,” Walker said, holding up a hand, eyes squeezed shut. He opened them, glanced at Dr. Isenberg, then turned again to Rue. “You’re not working to help Maeve anymore. You’re working to help Rose. Maeve is—”

“No,” Rue said, shaking her head.

“She’s gone. But Rose is still here, and you can help her.”

Rue heard a quiet little cry of anguish, like the air leaving a balloon. It took a moment before she realized the sound had come from her.

“Poor Ted,” she said. “Oh, Maeve. She was the sweetest little girl, so smart. When she went through her teen years, the hostility broke Ted’s heart. Then when she went to college and it was like she saw him with new eyes and she was so kind to him, it was like the greatest gift. He was so…”

Rue hung her head. Kat Isenberg reached out and held her hand, squeezed her fingers. Rue couldn’t wrap her mind around it—Maeve and Logan and Ellen, all gone, and now Rose sick with the same thing, infected by Red Hands. Tainted by something Dr. Isenberg thought might actually be evil. Real, malevolent evil.

“Is Ted…?”

“He’s with Rose and Priya,” Walker said. “Priya’s been shot, but she’s going to be all right. The bullet didn’t hit anything vital, and she’s tough as nails.”

“Always has been,” Rue said. “Rose fell for her senior year in high school. Priya lets her parents turn a blind eye to the two of them, but she holds her head up, never apologizes for who she is. She’s tough. But I guess she’ll need to be.”

Rue gave Kat’s hand a grateful squeeze, then pulled away and went to sit back down at her desk. “Come on. Let’s get back to work. The Sinclairs are like my family. This right here is the only way I know how to help Ted and Rose, so that’s what I’m going to do.”

“Okay. I’ll be back in a while, see if I can help at all,” Walker said. He reached for the door, but paused to look at Isenberg. “There’s a hunger in them, y’know. The one who carries the contagion—Hecht, then Maeve, and now Rose. The longer they go without infecting someone, without killing someone, the worse the sickness hits them. But there’s a hunger, too, driving them to want to pass that infection along. If you can treat Rose’s symptoms, keep her from succumbing to the sickness, will that limit the hunger?”

“I wish we could tell you,” Isenberg replied. “Theoretically, the answer’s yes, but…”

“But?” Walker asked.

Rue stared at the computer screen, not looking up at them. “But it depends how much of the malignance in Rose is rooted in the bacteria, and how much is just … evil.”

The only thing Rose wanted was a blanket. As cool as the mountain air had been out there in the dark, even in July, it felt even colder in the little room where they had her locked up. A clean room, they called it. Not in the sense of being neat and tidy, though it was both of those things, but in the sense of being sterile. Of course, sterile also meant mind-numbingly boring.

“Try not to think of it as a jail cell,” said the Homeland Security agent who had opened the door for her when they’d put her in the room.

As jail cells went, Rose had to admit it leaned toward fancy. The whole room was off-white and looked to be made of plastic. The bathroom seemed to be one piece, as if it had been carved out of that white plastic and then slotted into place. The toilet and sink had biohazard symbols on them, as did the bathroom door, which made Rose feel a bit like a superhero. Or a weapon.

They’d given her a soft, cozy sweatshirt with Garland Mountain Labs on it, like it came from a souvenir store, or like these scientists and security guards had their own softball team. The pants, though, were thin cotton hospital scrubs, hence her desire for a blanket.

She had a bed. Between that and the bathroom, she thought she might be in this quarantine room for a while, but she wondered how they were going to handle feeding her. Certainly they wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble if they were going to let her starve to death.

Stop, she thought. Don’t think about food.

Rose sat on the edge of a chair, looking at her reflection in the blank screen of the TV attached to the wall. Don’t think about it.

She was hungry. Not thinking about being hungry didn’t make the hunger go away. What she wondered, though, was whether she felt hungry for food … or for something else. Her throat had begun to hurt. A tickle of a cough irritated the back of her throat. In her dark reflection, she could see dark splotches on her neck and heavy circles under her eyes like she’d let some goth punk girlfriend do her makeup.

So … hungry, she thought.

And froze, staring at her own eyes in that reflection, because the voice in her head just now hadn’t sounded like her, had it?

Rose hugged herself, bent over, perched on the edge of the chair. This was quarantine. She was supposed to be alone here, but Rose knew she would never truly be alone again. She opened her mouth to scream, but a little bell rang in her room, and she whipped around to see a green light blinking on the wall.

There were four doors in her clean room—one a closet, one the bathroom, one the door through which the men in hazmat suits had brought her, and a fourth, which had been locked when she’d tried the latch. Now that green light blinked just inches from the latch on the fourth door. Rose stood, went to the door, turned the latch … and it opened.

“Oh, Rosie,” her father said.

Rose stared at him, then at Priya, who’d been given a sweatshirt that matched Rose’s own. A spot of blood showed through the fabric, where she’d been shot, but Priya did not look quite as pale as before.

A hard plastic chair was the only piece of furniture on Rose’s side of the glass, and she sat quickly, mostly to avoid falling down. She hugged herself, staring at the two of them. First at Priya, then at her dad.

She thought of Maeve.

“Daddy,” she said, suddenly a little girl again. “I’m so sorry.”

Her father’s eyes were a bit glassy, like he’d been drinking, but he stood straight enough that she knew his thoughts were clear. Their side of the visiting room was no bigger than Rose’s—except there were two chairs over there—but neither Ted nor Priya bothered to sit down. Ted put both hands on the glass that separated them. He moved slowly, and she could tell his cracked ribs still pained him, but he barely seemed to notice as he looked in at her.

“You were brave,” he told her. “You found your sister. I should’ve been there. I should’ve…”

He glanced away, as if he couldn’t meet her gaze.

Rose knew nothing she could say would make him feel better. His injuries would have held him back. He’d never have found Maeve. Rose and Priya had gone off on their own without consulting him because none of them had been thinking clearly, logic fogged by trauma and grief. Now here they were.

“Babe,” Priya said.

Her left arm had been put in a sling, but Priya reached to touch the glass with her right hand, fingers splayed. Rose covered it with her own hand, an inch of glass between them, protecting Priya from the disease eating away at Rose.

Rose put her forehead against the glass, and Priya did the same.

“They think they can help you,” Priya said quietly. “They’re working on it.”

Rose lifted her head, now eye to eye with Priya, but she said nothing about the prospect of these scientists helping her. Priya hadn’t been infected, but after being with Maeve and seeing what had happened to her, what was inside her, they knew that the scientists at Garland Mountain Labs hadn’t developed this malignant contagion … they had unleashed it.

There’s no putting the genie back in the bottle, she thought.

Or, at least, Rose hoped the thought was her own.

“Fight it,” Priya said as if she could see the doubt and worry in Rose’s face. “I love you, Rose. I love you, and I need you.”

Rose could only give her a quiet nod. She would fight the influence of the thing whispering, even now, deep inside her. For Priya’s sake, yes, and for her dad’s sake. She was all he had left. But mostly, she would fight for Logan and Mom and for Maeve, all of whom the hunger had taken from her. Rose and the Red Death, she thought. Only one of us will live.

This time, she knew the thought was her own.

But the whispers were still there, slithering in her skull.

Rose looked at Priya and her dad. The way they stood, even the way they looked at her, she could see they thought this was over.

But it wasn’t over. Not at all.

27

If someone had asked her even two hours earlier, Cristina Vargas would have predicted an unmitigated disaster for Project: Red Hands. Already, Oscar Hecht’s decision to experiment on himself had led to a pile of corpses, including his own. Hecht had killed eight people with his BMW at the parade and another nine with his bare hands before Maeve Sinclair had bashed his skull in with a baseball bat. In addition to Hecht, Maeve had gone on to kill her mother and brother. The chaos in video clips made it difficult to say with certainty whether the other two people who’d died the morning of July 4 had been touched by Hecht or by Maeve, but either way, they were dead.

Then the slow-motion massacre had moved up onto Mount Champney. They didn’t have a head count yet, but between those shot to death and those infected with Red Hands, the dead numbered in the dozens. General Wagner had been much less concerned with how to spin the news than he’d been with capturing Maeve Sinclair, but everything had changed now. The general had been removed, and it would be up to Homeland Security to devise a story to explain the video that the whole world had seen of Oscar Hecht, as well as the quarantine, and the deaths in the mountains above Jericho Falls.

Vargas mustered a morbid grin. At least it wasn’t her job.

She stood on the rim of Moonglow River Gorge. The whole area had turned into a hive of postcrisis activity. Muddy Jeeps and three-wheelers lined the rim, some parked between trees. Homeland Security had accounted for nearly all the White Oak Security employees—living or dead—who had been working for General Wagner. Bodies were being loaded onto wagons and into the backs of Jeeps. Some asshole with a drone had been taken into custody, his drone destroyed. The state and local police had been informed that Maeve Sinclair had been found and they’d been asked to stand down.

One thing Vargas had to say for SRC Director Alena Boudreau—the old bitch worked fast. And she knew how to utilize her assets. Vargas had initially worried that her involvement with Red Hands would end her career, but so far it appeared that the general would suffer the consequences and that Vargas would be retained to continue her research. The bad news was that Maeve Sinclair had died.

But Rose Sinclair had been infected. That might not have been good news for Rose, but for Vargas, it was Christmas morning. They would have a living subject and two dead ones—Maeve and Oscar Hecht, not to mention the bodies of all those Maeve and Oscar had killed.

A gust of wind swirled across the rim of the gorge. Vargas shivered and looked up at the sky, breathing in the mountain air. It must have been going on 3:00 a.m. by now, she thought, and the last of the clouds had begun to clear off, exposing the stars and a crescent moon. It had been a long time since she had slept, but she felt energized. Exhilarated. Sleep could wait.

The distant buzz of an approaching helicopter arrived on the next gust of wind, just as a Garland Mountain lab monkey named Hurwitz trotted up to her.

“Dr. Vargas, they’re prepping to move the body. The chopper’s almost here,” Hurwitz said.

So earnest and dutiful. Alena Boudreau would be cleaning house now that she had taken over, but Hurwitz couldn’t be sure if Vargas would still have any power, so he was kissing her ass just in case. She nearly snapped at him—did he think she couldn’t hear the helicopter approaching? Instead, she thanked him with a beatific smile and turned to look down into the gorge. Even when Hurwitz took up position beside her, almost elbow to elbow, as if they were equals, Vargas did not slap him down. Like Hurwitz, Vargas couldn’t be sure what the new boss might do. She had to be careful, just in case this obsequious, snot-nosed lab monkey landed higher up the ladder than Vargas herself.

Fucking politics, she thought.

Down in the gorge, retrieval teams were still zipping corpses into body bags. They wore hazmat suits, despite Vargas’s certainty that they couldn’t be infected by contact with Maeve Sinclair’s victims. Vargas and her deputy, Kat Isenberg, had examined Oscar Hecht’s body themselves and were fairly sure that even contact with Maeve’s corpse wouldn’t release contagion. Whatever activated the passage of the infection from host to victim, it went dormant when the host died. At least, it had gone dormant in Oscar.

But better safe than sorry.

The helicopter buzzed over the tops of the trees. Vargas and Hurwitz both squinted and covered their eyes as the spotlights beneath the chopper swept the rim of the gorge. Arrays of emergency lights had been set up down at the bottom of the gorge to help with the investigation and body retrieval. The helicopter’s spotlights added to those lights, and now the area around Maeve’s corpse lit up like high noon in the desert. Several techs in hazmat suits backed away from Maeve’s corpse, waving to the chopper. Two of them knelt by the body, and Vargas saw they had not finished preparing it for airlift. The techs had shifted the corpse onto a backboard to preserve its condition, and now they lifted it, then lowered it into the thick, yellow, plastic body bag specifically crafted for potentially infected human remains. Black biohazard symbols were printed all over the yellow plastic.

“It’s finally over,” Hurwitz said as if he’d been running the show all along.

Vargas glanced at him. “It’s just starting, actually. Unless you need a vacation.”

Hurwitz smiled thinly. “Are you…”

He narrowed his eyes and leaned forward, as if he meant to pitch himself over the edge. Vargas looked into the gorge, following Hurwitz’s gaze, and felt a chill envelop her. She took a step back from the rim.

The corpse of Maeve Sinclair stood up, yellow biohazard body bag pooled around its ankles. Hazmat-suited techs scrambled away from her, but the dead thing reached out and caught the back of one tech’s hood. Maeve yanked the tech toward her, ripped open the plastic hood, then shoved the tech away from her. Grasping at the rip in his hood, the tech staggered a dozen feet, fell to his knees, and sprawled face-first onto the rocks at the edge of the Moonglow River, twitched once, and went still.

Dead.

Maeve hadn’t touched him.

“Oh, fuck this,” Hurwitz said, backing quickly away from the rim. He turned and started running toward the nearest mud-spattered Jeep.

Vargas couldn’t run. She could barely think. None of this made sense. The whole point of Red Hands was that it passed through skin-on-skin contact. She moved closer to the rim, resisting the urge to flee. The thing that had been Maeve Sinclair turned south and began to stagger in that direction, first slowly and then with unsettling speed. Its jerky, flailing movements suggested that whatever had happened to Maeve, even if she were somehow still alive—or alive again—her brain had stopped worked properly.

“Shoot her,” Vargas said quietly. Then she unclipped the radio at her belt, thumbed the button. “This is Cristina Vargas. We have Subject Two secured at the lab. We do not need Subject One. Eliminate her.”

“Dr. Vargas,” a voice came back, fuzzed with static. “Director Boudreau specifically—”

“Fuck her! She’s not here!” Vargas barked, voice cracking in panic. Her stomach churned and her heart pounded, and it occurred to her that there had been emotions she had never understood before now. Terror. Real terror. Her hands clenched and her palms turned slick with sweat as she shook her head and leaned farther over the edge, watching as hazmat-suited techs climbed rocks to get out of Maeve’s path and others retreated north. One of them jumped in the river, swept south in the current.

They had seen what Vargas had seen. Maeve had never touched the tech she’d just killed.

Not just terror, Vargas thought. Revulsion. For all Oscar Hecht’s talk about whispers in his head, about the Red Death, she’d thought it all absurd. But she watched Maeve spider-crawl over massive stone slabs and reach the wall of the gorge, and she understood that the thing down there in the gorge must be evil. Vargas would have said, even two minutes ago, that evil existed only in myth.

A whimper escaped from her lips.

She thumbed the radio again. “Did you hear me? Kill her, goddamn it!”

Still, they held off. The helicopter hovered, the pilot uncertain what to do next, rotors blasting a wicked downdraft into the gorge.

Then Maeve started climbing the wall, scrabbling on rock and dirt and clawing straight upward. The Blackcoats were gone and these Department of Homeland Security agents had a different set of orders, but at least one of them must have felt the terror that Vargas felt. A single gun opened fire, and then others followed. A bullet struck Maeve Sinclair in the head, blew out the side of her face, and she swung away from the wall, clinging by the fingers of one hand.

Her feet found purchase. Her free hand dug into a crevice. She leaned her head back and in the chopper’s spotlights. The single eye remaining in the intact left side of her face glared up at the DHS agents. Maeve shook as if in a seizure, managed to cling to the rock face, and then she screamed in a voice that sounded more like a wounded beast than anything human.

The helicopter veered off. The rotors whined as it cut southeast, sliced diagonally into the gorge, and struck the opposite wall. The whole gorge shook with the impact. The crump and scream of tearing metal filled the air, blotted out by the whine of the chopper’s engine, and then the fuel tank exploded. The wreckage scraped along the rock wall and landed, burning, on the opposite bank of the river.

A DHS agent opened fire on Maeve. Bullets struck the rocks around her. A second agent fired, and then a third, a chorus of gunfire.

Vargas had been an atheist since the age of eleven. Without realizing it, she began to pray silently.

The gunfire halted. One of the DHS agents went to his knees, coughing. A second agent clutched at his neck, trying to breathe, and then tumbled over the edge and fell into the gorge, bones cracking as he struck outcroppings all the way down.

Vargas could only watch as, one by one, every person up on the rim coughed and staggered and collapsed. Two more slipped off into the gorge. In the back of her mind, Cristina Vargas screamed at herself to run, but her heart simply wasn’t in it. In her heart, she knew it would make no difference.

In the driver’s seat of a Jeep tucked between two pine trees, Hurwitz managed to start the engine before he choked and vomited a stream of black and yellow bile. He collapsed onto the steering wheel. The horn beeped once. The engine kept running.

Bleeding, broken fingers grabbed the rocky ledge at the top of the gorge, and Maeve Sinclair crawled up onto the rim. Jerking limbs shifting as if she popped bones back into place, she stood and turned to scan the trees and the landscape to the north.

Forty yards away, Cristina Vargas covered her mouth to silence the mewling noise that escaped her. The air between them rippled with some invisible pulse, and she felt an oily film on her skin. Death enveloped her with a shift in air pressure. She tried to clear her throat. Her ears popped. Vargas tried to reach up to grab hold of her head, staggered by the pain that clamped around her skull, but she felt too weak even for that. When she coughed, it racked her body so fiercely that she went down on one knee. Black spittle sprayed from her lips, and she fell onto her side.

Lying there, floating on a wave of death, she saw the corpse of Maeve Sinclair turn southward and begin to run along the rim of the gorge, headed downhill. Off the mountain.

Vargas gave a final, rattling cough and saw no more.

“Walker, could you please take a seat? You’re irritating the hell out of me.”

He stood near the door, hands stuffed in his pockets, head bobbing and tapping one foot as if in time with music none of the others could hear.

“Nervous energy,” Walker said, staring at Alena. “Sorry.”

“Sit down,” she replied, not attempting to disguise it as anything but a command.

“No, ma’am. Director Boudreau. I don’t think so.”

Alena rolled her eyes. They weren’t off to a great start, the two of them. He knew he must be getting on her already frayed nerves, but the woman had used him as a pawn in her own power games, and Walker was in no mood to worry about pissing her off. General Wagner had an infinite black void where his ethics ought to have been, whereas Alena seemed like a human being, a woman with a moral compass. Even so, it would take time to decide whether or not he trusted her or even wanted to work for her. His time on the bench had its benefits, and the idea of making amends with his son had a lot more appeal than continuing to work for people who would employ men like General Henry Wagner.

“Suit yourself.” Alena sighed and turned her attention back to the others at the conference table.

Walker remained standing. Kept tapping his foot to that unheard rhythm. Most importantly, he stayed in that spot, just a few inches from the door. The sooner he could get out of there, the better. The farther from New Hampshire he could get when this was over, the happier he would be.

“What’s to become of General Wagner?” Justin W. Jones asked.

Alena cocked her head. “You miss him already, Dr. Jones?”

Idiot, Walker thought.

“No, no,” Jones replied, backpedaling fast. “He’s the DoD’s problem now. I just have a lot of questions, as you might imagine. Are you going to stay on-site, work out of Garland Mountain, now that the SRC has taken over our government contracts? Or will you put someone else here to oversee those? I just—”

Ted Sinclair slammed a hand onto the table. “Are you fucking kidding me?” He glared at Jones, fuming.

“You have something to say, Mr. Sinclair?” Alena asked.

Ted shot her a withering glance. “This is the conversation you want to have right now? Human resources? Rose is downstairs in a fish tank, and the rest of my family is … is gone. I know you’re all worried about the cover-up, how you’re going to clean up this mess, and who’s going to get fired and who’s going to prison—”

On the last word, he shifted his gaze toward Justin W. Jones.

“But all I want is some reassurance that everything that can be done for my daughter will be done and that nobody is going to try to separate me from her.”

Alena softened. Walker thought he might be seeing her real self for the very first time.

“We’re all living in the dark, Ted. I don’t know what’s going to happen now, but here are the things I can promise,” she said. “As long as I’ve got anything to say about it, the team here will do everything possible to help both of you. That includes letting you decide how you want to handle your comings and goings at this facility. If you want to be here 24-7, you’ll have anything you need for as long as you need it.”

Ted seemed to want to shout again, but he must have seen something in Alena’s eyes, perhaps the same thing Walker had just seen, because he gave a nod and exhaled as if he had found some comfort in this for the first time. His eyes dampened, and he reached up to wipe at them, turning away from the table for a moment.

“One small order of business,” Walker said. “Mr. Sinclair’s best friend is Dr. Rue Crooker, a biologist from Boston University. Right now, she’s downstairs helping Kat Isenberg try to figure out how to help Rose, and they’re apparently making some progress.”

Alena gave him a quizzical glance. “Dr. Crooker works here?”

“Not technically,” Walker said. He gave a small shrug. “I deputized her.”

“How the hell did she get through security?” Dr. Jones asked.

“Dr. Isenberg brought her in as a visitor, then sneaked her down to the lab.”

Jones swore, but Walker ignored him. He had no power here.

“You don’t have the authority to do anything like that,” Alena said.

“My role is … ill defined so far,” Walker reminded her. “I’m not sure I even work for you, to be honest. But what I would recommend is that you hire Dr. Crooker immediately, whatever the cost, to work with Dr. Isenberg on this. In fact, it wouldn’t be a terrible idea to give her the job of overseeing all the government-sponsored research that comes into Garland Mountain. Rue Crooker actually has ethics, maybe even a soul. This place could use her. And let’s be honest, Alena, the SRC could use her, too.”

“I’ll take it under advisement,” Alena said. “Now let’s—”

“Walker’s right,” Ted Sinclair said, his voice cold, words clipped. “You said you’d give me what I need to feel like Rose is being taken care of. What I need here is Rue.”

Alena tried to hide her pique. She managed a thin smile, then gave Walker a reproachful glance. “We’ll make it happen. Anything else?”

“I’m sure there will be,” Ted said. “But now’s not the time. I need to sober up. I need to get some rest. I need to go back and make sure Rose is okay, and I need to talk to Priya. Her parents will have to be called. I’m sure they’re crazy worried about her.”

Justin W. Jones sat up a bit straighter. Unsure of his place now, he kept his gaze on Alena. “There’s the matter of secrecy. We’re still working out a story for the media.”

Alena held up a hand to silence him. “Not now, Dr. Jones.”

Ted stood up, his chair scraping the floor. “Don’t worry, you heartless pricks. I know anything you’re going to do to help us now is contingent on us cooperating. I’ll make sure Priya understands, too. I’ll make the government pay for what we’ve lost eventually, but right now, I’m too tired and too sad to think straight, so I’ll put off my mercenary demands until I can take a breath without wanting to scream.”

His eyes brimmed with tears as he looked at Dr. Jones. “If you have people you love, I hope they die horribly, gasping for breath. I hope you’re there to see it. I hope they know you’re watching and they look at you like they don’t understand why you’re not helping them, and you never sleep again without being haunted by the memory of their eyes in that moment.”

Walker cringed, all the breath knocked out of him by those words.

Justin W. Jones looked as if he might throw up. “Jesus Christ. That’s—”

“Cruel?” Ted gave a hollow laugh. “I meant every word. I’d regret not saying it. I blame you and everyone else who could have stopped this from happening in the beginning. My dead children blame you. Rose, downstairs, is fucking death personified. She’ll never hug her father or her girlfriend again. She blames you, Jones. I hope you live a very long life without a moment’s peace.”

Alena and Jones had both lowered their heads.

Ted strode from the room, fists clenched at his sides.

A moment later, Walker followed.

Priya sat cross-legged on the floor, her muddy sneakers against the glass that separated her from Rose. “It’s hard to know what to say, except ‘I love you.’”

Rose faced her, also on the floor, the soles of her Sperrys pressed to the glass. She lowered her head, staring at her hands, which hung between her legs, fingers splayed, like creatures in hibernation. Waiting to be woken.

Seconds ticked past. Priya’s heart clenched.

“Rose?”

Rose looked up.

“I said I love you.” Priya reached forward and pressed a hand against the glass.

“I heard you, babe. I love you, too. You know I do,” Rose said. She didn’t reach out to touch the glass, but she did lift her gaze to meet Priya’s. “You should go home.”

“What? No way.”

Rose leaned toward the glass but still did not reach out to touch it. “You should be with your family—”

“You’re my family.”

This time, Rose did reach for the glass, but not for tenderness. She slapped her palm against it, making Priya flinch. “You’ve been shot. You need real doctors. A hospital. You need to be with your parents, and you need sleep before you work out what to do next.”

Priya’s bullet wound throbbed with heat and pain. She leaned away from the glass, just slightly, lowering her hand. “You think I’m going to abandon you?”

“That’s not—”

Priya stood. “I know what you mean. I don’t entirely disagree. And yes, I’m going to see my parents and calm them down, but I’m twenty-one, Rose. We’re not little high school giggle-girls. What I feel for you isn’t some crush. It’s not something I can just turn off or burn black candles and write in my journal about. I fucking love you. Okay, we’re still young in comparison to old people, but we’re old enough to have lived a little, met some shitty human beings, and I know what I want in this life, and that’s you.”

Rose did not stand. She placed the palms of both hands on the glass and looked up at Priya. “You can’t have me, Pri. Not unless they have a cure, and do you honestly think that’s going to happen anytime soon? Until then, this glass will always keep us apart. This glass, or some hazmat suit, or something else. You really think you’ll be okay with a girlfriend you can never touch, who can never touch you?”

“It won’t be never! They’ll find—”

“What if they don’t?”

Silence filled the space between them, more of a barrier than the glass could ever have been. Exhaustion gripped Priya, as if strength had been bleeding out of her. Depleted, only sorrow left, she told herself Rose needed rest, same as she did.

“You’ve lost so much,” Priya told her. “I can’t imagine what you’re feeling. But I promise you haven’t lost everything. I’m not going anywhere.”

On the other side of the glass, Rose sat in silence, tears running down her face.

Priya lowered herself to the floor again. She sat facing her love and reached out to press both hands to the glass. It wasn’t much, but it was all they had.

“Rosie,” she began.

“I love you, too,” Rose said without looking up. “So much.”

Priya smiled, even as the sadness tore her apart.

Long seconds passed.

Then alarms began to wail, red lights flashing overhead. Heavy footfalls thundered by, right outside the door, people shouting.

“What the hell?” Priya asked, turning toward the door. “What now?”

“Maeve,” Rose said. “She’s here.”

Priya stared at her. “That’s not … Babe, Maeve is dead.”

Rose stiffened, spine rigid. Her head turned, chin lifted, as if she heard something Priya’s ears could not.

“You may be right,” Rose said. “But dead or not, she’s coming for me.”

28

The alarms shrieked, red lights flashing. Walker imagined the inner corridors of NORAD when nuclear apocalypse was imminent. He turned to look at Dr. Jones. Alena might be in charge now, but Jones knew the facility and its protocols.

“Talk to me, Jones!”

Justin W. Jones had gone pale pink in the flashing red lights. He looked like he might vomit. Whatever had happened, this was not a drill.

“Alena, get up!” Walker barked.

He didn’t have to tell Ted Sinclair. The man reached for Alena, but she shook him off, and then all of them were standing, moving toward the door. Walker reached for the knob, convinced that the alarms would put them into lockdown, meaning locked in, but when he turned the knob, the door swung open.

The two Homeland Security agents out in the corridor were barking questions on their comm units, but they looked as disoriented as Walker felt. He turned and grabbed Jones, hauled him close.

“What is this?”

“Alpha Red,” Jones snapped, whipping his head around, desperate to be free. “Terrorist attack or bioagent release. It’s never happened before. It can’t be—”

Ted grabbed Walker’s arm. “Rose. I’ve got to get to her.”

“It could be her,” Alena told him. “It must be.”

“What about Priya?” Ted said. “I can’t just—”

Walker nodded, turning to Jones again. “There a safe room on this floor? Quarantine space, in case of contamination?”

Dr. Jones started to point south along the corridor, toward an array of glass-walled offices. Walker spotted a darkened hallway, lost in shadow between the flares of the red emergency lights. He spoke, but his words were lost in the blare of the klaxons.

Walker looked at the DHS agents. “Take Director Boudreau and Dr. Jones. Get them into a safe room, and stay there till the all-clear.”

Alena’s eyes narrowed. He could see cold calculations running in her head. If she felt a fraction of Walker’s own terror, she didn’t show it.

“Move!” Alena snapped at Jones.

Jones started nodding and kept nodding as he hurtled down the corridor ahead of them. Alena and the DHS agents followed. Walker glanced at Ted, saw that the other man understood his intentions without him needing to voice them, and together they ran the opposite direction, toward the elevators.

The red lights turned the halls into a strobing crimson hell. Walker raced ahead of Ted Sinclair, who limped as fast as he could manage on his injured knee. Ted called out questions as he tried to keep up, but Walker ignored them. He had no answers.

As he turned a corner, he heard the first gunshots.

His breath caught in his throat, and he froze in the hall, listening. In the quiet between the cries of the alarm, more gunfire erupted. Ted caught up, grabbed Walker’s sleeve. Walker shook him off, precious seconds ticking by as he racked his brain. Terrorists, maybe. Someone had sent the assassin, Agatha, unless she’d been a solo operator. Then there’d been the killers on dirt bikes, trying to get to Maeve, to kill her and take the death touch from her.

“What is this?” Ted asked, staring at him, wide-eyed.

Walker held up a hand to silence him, thinking. Could it be General Wagner? Would he have gone this far? A traitor to his nation? Would White Oak Security have allowed their Blackcoats to kill DHS agents and armed security at a top-secret research facility under government supervision?

“Fuck it,” Ted snarled. “And fuck you.”

He hurried onward, heedless of the gunfire. Walker knew he was right. The only way to answer his questions was to live through this, but right now, all Ted Sinclair cared about was protecting Rose and Priya, and Walker understood that. If Charlie were here, he would have made the same choice.

Charlie. Walker thought Charlie might have told him to go back and take shelter in a safe room with Alena and Dr. Jones. But Walker had never made his choices based on safety. His grandfather had been a malicious bastard, his father had been a coward, but both men had given him the same gift, one thing they both had in common and had passed to Walker. A single quote from a century before, which Walker had used in his high school yearbook. “A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.”

Walker hadn’t been built for safe harbor.

He followed Ted Sinclair, running through strobing red lights, running toward gunfire.

They reached the elevator hub. Gunfire echoed down the corridor to the left. Double doors down that end smashed open. Two guards and a quartet of DHS agents backed through the doors, firing at invaders Walker couldn’t see.

Ted punched the call button, which glowed orange. Lockdown or not, the elevator still worked.

Walker took his arm and pressed him into the narrow well of the elevator door, seconds ticking by, waiting for the doors to slide open. Gunshots echoed down the corridor, punctuating the clamor of the alarm. Walker reached for his gun, and his fingers grasped nothing but air—the guards had taken it from him when they’d arrived.

He worried the elevator wasn’t coming, that the button had lit up but lockdown meant the lift wouldn’t really be working.

He stared at the backs of the DHS agents and security guards as they kept backpedaling.

A DHS agent stumbled, tripped over his own feet. For a heartbeat, Walker thought him an idiot, but then he saw the man turn onto his hands and knees, gasping and grabbing for his throat. Purple blotches blistered his neck. Dark spittle flew from his mouth.

A security guard and another DHS agent grabbed for one another as they fell, sprawling on the floor. By then, the first had died, black blood pooling around him, and the other three had begun to cough and gasp and stumble.

Over their heads, Walker saw a single figure striding along the corridor toward him, cast in shadows and flashes of crimson light. Beyond her, scattered in the hall back the way she’d come, were more corpses.

“Ted,” Walker said, grabbing the back of his neck. “Run.”

Ted stared at her. “Rose. Oh, God … my Rosie.”

“That’s not Rose.”

“But you … you said Maeve was dead.”

Walker shoved him hard, got him moving back the way they’d come, had to catch Ted to keep him from falling when his bad knee went out.

“She was,” Walker said. “I swear to God, she was.”

There’d been a bright red Exit sign twenty feet back. The door showed a pictograph of a person walking up some stairs, along with the words AUTHORIZED USE ONLY—ALARM WILL SOUND. He almost laughed as he kicked the release bar and the door swung inward.

Walker pulled and shoved and half-carried Ted, who cried out in pain as they ran and stumbled down the stairs. The man had cracked ribs and had torn something in his knee. Whatever numbing his drinking had provided had worn off now, scoured away by pain, but Walker couldn’t let him stop or even slow down. With every flight of stairs, every landing, he waited for the coughing to start. If Maeve saw the stairwell door open, she would start down after them. Would the concrete and steel protect them, slow the spread of the contagion that had begun to blossom out from her? He prayed it would. Prayed, unsure who or what might be out there to listen.

They reached sublevel two. Walker blinked in surprise when he saw the sign, then barreled through the door, hauling Ted behind him. Somehow the alarm sounded even louder here. The red lights flashed. He spun in a circle, trying to figure out which direction the quarantine chamber might be. They weren’t in the hexagon at the core of the building but in a side corridor. Down the hall, he saw the open space of the common area around the hexagon, the main elevator bank, and he hauled Ted in that direction.

“We have to find Rose and Priya,” Ted said.

“That’s what we’re doing. But we need a safe room or we’ll be dead. Priya, too. One of the labs, if we can get through.”

“Not without them!”

Walker turned to snap at him. “I know!”

They reached the hexagon. He skidded to a halt and spun around, the klaxons blaring into his brain. Two guards stood by the elevator, guns drawn. He was about to run to them, warn them that Maeve would be coming, and then the red lights flashed brightly and he saw the lab beyond them. A pair of women stood beyond the glass, looking out.

Rue Crooker and Kat Isenberg.

“Come on!” Walker ordered.

Ted ripped himself from Walker’s grasp. “Not without Rose.”

Walker reeled on him. “Where do you think Maeve is going? Rose is infected now. That happened because Maeve died, Ted. She died. I saw her corpse. Shot to death, bled out. Red Hands didn’t kill Rose because it needed her as a host. Something’s happened that we can’t possibly understand, but Maeve didn’t come here by accident. She’s looking for something, and the only thing that makes any sense is that she’s looking for Rose. For them to be together.”

Ted took a step away from him. Stumbled, nearly fell.

A figure appeared down the hall, beyond the lab where Rue and Kat waited. A shadow between red flashes. Walker felt his heart sink, waited for the sickness to carve him up, but then the red light strobed again and he saw it wasn’t Maeve at all.

Priya ran toward them. “Ted! Oh, thank God. Please, you’ve gotta come. Rose is fighting it, but she needs you. Please!”

Ted raced to her, barely a trace of his limp now, and the two of them vanished around the corner.

The elevator doors opened, and the two guards stepped on. They’d watched the whole thing unfold, guns at the ready, but hadn’t opened fire. One of them looked deathly pale, but not sick. Not yet. Neither of them wore a hazmat suit.

Walker ran toward the lab, where Rue and Kat were gesturing madly for him to hurry.

He thought of Ted and Rose. Of Ted and Maeve. Of Ted and Logan.

He ran faster.

Stop fighting, Rose thought. They’re right there. All you have to do is reach for them. If you need them, you know they will not deny you. That’s what love is, Rose. That is what love is.

“No,” she rasped, lips flecked with bitter black spittle. She licked it away, swallowed it down, fought the urge to throw it back up. “You’re not … me. That’s not…”

“Rosie. Love?” her father said, so gently. He uttered a little sob and wrapped his arms around himself, and she knew he did it because the glass kept him from reaching for her, holding her and comforting her the way a parent should. The way a true parent would want to.

“That’s not love!” Rose cried.

She began to cough, turned away from her dad and Priya. Huddled her face in the corner of her isolation room.

“Fight it, Rose,” Priya said quietly.

She understood, more than Rose’s father did. Priya had been on the other side of the glass when the hunger had really begun to claw into Rose. She’d cried as Rose had described to her the voice in her head, the insidious things it said to her, the suggestions it made. The way she wanted to touch Priya, how she wanted to rationalize it.

The hunger had stabbed her in the chest seconds after the alarms began to sound. It had been nestled inside her, somewhat under control, and Rose had believed she had time, that she could hold it off. Then the alarms blared and the red lights flashed and the hunger pounced, as if it had been waiting for the moment she would be off-balance.

And it whispered to her.

He loves you. He’ll do anything for you.

Rose had told Priya to find her dad. Much as she loved Priya, and as broken as her father so often seemed, she needed him now the way she had when she’d been a young girl, waking in the dark after a bad dream, afraid of every shadow. Afraid of getting out of her bed and afraid of staying in. Her mother was dead. Rose needed her father to tell her everything would be all right in the end, that they could help her. That they could rip this hunger and its whispers from inside her. She needed her dad to lie to her.

To hold her.

No. Not hold her. Anything but that.

Rose turned to him. Her throat felt ablaze with pain, torn up on the inside. Trickles of fluid ran down her face, but they weren’t tears. Plague lesions had formed and were leaking.

“You have to go,” she told them, looking from her dad to Priya. “You shouldn’t have come in here with me.”

“We can’t,” her father said, face etched with sorrow, his heart breaking over and over and over again. “I told you. We’re safer in here than out there. As long as you can control it, we’re safer. Maeve is out there.”

Rose shook her head. Every muscle felt the urge to reach for him, to embrace him, to kiss Priya, to infect them and take their lives to feed the hunger and the disease in her. But she leaned against the wall and wrapped her arms around her knees.

Fuck you, she thought, and this inner voice belonged to her. You can’t have them.

The Red Death whispered to her in return, the voice slithering inside her skull. The sickness will rot you down to snot and marrow.

Rose didn’t care.

She looked at Priya and then at her father.

“That thing out there,” she said. “It’s not Maeve.”

Walker stared at Kat Isenberg, heart pounding, glad to be on the inside of the secure door of the lab. Each of the sublevel labs at Garland Mountain had been built with contamination protocols. The moment the alarms had gone off, each lab had sealed itself to keep any contagion from escaping and also to prevent any outside contaminant from getting in. They were safe in here, or so Walker told himself. Images of the guards and Homeland Security agents dropping dead in the upstairs corridor swam into his head, and he pushed them away. Nobody really knew what they were dealing with here. All they could do was press on.

“You’re sure about this?” Walker asked.

Kat threw up her hands. “Of course I’m not sure. Rue’s only been here half a day. Her instincts are fantastic, and we worked on this together, but I have no idea if it’s—”

“Just tell him!” Rue said, plugging her ears with her fingers. The alarms were drilling into all their brains by now.

Kat nodded. “Vargas and Hecht and I were working on a bacteriophage engineered to shock the infection into dormancy. It’s not a cure. The introduction of the phage won’t kill the bacteria, but it should slow it down. Might even put it into hibernation inside the cells.”

Walker could have kissed them both. “Inject me.”

Rue unplugged her ears. “We don’t know what it’ll—”

“It might keep me from being infected,” he said. “If it doesn’t, it’ll diminish the effects enough that it should buy you time to keep working.”

Walker didn’t need to see the glance the two scientists exchanged to know they agreed with his assessment. They were all scientists.

“Inject me,” he said again. “Then give me the biggest syringe you have. I’m going to find Maeve. Nothing else has stopped her, but if anything can—”

Something slammed against the glass door. Kat Isenberg gave a jump and cried out. Walker spun around, but he saw Rue’s expression even before he turned and he knew what he would see.

Maeve Sinclair’s corpse dragged a bloody palm across the glass, made a fist, and began to pound on the door. So many bullet wounds had torn up her body that the fabric of her clothes had become almost indistinguishable from her flesh. All ripped, all bloody. One half of her face had been obliterated. Shards of her skull jutted from brain matter like shark’s teeth.

The grin on what remained of her lips and the red gleam in her single eye were enough to tell him that it wasn’t Maeve looking through the glass at them.

Walker wished he had time to mourn her.

“Kat, tell me you have that injection ready.”

Rue told her to stop, to wait, but Kat grabbed Walker’s arm. They’d been working down here for hours and had studied a hundred possible solutions. He winced as she injected him with the only one any of them believed might make a difference.

Walker held out his hand.

The thing inside Maeve Sinclair watched as Kat put a second syringe in Walker’s palm.

It stopped slapping its bloody hands against the glass and its half smile widened as if it knew what came next. As if it dared Walker to try.

“Rue,” Walker said. “Open the goddamn door.”

“No,” she said. “Don’t do this.”

Kat Isenberg whispered some small kindness to Rue and then gently moved her out of the way, reaching for the controls that would override the contamination protocol and allow her to open the door. To let Walker out … or to let the monster in.

Another wet slap hit the glass.

Walker glanced over and saw it wasn’t Maeve’s hand but her ruined face. She slumped into the door and slid down, collapsing, leaving a smear of blood and mucus and black rot on the glass. For a second or two, she leaned against the door, and then the dead thing toppled backward and slid onto the floor.

The malevolent grin on that half face remained, but the red light winked out in that one dead eye, and the corpse lay still.

Rose felt a different sort of ache. Not the hunger that gnawed her insides but a kind of lure, hooked into her chest, drawing her with such power that it could not be refused. The alarm continued to blare, but the noise had receded somehow, as if muffled by this new yearning. The red lights flashed on the faces of her father and her girlfriend, but she barely saw them now.

“What are you doing, Rose?” Priya asked, her voice little more than a whisper in the dark, the scratching of a mouse trapped in the wall.

Rose exhaled, weakness deflating her. She leaned against the glass wall, looked through it, and wondered where Priya had gone. Earlier, they had been able to gaze at one another through the glass.

“Hey! Rose! Snap out of it!” Priya shouted.

She clapped her hands loudly. Rose blinked and swiveled her head to look at Priya.

“Where are you going?” Priya asked.

Ted stood behind her, hands on Priya’s shoulders. “Rosie, just stay here. Please. You can’t go out there.”

In the strobing red glare, Rose saw her own hand wrapped around the doorknob. The same door her dad and Priya had used to join her in the isolation room. They’d come in here because they thought they would be safer with her than out there in the corridors with Maeve on the hunt.

Rose could feel Maeve out there now, and she understood what Priya and her father did not—sharing this room with her couldn’t keep them safe. Rose might be able to control the hunger, the Red Death that whispered into her brain, but Maeve had already lost that fight. The infection had gotten deep into Maeve, eaten into her marrow, and all that remained of her now was the Red Death. Rose could feel it out there in the halls of Garland Mountain—coming for her. The Red Death might feed on others along the way, might spread its contagion, infect everyone it came near, but the whispers inside Rose’s head knew the truth.

The rotting, living death had been torn in half, split between the Sinclair sisters, and it wanted to be reunited.

“I can’t stay here,” Rose managed to say before a ragged cough burst from her lips. She gasped to catch her breath. Bitter black fluid leaked from her eyes and nose. She looked over at her dad and Priya. Sounds had retreated again, their voices were muffled, but it was better that she could not hear their pleas.

“You’ll be safe without me,” she said, looking sadly at her father. “I’m going out to give her what she wants.”

Priya started to reach for her, anguished, heart breaking. Ted wrapped his arms around Priya and pulled her away, held her back. He stared at Rose, crying, but he would not let Priya be infected.

“Thank you, Daddy,” Rose said.

She opened the door they had unlocked when they’d come looking for her. Rose wasn’t a prisoner any longer, and neither was the death inside her.

The door slammed behind her, and Rose went out to meet her sister.

Walker crouched by the glass door of Garland SL2-Alpha and stared at Maeve Sinclair’s ravaged corpse. He had watched her die twice tonight and wanted to be sure. The closer he looked, the more he focused, he understood how impossible it was for her to have gotten this far. Bullets had torn apart her chest. Broken bone jutted from her side. Her right knee looked shattered. But of course it was her face, her skull, the visible wreckage of her brain, that told the tale. Even in the pulsing red light, he could see the black lesions on her brain. Blisters leaked a thick fluid that looked more like paste than blood.

“Stay back from the door,” Rue said over Walker’s shoulder.

“She’s dead.”

“Walker,” Kat Isenberg replied, “she’s right. We don’t know that. Until someone shows up to confirm and start the cleanup, let’s not take any chances.”

He kept staring at Maeve. Her one good eye had filmed over, and now a viscous, milky caul had begun to form on the retina.

“It doesn’t make sense,” he said. “The Blackcoats killed her in the gorge, but here she is. You both saw her. She had enough strength to get all the way down here, but then her body just gives out?”

“For Christ’s sake,” Rue said, “look at her.”

“That’s what I’m doing.”

Rue came and stood beside him. She didn’t crouch down, though her view of the corpse would be obscured by the smear of blood and fluid that Maeve had left on the glass.

“She’s not moving,” Rue said. “She’s not going to move. Whatever drove her to get her here, the bacteria inside her, the Red Death, her body finally took enough damage that she couldn’t go any farther.”

Walker stared. “Maybe.”

As he stood and turned toward them, a wave of disorientation swept over him. He wavered on his feet, and Rue grabbed his arm to steady him.

Isenberg hurried over to them. “What is it? Do you feel sick?”

The question made Rue back away from him as if touching him had burned her. She looked at her hands, eyes flaring with worry. Isenberg watched him through heavily lidded eyes, but he could practically see the anxiety bristling inside her. Her body language gave away her fear.

“Just a little light-headed,” he promised them. “Yes, probably from the bacteriophage you shot me up with, but I don’t feel sick. Not even a cough.”

“It wouldn’t infect you like that, anyway,” Isenberg said.

“I know that,” Walker replied, then pointed at Rue. “Tell her.”

Rue flushed. “I don’t need to be told. I’m just jumpy after everything. Jumpy and tired.”

Walker saw the tension leave them, and he exhaled. “All right. So we just wait for a cleanup crew to handle this. I hope you have a deck of cards or something.”

Isenberg started talking about what she thought would happen now, wondering who might be left alive in the building and how long it might take for someone to come investigate.

Rue glanced back along the corridor that led deeper into the lab, where there were two isolation rooms, conference rooms, offices, and additional laboratory spaces. “You’re telling me there aren’t hazmat suits in all these labs, just as basic equipment provided?”

“There are at least four,” Isenberg replied. “But do you really want to be the first one out there, checking out Maeve’s remains, with no backup at all? Not me. Either way, we’re all going to get to know each other much better in the next couple of days. The quarantine on this whole facility is going to be thorough and—”

Rue pointed through the glass. “Here we go. Faster than I’d have thought.”

Walker turned, pressed his face to the glass, and saw four people in shapeless yellow hazmat suits working their way along the wide common area around the elevator hub in the middle of the hexagon. All four had guns, and they moved like soldiers instead of scientists—though Walker himself was both and knew others who fit the same description.

The alarm stopped blaring.

“Thank God,” Isenberg sighed.

Walker’s eardrums pulsed with the same rhythm, as if the alarm had not gone silent. A tinny buzz in his ears reminded him of a dozen crowded music clubs from his misspent college years. The red emergency lights kept flashing, but as irritating as they were, he would endure them forever as long as he didn’t have to hear the klaxons anymore.

“Hey!” Rue called, slapping the glass door of SL2-Alpha. “Over here!”

One of the hazmat-suited guards spotted them, started in their direction, and then halted as he spotted the wreckage of Maeve’s corpse. He pointed, said something to his comrades, and slowly they began to approach.

Walker leaned against the glass, waiting for them.

Out the corner of his eye, he saw something twitch, and looked down at Maeve’s remains.

The dead thing’s right hand shot upward, stretching as if it had just woken from a long sleep. As it did, skin and rotting flesh tore and split. Long, spindly, skeletal fingers pushed out from within. The skin of her arm hung down in strips. The skeletal fingers reached up, sank sharpened tips into cheek and skull and brain, and ripped. The other hand propped the dead thing up and it began to rise.

The Red Death tore Maeve Sinclair’s ruined body off as if it were nothing but a costume, a skin suit. It had grown like a tumor inside her, infected her, taken her over. It broke skull away, cracked off ribs, removing the Maeve husk like a lobster shell.

Behind Walker, Rue Crooker had begun to pray.

“I think it’s … Is it the devil?” Kat Isenberg asked, her voice hitching, both hands up behind her head. She trembled, shook her head, stepped back from the glass. Her eyes hinted at encroaching madness. “We woke it up, Walker! Oh, God, we woke it up!”

Draped in ribbons and scraps and dripping fluids of Maeve, the withered, red cadaverous thing heard the shouts of the guards in their hazmat suits. They opened fire. Bullets ripped into the dead thing, ricocheted off the glass, and the Red Death turned to glare at the yellow hazmat suits awash in the flashing crimson lights.

It seemed to expect them to fall.

When they did not, safe inside their hazmat suits, it moved with unnerving speed. Those spindly fingers were sharp enough to tear through the yellow suits. Men and women screamed, kept firing their guns, and then were coughing. Falling. Dying.

“We have to do something,” Walker said quietly, almost to himself.

Rue laughed in a way that told him something inside her had broken. “Do what? What the fuck can we do?”

“Not you,” Walker said, looking at her. “I had the injection.”

He turned and stared at her, then Isenberg. “Both of you get into an isolation room. Right now. Ten seconds and I’m opening this door! Go!”

They hesitated.

Walker was about to shout at them again when Rue pointed out through the glass.

“Look.”

He turned … and saw Rose.

Had Rose been looking only with her eyes, she would never have stopped screaming. She saw the broken, shredded human remains sprawled on the floor surrounded by little puddles of blood and viscera, and she knew it had once been her sister. But from thirty feet away, in front of the doorway to SL2-Epsilon, she felt Maeve’s presence. The yearning that drew her to this place, at this moment, came not only from the contagion inside her—the infection she and Maeve had shared—but from a deeper, even more primal connection.

She stared at the withered husk before her, at the red gleam in its black eyes and the way its dried skin pulled back from yellow teeth into a corpse’s grin, and she saw both death and beauty there. The Red Death had been an infection, now torn free of its host, but some part of Maeve had infected it in return.

“Sister,” Rose said.

The husk staggered toward her, dragged its feet, smearing Maeve’s blood in its wake. It gained strength, spine straightening, thin arms rising as the red emergency lights continued to flash, so that its movements seemed a zoetrope nightmare. One step in each moment of darkness, one step bathed in red light. Bones cracked as it stretched its hands out for her, fingers bent into claws.

In the silence, Rose heard Walker and Rue pounding on the glass door of SL2-Alpha. In the next flash of red light, she saw them there, banging, gesturing to her, calling out. They understood nothing. How could they know what it felt like to have the Red Death seething inside her? To feel the urge, the yearning so strong that the word hunger could never describe the ravenous need? How could they understand what it felt like to know you were one part of a whole, to feel the pull of your other half, to scream inside your own skull and fight with your soul to run the other direction, but to watch your body move toward death regardless?

At least I won’t be alone, Rose thought, staring into that cadaverous grin, those hellish, eternal eyes, and searching for her sister there.

Rose opened her arms, and the Red Death stepped into that embrace.

Walker smashed his fist against the glass. He started to scream Rose’s name again, but when the husk slid its arms around her and lay its head so gently on her shoulder, he saw a sorrowful peace on Rose’s face.

He held his breath and could only watch as new blemishes emerged on Rose’s neck and cheek, blistering, cratering, bleeding black.

Beside him, Rue cried out, pounding on the glass.

Walker grabbed her arm, turned her toward Isenberg. “Get in the isolation room. Right now.”

As he grabbed the larger syringe, Rue started to argue, but Isenberg reached for her hand and tugged her away from him. The two of them rushed deeper into the lab. Walker called out to them to tell him when they were about to seal the isolation room door. Eight or nine seconds was all it took before he heard Isenberg shout and then the slam of the door.

He slapped the fat black button on the wall, an emergency disengage for the lab’s entry door. Air hissed as the containment seal breached, and he closed his eyes for a moment, filled with a regret he could not express. The last thought he’d had before hitting that button should have been of his son. The injection Isenberg had given him made him feel nauseated and unsteady, his vision blurred slightly, which meant it had done something to him. Maybe killed him, maybe inoculated him. All these years, he had made one decision after another to put himself at risk with hardly a thought for the scars he would leave behind.

I’m sorry, he thought to a son who would never hear him.

Syringe clutched like a dagger, he ran toward the husk, unsure what it would do, knowing only that he had crossed the threshold. He breathed in the air that had killed so many others. His head throbbed with pain, and that swirl of nausea worsened. He waited for a cough, waited for a tickle in his throat, waited for the pain of fissures rotting on his skin.

He raised the syringe.

Red lights flashed, turning the embrace between Rose and the Red Death into a flickering grotesquerie. In the quiet, he could hear Rose weeping over the sound of his own footfalls and the beating of his heart. He crept toward the husk, thumb on the syringe, aiming for the back of its neck.

Walker’s breath caught in his throat.

He froze in place and watched as the husk began to wither even more. The dried skin pulled taut over its bones. It shriveled in Rose’s arms. The leathery skin crumbled, cascading to the floor in a fine red dust. Rose opened her eyes, releasing a moan that echoed with loss. She fell to her knees and tried to grasp the Red Death’s bones in her hands, but they gave way at her touch and spilled to the floor into the growing pile of red dust, as if that was all they had ever been.

Rose drew a heavier breath, there on her knees, trembling. To Walker’s eyes, she looked thinner, as if she, too, had begun to wither.

He spoke her name, and she looked up at him, scarlet eyes gleaming brightly.

“Help me,” she whispered in a voice he’d never heard before.

Walker plunged the syringe into her neck, then stood back to wait.

Seconds passed before he allowed himself to hope. Then Rose coughed once, reached up to touch the blisters on her neck, and climbed unsteadily to her feet. The red tint in her eyes remained, but it had diminished.

She spoke in a raspy whisper, as if the words came from a long way off.

“Get me back into isolation,” Rose said. “I’ll … hold on as long as I can.”

Behind her eyes, he thought he saw something else looking out.

“Whatever they’re going to do,” she said, “tell them to work fast.”

29

The remaining hours of darkness passed quickly. Rue managed to fall asleep shortly after sunrise, though she had only the clock to let her know morning had come. On a plastic mattress worthy of a college dormitory, sweaty under a synthetic blanket, she managed four hours of fitful sleep in which she dreamed she woke in a snowbound winter cabin. Logs crackled in the fireplace while the beams of the cabin groaned with gusts of wind. In her dream, Rue nestled herself into the arms of a lover, sprawled on the floor in front of the fire. At peace.

She woke to the slamming of a door, saw where she was, and lay rigid on the bed, listening, waiting to hear a scream or an alarm. A full minute passed before she could slow her heartbeat to something resembling its normal rhythm.

A knock came at the door.

Rue sat up, looked blearily around at the cell she’d slept in. Dr. Isenberg had told her that almost everyone who worked in the sublevel labs ended up crashing in the isolation rooms at least once. As exhausted as she had been this morning, the space hadn’t bothered her, but now an urgency filled her. A claustrophobic frisson that made her drag the sweaty blanket around her and hurry to the door.

When she opened it, Walker waited on the other side.

She blinked. “You don’t look dead.”

“The jury’s still out.”

“Seriously,” Rue said. “They’ve cleared you? After Isenberg injected you with that bacteriophage?”

“I’m not contagious,” Walker replied. “Doesn’t mean they’re letting me out of here anytime soon. They let me sleep for two hours, but mostly they’ve been taking my blood and other fun samples.”

Rue could see how exhausted he must be. The bags beneath his eyes were dark crescents, and his skin had a sallow hue. But there were no plague blossoms, no black bruising on his throat, and at least thus far, he didn’t seem to be coughing.

“You’re actually okay? After being so close to that … to Maeve?”

“I wasn’t kidding. The jury is definitely still out. There’s no trace of the Red Hands bacterium in my blood culture or cells. Just the phage.”

“That injection shouldn’t have been so effective,” Rue said. “Not if you were exposed to Red Hands. Maeve was radiating that contagion like some kind of cloud around her. Based on what Alena said last night, up at the gorge, it killed people who were almost a hundred yards away.”

Walker shrugged. “By the time she got to us, I think she’d almost burned out. It had used her up. Director Boudreau and I think what you call a ‘cloud’ had limits. When her body gave in, the aura effect dissipated. I wouldn’t have wanted the thing that ripped its way out of her to touch me—or Rose, for that matter—but I think I got lucky.”

Rue leaned against the doorframe, wrapped in her blanket. “I’m glad. Enough good people died yesterday.”

“I’m still stuck here for a while, though,” Walker said. “I’m guessing four or five days of poking, prodding, tests, and observation to see if I start unraveling. I’d like to get home, but I’m also glad to stick around and see how things go for Rose.”

Rue lifted her eyebrows.

Walker nodded. “She’s alive. And sick, but not any sicker than she was when you fell asleep. Isenberg is working with the SRC team that Alena brought in.”

A darkness seemed to pass over his face. Walker exhaled, eyes downcast. “The only voice coming out of her is her own, so far, but you can see it in her eyes sometimes, when she looks at you. The infection is still there, and so is the other thing. The old thing. Sometimes you can feel it watching.”

“Last night, Isenberg said she thought if we could kill the infection in Rose, we could get rid of it.”

Rue and Walker studied each other for a moment. She’d noticed neither of them wanted to name the ancient presence rooted inside Rose Sinclair. Neither of them wanted to call it the Red Death, as if someone using the term Poe had coined would lend the thing even more malignant power.

“Speaking of Alena,” Walker said, “I hear she offered you a job.”

“Last night,” Rue confirmed. “Though I get the impression it’s more about locking me into the penalties for revealing government secrets. If I’m an employee—”

Walker scowled. “Don’t kid yourself. She needs you way more than the university does. You’ve already proven your usefulness.”

“I strip-mined Oscar Hecht’s research and took a shot in the dark when we were desperate.”

“Okay,” Walker said. “Have it your way. But I hope you take the job.”

“I’ve been searching for biological secrets to unlock my whole life. After the things I’ve seen, there’s no way I can go back to my old job. Besides, Kat Isenberg told me she wants someone to boss around.” Rue shrugged. “I’ve got a few days to think it over. None of us are going to be released from quarantine till then, at least, so I might as well make myself useful in the meantime.”

Walker held on to the door. “I’m glad to hear it. And I’m grateful, Rue. I don’t want that to get lost in all of this. Alena sent me up here on an assignment. This was my job. But you got into it just because you cared about Ted and his family. Not many people would have stuck with it when they realized how dangerous things were becoming.”

Rue flushed. “He’s my best friend. They’re my family, too.”

“I know,” Walker said. “And he’s asking for you. Why don’t you go and see him before you get to work.”

“I’ll do that. Thank you,” Rue replied. “How is he?”

“Edgy. Probably itchy for a drink, but he’s focused on his daughter. Determined. Standing tall.”

Rue surprised herself by smiling. That was something, at least.

Rose couldn’t bear to tell her father she wanted to be alone. Flush with fever, racked with chills, plagued by whispers and hunger pangs, she had barely slept at all. The isolation room she found herself in now had a bit more personality than the one she’d been in the night before. The researchers in this lab had painted the walls a soothing blue, and phosphorescent paint had been used to dapple the ceiling with glow-in-the-dark stars, but that didn’t make it any easier to look at her father and Priya through the glass.

When Rue came to the door, knocking softly, and called Ted out into the corridor to speak with her, Rose felt weak with gratitude.

Priya slept on the other side of the glass. The Homeland Security agents had carried a bed in from another part of the lab so that they could all be together, despite being separated by the glass. Rose watched Priya sleep, and it soothed her to know she would be okay. Her bullet wound had been seen to. Her parents had been called. Someone on the outside had apparently met with them in the early hours of the morning, shortly after it had all come to an end, and explained that she would be quarantined here at Garland Mountain for several days along with Rose and Ted. Priya had spoken to her father, and then Ted had gotten on the phone.

Now Priya slept. Rose exhaled softly, spreading her fingers across the glass, heart aching as she watched Priya’s chest rise and fall. Her face looked peaceful, as if none of the horrors of the prior day had ever happened.

She’s going to leave you, a voice whispered in her head.

It wasn’t her own voice, but it didn’t belong to the Red Death, either.

“I know,” Rose said quietly, pressing on the glass. The hunger had diminished but not disappeared. Sadness clawed at her now more than hunger. The voice understood.

Priya would have to leave. Rose would have to stay. Priya’s family would want her out of here, out of danger. She would argue at first, but Rose would insist. She would break Priya’s heart if she had to, to make sure she would be safe.

It wouldn’t be safe in here, Rose knew. Not until the SRC found a way to help her.

Maybe not ever.

Alena Boudreau had promised they would never stop trying. They had already found a way to suspend the spread of the bacteria, to reduce the infection, which Alena said gave her faith they might be able to kill it. Burn it out, she’d said.

For now, the fever remained.

And the voices.

Dad won’t leave you here alone, one of those voices said.

Rose smiled and wiped at her eyes. She’d been stubborn, trying not to cry. The hunger might still be in her, the malignant old god, the dead thing that spoke to her. But the other presence inside her felt even stronger, and it soothed her fever and gave her courage.

I won’t ever leave you, either, it said, inside her head. I love you.

“I love you, too, Maeve,” Rose whispered, leaning against the glass of her cage. “I love you, too.”

Walker had showered and shaved. They’d come for more blood tests and given him orange juice and coffee and had scrounged up a box of Pop-Tarts from somewhere. He’d met with Alena three separate times, talked to Kat and Rue. He’d seen Ted Sinclair only briefly, and that was enough. With General Wagner gone, the man’s grief and pain needed a target, and Walker didn’t feel like volunteering for that assignment. The longer Ted went without a drink, the worse it would be.

Ted planned to use quarantine to dry out. Walker didn’t bother to warn him that he would be putting himself through hell. What could be worse than the hell he’d already endured?

Now Walker sat in a conference room on sublevel two. Hazmat teams were doing biohazard cleanings on the upper floors first. When they were ready to start on sublevel two, he’d be quarantined inside one of the lab isolation rooms, but for now, the only people who came down were in hazmat suits. Alena had been cleared of quarantine already, but she planned not to leave the facility until no doubt remained.

All of which meant no sunshine for Walker for a while. No fresh air.

No going home.

But at least he had his phone. Alena had given him network access so he could communicate with the outside world, something she told him only two others had been given. A sign of trust, she told him. An investment in the future of their working relationship.

Walker had managed not to laugh.

After all of this, she thought he would take her call the next time she had an assignment for him. The Global Science Research Coalition needed him, she’d said.

Walker sat in the dark in the conference room, the light from the corridor barely penetrating the shadows around him. He stared at his phone, trying to compose a text in his head but not finding the words.

Finally, he tapped out a message.

Still out of town, and now I’ve got this infection. Doctors want to keep an eye on me, so I’ll be away another week or so. All I’ve been able to think about is the way I left things between us. You’re growing up, kid, and tough as it is for me to hear, I know what you said is true. You don’t need me, and that’s okay. But you should know, Charlie … I need you. When I get home, I’m going to ask you for another chance. You don’t owe it to me, and I don’t deserve it, but I’m going to ask, anyway. Once I get back to you, I’m not going to leave town for at least a year. Whatever it takes, I’m around for that year. If you’re willing to take the job on, I’ll put you in charge of my schedule. When you feel like seeing me, I’ll be there. You don’t have to answer right now. Give it some thought. I love you, kid. Take care of your mother. See you soon, I hope.

Walker stared at the message. Furious as Charlie had been, it seemed like a paltry effort, but since he couldn’t go home just yet and tell his son these things in person, and he didn’t want to let more time pass, he had to get the words out. It was the longest text he’d ever written.

He hit Send.

Took a breath, staring at the screen.

Watched as the message went through and the word Delivered appeared.

Thought about Ted Sinclair and the way he’d judged the man. Thought about what Ted had lost and what kind of father he really was. What kind of father he wanted to be.

The phone darkened, and Walker tapped it to keep the screen from locking.

Then he noticed his message had been read.

Below it, an ellipsis. Three dots.

…

Charlie had started to text a reply.

Walker stared at his phone, waiting.

…

…

…

…

Acknowledgments

It’s impossible to properly thank all of the people who are there with support and encouragement, both personally and professionally, but that list must begin with my fantastic agent, Howard Morhaim, and my manager, Pete Donaldson. Sincere thanks to the whole team at St. Martin’s Press, especially Michael Homler for his friendship and passion, and Cassidy Graham for keeping the trains running on time. Much gratitude to Megan Gelement, Caspian Dennis, and Heather Baror, to Cat and Michael Scully, and to Maria Carlini for once again answering stupid questions.

Writing is a solitary profession, but no work is done nor life lived in a vacuum. It would be impossible to remember everyone who has taken the time to make my days a little brighter over the course of writing Red Hands and the list would be absurdly long. I’m deeply grateful to have some wonderful friends. That said, there are some I can’t go without thanking for their friendship, support, and advice, including Tim Lebbon, Tom Sniegoski, Jim Moore, Amber Benson, John McIlveen, Bracken MacLeod, Jaime Levine, Hillary Monahan, Brian Keene, Mary SanGiovanni, Rachel Deering, and my sister, Erin Golden.

Finally, my love and eternal gratitude to Connie, Nicholas, Daniel, and Lily.

Also by Christopher Golden

The Pandora Room

Ararat

Dead Ringers

Sons of Anarchy: BRATVA

Snowblind

Baltimore, or, The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire (with Mike Mignola)

Joe Golem and the Drowning City (with Mike Mignola)

Father Gaetano’s Puppet Catechism (with Mike Mignola)

The Boys Are Back in Town

Wildwood Road

The Ferryman

Strangewood

Straight On ’til Morning

Soulless

The Myth Hunters: Book One of The Veil

The Borderkind: Book Two of The Veil

The Lost Ones: Book Three of The Veil

The Ocean Dark (as Jack Rogan)

The Shadow Saga

Of Saints and Shadows

Angel Souls and Devil Hearts

Of Masques and Martyrs

The Gathering Dark

Walking Nightmares

The Graves of Saints

King of Hell

About the Author

CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN is the New York Times bestselling and Bram Stoker Award–winning author of Ararat, Snowblind, Dead Ringers, and Of Saints and Shadows, among many other novels. With Mike Mignola, he is the cocreator of two cult favorite comic book series, Baltimore and Joe Golem: Occult Detective. Golden is also the editor of such anthologies as Seize the Night, The New Dead, and Dark Cities, and the cohost of the popular podcast Defenders Dialogue. He lives in Massachusetts. You can sign up for email updates here.

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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

First published in the United States by St. Martin’s Press, an imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group

RED HANDS. Copyright © 2020 by Christopher Golden. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Publishing Group, 120 Broadway, New York, NY 10271.

www.stmartins.com

Cover design by Jonathan Bush

Cover photographs: trees © iStock/Getty Images Plus; handprint © Rayyy/Shutterstock.com

The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

ISBN 978-1-250-24630-1 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-250-24631-8 (ebook)

eISBN 9781250246318

Our ebooks may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or by email at MacmillanSpecialMarkets@macmillan.com.

First Edition: 2020

Contents

1. Title Page

2. Copyright Notice

3. Dedication

4. Chapter 1

5. Chapter 2

6. Chapter 3

7. Chapter 4

8. Chapter 5

9. Chapter 6

10. Chapter 7

11. Chapter 8

12. Chapter 9

13. Chapter 10

14. Chapter 11

15. Chapter 12

16. Chapter 13

17. Chapter 14

18. Chapter 15

19. Chapter 16

20. Chapter 17

21. Chapter 18

22. Chapter 19

23. Chapter 20

24. Chapter 21

25. Chapter 22

26. Chapter 23

27. Chapter 24

28. Chapter 25

29. Chapter 26

30. Chapter 27

31. Chapter 28

32. Chapter 29

33. Acknowledgments

34. Also by Christopher Golden

35. About the Author

36. Copyright