Much, much worse than the violence of those she didn’t save was the gratitude of those she nearly could. The smiles on the faces of those for whom she’d bought a little time, too dulled by disease and malnutrition to ever question the economics of trading a quick death for a lingering one. The pathetic delight of some father who’d seen his daughter cured of encephalitis, not knowing or caring that Seppuku or the Witch or some rogue flamethrower would take her next month or next year, not thinking of the rapes and broken bones and chronic starvation that would stalk her in the days between. Hope seemed nowhere more abundant than in the faces of the hopeless; and it was all she could do to meet their eyes, and smile, and accept their thanks. And not tell them who it was that had brought all this down upon the world in the first place.
Her experiment with naked eyes was long since over. If the locals didn’t like her affect, they could damn well go somewhere else.
She wanted desperately to talk to Taka. Most of the time she resisted the impulse, remembering: Ouellette’s friendship had evaporated the instant she’d learned the truth. Clarke didn’t blame her. It couldn’t be easy, discovering you’d befriended a monster.
One night, lonely enough to gamble, she tried anyway. She used a channel that Desjardins had assigned for reporting any late-breaking Seppuku incidents; it got her to an automated dispatcher and thence to an actual human being who—despite his obvious disapproval over personal use of dedicated channels—patched her through to someone claiming to speak for a biological countermeasures lab out of Boston. He had never heard of Taka Ouellette. When Clarke asked if there might be other facilities she could check with, the man replied that there must be—but the goddamned Entropy Patrol never told them anything, and he wouldn’t know where to point her.
She made do by indulging in false hopes. Lubin would catch his prey. Desjardins would honor the deal they had made. They would track down the threat to Atlantis, and disarm it. And Taka Ouellette, or others like her, would solve the mystery of Seppuku and stop it in its tracks.
Maybe then they could go home.
She didn’t even recognize him at first.
He came staggering out of the woods on foot, limping, purple-skinned, his face a swollen mass of scabs and pulpy bruises. He wore a thermochrome windbreaker with one of the arms torn away, and he lurched into sight just as Clarke was about to shut down for the evening.
“Hi again,” he said. A bubble of blood grew and popped at the corner of his mouth. “Miss me?”
“Holy shit.” She hurried over and helped him towards the MI. “What happened to you?”
“ ’Nother r. A Big r. Fucking capital r. Took my bike.” He shook his head; the gesture was stiff and clumsy, as if rigor mortis were already taking hold. “That other K around? Taka?”
“No. I’ll look after you.” She guided him to Miri’s right mouth, took his weight as he sagged onto the extended tongue.
“You really a doctor?” The teenager managed to look skeptical through all the gore. “Not that I care,” he added after a moment. “You can check me over any time.”
Finally it sunk in: Miss me?
Clarke shook her head. “I’m sorry, but I’ve seen a lot of people lately. I don’t know if I’d recognize you even without all the facework.”
“Ricketts,” the boy said.
She stepped back. “You brought—”
“I brought that stuff that’s gonna kill ßehemoth,” he said proudly through cracked and puffy lips.
You brought the stuff that’s going to kill us all, she thought.
It shouldn’t have been any kind of dilemma. Get him into the MI. Clean him up, fix the physical injuries, confirm the presence of any new predator eating him from the inside out.
Maybe he’s clean. All the contaminated stuff was sealed up in that bag, maybe he never had direct contact—
Confirm Seppuku. Isolate the victim. Call for extraction.
Hope to God that if he’s got it, he can’t breathe it on me...
“Lie back. Get your feet up.” She was at the rear panel almost before Ricketts had taken his feet off the ground. She stabbed the usual icon, heard the familiar hum as Miri swallowed. Clarke told the vehicle to close both mouths and run the standard diagnostic suite.
She left him in there while she sprayed herself down with disinfectant. Overkill, probably. Hopefully. She was wearing the requisite sterile gloves, and the ’skin of her tunic protected her under Ouellette’s borrowed clothing—
Shit. The clothing.
She stripped it off and bagged it for incineration. The rest of her diveskin was in her backpack, stashed in the cab. The forsaken pieces, retrieved, wriggled back into place, seams sealing together into a comforting second skin. Diveskins weren’t built with antipathogen properties explicitly in mind, but the copolymer dealt with salt ions as a matter of course; it had to keep out anything as large as a living cell.
When she got back to Miri’s rear panel, the diagnostic cycle had finished. Rickets was suffering from a broken cheekbone, a hairline fracture of the left tibia, second-degree concussion, borderline malnutrition (better than average, these days), two impacted wisdom teeth, and a moderate roundworm infection. None of that was life-threatening; most of it could be fixed.
The diagnostic suite did not include a scan for Seppuku. Seppuku didn’t exist in the standard database. Ouellette had cobbled together a hasty, separate subroutine in the wake of her discovery. It didn’t do much—no helpful breakdown into first/second/end-stage categories, no list of associated macrosymptoms. No suggested course of treatment. Just a blood count, really. Clarke didn’t even know how to interpret that simple number. Was there such a thing as a “safe” level for Seppuku?
Zero, she assumed. She tapped the icon to start the test. Ricketts twitched in the little spycam window as Miri drank a few more drops of his blood.
It would take a while to run the analysis. Clarke forced herself to focus on Ricketts’s other problems in the meantime. The roundworms and the teeth could wait. Targeted vasodilators and calcium suppressants eased the concussion. Broken bones were almost triviaclass="underline" plant microcharge mesh into the affected areas to crank up osteoblast metabolism. Clarke had been doing that almost since the day she’d become a rifter.
“Hey!” Rickett’s voice sounded tinny and startled through Miri’s intercom. “I can’t move!”
“It’s the neuroinduction field,” Clarke told him. “Don’t worry about it. It just keeps you from jerking around during the cut-and-paste.”
Beep.
And there it was. 106 particles per milliliter.
Oh Jesus.
How long had he been wandering around in the woods? How far had he spread it? The person who’d beaten him up: was he spreading it now, had he invited Seppuku in through the raw oozing skin of his knuckles? How many days before he discovered how much he’d really paid for a lousy motorbike?
Isolate the vector. Call in a lifter.