"In a jar or something?" Lubin seemed almost amused by that. "Johnny Appleseed with a grudge?"
Desjardins didn't know and didn't ask. "Wouldn't have to be deliberate, necessarily. Maybe just some dirty piece of heavy equipment that gets moved around a lot."
"But you'd be able to track that. Even a bunch of infected contract workers should be easy enough to track down."
"You'd think." Didn't seem to be much of a problem to the guys with the flamethrowers, anyway…
"Yet you couldn't find any candidates in the record."
"No living ones, anyway."
"What about the rifters?" Colin suggested. "That whole scene seems to be fashionable these days. Maybe there's a connection."
"They were all—"
— killed in the quake. But the bottom dropped out of his stomach before he could finish the thought.
What about the rifters?
The scanners at security had seen machinery in Colin's chest.
Desjardins, you idiot.
The rifters.
One of them was standing right at his shoulder.
A single petrified moment to wonder which road had led to this:
Let's-call-him-Colin had risen from the ashes of Beebe Station and was pursuing his own apocalyptic agenda. Johnny Appleseed with a grudge, whatever the fuck that meant—
Or:
Let's-call-him-Colin hadn't been stationed at Beebe at all, he just had a—a personal interest. A friend, perhaps, a fellow rifter sacrificed for the greater good. But maybe Colin wasn't satisfied with the greater good. Maybe Colinwanted closure.
Or:
Thoracic implants didn't necessarily equal an amphibious lifestyle. Maybe Let's-call-him-Colin wasn't even a rifter. He sure as shit wasn't an ordinary one, anyway. How many of those neurotic head cases would have been able to find Desjardins in the first place? How many could have broken into his home, laid him out, read his mind, threatened his very life without breaking a sweat?
Am I infected? Am I dying? Am I leaving traces for someone like me to sniff out?
Nearly a second had passed since the words had died in Desjardins's throat
I've got to say something. Jesus, what do I say?
"Actually—" he began.
He wants me to search Beebe's personnel files. What if he's in there? Of course he won't be, he wouldn't blow his own cover that wouldn't make sense—
"— I'm way—"
Whatever he wants he doesn't want me to knowhe wants it, oh no, he's being way too casual about this, just another possibility to follow up, right—
He won't push. He won't force it—
"— ahead of you on that," Desjardins finished easily. "I checked the rifters already. I checked everyone who had anything to do with Beebe. Nothing. Nobody's touched their bank accounts, no watch transactions, nothing at all since the quake."
He glanced up at Colin, kept his voice level. "But they were pretty much at Ground Zero when the Big One went off. Why would you think they'd survive?"
Colin looked back neutrally. "No reason. Just being systematic."
"Mmm." Desjardins drummed his fingers absently on the edge of the board. His inlays lit with visual confirmation: he'd opened a channel directly to his visual cortex, without—he glanced at the wall just to be sure—without sending an echo to any external displays.
"You know, I was thinking." Another idle tap on the panel; a luminous keypad sprang up in his head, invisible beyond his own flesh. "About why the primary vectors aren't dying as fast as the people on the Strip." His eyes darted subtly across the pad, focusing for the merest instant here, and here, and here on the characters. Letters brightened at his glance, began forming a command. "Maybe a nastier strain's developed out there." B—e—e— "Maybe the higher population density—all those extra dice rolls—maybe they just lead to a higher mutation rate."
Beebe Station.
Private menus bloomed around the edge of his vision. He focused on Personnel.
Let's-call-him-Colin grunted.
Four women, four men. Desjardins brought up the men; whoever was standing next to him probably hadn't changed that much.
"And if there's two separate strains, our propagation models are probably wrong," he said aloud.
Employee headshots. All faces unfamiliar. But the eyes…
He looked up. Let's-call-him-Colin looked back through a luminous palimpsest.
Those eyes…
The flesh had been reconstructed around them. The irises were darker. But for all that, the differences were cosmetic; a flaw in the iris left unchanged, a telltale capillary snaking across the sclera. And the overall aspect ratio of the face was identical. A casual change in appearance, more disguise than reconstruction. A new face, a new pair of socks, and—
"Something wrong?" asked Kenneth Lubin.
Desjardins swallowed.
"Uh, the caffeine," he managed. "Sort of sneaks up on you. I'll be right back."
He barely saw the corridors scroll past. He missed the washroom entirely.
Oh God. He's been in my home he's breathed in my face he even stabbedme in the neck with something and he's probably rotten with ßehemoth, it's probably growing in menow it's probably—
Shut up. Focus. You can deal with this.
If Lubin were infected, he'd be dead already. He'd said as much himself. So he probably wasn't a carrier. That was something.
He could still be packing, of course: Johnny Appleseed with a grudge, lugging ßehemoth around in a petri dish. But what if he was? Why would he cross a continent just to innoculate Achilles Desjardins of all people? If he'd wanted Desjardins dead for some reason, he could have done it while the 'lawbreaker was laid out on his own living room floor.
That was something, too.
Probably both of them were clean. Desjardins allowed himself a moment to feel sick with relief, then opened the door to Jovellanos's cubby.
It was empty; she'd taken the day to burn off some accumulated overtime. Achilles Desjardins thanked the Forces of Entropy for small mercies. He could use her board, at least for a few minutes. For however long one might reasonably be expected to spend on the toilet.
He hooked his account and considered:
Lubin wanted him to see Beebe's personnel files. Didn't he realize that Desjardins would make the connection, once the ID photos came up? Maybe not. He was only human, after all. Maybe he'd forgotten about the pattern-matching enhancements that 'lawbreakers came equipped with these days. Maybe he'd never known in the first place.
Or maybe he had wanted Desjardins to see through his new identity. Maybe this was some twisted loyalty test courtesy of Patricia Rowan after all.
Still. It seemed more plausible that Col— that Lubin was interested in the other rifters. He either wanted to know something about them, or he wanted Achilles Desjardins to know something about them.
Desjardins fed names to the matchmaker and sent it hunting.
"Semen-sucking savior," he whispered two seconds later.
She was proliferating in plain sight. She'd been reported on half a dozen continents in a single day. Lenie Clarke was on the run in Australia. She was making friends in N'AmPac and planning an insurrection in Mexico City. She was wanted in connection with an assault in HongCouver. She was a porn star who'd been snuffed at eleven years of age.
More ominously, Lenie Clarke was ending the world. And nobody—at least as far as Desjardins could tell—had actually noticed.