“Do you have fig trees?” Kate asked.
“No. But our neighbor does, and some of the branches hang over the fence.”
She waited, but no one else volunteered their own zoonotic risk profile. If the details didn’t match, why not say so?
Gary said, “In any case, we know it must be jumping straight from human to human now.”
Kate frowned. “What makes you so sure?”
“Because of the speed,” Linda interjected.
“But what exactly do we know about the speed?”
Linda was starting to lose patience. “My mother, in Sydney, was already affected the very same day my husband changed. I called her up to try to tell her something was wrong, and she was… gone.”
Kate nodded soberly. “It hit my sister, the same night as my husband and my son. But this morning…” She steeled herself, ready to find out the hard way if her own revelatory experience could sway anyone else. “I called a friend who’s been in America for the last two months—”
Everyone turned away from her to look across the warehouse floor, back toward the loading bay. A woman was approaching the circle. Her eyes were lowered, and she’d shaved her head, but as she crossed into the yellow light of the hurricane lamps, Kate recognized her by the shape of her face.
Her four companions rose to their feet, and Kate followed them. Each of them embraced Natalie in turn, and then Gary introduced her to Kate.
Kate shook her hand in silence. Natalie didn’t meet her gaze. The six of them sat on the tartan picnic blanket that Gary had spread on the concrete floor.
Natalie said, “It has to be tonight.”
“Are you sure?” Gary asked. “Once we tip our hand, there’ll be no going back. And I still think I can get more recruits. Rowan’s gone missing, but he might turn up—”
“No. We can’t wait any longer.” Natalie spoke calmly, but with a tone of authority. “We need to send a signal to all the people who are still unreachable. We need to let them know that they’re not alone, that there’s an army on their side, and an example they can follow.”
“I understand.” Gary looked around the circle. “Is everyone ready?”
Everyone but Kate nodded, but Kate saw Ahmed glance her way uncertainly. If she gave him more reason to doubt, there might be a chance that she could break the consensus.
She said, “Please, can I share a story with you? It will only take a minute.” Forget Emily and her voicemail. She needed to cut closer to home.
Gary looked to Natalie, then said, “Of course.”
“The night I left my family,” Kate began, “I was driving around for a long time, trying to decide what to do. Then I thought: I’ll go to my sister. She’ll help me, she’ll understand. I didn’t have my phone, so I couldn’t call her. But as I drove toward her house, as I got closer and closer, the more I thought about what would happen once I knocked on her door, the more certain I was that she’d already gone the way of my husband and my son. I knew she was exactly like them—without even seeing her, without even talking to her.
“So I thought: I’ll go to my friend Chris. He lived much farther away, but I trusted him. So I set off south, heading for his apartment, glad I still had someone I could turn to. And the same thing happened. I never arrived; I never saw him, I never heard his voice. But I was absolutely sure that he’d been hollowed out.
“What does that mean? Do I have some magical sense of who’s changed, that I can know that without even meeting them?”
Natalie said, “You made a guess, that’s all.” Her manner was growing brittle and defensive. She was an intelligent woman; she knew there was no intuition that could work like this, no presentiment that could be trusted in the absence of a single fact to guide it.
“But the feeling was so strong,” Kate insisted. “As strong as when I saw what my husband had become, lying beside me in my bed. I never let him speak, either. I just knew, because it was so clear to me. But now, if I’m honest with myself, I’m afraid that it wasn’t him who changed. I’m afraid—”
Natalie snapped. She started screaming, then she leaned over and began pummeling Kate with her fists. Linda and Ahmed took hold of her, pulling her back, but she kept shrieking and thrashing. Suzanne began sobbing, staring at Kate in horror, as if she’d just stabbed all five of her comrades through the heart.
Kate kept talking, sickened by the cruelty of what she was doing to a woman already annihilated by grief, but determined to finish the job for the sake of anyone still tempted to follow her.
She said, “I’m afraid I’m the one who changed. The dog dug around in the bat shit, then she got sick, and I let her lick my face. My face, not my husband’s, not my son’s. I thought they’d lost everything that made them human, but now I know that it was all in my head.”
12
“Surprise!” Reza called out from the far side of the visitor’s yard. He was holding a child in his arms.
Kate approached them warily. “Is that really him?” As soon as the words slipped out, she wished she could take them back, but if Reza heard them as more than a figure of speech he did nothing to show it. “He’s grown so much,” she added.
“Yeah. I’m fattening him up for sumo school.” He smiled and held Michael out toward her.
Kate hesitated, afraid that after so long he wouldn’t recognize her. But he gazed placidly into her face, and offered no protest when she took him in her arms.
They sat together on one of the benches.
“That beard’s getting out of control,” she told Reza.
“Ah, but you love it, don’t you?”
“It helps.” The neurologist had suggested this trick, and it seemed to be working. The new Reza reminded her of the old one, just enough to invoke memories of him without raising her expectations too high, while she built a new set of responses to the way he looked now. Sometimes it felt wrong when she kissed him, like some sick game with twins, but if she had to choose between the old Reza being dead to her forever, or reincarnated in this imperfect look-alike, she’d settle for transmigration into a doppelgänger with a beard.
She turned to Michael, and he reached up and put a hand on her face. “Who is the most beautiful boy?” she asked. “Can you guess who that is?” He smiled, a little smugly, as if he knew he was being flattered simply from her tone. That seemed new, but she could love what was new. Everything that mattered most in his life was yet to come.
Reza put an arm around her shoulders, and she didn’t flinch.
“The last scan showed no inflammation,” she said. “And there’s no more trace of the virus in my CSF. So maybe another week. They’re still cautious; some of the others have had flare-ups.”
“I’m glad they’re cautious,” he said. “But we can’t wait to have you home.”
Kate bent down and kissed Michael three times in rapid succession. He cooed with delight and tugged at her hair. Nobody could tell her what the future held, for her or the seventeen others. “Capgras syndrome” was just a name for a cluster of symptoms that had been seen in half a dozen different diseases; it was not the means to divine a prognosis. But even if her raw perceptions of people had forever lost their power to evoke the emotional history that had once fleshed out their meaning, her love for her family had not been lost. She just had to find detours around the barriers, and dig tunnels to the deeper truth.
“How’s your father been?” she asked Reza.
“Oh, didn’t I tell you?”
“Tell me what?” Kate was worried for a moment, but Reza didn’t seem upset.