“Were there reports of illness at the village before her arrival?” Dawit asked.
“Coughs and sniffles, not the stomachaches—as far as we know,” Alex said. “But there were only sixty-three survivors. Most of the stories died in that village.”
She checked Dawit’s face again. Another impassive nod. Death didn’t bother him.
Moses went on. “Gabrielle was only at the school for an hour—she called her boss and said she was going to a student’s house to rest. That night, the host family also complained of sudden stomachaches. A teenage victim sent an email to a relative in Lagos at eight-thirty. Another student, a neighbor, also complained of stomach pain in a telephone call by midnight. By morning, apparently, dozens in their families were ill. And neighbors. There were emails the next day about a ‘stomach flu.’ By the next morning, the entire village was dead.”
“Might as well have been a bomb,” Alex said.
“So here’s the part we really don’t like …” Lucas said. “Seventy-five people died in North Korea, isolated to a village. But only six people died in Puerto Rico a month later—even though there were two carriers, not one. And there’s no Asian link to Gabrielle. It just …”
“Appears out of the sky,” Moses finished matter-of-factly.
“Like brushfires,” Alex said. “We don’t know what’s starting the flares. And we don’t know what’s putting them out.”
“But it’s the deadliest SOB on record,” Lucas said. “It spreads faster than anything we can compare it to. Much more virulent than Ebola. SARS. Dengue fever. Lassa fever.”
Finally—a hint of alarm on Dawit’s face.
“The bug that wipes us out will look a lot like this one, Dawit,” Alex said.
Dawit blinked, seeming to agree. “How has it stayed so quiet?”
“Politics,” Alex said. “Just like in Puerto Rico—fear of panic or some other reaction. Here, the new government’s scared it’ll look like an ethnic clash. It’s a Muslim village, past skirmishes with Christian neighbors. At first the police thought it was poison, maybe a chemical agent. Bioterrorist attack, just like the theory in the U.S. An entire village of Muslims getting killed doesn’t look good on Al Jazeera. A lot less could set off a killing spree nobody wants. The government is pretending it never happened, so we have to meet our source there at dawn.”
“The whole bloody world needs to see it,” Jared said, his voice trembling.
The United States had done an even better job of covering up the outbreak in Puerto Rico—if not for a single blog posted for only twelve hours, they might never have heard about it. Rumors of the outbreak in Nigeria were much more widespread.
“Glow had no impact on the outbreak?” Dawit said.
Nigeria had been one of the first nations to make Glow available at dedicated government clinics, which were always swamped with seekers. Glow centers kept the police and army busy. Too often, desperation turned ugly.
Alex sighed. “It’s illegal to keep a personal supply, but usually there’s somebody …”
“Missionaries and witch doctors,” Moses said. “Claiming Glow is their magic.”
“My guess is, nobody had any,” Alex said. “It swept through so fast, nobody had time.”
“Then how is it possible to have only six dead in Puerto Rico?”
“Go on and tell him,” Lucas urged her.
Alex’s stomach ached, spraying a bad taste into her mouth. She had stumbled on the strange significance of Puerto Rico only hours before Dawit arrived, and she still had gooseflesh on her arms. Alex’s legs ached to rest, so she pulled up a tall stool and sat with a sigh.
“In Puerto Rico, all of the dead were staying at a little hotel in a tourist town, Maricao. But no one else got sick—including dozens of people who had contact with them over the incubation period.”
“Fortunate,” Dawit said. “But very odd.”
“It gets weirder,” Alex said. “The dead woman from San Juan was named Rosa Castillo. She had a son named Carlos Harris. His wife—”
“Phoenix Harris,” Dawit said, breathless. “I just met them both. Are you sure?” Was Dawit’s face growing a shade paler? Alex was almost certain of it. Finally! Dawit got it.
“Damn right I’m sure,” Alex said. “Phoenix’s mother-in-law died of the same virus we saw in North Korea. Carlos Harris blogged about it! We smuggled out her blood work, and I did the analysis myself. We haven’t been able to get tissue samples here yet—we were run off from the village pretty quick—but I’m betting it’s the same strain.”
Alex pointed out the translucent sheets posted to a lighted panel on the wall beside her, enlarged images from an electron microscope. Dawit leaned close, studying the images. The photos of the new virus reminded Alex of linguini-shaped Ebola, but with coats of spikes.
Alex went on. “It hijacks the immune system, like Ebola. Disables tetherin and turns our immune responses against us to create new virions. Lots of them—a flood. That’s why the mortality rate is so high. So that’s the medical side. But on the personal side …”
“Phoenix’s mother-in-law and a girl Jared knew?” Dawit said. “Statistically …”
Lucas nodded. “Right. Impossible. That was our way of thinking, too. Why’d you think we’ve been so frantic?”
Dawit squeezed Alex’s shoulder fondly, a rare affectionate gesture that startled her. A glimmer in Dawit’s eyes made her heart race. What did he know that he wasn’t telling them?
“Dawit, we’ve been saying for two weeks how grim this outbreak looked!” Alex said. “Where’s the support from home?” Home was their code for the Lalibela Colony.
WE NEED TO TALK ALONE, Dawit told her privately. WITHOUT THE BOY.
The tickling sensation, a whispered breath, always made Alex swipe at imaginary gnats. “Maybe we should talk alone,” Alex said to Lucas, as if it were her own inspiration, not Dawit’s.
“Looks like we better,” Lucas said. He couldn’t read minds yet, but he wasn’t fooled.
The young man shrugged, standing. “I’ll walk to the lobby,” Moses said. “Mr. Wolde, please tell your daughter hello from her friend Moses. She was an amazing child. So amazing!”
Dawit didn’t answer, staring straight through Moses as if he weren’t there. Sometimes Dawit seemed not to see people at all, his eyes bypassing everyone like they had at her mother’s Sunday dinners. Everyone except Jessica; you had to work to pry his eyes away from his wife.
The door closed behind Moses.
I’VE SEEN THIS VIRUS, Dawit said silently. ONE LIKE IT.
Air seeped from her lungs. Another surprise! The world reinvented itself daily.
“When was the outbreak?” Lucas said. “Where are the records—”
Sometimes her husband’s naïveté drove Alex crazy. He reminded her of the way Jessica had been, once upon a time. “What’s the rest of the story, Dawit?”
“It may be ours,” Dawit said quietly.
“Lord Jesus,” Alex whispered, eyes wide. She’d known what he was going to say, but it still hurt her ears.
“Define … ‘ours’?” Lucas said, still not wanting to face it.
“From the House of Science,” Dawit said.
Alex and Lucas had been invited to the repository of technology and scholarship in the House of Science’s underground wings in Lalibela, but they had been given very limited access to the treasures. Unrestricted areas only, always under escort. Alex had been waiting for permission to see the colony’s HIV research. Lucas blamed their cultural prohibition against sharing with mortals, but to Alex it had always looked like hiding.
“Developed at least eighty years ago,” Dawit explained. “Not an identical strain, but very close. There have always been factions …”
“Ready to wipe us out,” Alex finished. Hot dust seemed to coat her throat.
Dawit nodded. “Only small factions. Our recurring debate.” He sounded unapologetic.
Anger lifted Alex to her feet and seemed to raise her
height. “Was AIDS yours too?”
“No,” Dawit said, his eyes unblinking and impassive. It wasn’t the first time she’d asked, and the answer was always the same. She was a fool for having believed him.
Alex wanted to leap on Dawit, to slap at him or pound him with a fist, although she never had before—not even after Dawit killed her niece, accident or not. Now Alex understood what Jessica meant about the past feeling fresh enough to smell and touch: she could see Dawit’s hands around poor Kira’s throat. The coroner’s report said he’d strangled her in his badly failed quest to give her immortality.
“Explain this, Dawit!” Alex said. Lucas hooked his arm around her waist to hold her.
“Try right goddamn now,” Lucas said.
Dawit blinked with his own anger. “You’re making it too simple,” he said, struggling to sound measured.
“Simple?” Alex said. The urge to strike at him reared again.
“Yes, Alex, simple,” Dawit said. “Because if it were my Brothers, we could contain it. But I believe this virus is in the hands of someone outside of Lalibela, which is a significant complication. So we don’t have the luxury of raw memories.”
Fear curled Alex’s stomach into an icy fist. “You think it’s Michel?” she said.
As Dawit nodded, Alex’s anger at him melted.
“Fana thinks so,” Dawit said. “Michel might have access to our research, with or without help. If he’s following Sanctus Cruor doctrine, expect bigger outbreaks soon.”
Michel.
One man had overwhelmed all of Dawit’s people in Washington from thousands of miles away. Lucas had told her he’d been as helpless as a child when he lost his eyesight for a harrowing moment, struck blind by a Life Brother acting under Michel’s mental influence.
Alex was as close to crying as she could allow herself. What should she cry about first?
“What was the rationale, Dawit?” Alex said. “When ya’ll were back in the lab trying to dream up ways to kill us in large numbers—random men, women, and children. How did you explain it to yourselves? What made it all right?”
Dawit looked wounded. “I can’t speak for them, Alex. I pray you know that.”
“But you’ve got an idea,” she said, pinching his soft cheek. “Come on, sweetie. We’re all family here.”
Dawit shrugged. He paused. “The air tastes different now. To us. So much has changed. There are too many of you.” His voice was so quiet, Alex barely heard him. Dawit had made the pronouncement without a blink.
“Fana is here,” Dawit said. “She’s resting from the concert, but she’ll go to the village.”
Alex felt pained for her niece, who was so young. But her weary heart celebrated for the first time since her stomach had begun its mourning ache.
Ten
6:30 a.m.
Fana realized that this trip was the closest thing she could remember to a family outing. Only her mother was missing; Mom wasn’t strong enough for this journey.
The three-vehicle caravan of Land Rovers bounced along the unpaved road in a cloud of dust, undercarriages whimpering. To Fana, their journey was like the replaying of a dream, or a future memory. She had felt this day before. She had seen this dry, rocky land of dying saplings, without a single mature tree in sight across the dusty, arid plain.
The smell of death was everywhere. The air stank of rotting flesh. Fana heard phantom screams, the last echoes of fear and pain to the pitiless sky. Tears burned Fana’s eyes. She would no more mourn simple death than she would mourn watching a boatman cross a river—that was all death was—but unexpected passages left so much pain in their wake. Her mother would not have been so shredded by her grandmother’s death if not for Michel’s hand in it.
Had an entire village suffered because of her childishness?
“We’re close now,” Jared said quietly, but she had known that from the smell. And the sudden sound of shouting that grew louder as they drove. Jared held her hand, and she held his.
Fana had loved her cousin since before his parents’ marriage made them family; before she had met him in the physical world. Their spirits had played together when leukemia ravaged his body, nearly transporting him across planes. His father’s search for a cure was what had brought him to Aunt Alex, along with the mercenaries who had almost killed them both.
And Moses was in Kano! She had seen him only briefly when they picked up her family at their hotel, but as he’d leaned into her window, Moses was the same lanky giant she’d known when she was three, and later, when her family flew him to the Washington colony to be her playmate. She had made it rain for him once, and she had hurt him without meaning to. Neither of them had spoken of it, but they both remembered.
Jared’s touch and the memory of Moses’s smile would carry her through this day.
Hundreds of people waited ahead, crowding in a surge. Army trucks appeared in the road beyond a rise, blocking the growing crowd along a perimeter already fenced with rapidly unrolled spools of barbed wire. Her father and her personal guard in the front seat, Berhanu, coiled with readiness. A year ago, she’d hated living under guard, but she knew better now. The three vehicles’ formation tightened as the drivers slowed. In Mexico, the last time Fana’s father stumbled into a knot of soldiers, he’d ended up Michel’s prisoner. All of them had.
Fana didn’t like being nervous, so she tried to reassure herself with logic: Michel had no need to trap them. He could have brought them back at any time.
Her father’s gun snapped to his hand, ready.
“How far is the village from this perimeter?” Dawit said.
“Quarter mile,” Uncle Lucas said.
Aunt Alex nodded toward the gun. “Dawit, we’re supposed to look like scientists.”
“Scientists, not fools,” he muttered. But he hid the weapon beneath his shirt again.
“How was Phoenix?” Aunt Alex asked Fana suddenly, surprising her. “At the concert?”
Music flared in Fana’s mind. She smiled. “Brilliant. Sorry you missed it.”
Her aunt smiled. “Me too.”
Aunt Alex and her mother had first played Phoenix’s music for her, an addictive dance song called “Party Patrol,” the first song Fana ever danced to when her physical body was still a novelty. Their shared smile was a balm, but those days were long gone now.
Fana’s smile vanished quickly as Aunt Alex pulled a handful of plastic name tags from her pocket and handed them out one by one. “Make sure these are visible,” Aunt Alex told them. “As of the last election, Clarion’s name is no good here. We’re with the CDC today.”
Fana glanced at her plastic badge. A recent, unsmiling photo of her sat above a bland name: MARY FIDLER. EPIDEMIOLOGIST, CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL FIELD RESPONSE TEAM.
“The head of the healthy ministry’s sharp,” Uncle Lucas said. “Dr. Ogunyele. He’s mastered the medicine and the politics. He alerted Alex, and he’s taking good care of us.”
Aunt Alex went on. “Chris Ogunyele stepped in quickly enough to stop the spread when the official government line was ‘poisoning.’ Thank the Lord he isolated the village.”
Michel had stopped the infection’s spread, Fana suspected. Just as he had in Puerto Rico. To him, it had been like blowing out a match after watching it burn for a time. There was nothing the mortal health minister could have done to make it better or worse.
Rows of green jatropha shrubs began dancing outside Fana’s window. She thought they were swaying with memories, until she heard the beating winds of approaching helicopters. She peered up at the sky. One helicopter was flying low enough for her to see inside: soldiers’ legs and boots. Guns dangling from the open bay door.
“A riot is coming,” Dawit said.
“We’ll be in and out before that happens,” Uncle Lucas said.
“We better be,” Aunt Alex said.
“No—not you, Aunt Alex,” Fana said quickly. “You and Jared stay behind.”
Her aunt looked at her, defiant eye
brows raised high. “What? We’ve been there already to lay the groundwork, and we’re fine!”
Jared let go of her hand. “This again.” He hated lines between mortal and immortal.
Sorry, cuz. “It’s not just a disease,” she said. “Let’s not pretend it is.”
That was the one lesson her mother always drummed into her head: don’t ignore the obvious. Don’t be afraid to look at the truth.
“My wife couldn’t bear it if something happened to her nephew and only sister,” Dad said. His voice was heavy with the idea of it.
Alex’s face softened, although disappointment burned in her eyes. “That’s the sweetest thing you’ve said to me in twenty-five years, Dawit.”
“Desperate times call for desperate measures, Alexis.”
Alex and Dawit laughed, but without joy. Fana smiled at her father’s rare joke. She had sensed an earlier argument between her father and her aunt, and she was glad they were moving beyond it. She told herself she wasn’t creating the peace, but it was hard to be sure.
Fana scanned the sea of rainbow-colored scarves from the women crowding the barricade, washed in their wails and shouts. Fana remembered that she was wearing her own favorite white gauzy netela head scarf, and wrapped the soft fabric across her mouth and chin as she watched the crowd draw closer. Fana had never outgrown the reflex to cover her face when she was away from home. Unwelcome thoughts were louder when others looked at her—or came close to her—and it was hard to filter out the noise. A scarf offered nothing to stare at; it was a relief from being tumbled inside the hurricane. Like a little kid with a security blanket, Johnny said.
“Aunt Alex?” Fana said. “We’ll bring less attention if you cover your head.”
Uncle Lucas muttered, “Told you.”
Aunt Alex sighed, but she accepted the mustard-colored veil he pulled out of his briefcase. He had asked her to wear it before. Aunt Alex didn’t argue this time, taking the veil without a word and draping it loosely across her graying Afro.