Where did Ramsay say they were going? I asked myself. Room Four? I tried to think where that would be, and traced a path there in my mind. I had an easy go of it; there had been plenty of time to study schematics during our waiting period.

It only took a few seconds to cover the distance. I reached the door and swiped to open once, twice, three times without success, then realized that the blood smeared on my fingers must have interfered with my bio-signature and I tried it with my other hand. It slid open to reveal Ramsay standing behind Bergman and Banks, who were both on the floor in sniper’s crouches, their rifles trained on a figure curled in the lower of the two bunk beds pressed into one of the corners. It was the girl from Britt’s holoscreen, I realized. The one whose name I never learned. She rocked back and forth on the mattress, arms wrapped around her knees. The ghosts of tears streaked like ribbons down the sides of her face and chin. Her eyes were ringed with a Gothic blend of broken capillaries and smeared mascara, and I wondered again why these people bothered perpetuating the customs of the outside world down here in the bunker. Her left hand held a syringe full of a clear liquid which I could only guess was cytomorph, or something equally lethal. A holoscreen pulsed on the wall opposite her bunk.

Ramsay raised a hand as I entered, warning me to go no further. He didn’t want me there, I could tell. In the half-second’s worth of attention he paid me I could almost see him trying to decide which would cause the least trouble; to make me leave or let me stay. I backed into the corner I deemed most out of the way. He seemed to accept that.

Neither the girl nor the wall behind her showed any signs of having been fired upon. “What’s going on?”

“Shhhh!” Banks hissed from the butt of his gun. He pointed at his eyes through the plastic of his visplate, then at the girl, and I understood immediately. Hostage protocol one-oh-one: eyes and ears on the mark at all times. The fact that the person holding them hostage was themselves didn’t make a lick of difference.

“You…” she sniffed, and did her best to choke back a sob. “…you shouldn’t have come.” She shot us a sidelong glance. Her emerald eyes were somehow both hateful and piteous at the same time. Her blonde hair framed her face in a way that might have been pretty if she wasn’t so strung-out. Her feet shifted in her sheets, revealing toenails shelled in flaking polish that had once upon a time been pink. I couldn’t tell if she was speaking to the four of us generally or to me specifically.

Her grip tightened on the syringe. None of us engaged.

“You should have left us here to rot!” she wailed. “You should have listened to Miller, and you should have sealed this place forever! You should have…you should…have…” her eyes drifted, transfixed, towards the holoscreen. The projection was massive in the confined space. It covered the entire wall, and it was filled, corner to corner, with scrolling lines of the same nonsensical markings I’d seen on Britt’s a few minutes earlier. Her lips moved idly as she stared. The pain in her eyes began to fade. Her body raised, joint by joint, as if drawn by unseen forces. The syringe started to twitch, gently, oscillating, like an engine stuck in neutral.

I decided to press my luck. “Ramsay,” I whispered from the corner of my mouth. “What’s going on? Why is she…whatever she is?”

Ramsay hesitated, then shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine. She was like this when Banks and Bergman found her. Just sat there, staring at the wall, exactly like she is now. Except for the cyto,” he said, almost as an afterthought, and gestured toward the needle. “She grabbed that when she noticed us.”

“When was that?” I remembered the gunshot I’d heard that brought me here in the first place.

“A few minutes ago.” It was Banks who answered. “Bergie and I found her in the sweeps, as soon as we got the door un-jammed. She’s been locked in here for days.”

“Banks!” Ramsay hissed. “Eyes!” Banks grumbled something foul under his breath, but he re-focused on his gun.

And then she was back. The pain spilled back into her face, and she resumed her defeated posture. “You should have bombed this place to slag,” she finished softly. Resolutely. The words of a person who has searched every corner of their soul and found their fifty-one percent. “Not that it would have done you any good,” she whispered. “It still would have gotten out. Somehow.”

“What would have?” I blurted it out without thinking, and regretted it immediately. The other three shot me daggers. I hesitated for a moment, then pressed on. To hell with protocol. “The virus? Prof Haggarty?”

“How did you…?” Her eyes sparked at the mention of the nickname, and she picked her chin up off her chest. A shred of humanity crept back into her face. For the first time I noticed how emaciated she was. Her cheekbones looked like they were about to shred her skin.

“Britt’s.” I answered. “Out in the lab. There was a…” but I cut myself off when I saw her eyes sink and her head fall back to her knees. She already knew. Somehow.

“Yeah.” It took me a second to realize she was answering my original question.

“What do you mean ‘it would have gotten out?’ You mean it would have gotten out of the bunker? Out into the outside world?” The part of me that knew I’d have to answer for such a breach thrashed in its imagined trap. My mind reeled, already preparing a defense. “And how would it have gotten out anyways? The security is state of the art! How would it have survived the barrier? And the decon systems? And the hatch, and the tundra? What about the fail-safes built into the bots themselves? Wouldn’t you have touched those off if everything else went off the beam?” I fired off questions as fast as I could think of them, not giving her a chance to respond. My eyes automatically scanned the room, searching for support, but they were met only by Ramsay’s emotionless stare. The starkness of it stripped away some of my freneticism, and made me realize what I should have been asking from the start.

“And…why would that have been so bad?”

The girl considered her syringe, and switched it to her other hand. Springs creaked as her weight shifted slightly to her side. Banks and Bergman re-focused their rifles, which each had slackened in the exchange, as if that could somehow stop her from, well, whatever it was they were trying to stop her doing. A bead of sweat that Bergman’s biosuit hadn’t been able to siphon off pooled in the rim of his visplate. “How much did you see?”