“Enough,” I said, breaking the trance that had fallen over the room. I turned my head from the holoscreen, a white flag of surrender to the savagery I was witnessing. “That’s enough. We don’t need to see the rest.” I’d seen people die before – I did work for the Coalition, after all – but it was always with a purpose, always someone faraway, who had held a needed post, or failed in some spectacular way. Never in a fit of passion, the way Rauch had murdered Charles, or the girl’s ultimate self-defense. Never this senseless taking of a life.

From the corner of my eye I saw the girl still gripping the end of the cable as she cried into Miller’s chest, forcing Rauch to sit up straight, like a handler might a pup. Only when Miller held her close, found the hand that held the cable, opened it with gentle fingers, and took her hand in his did she release him. His body slouched to the floor. The blood in his head made a sickening squelch as it whipsawed to the tile. I thanked God it didn’t split.

The girl shifted in her bunk. “I…can’t stop it,” she whispered, and turned her head dejectedly. The girl on the screen had broken her embrace with Miller, and now was helping move the body to a less obtrusive place. To the place we’d seen it when we’d first entered the bunker. “They’re still evolving, you see. They’ve taken all control.” Her bedding rustled in a susurrus of fabric as she worked her feet underneath her comforter. To me that was a waste of effort. They seemed to have no warmth to hold. “But you’ll know all about that soon enough.”

This caught me by surprise. I noticed Banks and Bergman fingering the visplates of their biosuits, as if that could confirm the seals. Banks, in particular, was put off by her remark. He traced a finger around his entire visplate, then checked his wrists, ankles, and the zipper on his chest, every place there might be a gap. I chuckled softly to myself…and resisted the urge to do the same.

“Ha!” the girl hooted. “You think those will keep you clean?”

“Well,” I answered, once enough time had passed that it was clear the others wouldn’t, “that’s the purpose for which they were designed, by folks who know how these things work, so, yeah, I suppose I do.”

“They won’t.”

I waited for an explanation, but no explanation came. She made me drag it out of her. “And why, pray tell, is that?”

“Because they’re evolving!’ she exclaimed. “Haven’t you been listening? That’s what they do!” She jerked forward as she spoke, pulling herself out of her corner for the first time since we’d entered the room, and sat up on the edge of the bunk. Banks and Bergman tensed. They shouldered their firearms once again, but this time Ramsey waved them off, signaling that she posed no threat that rifles in her face could quell. The girl noticed none of it. “They were tied to the Haggarty at first,” she said, “which is a very mammalian strain. It can’t survive outside our bodies, or an incubation room. But that was a weakness. It handcuffed them while doing their job, and the bots were always agents of change. They coded that weakness out of themselves, making themselves stronger, more adaptable…more contagious. First they developed a way to transmit through the air. That was probably easy for them, with so many examples in the database to model after. But then we grabbed our biosuits, which, as you say, are design especially to prevent transmission through air, or touch, or any other available medium, and we forced them to get creative. Over thousands of generations they squeezed the Haggarty out entirely. Only the shell – the organic, biological shell of the virus, which helped them mask their true selves long enough to spread some roots – was valuable to them, so they got rid of everything else. And they replaced it with code that they could packet up. Just chunk out willy-nilly, in whatever size blocks it felt like, without regard for the completeness and the self-sufficiency that were so critical to vees” She shivered, suddenly, as if the knowledge of what she was saying gave her chills. “As a result, they were able to shrink those shells until they were small enough to pass through the filters in the breathing apps, and, with the bits of code as isolated as they were, inert enough to survive sterilization. That gave them everything they needed to beat the suits. They just had to find a way to recombine once they entered the body. And I don’t think they had any problem with that.” Here she paused and lowered her voice, speaking to herself again when she continued. “It didn’t even take a day,” she whispered.

Another silence. Ramsey moved as if to give her a goose, as I had a moment before, but I stopped him. Somehow I sensed that she wasn’t waiting on a prompt this time.

She made no special haste about it. She dangled the syringe between her thumb and forefinger, watching in pendulum this way and that, then wrapped it up in a four-finger grip. A bubble of air rose through the liquid inside as she turned it end over end. She cocked her head and studied it as it reached the surface and burst, splitting into a dozen smaller bubbles that clung to the walls of the cylinder, like spume on a rocky beach, then dissolved back into the well.

“So you see why your suits won’t save you,” she told the needle. “They’ll pour through them like a sieve.” She placed her thumb on the plunger. Her knuckles whitened as her grip on the cylinder tightened. “Like I said,” she whispered, lips barely moving, voice barely audible above the hum of her holo, “you shouldn’t have come.”

Her holo showed her and Miller seeing to Britt, who by now had regained consciousness. He held a hand to his head, still clearing out the cobwebs, by the looks of things, and rubbed the knee on which he’d fallen. But he appeared to be recovering well. They were starting to talk about what to do next. The discussion flowed more smoothly now that Rauch was out of the picture.

I watched with only passing interest. My mind was busy playing back some of the things the girl had said:

“Airborne…packets…small enough to pass through filters…”

“Inert…survive sterilization…”

“Like I said, you shouldn’t have come…”

“You should have bombed this place to slag.”

Suddenly it all made sense. “It can’t be contained,” I said, and edged away from her again, as if ten centimeters of distance might somehow make a difference. “The sealed bunker, the radio silence, the closed-circuit ventilation, the way the access codes just stopped working…that was you, wasn’t it? The equipment never malfunctioned. The bots and vees never hijacked it. You did all that on purpose!”

The girl only stared at the needle, and at the holoscreen beyond, where Britt was gingerly testing his balance, using Miller and the girl as crutches as he paced the floor.

“You’re the ones who smashed the com-lines! You’re the ones who scrammed the codes! You’re why overrides were useless, the reason we had to chirp our way in! You did everything you could to seal, scramble, redirect, and blast anything you could to help you make a quarantine, even if it meant your lives.” I watched as Britt gave both of them a tentative thumbs-up. They released him, leaving him to stand or fall on the power of his own two legs, but my attention was in the background, where Rauch’s body sat beside the pool of Charles’ blood, his fairy pale, blue, and frozen as it showed its final scene. They weren’t wrong. To seal themselves in like that, to do every single thing they could in an effort to contain the outbreak, was actually commendable. I asked myself, briefly, if in the same situation I’d have been able to do the same, and it was a question I couldn’t answer. But the way they went about it left a lot to be desired. “Why didn’t you tell us?” I asked. “Why leave us in the dark, knowing what we’d have to do?”

The girl bobbed her head from side to side, dropping it gently as she did. A sad little gesture, which seemed to mean ‘I don’t know,’ ‘people make mistakes sometimes’ and ‘because we did, assface’ all at the same time. The screen homed in on Rauch, as if to ask how HQ would have reacted to two separate deaths on the team. Then the scene blurred to nothing, making way for the next in line. “Can you honestly say it would have mattered?” she asked, eyes still focused on the needle.

It was my turn to be stilled. I thought back to the vote in the war room, and tried to guess whose might have changed. I had to admit, I wasn’t sure.

“What’s your name?” she asked, as the next scene bubbled to life onscreen. “I never caught it.”

I hesitated. Names were not protocol in situations like these. She should have already known it, of course. It’s not like we had never talked. But then again I should have already known hers. Why couldn’t I remember dammit? If I could just remember, maybe I could –

“Ramsay,” said the voice to my left. I shot him a dirty look, wondering what he could be thinking, but I held my tongue.

The girl nodded softly to herself. I don’t think she really cared who answered.

“Do you believe in God, Ramsay?”

Ramsay shuffled his feet, noticeably caught off guard. He and I shared another glance. Don’t look at me, I shrugged. Your mess…

“Yes,” he said, “I suppose I do.” He shot a nervous glance at Banks and Bergman, as if considering his answer carefully, and how it might affect his command. “Not in a strictly biblical sense, but…yeah, I believe in a higher power.”

She nodded again. The corners of her mouth curled upwards for a split second, the barest hint of a smile. It was the answer she’d been hoping for. “And…do you believe that He is merciful?”

Silence. It was obvious what she was doing. No one wanted any part of it.

The scene finished rendering. She and Miller, alone in the incubation chambers, sitting at the console, staring at another screen. She looked normal, more or less – a little worse for wear than she had in the other playbacks, but miles fresher than the girl beside us in the room – but Miller’s neck was covered by a bandage that was woefully undersized for the wound it seemed to be trying to patch. Skeins of code spanned the expanse of one panel on the display. A colored helix spun lazily on another. Both their eyes flicked from one back to the other, as if the two were somehow linked.

The girl’s features drained when she saw it. “I sure hope so,” she choked.

She jammed the needle into her thigh, depressed the plunger, and sent five cc’s of uncut cytomorph coursing through her system. After everything she’d been through, all the death she had seen, and the destruction she had helped unleash on all the people she had cared about, I had a hard time even being mad.