Page 4 of Evolved

Gina and I, fully aware that this nurse may never return, video the process on our phones, watching every movement closely, asking questions, making notes.

The nurse comes on the second day, but, ominously, not the third.

After that, Gina and I run the dialysis machine ourselves,and I work hard to forget that the president-elect is somewhere on the other side of the building, fighting for his life, hooked up to fifty machines, while we attempt to govern what feels like a sinking ship.

The pills helped with Gran’s fatigue and breathing, but with the dialysis, the swelling in her ankles goes away entirely. She seems as good as new again, enough to let me convince myself that Dr. Bakshi was wrong. She’ll have more than a decade. She’ll be okay.

Beyond that, the fact that she got sick a month early, causing Gina, Knox, and I to mask up and limit her exposure to anyone outside of our sphere, was a strange twist in fate that may allow us to survive this thing.

Maybe we weren’t exposed because we were already distancing.

Each day, while the machine whirs, a slow rhythmic humming as it cleans Gran’s blood, we go over our daily agenda, which mostly means taking in problems and considering options.

The power grids are operating at emergency capacity and run by a dwindling skeleton crew, and we focus on keeping them going as long as possible, as well as getting access codes to necessary officials so they can resume activity when the illness runs its course.

We gather access codes to weapons lockers and armories within two hundred miles of DC and suggest all governors do the same for their own states.

We contact heads of departments and gather access codes for NSA, FBI, CIA, NGA. Though we will still need to get energy to the ground stations used by the US government for its defense intelligence, and they are housed in a secret undisclosed location—and the only person we’re certain knows its location other thanthe unconscious president himself, are the Secretary of Defense, the Chairwoman of the Joint Chiefs, and the Director of the NSA. The Secretary of Defense hasn’t responded to a message in two days. The Chairwoman is dead. The Director is hiding out in an undisclosed bunker.

It’s at the end of a dialysis session, a couple weeks in, that Gran sets her phone carefully down beside her laptop and removes her face mask.

After a second, Gina and I meet eyes and follow suit.

Breathing air in the same room as them feels terrifying but also freeing.

Gina smiles tremulously at me. I forgot she had a tiny gap in her teeth, and somehow seeing that relaxes me. I never met my mom. I never had a good friend, but Gina sits somewhere between the two, like an aunt or a big sister.

“We’ve been isolating for long enough now.” Gran’s lips, carefully painted her typical dignified mauve, press together into a flat line. “I think perhaps a cup of tea is in order. Tilly, my love, would you do the honors? Gina’s hip has been bothering her.”

“Of course.”Tilly, my love,is reserved for we’re no longer working, for when I’m her granddaughter, not her employee. It means we’re going to get personal.

I’m halfway to the door when she says, “Four, love. We need four mugs.”

Four means Knox.

I prepare four mugs, my hands shaking with a combination of nerves and forgotten breakfast.

The president must be dead.

It’s the only explanation for why we need no masks and tea and Knox andTilly, my love.

I put the four mugs on a tray and carry them back like a server in a coffee shop. The surfaces of the tea ripple like fourtiny oceans, reflecting back the overhead skylight windows and the raging winter sun outside. Two of the handles knock into each other like they’re vibrating with my every step, making a foreboding ripple of sound that fringes on a dirge.

I arrive at the same time Knox does. Gran must have texted him.

He stands now in the open doorway to the left of the fireplace and its painting of Teddy Roosevelt himself astride a bucking stallion in blue and yellow.

It’s a sharp contrast to the man standing beside it, wide shoulders in a black suit, a crisp white shirt. It accentuates his lean energy and swagger and unconscious grace as he enters the room.

“Gina, looking lovely,” he says, and Gina puffs up like a male bird in mating season. “Viola, you too.” He inclines his head at Gran and then turns toward me. “Hello … you.”

My brows draw together because I’m not sure what to call him. In the past, I always said Agent Silva, but that feels bizarre now. So I say nothing.

“I brought cookies,” he says with a wry shrug, and somehow, despite the jocularity of his words, his body manages to convey an odd degree of sorrow and understanding, like he’s acknowledging with incongruent words the horror that has come and will come and the fact that we stand on a balance beam smack between the two. He’d be very good at delivering speeches.

“Seemed like a cookie kind of day.” He tips a box of chocolate-peanut butter fudge cookies that probably have about four hundred calories each. “And you can’t have tea without cookies. Isn’t that a rule?”

“It’s not.” I know rules generally and rules specifically, and I know them well, and that’s not one. Peanut butter and tea soundwrong together.

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