Page 5 of Evolved

Gran tuts at me. “Ignore my granddaughter’s rudeness.”

“It wasn’t rude …” I trail off when his grin amplifies into a laugh. “It’s just true.”

It is.

Gran gestures delicately to the conference table. “Cookies are perfect. As is your timing. Sit. Both of you.”

I set the book with its four mugs down as he ambles into the room, unbuttoning his suit coat and dropping into a chair opposite us. He glances at me, and I can feel the weight of his dark eyes as they scan my face briefly, dipping, just for a second, down to the gray sweater I’m wearing, then back up to my lips, without a mask, and it’s a strange hyper-awareness that has me conscious that he hasn’t seen my lips in weeks either.

And all I can think ismy lipsandhis lips.Exposed, like a Victorian woman showing a glimpse of a scandalous ankle.

Gran gestures at the chair beside Gina, opposite us.

Gina sniffles and discretely moves a tissue off her lap to wipe it under her nose before taking her tea off the book. Whatever she and Gran discussed in my absence, it wasn’t good.

It’s clearly not the time for me to be looking at Knox’s lips.

Or his eyes.

I push his mug toward him. He reaches out to take it. For a single second, his fingertips touch mine and zap like an electric shock. I jerk my hand back away and tuck it into a fist under the table.

“I just received an email from Jim Helios,” Gran says, her knuckly hand, covered in age spots and rings, coming up to settle over the hollow of her throat, gold and diamonds glittering icily. Helios is the head of NIH. “Official estimates for the flu have come in. Unreleased as yet. The mortality rate is … higher than anticipated.”

We’ve been waiting for clear figures since the first man died in Paris, the whole world, our collective hearts sinking with every new death, every new city to announce an infection.

“How high?” I ask.

“You need to prepare yourselves,” she says crisply. “The figure is … alarming. Far more so than what’s been reported on the news.”

Gina’s chin rumples.

Knox leans back in his chair, and it squeals out a long protest.

“Just say it,” I breathe.

“Ninety-nine percent,” Gran says.

“No,” I whisper.

“Unfortunately, yes. Far worse than anyone could have imagined,” Gran adds.

Gina’s gasp breaks off into choked silence as her hand comes up to cover her mouth.

“That has to be a mistake.” I blurt, knowing it’s not. The latest estimates have been closer to sixty percent.

“It’s not. Ninety-nine percent fatality.” Gran lifts the teabag from her mug and drapes it carefully over the rim. “Death.”

Knox leans forward to rest his elbows on the table, his head dropping to his hands.

Even the bubonic plague only killed twenty-five to forty percent at its absolute worst. Spanish Flu killed less than two percent, Covid less than a fraction of one percent. The worst viruses of all, Ebola and Marburg, only kill around fifty percent, depending on the degree of medical intervention. These are facts I know because I looked them up when I wrote her last address.

“The numbers have been corroborated across China, Japan, Australia, France, Brazil, and Nigeria,” Gran says.

My tongue sticks in the back of my throat, instant images rising up in my consciousness, bodies piling up in hospitals,mass graves, skeletons too small to contemplate. “That can’t be right.”

“It is,” Gran says firmly, her voice returned, and she smooths the lapels of her navy cardigan.

Her hands are shaking, too.

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