Page 32 of Spread Me
“Think,” Nkrumah urges. “Think back. It could help. Come on, you were in the shower, and…?”
“And, I don’t know, they were kind of”—she doesn’t want to say it, she has no choice but to say it—“flirting with me?”
Mads shakes their head. “We knew that. They came on to you in the exam room, right? And—”
“What about Saskia?” Nkrumah interrupts. “When I was moving the bookshelves with Jacques, she was calling your name through the lab door. Did she come on to you too?”
Kinsey shrugs. “Maybe?” The lie feels like cooling candle wax on her tongue. “I don’t know, I can never tell when someone’s flirting with me. Are you sure it was my name she was saying?”
“I heard it too,” Mads says. “And she was staring at you a lot when we were talking about splitting up to check each other over. She was doing that thing,” they add, lifting a hand to their throat.
“Oh, yeah, the horny necklace thing she does,” Nkrumah says, snapping and pointing at Mads. “That’s her tell. She always fidgets with that cross when she’s turned on.”
Kinsey holds her hands up, trying to stop them. “Guys, stop. None of that makes any sense,” she says. “Why would the lichen—why would it have the same tells as Saskia? That doesn’t—”
“It replicated Domino well enough to whistle,” Nkrumah says. She’s picking up speed, gaining enthusiasm. “Yesterday I could hear them whistling in the shower from clear down the hall. Obviously the lichen is picking up our behaviors too. Neural pathway mirroring, maybe? Kinsey, think hard,okay, this is important.” She studies Kinsey’s face with rapt intensity. “Did Saskia flirt with you?”
Kinsey closes her eyes. Remembers the chill of Saskia’s necklace pressing into the nape of her neck. She feels briefly dizzy with need. “I think so,” she says weakly. “Yeah, I think she might have.”
“That’s it, then,” Nkrumah says, pushing herself to her feet. “The lichen wants Kinsey. Mads, are you horny for Kinsey?”
“Uh,” Mads says, “I don’t—”
“Because I’m not horny for Kinsey,” Nkrumah continues, seemingly oblivious to Mads’s discomfort. “So you and I are fine, then. Kinsey, sorry, I’m not gonna ask if you’re horny for yourself, you’d just lie anyway if you were.”
“I wouldn’t—wait,” Kinsey says.
But it’s too late. Nkrumah has momentum, and she’s not stopping for anyone. “This is an easy solve,” she says, turning her entire body to face Mads. “We just have to kill Kinsey.”
Kinsey is on her feet before she knows she’s about to stand. “What? No, that’s—”
“We’ve been thinking about this all wrong. It wants Kinsey. It’s only pursuing Kinsey. Think about it, Mads,” Nkrumah says eagerly. “Domino didn’t try anything with you when you went into that room, right? They didn’t try to hurt you, they didn’t even try to touch you.”
“Definitely didn’t flirt with me,” Mads says, frowning thoughtfully. “That’s true. It doesn’t seem compulsive. Honestly, it doesn’t even seem malicious. Maybe we’re jumping to conclusions here. We’ve been reacting with fear but we have no proof that this lichen wants tohurtus.”
That’s too much for Kinsey. “It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t want to hurt us,” she says. The sand on the roof is loudernow, tapping like Nkrumah’s finger on the exam room glass. Kinsey doesn’t want to say any of this. Speaking it out loud is almost unbearably painful—it’s the thing she never lets herself think, never lets herself look at straight on. “They’re viruses. A virus doesn’t want to hurt anyone, it just wants to live. It just wants to survive and propagate. It can’t help the fact that its very existence hurts everything it touches. It can’t help it,” she says again, her voice breaking on a sob. “But that’s what we can’t afford to forget—whether it wants to kill us or not, killing is all it’s capable of. We can’t forget that. People will die if we do.”
Mads regards her. Then their gaze shifts behind her, to stare down the corridor where Domino’s and Saskia’s doubles lie in wait. “You’re both right,” they say.
Kinsey doesn’t like the resignation in their voice. “How do you mean?”
They’re quiet for a long time. They won’t look away from the lab corridor. Their shoulders rise, then slump forward. When they finally answer her, they sound hollowed out. “Kinsey, you’re right that it doesn’t matter what the lichen wants—it’s dangerous. And Nkrumah, you’re right that we should kill Kinsey.”
Kinsey takes a half step backward, away from them both. “What?!”
“Not just you,” Mads says, as though that’s better. “It’s not just you that needs to die. It’s all three of us. And Saskia, and Domino. And Jacques, too,” they add, glancing toward the door to the airlock. “We should bring him inside and kill him. And then we should burn this place to the ground.”
“Mads—”
Mads rubs their eyes, digging their knuckles into the deep hollows of fatigue there. “It’s the only way to makesure we eliminate the lichen completely. So none of us can risk transmitting it to the rest of the world.”
Kinsey looks back and forth between them. “You can’t be serious. We’re not killing ourselves. That’s—it’s just not what we’re doing,” she says, feeling ridiculous as the first real flutter of panic unfurls inside of her. “No. There has to be a better solution. There’s always a better solution.”
“Not this time,” Nkrumah says. Her eyes are still bright, her expression still engaged and enthusiastic—but her face isn’t moving. It’s a mask, Kinsey realizes, and it’s stuck. “I can go get the field rifle from the Jeep. Let’s not waste time. Mads, are any of the cleaning supplies in the storage closet good for accelerant?”
“Wait.” Kinsey’s entire body is buzzing. “Wait wait wait. Stop. Please—there’s something I haven’t told you.”
Mads and Nkrumah both turn to face her. They look energized, terrified, determined. They look ready to face death—but when Kinsey speaks, they still listen. They wait for her to tell them the thing that will change their minds and save them all.
