Page 33 of Spread Me
She has to save them all.
“I—” Kinsey freezes, realizes that everything she hasn’t said, every secret she’s holding, has the potential to make things worse. It doesn’t matter. She has to say something. She has to stop them. “I never got sick,” she says at last.
“What do you mean? Of course you did,” Mads says, frowning. “We all did.”
“I didn’t. I lied. I just didn’t want to catch what everyone else had. I stayed in my room for a few days while the rest of you got sick, but I was fine the whole time.”
“But you were one of the first ones who got sick,” Nkrumah says, tilting her head to one side. “You couldn’t have known that everyone would—”
“Mads called quarantine,” Kinsey interrupts. “I figured, better safe than sorry. I shouldn’t have lied,” she adds, hoping that admitting this small failure will save her from having to own up to any bigger ones. “It was selfish of me. I just didn’t know how to tell you before now. I’m sorry.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Mads says.
“Of course it does.” Kinsey needs it to. “I don’t—I don’t want to die. And since I didn’t get sick, we know the virus didn’t get me. Maybe I’m immune or something,” she says, trying desperately to iron the tremble out of her voice. “I can go get help. I can go tell someone what’s happening. I can—”
“It doesn’t matter,” Mads says again, more firmly this time. “Just because you didn’t have symptoms, that doesn’t mean you didn’t get the virus. You could be a carrier. Hell, for all we know, you could be an incubator.”
“I’m not—”
“It’s not a chance we can afford to take,” Mads says. “If this lichen gets out of the desert, that’s an extinction-level event. This thing kills whatever it touches and eats whatever it kills. It would wipe out humanity.”
“It would wipe out everything,” Nkrumah breathes. Her adrenaline seems to be ebbing at last. Her shoulders slump, her chin sinking to her chest. “Everything. Gone. We have to. We have to—shit. God damn it. Fuck.”
Kinsey reaches a tentative hand toward Nkrumah, rests it on her shoulder. “This is too big for us to figure out right now,” Kinsey says. She tries to make it gentle, soft. She tries not to sound terrified. “We’re all exhausted and scared and overwhelmed. Let’s sleep on it, okay?”
“What’s the point?” Nkrumah asks. “Sleeping won’t make the situation any better.”
“No,” Kinsey agrees, “but it might make us smarter. There are answers. We just have to come up with them.”
Mads nods. “Okay.”
“Really?” Kinsey’s head swims with relief.
“Yeah, fine,” Nkrumah agrees. “Eight hours. We meet back here—”
“In the canteen,” Kinsey interrupts. “I want to sit on a couch.”
“Fine,” Nkrumah says. She sounds more exhausted by the second. “We all need to eat something. I gotta put this fucking thing back on the pile,” she adds, brandishing the keycard she used to exile Jacques. “But if nobody has a better idea eight hours from now, we end this. Deal?”
Kinsey gives her shoulder a soft squeeze. “Deal.”
They walk down the hall to their respective bedrooms in silence. Kinsey locks her door, then leans against it, staring at the painting on her wall and hoping an answer will come to her before dawn.
Jacques is scrubbing the lab tables. Soapy water, a soft yellow sponge, his arms rhythmically pumping across the stainless steel. His shirt hangs out of the back pocket of his cutoffs. It sways in time with the rocking of his shoulders and hips.
Mads stands in the doorway to the lab, their arms folded across their chest. They came to ask Kinsey for something—she’s at a microscope, recording the diameters of cryptobiotic fungal hyphae from the previous day’s samples. Mads loves coming to request equipment and supplies while she’s recording data, because they know she hates the distraction and will say yes just to make them go away.
But they’re not asking her for anything yet. They’re just standing there, watching Jacques work. Their expression isplacid, but their head is tilted at a curious angle. “You do this every morning,” they observe.
“Mm,” Jacques responds, not looking around at them.
“Nobody even used the lab yesterday. You were all in the field all day long. That table is still clean from the last time you scrubbed it.”
Jacques dunks the sponge into the plastic bin of suds, wrings it out. “That’s true.”
“What do you need, Mads?” Kinsey asks, adjusting the focus on the scope even though she can already see perfectly clearly. This is why she doesn’t like distractions. They make her fidget.
“I need to know why Jacques is cleaning a clean surface. Could be a sign of desert madness.”
