Page 19 of Spread Me
Kinsey looks around at her team and sees the way they all sag under the punishing weight of the heat. She grudgingly rises, feels the blood in her legs unpool, watches as the horizon swims and shimmers in the distance. “One hour,” she says. “Unless Mads says we need longer. Which they won’t. Deal?”
Saskia’s already gone, striding back the way they’d come at dawn. As soon as Kinsey starts walking, she knows that Saskia was right—she can feel the full breadth of the kilometer between them and the station, the way it stretches relentlessly between her team and the respite they all clearly need. She stumbles over her own feet, kicking up dust and nearly sprawling across a trail of carpenter ants.
She stands there, trying to recover, waiting for her head to stop spinning. She startles at the feel of a cool, dry hand on her elbow. “Come on, then,” Saskia says in a low voice, her lips curling up at the corners. “I’m sure Mads will say I was being silly and inefficient, making us go back. Let’s go talk to them, so you can say you told me so.”
They walk together, Saskia clearly slowing her pace to stay beside Kinsey. She points at things as they pass—things that are mundane to the desert, but still at least a little incredible to everyone on the team. A massive lizard resting in the shade of a stone, and his smaller counterpart basking in the sun up above, both of them watching the passersby with suspicious, darting eyes. A thorny bush socovered in caterpillar webbing that it looks like a fresh-spun cone of cotton candy. A black seam in a rockface that sets off a debate about whether it would make sense for there to be coal out here. Saskia gets them talking, checks in on each of them subtly enough that they don’t snap at her.
When they get back to the station, she stands by graciously as Mads berates the entire team for staying in the field during the hottest part of the day. Kinsey finds her twenty minutes later, after a steady stream of water and cool damp compresses have brought her most of the way back to herself.
“You have every right to say that you told me so. That was stupid,” Kinsey says evenly. “I could have gotten us killed.”
Saskia shakes her head and offers Kinsey a small, conspiratorial smile. “No way. I remember when you interviewed me, Kinsey. You told me that you need every person on your team to be ready to put you in a headlock and drag you out of the field.”
Kinsey doesn’t feel the warmth rising in her cheeks, but she knows it’s there, joining the flush of her lingering heat exhaustion. “I didn’t think I’d need—”
“Sure you did.” Saskia gives a liquid shrug. “So you see? You have nothing to apologize for. You couldn’t have gotten us killed. We’d never let you do such a thing. You made sure of it when you brought us on.”
“Still, though, I’m—”
“You’re perspiring again. Good sign.” She grins, eyeing Kinsey’s hairline. “Come on. Let’s go show Mads. They’ll be thrilled to see it. Mads! Kinsey’s sweaty!”
She leads the way to the exam room, and Kinsey follows.
Kinsey wakes in the morning to the sound of Mads pacing in the hall outside her door. She doesn’t know how early it is. She doesn’t have a window in her bedroom, doesn’t have a bedside clock, hasn’t charged her cell phone in months. Here at the station, she gets up when Mads gets up—their footfalls are her morning alarm. It could be midnight. It could be noon. All she knows is that the wind outside is still hammering at her wall, and Mads is up, so she is up.
She opens the bedroom door and pokes her head out. “What time is it? Is that storm still going? Did you figure out how to read Weatherman?”
Mads, who had just finished stomping past her door, whips around. Their face is wild with relief. “Oh, good, you’re awake.” They hand her an unopened packet of wild berry Toaster Strudel. “There’s breakfast. Come with me.”
Kinsey, still in the tank top and underwear she slept in, stumbles down the dim hallway after them. The research station is strange with the lights off. Liminal. It feels like a bus station, or a movie set, or a shopping mall after all the stores have closed for the day. “Where are we going?” she asks, her voice still thick with sleep.
“Lab,” Mads answers. “Storm’s been going all night. Hell out there.” Kinsey frowns. Mads isn’t usually this short with her. Mads isn’t usually short with anyone. They’re not a huge talker, but they’re also perma-calm, existing in a state of enormous sanguinity. Before they burst into the exam room the other day, she’s never seen them so much as shout. Now, they’re curt and hurried, stalking toward the lab like they’ve got a pot boiling in there.
As they hustle past the exam room, Kinsey notices that someone has taped cardboard over the window. There’s more duct tape on the door than there was when she sealed Domino inside the day before, too—a lot more. So much that the door itself is no longer visible.
“Is Domino still in there?” she whispers.
Mads doesn’t answer. They keep moving, down the hall and through the open door of the lab, ignoring the whine of the wind on the other side of the exterior wall. She realizes that Mads is still wearing the clothes they had on yesterday. She wonders if they’ve slept at all.
The lab itself isn’t substantially different from the canteen, with the food swapped out for equipment and tech. Wire shelves line the walls. Stainless steel lab tables stand in two rows in the center of the room. They’re on rubber-footed legs instead of locking casters, built for stability instead of mobility, but otherwise there’s no discernible difference between them and the exam table in the room next door.
Weatherman stands in one corner, looking for all theworld like an arcade game. The big glass screen shows a stream of incoming storm data in shades of red and green and amber. It fills the lab with a flickering glow. Kinsey watches the flow of numbers and coordinates, wishing she’d done more than a cursory training session. She knows the numbers indicate danger, but she has no idea how much danger she and her team might actually be in.
One of the lab tables is littered with the detritus of a long night’s work: crumpled paper towels, discarded pipettes and wadded nitrile gloves, paraffin wax on a cordless warmer, hydrogen peroxide, dye, droppers, formalin in a dark brown glass bottle, a jug of ethanol withJacques don’t drink me!scribbled on a stripe of masking tape across the front. The other table is bare, with the exception of two compound microscopes and a lab notebook.
The wind is loud in here. It’s on just the other side of the wall, same as in her bedroom. It yanks at the wall like it wants to get inside, banshee-yowl and scouring sand. On the other side of that wall, Kinsey knows the sky is either pitch-black or Hell-red.
Mads hurries to the microscope, ignoring the mess behind them and the noise around them. “While I was in the exam room, after you left—”
“Sorry, by the way,” Kinsey interrupts. “I shouldn’t have left like that.” She’s not sure how embarrassed she should be, not sure how much Mads saw. She wonders what Domino told them.
They look up at her and all she sees in their eyes is understanding. “It’s fine. I shouldn’t have made you collect the sample all on your own. That wasn’t fair to you.”
“None of this is fair,” she responds gently.
Mads looks back to the microscope. “Well,” they say, adjusting the focus minutely, “anyway, after you left, I madesure Domino was okay, and I grabbed the tissue sample you took from them. It was a great one. Kind of a lot of tissue, actually. Like… way too much. I’m not sure how they weren’t seriously injured.” They pause for a moment, leaving a gap that Kinsey knows she’s supposed to fill with some kind of explanation. She lets the silence hang until Mads continues. “But they seemed fine, so. While I was in the room, I figured I might as well take a tissue sample from the specimen, too.”
It takes Kinsey a moment to remember the specimen they found in the desert, the creature that started all the chaos. “That would have been good practice for me before I stabbed Domino in the armpit, huh?”
