Page 23 of Spread Me
They take turns looking into the microscopes on the coffee table, one by one. Nkrumah goes last. She takes a long time peering down into the lens. When she returns to her seat on the patched love seat, her gaze remains locked on the microscope, like it might turn to her and speak.
Kinsey continues. “Given how easily the lichen took Domino’s shape, and the shape of the specimen we found—we think it can look like anything. Anything living,at least, although I suppose we shouldn’t rule out nonliving things as well.”
She sees most of her own feelings reflected on their faces. Nkrumah looks focused and interested; her mind will be racing, Kinsey knows, with the scientific possibilities opened up by a mutualistic collaboration between fungus and virus. Nkrumah is always looking for the roads that might unfurl as a result of the team’s fieldwork. She’s always hoping for broader horizons and brighter futures.
Jacques, meanwhile, is pale and tight-lipped. He’s already compartmentalized his grief and heartbreak about Domino. Rather than feeling the weight of loss, he’ll be focused on considering the ramifications: the dangers of a fungus that can move with the speed and flexibility of a virus, the horrors of a virus that has the longevity and stability of a fungus. Jacques is the soothsayer of the team, the one who sees trouble on the horizon while everyone else is busy staring at a hole in the ground. He always knows when to be worried. Kinsey can see that he’s worried now.
Saskia is tougher to read. That’s not unusual. Her face tends toward stillness. She’s stroking the Eastern Orthodox cross around her neck with her middle finger, long slow strokes that make Kinsey feel like she shouldn’t be watching. Saskia is a thinker. She takes her time, assesses situations slowly, combs through information until it falls in shining waves she can run her fingers through easily. The information Mads and Kinsey have delivered to her today is simple in content and complicated in its ramifications. It’ll take time for her to organize it in her mind, but once she has, she’ll deliver some scathingly concise answer to everything, something that will make the rest of them wonder how they didn’t see it sooner.
Mads looks exhausted. Kinsey guesses they’ve beenawake for thirty hours, maybe more. They clear their throat, and all the remaining eyes in the room snap to them.
“I, um.” They hunch their shoulders, jam their hands in their pockets. “I can’t figure out a gentle way to put this. Domino.” They stop and don’t seem to know how to start again. Their eyes lift to the ceiling, like they’re listening to the song of the storm raging outside.
“You can say it,” Jacques says. His voice is rough. “Domino is gone.”
Nkrumah shoots up out of her chair, her arms crossed over her chest. “No, they’re not,” she snaps. “Stop it. Just because they have, what, a fungal infection? That doesn’t mean they’re dead. They’re in the exam room right now, probably hungry and thirsty because you idiots haven’t brought them any—”
“They’re not hungry,” Saskia says in a low, even voice. “They didn’t ask for anything when Kinsey went in to take the sample from them. Remember?”
“That’s right.” Jacques rocks forward in his seat, rests his elbows on his knees. “And they didn’t join us for breakfast yesterday morning. Neither did you, Kinsey. I guess because you were with them.”
She frowns to herself, remembering. “Yeah, I was with them. They wanted to go look at the specimen—at least, that’s what they said. I think they just wanted to get me alone, though. We went straight into the lab from the shower. Our hair was still wet. Well,” she says, considering, “mine was. Theirs was already dry.”
“The fungus would be efficient at trapping and storing moisture,” Mads offers. “Maybe it was already distributed throughout the primary body.”
“Don’t talk about them that way,” Nkrumah pleads. “Listen to yourselves. ‘The body’? That’s not how we talkabout our—our colleague.” Her voice breaks, her eyes dropping to the floor. Domino’s never been just a colleague to Nkrumah, and she’s never been good at pretending otherwise.
“It sounds like that’s not ourcolleaguein there anymore,” Jacques says gently. “The sample Kinsey took—”
“Oh, so we’re deciding that based off one sample? A sample we got from someone who doesn’t even know how to take one properly?”
“I do know how to take a sample,” Kinsey replies. “Not in a way that wouldn’t hurt a living person, so yeah, Mads was talking me through it. But I didn’t get the chance to follow Mads’s instructions, because Domino, um. They took the needle from me. They took it, and they pushed it in.” She bites back the memory of how much they’d seemed to enjoy the penetration of the wide-bore needle as it slid into the moist cavern of their body. “It went deep. Way too deep. That needle went in far enough that honestly, I was scared it might kill them.”
“It probably wouldn’t have killed them,” Mads says. “Probably. But at the very least it would have hurt. A lot.”
“You sound disappointed that you didn’t manage to murder them with your incompetence.” Nkrumah starts pacing, her arms still crossed, her shoulders taut. “You sound like you want us to abandon them just because they’re freaking you out.”
Mads lets out an exasperated sigh. “Nobody wants Domino gone. You know that.”
“I get what you’re saying, though. And I’m sorry.” Kinsey makes sure she’s facing Nkrumah head-on, looking her square in the eyes. She doesn’t want to say what comes next, but more than that, she doesn’t want to leave Nkrumah alone with it. “But what I’m telling you is, with howfar Domino pushed that needle in, they should have been incapacitated with pain. But they weren’t. They didn’t seem to notice that it was happening at all. Whatever’s going on with their body, they’re different now. And not in the way that change is the only constant of biology,” she adds, seeing Nkrumah’s rebuttal before it comes. “I’m telling you that they’re fundamentally transformed on a biological level, and we need to figure out what that means before we can figure out what to do with them.”
Nkrumah’s shoulders sag. It looks like she’s nearing acceptance—but then Jacques weighs in.
“We just need to accept the reality of the situation,” he supplies. “We discovered something new. Discovery comes with consequences. Domino would understand that.”
Nkrumah looks at him with stark disbelief for a few seconds before turning and walking out of the room. A moment later, there’s the beep of the card reader on the interior airlock door, then a second, fainter beep as Nkrumah storms outside.
“She shouldn’t be out there,” Kinsey says. “It’s dangerous.”
“She knows the risks. Let her go,” Mads says softly.
Kinsey doesn’t like it—the idea of a member of her team standing out in the storm. The wind is quieter now, but the sand out there will still be whipping across the desert hard enough to strip the top layer of flesh from anything that stands still for too long. She hopes Nkrumah grabbed eye protection on the way out, at least. “Fucks sake, Jacques. Was that necessary?”
Jacques frowns and mutters, “It’s true.”
Saskia doesn’t make a sound, doesn’t move—but somehow, something about her shifts to convey that she’s ready to share a thought. Jacques, Mads, and Kinsey all turn to her, attentive.
“What’s up?” Kinsey asks.
