Chapter Eight

Damian drops me two blocks from the hospital because I ask him to, because whatever's happening in there, I don't want to walk in flanked by a billionaire nobody's supposed to know I'm associated with yet. I regret it within about ninety seconds of getting out of the car.

The emergency bay is a wall of noise before I even reach the doors — gurneys, raised voices, a security guard standing in the doorway with his arms crossed telling a line of people that the hospital isn't taking new admissions right now, which is the kind of sentence hospitals don't say unless something has already gone very wrong inside.

I find Reyna's number and call instead of texting. She picks up on the second ring, breathless.

"Ivy, I can't talk, we've got a situation—"

"I'm outside. Let me in."

"You can't, they've got the bay locked—"

"Reyna." I say her name the way I used to say it when we were nineteen and she was about to talk herself out of something she actually wanted to do. "Let me in."

There's a pause, and then the line goes dead, and thirty seconds later a side door two buildings down cracks open and her face appears in the gap, pale, hair coming loose from its clip, scrubs spattered with something I decide not to look at too closely.

"You should not be here," she says, pulling me inside anyway, down a service corridor that smells like antiseptic and something under it, something wrong. "It's not just the one patient anymore, Ivy. We've got three more since I texted you, all with the same presentation, all coming in from the same three-block radius, and the attending's finally stopped calling it an outlier and started calling the health department, which means in about an hour this stops being our problem and starts being everyone's."

"Show me."

"Absolutely not."

"Reyna."

She stops in the corridor and looks at me the way she used to look at me right before she gave up trying to talk me out of something, which is somehow both a comfort and the worst possible sign, because the last time she looked at me like that we were breaking into our college's chemistry building on a dare and nobody almost died.

"Five minutes," she says. "Through the observation window. You do not go in that room."

The window looks into a containment bay I didn't know this hospital had, glass thick enough to muffle sound to almost nothing, and through it I can see a man restrained to a bed, maybe forty, ordinary in every way except for how wrong his skin looks under the fluorescent light, gray-yellow, sheened with sweat, veins standing dark against his throat. Two nurses in full protective gear are working fast and careful just out of reach of his hands, which are straining against the restraints with a strength that doesn't match the rest of him at all.

"He came in disoriented," Reyna says quietly, close to my ear. "Within two hours he was combative. We've had to increase the restraints twice. His labs don't match anything in the system — cytokine markers are through the roof, but it's not sepsis, it's not meningitis, it's not anything any of us have a name for."

On the other side of the glass, the man's head turns, slow, unnatural, and for one terrible second it feels like he's looking directly at me through glass I know he shouldn't be able to see through at all.

"Reyna." My voice comes out smaller than I want it to. "I need you to trust me on something, and I need you to not ask me how I know it yet."

"Okay."

"Whatever's happening in that room. It's not going to stay in that room. Not today, not this week — but soon, and when it starts moving, it's going to move faster than anyone in this building thinks is possible." I grip her arm, hard enough that she looks at me instead of the glass. "You need to start stockpiling supplies you're not supposed to need yet. Protective gear, especially. And you need to trust me when I tell you which parts of this city are going to be safe longer than the rest, because I am going to need you somewhere specific when this gets worse, and I need you to be ready to move fast when I say so."

She's quiet a long moment, studying my face the way she studied the man on the other side of the glass, looking for the wrongness underneath.

"You've changed," she says finally. "Something happened to you. I don't know what, and you're clearly not going to tell me yet, but I've known you since we were nineteen, Ivy, and you are not the same person who texted me about wedding flowers three days ago."

"I know."

"Is it good or bad? Whatever changed you?"

I look back through the glass, at the restrained man whose fever isn't supposed to exist yet, at the two nurses working fast and careful around hands that are pulling harder against leather straps than any ordinary sick man's hands should be able to pull.

The alarm goes off before I can answer her.

It's not loud, exactly — a low, insistent tone, more urgent than the ordinary hospital chime — but I watch both nurses' heads snap up at the exact same instant, watch them both take one full step back from the bed on pure instinct, and through the glass I see the restraint on the man's left wrist give way all at once, leather tearing like it's nothing at all.

"Get down," Reyna says, and shoves me hard against the corridor wall just as the containment bay door bursts open thirty feet down the hall and the alarm stops being a warning and starts being something the whole floor can hear at once.