There were two items, both rife with dangerous pathology. Desjardins was no pathologist, but then again he didn't have to be; the friends and advisors arrayed about him distilled all those biochemical details down to an executive summary that even he could understand. Now they served up a pair of genotypes with red flags attached. The first was almost ßehemoth, only better: greater resistance to osmotic stress, sharper teeth for cleaving molecules. Higher virulence. At least one critical feature was the same, though. Like baseline ßehemoth, this new strain was optimized for life at the bottom of the sea.

It did not exist in the standard database. Which raised the question of what its technical specs were doing in a glorified ambulance out of Bangor.

It would have been enough to grab his attention even if it had arrived unaccompanied. It had brought a date, though, and she was the real ballbreaker. She was the bitch he had always dreaded. She was the last thing he would have ever expected.

Because he had always known that Seppuku would gain a foothold eventually.

But he hadn't expected anyone on his own side to be culturing the damn thing.

Corral

Taka cursed her own lack of foresight. They'd spread the word, all right. They'd told all who came by of their plan to save the world: the need for samples, the dangers of lingering afterwards, the places she'd patrol to take charge of vital payloads. They'd taken special note of those few who'd driven up in cars or motorbikes or even plain old pedal-powered flywheels, got addresses from those who still had them and told the rest to check back regularly: if all went well, they might save the world.

And things had gone well, and then so horribly wrong, in such quick succession. They had their counteragent, or some of it anyway, but no prearranged signals to bring in the couriers. And after all, why would they have even bothered? They could have taken an afternoon and driven around the county. They could have waited for those of no fixed address to check in, tomorrow or the next day.

And now Taka Ouellette had the salvation of the world in her hands, and some shrinking fraction of a sixty-minute window to get it to safety.

She ran the siren continuously from one end of Freeport to the other, a shrieking departure from the music employed to announce her day-to-day presence. Hopefully it would summon the healthy as well as the sick.

She got some of both. She warned them all to take shelter; she promised a mother with a broken arm and a son with incipient stage-one that she'd come back and help them when the fires had passed. She urged the others, as they fled, to send the Six her way, or anyone else with wheels to burn.