He came staggering out of the woods on foot, limping, purple-skinned, his face a swollen mass of scabs and pulpy bruises. He wore a thermochrome windbreaker with one of the arms torn away, and he lurched into sight just as Clarke was about to shut down for the evening.

"Hi again," he said. A bubble of blood grew and popped at the corner of his mouth. "Miss me?"

"Holy shit." She hurried over and helped him towards the MI. "What happened to you?"

"'Nother r. A Big r. Fucking capital r. Took my bike." He shook his head; the gesture was stiff and clumsy, as if rigor mortis were already taking hold. "That other K around? Taka?"

"No. I'll look after you." She guided him to Miri's right mouth, took his weight as he sagged onto the extended tongue.

"You really a doctor?" The teenager managed to look skeptical through all the gore. "Not that I care," he added after a moment. "You can check me over any time."

Finally it sunk in: Miss me?

Clarke shook her head. "I'm sorry, but I've seen a lot of people lately. I don't know if I'd recognize you even without all the facework."

"Ricketts," the boy said.

She stepped back. "You brought—"

"I brought that stuff that's gonna kill ßehemoth," he said proudly through cracked and puffy lips.

You brought the stuff that's going to kill us all, she thought.

It shouldn't have been any kind of dilemma. Get him into the MI. Clean him up, fix the physical injuries, confirm the presence of any new predator eating him from the inside out.

Maybe he's clean. All the contaminated stuff was sealed up in that bag, maybe he never had direct contact—

Confirm Seppuku. Isolate the victim. Call for extraction.

Hope to God that if he's got it, he can't breathe it on me...

"Lie back. Get your feet up." She was at the rear panel almost before Ricketts had taken his feet off the ground. She stabbed the usual icon, heard the familiar hum as Miri swallowed. Clarke told the vehicle to close both mouths and run the standard diagnostic suite.

She left him in there while she sprayed herself down with disinfectant. Overkill, probably. Hopefully. She was wearing the requisite sterile gloves, and the 'skin of her tunic protected her under Ouellette's borrowed clothing—

Shit. The clothing.

She stripped it off and bagged it for incineration. The rest of her diveskin was in her backpack, stashed in the cab. The forsaken pieces, retrieved, wriggled back into place, seams sealing together into a comforting second skin. Diveskins weren't built with antipathogen properties explicitly in mind, but the copolymer dealt with salt ions as a matter of course; it had to keep out anything as large as a living cell.