"You kept him in Phocoena," Lubin said in a dead monotone.

"You can spank me later, okay? Just shut up and listen: I took him back to Miri and I ran every test she knew how to recommend, and they all confirmed it. Three days ago he was absolutely on death's door, and today I've seen worse head colds."

"You have a cure?" He couldn't believe it.

"It doesn't need a cure. It cures itself. You just—get over it."

"I'd like to see those data."

"You can do more than that. You can help collect 'em. We were just about to run the latest sequence when the lifters showed up."

Lubin shook his head. "Taka seemed to think—" But Taka Ouellette, by her own admission, had fouled up before. Taka Ouellette was nowhere near the top of her field. And Taka Ouellette had discovered Seppuku's dark side only after Achilles Desjardins had led her on his own guided tour of the data...

"I've been trying to figure out why anyone would create a bug that builds to absolutely massive concentrations in the body, and then, just...dies off," Clarke said. "And I can only come up with one reason." She cocked her head at him. "How many vectors did you catch?"

"Eighteen." Working night and day, tracking pink clouds and heat-traces, taking directions from anonymous voices on the radio, derms pasted on his skin to scrub the poisons from his blood, keep him going on half an hour's sleep out of every twenty-four...

"Any of them die?" Clarke asked.

"I was told they died in quarantine." He snorted at his own stupidity. What does it take to fool the master? Just five years out of the game and a voice on the airwaves...

"Taka was right, as far as she went," Clarke said, "Seppuku would kill if nothing stopped it. She just didn't realize that Seppuku stopped itself somehow. And she's got some kind of—esteem issues..."

Imagine that, Lubin thought dryly.

"—she's so used to being the fuck-up that she just—assumes she fucked up at the slightest excuse." She stared at Lubin with a face holding equal parts hope and horror. "But she was right all along, Ken. We're back at square one. Someone must have figured out how to beat ßehemoth, and someone else is trying to stop them."

"Desjardins," Lubin said.

Clarke hesitated. "Maybe..."

There was no maybe about it. Achilles Desjardins was too high in the ranks to not know of any campaign to rehabilitate the continent. Ergo, he couldn't possibly have not known Seppuku's true nature. He had simply lied about it.

And Clarke was wrong about something else, too. They weren't back to square one at all. Back on square one, Lubin had not invested two weeks fighting for the wrong side.