Anne helped him into the shower, brought him a warm robe to wrap himself in, took him back to bed, put a trash can next to him, brought him soup and painkillers and anti-diarrheal meds.

“I’m going to call a doctor,” she said.

Holtzmann shook his head. “Just the flu,” he said weakly. “I’ll be fine.”

Then he leaned over and heaved into the trash can.

The agony lasted through Sunday, into Sunday night. Anne talked to him, tried to distract him from the horror that was coursing through his body. He found himself babbling to her, about the meeting with Barnes and the President, about the Nexus children, about everything but the Nexus in his own brain.

By Sunday night the sheets were twisted and damp with his sweat, his writhing. Anne insisted on getting him out of bed so she could change them.

She fell asleep beside him, while the fever and pain and explosive evacuation of his body kept him awake through most of the night. His world was a feverish, twisted nightmare, horrifying images of the President, of Barnes, of Lane. They were all one, a three-faced demon torturing him.

Monday morning. Anne offered to stay home with him, to nurse him to health.

Holtzmann insisted she go to work.

He fired up his slate long enough to send a message in to the office, to say he was still sick. Subject lines loomed at him, lurid sentence fragments that made no sense. He ignored them, sent his own message, and disconnected.

The withdrawal peaked around noon. He knelt before the toilet, his face over it, red and straining, his whole body convulsing as it tried to push some imaginary toxin out of him. He puked up water, puked up bile, puked up nothing at all, but his body wouldn’t stop, wouldn’t stop convulsing, wouldn’t stop trying to turn his guts inside out, trying to shove his stomach up through his throat and into this bowl.

Then the episode was past. He cleaned himself as best he could, collapsed back into the sweat-stained bed, and slept.

Holtzmann woke at 5pm. He felt awful, but fractionally better.

His phone buzzed at him. A moment later his slate did as well. More calls from the office.

He forced himself into the shower, forced himself to clean up, to dress himself, to make himself look halfway presentable. Anne had left him soup in the kitchen. He reheated it, drank a bowl, slurped down noodles. His body trembled, but he felt stronger. The food stayed down.

Then he checked his messages, and found chaos.

Half a dozen of his underlings had been trying to reach him urgently, their messages overlapping with one another, conflicting with one another. Barnes had been calling, asking where he was, ordering him to reply.

The codes. The passcodes. The ones Rangan Shankari had given them didn’t work.