“George?” I asked. My own voice sounded almost exactly like hers had.

“We should go,” said Kelly, sounding suddenly alarmed. She took my elbow. I looked down at her hands, but she didn’t let go. “Or we should ask her about the research. You know, what we came to ask about.”

“Dr. Abbey?” asked Alaric. “What’s going on? What are you doing here? Why did you give your dog reservoir conditions, and what do you mean when you say he can’t amplify? And what does it have to do with the deaths of the people with the natural reservoir conditions?”

“The Kellis-Amberlee virus was an accident,” said Dr. Abbey, still looking at the pane of safety glass. Her hand moved slowly over her dog’s head, stroking his ears. “It was never supposed to happen. The Kellis flu and Marburg Amberlee were both good ideas. They just didn’t get the laboratory testing they needed. If there’d been more time to understand them before they got out, before they combined the way that they did… but there wasn’t time, and the genie got out of the bottle before most people even realized the bottle was there. It could have been worse. That’s what nobody wants to admit. So the dead get up and walk around—so what? We don’t get sick like our ancestors did. We don’t die of cancer, even though we keep pumping pollutants into the atmosphere as fast as we can come up with them. We live charmed lives, except for the damn zombies, and even those don’t have to be the kind of problem that we make them out to be. They could just be an inconvenience. Instead, we let them define everything.”

“They’re zombies,” said Becks. “It’s sort of hard to ignore them.”

“Is it really?” Dr. Abbey’s hand continued caressing Joe’s ears. “There’s always been something nasty waiting around the corner to kill us, but it wasn’t until the Rising that we let ourselves start living in this constant state of fear. This constant ‘stay inside and let yourself be protected’ mentality has gotten more people killed than all the accidental exposures in the world. It’s like we’re all addicted to being afraid.”

Ask her about the reservoir conditions, prompted George.

“George—I mean, I want to know, what do the reservoir conditions have to do with any of this?” My voice sounded unfamiliar to my own ears, like someone else was asking the question.

“The immune system can learn to deal with almost anything, given sufficient time and exposure. How else could we have stayed alive for this long?” Dr. Abbey turned to look at me, eyes dark and very tired beneath the erratically bleached fringe of her hair. “The reservoir conditions are our bodies figuring out how to process the virus. How to work around it. They’re our immune responses writ large and inconvenient, like the autoimmune diseases people used to suffer from before the Rising.”