“He did. So did Magdalene. But at the end of the day, Shaun, the only person I trust to tell me your condition is you.”

“I’d feel flattered if I didn’t know that you expected me to die.”

“Isn’t that your intention?”

I stopped for a moment, suddenly and sharply aware of George’s silent presence at the back of my head. Lying to Mahir would border on impossible, even if George was willing to let me, and in the end, I didn’t bother trying. “Eventually, yeah. But not until after we’ve found the people who killed George. Did you get those files I sent you?”

“I did,” Mahir admitted. “How much of them did you understand?”

“Not enough. I’m guessing you understood a little bit more.”

“Enough to make me think I’ll never sleep again.”

“That’s good—means the files are what Dr. Abbey said they were. I need you to do something for me.”

“What’s that?”

“Find a virologist with nothing left to lose and get them to check her work.”

Now it was Mahir’s turn to fall briefly silent. Finally, tone wary, he asked, “Do you understand what you’re asking me to do?”

“Yeah, I do. I feel like a total ass for doing it, but I do.”

Mahir went silent again. Honestly, I couldn’t blame him.

North America lost a lot during the Rising. Big chunks of Canada and the lower parts of Mexico have never been reclaimed from the infected. We held the line in Alaska as long as we could, but in the end, the infection was too strong and we had to let the entire state go. Almost every part of the United States has its little dead zones, places that are too damn dangerous to take back. None of that can hold a candle to what India lost. Because what India lost… was India.

The conditions in pre-Rising India formed a perfect model for pandemic spread of Kellis-Amberlee. We studied it in school as part of the standard epidemiology curriculum: Combine highly concentrated populations with large stretches of rural farmland, a polluted water supply, and large, unconfined animals, and you were basically setting up the ideal conditions for losing everything. According to the reports—the ones that made it out of India, anyway; there aren’t many—the virus first started showing up in Mumbai, where it went from zero to chaos in the streets in less than thirty-six hours. While India was throwing all its resources at trying to save the city, the infection was taking hold in the country, claiming villages and small towns so quickly that no one had time to sound the alarm. By the time anyone realized that the quarantine couldn’t possibly have held, it was way too fucking late to do anything but evacuate.