“Decontamination will take a few days,” said Kelly. If she had opinions about the legality of bugging CDC installations, she was keeping them to herself. “You won’t be getting anything until that’s done.”

“Well, then, I guess I’ll have plenty of time to catch up on my beauty sleep. All of you, good night, and try to get some rest.”

“I will,” said Becks, giving me a thoughtful look as I turned to go.

Making it up the stairs took more effort than it should have. I was so damn tired. It seemed like too much trouble when I could sit down and sleep perfectly well on the steps. I knew I needed to shower. Strict field protocols said I should have showered the second I got to the house, like Becks did. It can really screw up your insurance if you don’t go through proper decontamination after every logged trip into the field, but there are loopholes to the law, if you know how to use them. We didn’t log the trip to Dr. Abbey’s lab, and CDC offices are counted as some of the few public places not considered hazard zones. My failure to scrub up like a good little boy was strictly legal, and I was aware enough of my exposure risks to know that I hadn’t been dangerously close to anything infectious. I just didn’t want to go to bed feeling like I’d never be clean again.

The showers in Maggie’s house are another amazing example of what you can achieve if you have enough money and don’t care how much of it you spend. The showers in the Oakland apartments were bare-bones, consisting of air locks, computer-controlled water sprays, and simple blood test panels. Using them was like getting scrubbed down by industrial robots that didn’t give a damn whether you were comfortable with the process. They didn’t quite perform involuntary enemas, but God, they came close. Maggie’s place, on the other hand… When her parents set her up with a place of her own, they took “spare no expense” seriously. Some of the bells and whistles she had were things I’d seen only in magazines and in articles about people with more money than sense.

The entire bathroom was decorated in pre-Rising tile, with genuine porcelain fixtures, the kind that can get broken or splinter, thus becoming infection risks and requiring full replacement. It was easy to miss at first glance that the room was divided into two sections, since the main section contained the toilet, a full-sized sink, and an antique claw-footed bathtub. All you had to do to get inside was open the door—no blood tests required. If you were the sort of person who could ignore the heavy curtain covering one wall, you could pretend that it really was a pre-Rising bathroom, and that all that zombie nonsense had never actually happened.