“It’s all good.” I raised my helmet. “I’m taking the bike.”

“But—”

“We need someone riding point. And besides,” I said and grinned, “you know I’m going to get the best footage.”

He gave me an uncertain look. “You’re going to be exposed.”

“We’ve all basically bathed in insect repellent—if they bite me, I probably deserve it. Now come on, finish packing the van. We have a pretty narrow time frame here, and we need to get out before it closes.”

Becks lobbed a duffel bag at him. He caught it with an oof, and gave me a wounded look before turning to resume packing the van. I didn’t really care if he thought I was being an idiot. Maybe I was. I was also being a realist.

When the last box was wedged into place and the last bag was stowed, the four of them got into the van, rolling the windows all the way up. I put on my helmet, sealing it tightly before nodding to activate the intercom. “How’s our connection?” I asked.

“Loud and clear,” Mahir replied.

“Great. Now le roll.”

The garage door rolled smoothly upward in answer to some unseen signal from Maggie, and the night air came flooding in, chilling me even through my leathers. It wasn’t the temperature so much as the uncertainty that the air represented: the risk of a kind of infection we’d never been afraid of before. Kellis-Amberlee was a known quantity; it was, for lack of a better phrase, a safe virus, something that could kill you, but which we understood. The thought of a new vector made it all terrifying again.

Becks started up the van engine and turned on the headlights. I didn’t need them to see where I was going, since the exterior house lights were turned up so far that it practically looked like noon out in the yard. I walked over to the bike and swung my leg over it, balancing myself. “Go,” I said, into the microphone in my helmet. “I’ll be right behind you.”

The van pulled out of the garage. I let them get to the first gate before I started the ignition and followed.

The trip down the driveway was harrowing. We moved slowly enough that I had to walk the bike about two-thirds of the time. When that wasn’t possible, I had to coast, trying to keep from either overbalancing or stalling out. Neither would be good. And I’d be dealing with it alone either way, since there was no way I was letting the others stop the van to help me. That wasn’t part of the plan.