Kelly nodded firmly, looking more frustrated than anything else. “I tried to say something. I was e-mailing you for three weeks before we hit the point where I couldn’t hang around in Memphis anymore.”

The spam filters, said George quietly.

I winced.

“A secure phone line would have been noticed in a facility as locked down as the CDC,” Kelly continued. “When Dr. Wynne evacuated me, I wound up drugged and stuffed into the back of a truck that was hauling dry goods to California. I barely had a pulse for a few thousand miles. I definitely wasn’t in any condition to make phone calls.”

“You could still have opened the conversation with the fact that we might want to evacuate,” said Becks.

“Would you have listened?” asked Kelly.

Becks looked away.

Kelly sighed. “I thought not. Look: I had no way of knowing things would get that bad, that fast. The world doesn’t work like that in the lab. Things go slower there.” She took a shaky breath, calming herself. “Our research team was down to three when we realized none of us were safe. We had to get someone out alive if we wanted to preserve our results. Dr. O’Shea wasn’t willing to take the risk, and Dr. Li had a family. It had to be me. So I went to Dr. Wynne.”

“And he had you cloned,” I deadpanned. “Naturally. Why didn’t I think of that?”

“I had to seem to die—it was the only way that I’d have a chance at getting away with our results. Dr. O’Shea was working on a nerve study that required full-body subjects. She set up the clone. It was supposed to be her DNA.”

“Swap-off happened at the techie level?” asked Alaric, suddenly paying attention. He always paid attention when something started smelling like a story.

“Yes,” said Kelly. “One intern handed the sample to another intern, who handed it to a lab tech when Dr. Wynne asked him to run an errand instead, and by that point, it was easy enough to get the sample from the incubator and swap in one of my own samples instead.”

Ask her why the source DNA matters, prompted George.

“Right,” I muttered, before saying, in a more conversationalone, “Why does the source DNA matter? I thought the CDC was exempt from the prohibition against cloning.”

“Clones are illegal for moral reasons. The CDC’s dispensation allows researchers to do full-body cloning for research purposes, and the moral questions are skirted by permitting only self-cloning,” said Kelly. “That way the question of the clone having a soul can be politely ignored, and the religious community doesn’t feel the need to shut us down.”