“You need blood tests, a full … micropathology report … everything. You’re asymptomatic, now, but … however you feel … do it … there’s no way of knowing what the incubation period might be.” I was dripping sweat, and swaying on my feet; every breath felt like a lungful of fire. “What did you think they were going to do? Send in a hit squad with machine guns? I doubt … I was meant to get sick … at all … but the thing must have mutated on the way. Keyed to your genome … but the lock fell off, en route.” I laughed. “In my blood. In my brain.”

I sagged, and dropped to my knees. A convulsion passed through my whole body, like a peristaltic spasm trying to squeeze the flesh right out of my skin. People around me were shouting, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. I struggled to lift my head – but when I succeeded, briefly, black and purple bruises flowered across my vision.

I stopped fighting it. I closed my eyes and lay down on the cool, welcoming tiles.

#

In the hospital ward, for a long time, I paid no attention to my surroundings. I thrashed about in a knot of sweat-soaked sheets, and let the world remain mercifully out of focus. I sought no information from the people around me; in my delirium, I believed I had all the answers:

Ned Landers was behind everything. When we met, he’d infected me with one of his secret viruses. And now, because I’d traveled so far to escape it … although Helen Wu had proved that the whole world was nothing but a loop, and everything led back to the same point … now I was coming down with Landers’ secret weapon against Violet Mosala, Andrew Worth, and all his other enemies.

I was coming down with Distress.

A tall Fijian man dressed in white poked a drip into my elbow. I tried to shake it out; he held me still. I muttered triumphantly, “Don’t you know there’s no point? There’s no cure!” Distress was nowhere near as bad as I’d imagined; I wasn’t screaming like the woman in Miami, was I? I was nauseous and feverish – but I felt sure that I was headed for some form of beautiful, painless oblivion. I smiled up at the man. “I’m gone forever now! I’ve gone away!”

He said, “I don’t think so. I think you’ve been there, and you’re coming back.”

I shook my head defiantly, but then cried out in surprise and pain. My bowels had gone into spasm, and I was emptying them, uncontrollably, into a pan I hadn’t even noticed beneath me. I tried to stop. I couldn’t. But it wasn’t the incontinence that horrified me, as much as the … consistency. This wasn’t diarrhea; it was water.

The motion stopped eventually, but I kept shuddering.