We walked back to the bus to meet Raoul, who’d been waiting with the driver and had no idea of what had just transpired. As the bus lumbered back down Montjuïc, headed for the Sagrada Família, none of us spoke; Hannah’s hands covered her face, and Compton, her jaw set, stared out the window with a gaze so unfocused she could not possibly be seeing a thing. From where I sat, I couldn’t see Georgia or Vani.

That limp child; that trickle of foamy blood leaking from the corner of her mouth. Since my conversation with Wally, I’d been monitoring Pro-EID Com in a half-assed way, but now I clicked the website with a greater sense of urgency.

Right away, it was clear there had been an uptick in internet traffic describing what initially sounded like an unidentified pneumonia and was now being classified as a novel virus emerging in northern Africa and southern Spain. Scrolling through the reports, I noted a change in tone and frequency over the last two days. The first report—categorized as “machine-translated” into English—had been posted about a week ago. Because they were partly derived from nonmedical sites, culled from the internet at large, these reports tended to employ creative grammar and evolving information. Still, even though computers synthesized them, no report made it through the human chain of moderation unless it could be confirmed by a second, independent account of a possible emerging disease.

On the evening of 21 June, an urgent report was circulated by medical sites on the internet.

According to hospital authority, some medical institutions including Tangier, Rabat, and Kenitra have discovered patients with illness of unknown cause.

The unexplained cases refer to the following phenomena that cannot be diagnosed: fever; pneumonia or acute respiratory distress syndrome; reduced white blood cell count; seizures; and pulmonary hemorrhage. The condition did not improve after administration of antibiotics, speculating of viral illness.

No evidence exists of human-to-human transmission, and citizens need not panic.

Next, I found the report Wally had referenced, of the physician who’d died in international waters aboard the Tangier-Tarifa ferry, which had gained very little notice at the time. Following this report were a few others, continuing in a similarly vague, poorly translated vein until I reached the date of June 24, the day before yesterday. On that date, the reporting from the region increased in length and clarity but was still sandwiched between a number of other routine infectious disease reports from across the globe: dengue, Lassa fever, norovirus, malaria, measles, various forms of encephalitis, and some horror called the tomato spotted wilt virus, which was inexplicably attacking potatoes, not tomatoes. I squinted at the screen through a glare from the van’s windows, tuning out an impassioned monologue from Raoul on the unbeatable views from the balconies of the world-famous Hotel Miramar.