Remembering Beau—who was turning his head back and forth between the adults with unmistakable interest in this conversation—Hannah was about to ask him what was in the notebook he held when a sudden stillness captured her attention. At the end of the table, Kira was reading something from her phone.

“They’ve sequenced it,” she said. And then: “Oh my God.”

“Sequenced what? The virus?”

“Yes. They just announced it.” She leaned back from the phone, squinting, as she read aloud. “ ‘As of 9:19 p.m. the day prior to this reporting, an academician of the SNS’—that’s the Sistema Nacional de Salud, the Spanish National Health Service—‘an academician of the SNS reports complete genomic sequencing has been carried out regarding the pathogen of these cases of unexplained viral pneumonia. The cause has been determined to be a new type of artiovirus.’ ” She looked up, intensity etched across her face, and locked eyes with Declan. He too was wide-eyed, his fork arrested halfway to his mouth. “An artiovirus. I’ll be damned.”

“An artiovirus?” asked Hannah. She set down her fork. “They cause colds, right? I barely remember that one.”

“Yes. It’s named after the animal group in which it was first discovered, the artiodactyls.”

Silence. Then, from Georgia: “The what? There’s a virus named after dinosaurs?”

“No, no. Not dinosaurs. How could we isolate a virus from dinosaurs? Artiodactyls are large cloven-hoofed mammals, like goats and giraffes and cows and pigs. Artioviruses are not severely pathogenic in humans. I’ve never . . .” Kira paused, then resumed in a quieter voice. “They can cause mild disease, like colds. They’re like rhinoviruses or coronaviruses.” Again, she met Declan’s eyes.

“Kiki! You work on this virus?”

“I do, yes. It’s one of my official job titles: I’m the SME—the subject matter expert—for artioviruses at the Viral Infections Branch of the CDC. It’s been an obscure job, to say the least. I need to check in at work, guys, my team is probably waking up to this.”

Several people spoke at once. “Why didn’t you ever tell us that?” “This is the same virus Declan’s drug targets?”

Kira and Declan shot each other a look Hannah couldn’t quite interpret. “We were trying to find a cure for common upper respiratory infections,” said Declan. “Not this strain of the virus. But yes. Something similar.”

Compton appeared puzzled. “You said pigs . . . I thought diseases come from pigs all the time. Aren’t they supposed to be genetically similar to us?”