Today, traffic didn’t cooperate. Hannah didn’t mind a slowdown, though. She loved the serene oasis of her car, which she kept meticulously tidy. Her cup holder always held a shiny stainless mug of herbal tea; her stereo always played soothing instrumental music; her dashboard was always dustless and gleaming. But even if she’d been driving a rusty old heap like Kira’s car, she’d have found a way to enjoy the downtime of the drive. Impatience rarely bothered Hannah.

At the moment, her calm nature was a blessing. For one thing, Harry sat in the passenger seat. Harry’s was not a soothing presence: he twittered and hummed and jerked around in his seat as if he were being jolted with a cattle prod. She didn’t blame him: he had plenty of reason to be on edge. The internal dial controlling Hannah’s outward movements slid down at moments like these, while Harry’s lurched upward in spasmodic fits and starts until it broke and spun in useless circles. By the time they got to the hospital, she’d probably have petrified and he’d have spontaneously combusted.

Harry reached for the car’s stereo, changing the music to a news broadcast. Fleetingly, Hannah hoped for a cutesy nonstory: the unlikely friendship between two different species of zoo animals or the triumphant struggle of a Paralympian—or anything, really—but of course only one subject interested the public right now. You could not escape it, the saga of what was happening in New York; it dominated every social media page, every newspaper headline, every website, every television news report.

The rest of the country had watched in horror the images of National Guard tanks rolling through the obscenely empty streets of Manhattan, blocking entrances to bridges and tunnels, looking like a staged scene from a B-list disaster flick. But even that paled in comparison to the descriptions pouring out online from shattered healthcare workers in New York’s hospitals. Reading these tales of bodies piling up, she’d tried over and over and over again to reach Compton, but: nothing. Since the awful news that Compton’s husband had been one of the city’s earliest victims of the virus—which Hannah had learned not from Compton when they’d been isolated in Spain but from a later Facebook post from their old med school class president—she’d called, emailed, texted, DMed, and written multiple snail-mail letters. Compton herself wasn’t dead, she knew, because she occasionally tweeted terse missives about the number of dead and incapacitated people at her hospital. Her forty-seven Twitter followers had ballooned; now she had more than a thousand.