Covering the far camera meant standing next to the rats. When I approached, the animals all rushed to the sides of their cages nearest me, squealing and clawing at the edges. They were hungry, and I looked like food. Were they covered with fleas that would jump onto us as soon as the rats died, or would the rats— Enough! My hands, my very skin, trembled with fear.

I found empty cages under the table where the rats were housed. With clumsy fingers I stacked the empties onto each other. My hair was wet under the bonnet as I climbed my makeshift ladder.

Cady stood as far from me as she could while she cut off a piece of duct tape to pass to me. My hands inside their latex gloves were numb with nerves. I dropped two pieces of tape before I held on to one long enough to cover the camera lens. After that, dealing with the camera near the door was child’s play.

We watched the monitor. The man in black was dozing now. The clock on the computer screen read 2:20. It had taken forty minutes to cover the cameras. How much time did we have before the man in black noticed he’d lost his feed to the lab?

We couldn’t find an off switch for the fermenters, so we unplugged a cord that connected them to a massive backup battery. We unplugged another cord that fed the machine with the clanking arms. In the silence that followed, the sounds from the cages filled the room, rustling, squealing.

I put my hands over my ears, pushing hysteria back inside, down to the bottom of my mind. Keep working, keep moving, think only of the next step to solve this problem.

I surveyed the fermenters. We needed to detach them from the ventilator. I didn’t know what would happen if we took the nozzles off the tops, whether they would spew pestis all over the room. I wasn’t convinced that the amount of doxycycline we were taking would protect us from a plague bath. Cady and I hunted in the drawers but finally went to the kitchenette in the equipment center for a box of foil.

I climbed onto the counter and carefully unhooked a hose from one of the fermenters. Vapor rose from the opening. I quickly wrapped it in foil and taped it tight.

I was breathing hard, my eyes fogging inside the protective mask. One down, eleven to go. One step at a time: Unhook the hose, cap the top with foil, tape it shut. Unhook, cap, tape. My hair was soaking, clinging to my scalp underneath the bonnet. When I glanced at Cady, her face was white, freckles standing out like orange stars.

After we’d wrapped the last fermenter, we carried them from the countertop to the other side of the room, where we stashed them next to the machine with the exterior arms.