Sereva had to drag her away to eat meals and interact with the family, but Kit was reluctant to be in any room that didn’t have a monitor. At what point would they find Nolan, at what point would they discover Jex had died? She could not miss those announcements, either one of which would rend her in two. Sometimes, Sereva had meals brought to her in the study where Kit spent most of her time; sometimes, she sent Marcus and Bascom in to try to distract her. Kit played choisin with her nephews and helped them with their lessons (Sereva had designed a study plan for them during the quarantine), but she kept the monitors on. She couldn’t miss anything.

Thus, she was watching late one evening when the reporters waiting outside the Biolab were rewarded with a glimpse of one of the scientists. The exhausted woman who stepped through the door looked vaguely familiar to Kit, though at first she couldn’t say why. The reporters clamored about her so loudly that Kit missed any mention of her name, though they did calm long enough to let her speak.

“We think we’ve made some progress,” she said in a tired but calm voice. “It helped that Nolan’s notes were so complete.”

“Nolan’s notes—Nolan Adelpho’s notes?” one of the reporters demanded.

The woman nodded. “Yes. Two days after we learned of the indigo virus, we received a package from Nolan with a molecular breakdown of the disease and his theories on an antidote. We can’t be sure it’s effective, of course, until we have an actual human subject. But his notes are pretty thorough.”

The reporters seemed unable to grasp this entire concept. “You mean, Nolan Adelpho designed his own cure?” one of them finally asked. “And he told you how to make it?”

“That’s exactly what I mean.”

“But why would he do that?”

The woman searched the crowd for the speaker, her tired eyes suddenly gone dark and angry. “Because he is not Cerisa Daylen! Because he does not want anybody to die! Because Nolan concocted this virus to make you—all of us!—stop and think about who we are, what we’re capable of—”

“Murder and betrayal, that’s what he’s capable of!” one of the journalists shouted.