Garth and Constance had been out cold for over two days now, locked in a state of regenerative sleep as their bodies transformed to accommodate their new, immortal souls. I’d remained at Garth’s bedside for the first nine hours, and the inaction—the waiting—had nearly driven me mad. Patience isn’t my strong suit, and stillness is like torture to me.

“The news is reporting cases of the disease in hospitals in Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Albuquerque, Salt Lake City, and Vancouver now,” Dom said, breaking through my meditative fog.

I exhaled heavily, shoulders slumping. “Guess closing the state borders didn’t work.”

Washington had been under quarantine since the previous evening, once it became obvious that the people flooding hospitals in the greater Seattle and Tacoma areas complaining of a severe flu were actually the first wave of a new, frightening epidemic. The Cascade Virus—CV, for short, a strange viral pathogen that was seemingly nonresponsive to any kind of treatment—was all anyone could talk about on the news these days. I’d stopped watching TV or listening to the radio that morning, sick of hearing about the search for a cure. I already knew they’d never find one.

“Maybe they can stop it before it spreads across the country,” I said, resting my chin on my hand. Not sure who “they” were in my mind, but surely there was someone—some humanitarian group or special government organization—who could handle this. Someone who could succeed where we’d failed.

“Perhaps,” Dom said, but he didn’t sound convinced.

“If it gets any worse, this could be bad, Dom—like, extinction-level bad.”

“After everything we’ve learned from the members of the board, I believe that is precisely the point of all this.” Heru had learned from Scott, the youngest member of the Ouroboros board, that the Senate paid him half a billion dollars and promised him immortality if he arranged for the release of ten infected humans and planted them in major cities across the country. He’d only made it to seven by the time we shut down his base of operations, the lab in SoDo.

I shook my head, feeling defeated. “I just don’t get it. Why would the Senate do this? How could they? It’s just so . . . so wrong.” What good was Heru’s war now when all he was fighting for was a crumbling world?

“I wish I had an answer for you, little sister.”

“I don’t,” I said. “That would mean your mind is just as twisted as theirs are.” I inhaled deeply, then sighed. “The number of people who are going to die . . .” Even thinking about it twisted my stomach into knots. “I wish there was something I could do. Anything.” I’d never felt more useless in my life.

“There is something you can do,” Nik said from some ways behind me.

I straightened and twisted around on the driftwood, spotting him at the mouth of the trail leading to the beach through the woods. “Shouldn’t you be with Mari right now?” The two had been working together so closely for the past couple of days that I’d barely seen him, even though we’d both been in and out of the basement laboratory the whole time.