When Desmond and Avery disappeared over the next hill, Peyton turned to her father. She had bandaged his leg as best she could and had inspected the other bruises and scrapes on his body, but he needed an X-ray—and a pain medication stronger than the ibuprofen she had given him. Those things would have to wait.

“I don’t trust her,” she said.

He was studying the folder from Aralsk-7, shuffling through the pages like he was counting a deck of playing cards.

“Neither do I.”

Two hundred yards from the camp, Desmond and Avery lay flat on their stomachs, taking turns using the binoculars.

What Desmond saw didn’t make sense. Healthy individuals, moving about. Kids going to school. Breakfast cooking on an open pit grill just outside a building with a concrete floor, metal poles at each corner, and a corrugated metal roof. People sat at rows of tables, eating. About half of them were aboriginals.

There was not a single sick person here. No personnel in PPE.

Was this the Citium’s test site? Were these people the lucky ones—the test group who had gotten the viable cure?

Desmond focused the binoculars on the largest building, which was also metal but was enclosed on all sides and had a small loading dock on the back. A sign above a roll-up door read: SARA. Below it were two lines of text: South Australia Relief Alliance and A Hand Up, Not a Handout.

The door was halfway up, and as Desmond watched, a woman with gray-streaked brown hair ducked under it and walked out onto the concrete loading dock. Spring was turning to summer here, and she was wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt that rippled in the early December wind.

Desmond focused the binoculars. His eyes went wide when he saw her face. She had aged some, but there was no mistaking who she was. He wracked his brain, trying to reason why and how she could be here—why the folder at the Citium lab would have led here.

He let the binoculars fall to the ground.

Avery sensed his unease. “What?” She took the binoculars, scanned the camp, searching for what had alarmed him. “What did you see, Des?”

He stood up.

She shifted to her side and stared up at him, aghast. “Get down.”

“Come on. We’re going to the camp.”

“Are you crazy? You’re just going to walk in there?”

“Yeah. This place isn’t what we think it is.”

Chapter 96

Chapter 96

Desmond hiked across the field with Avery close behind him, making a beeline for the building to the right of the white tents.

Avery grabbed his arm. “Will you tell me what’s going on?”

“Not sure myself.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means there’s something going on here that I don’t understand. A piece is missing.”