“You should pay better attention,” she said smoothly, walking past him to the back room. “All I smell is the brisk scent of mint.”

The med room was well stocked and didn’t look like it had been hit yet—though someone had obviously been rifling through it recently, leaving prints and scuffs in the thick layer of dust. Probably the grunts, she thought, though I’ve never seen a grunt run actually sort through the meds before.

Kira started organizing the counter space, designating one area to keep and one to destroy. Salvage training was the first thing the interns learned: which meds could last, and for how long, and which were too far gone to be safe. Bringing expired medication back to East Meadow was even worse than bringing back broken machines, not because they took up space but because they were dangerous. The medics were the caretakers of the entire human race; the last thing they needed was for someone to take the wrong pills—or worse yet, for a vast stockpile of discarded medication to get into the water table. It was safer and easier to sort it out here; they’d even learned how to deal with animal meds, for exactly this kind of scenario—a dog antibiotic was still, at the end of the day, an antibiotic, and without extensive manufacturing facilities, the islanders had to take what they could get. Kira was already sorting the cupboards efficiently when Marcus staggered in, his mask finally in place.

“This place smells like a crypt.”

“It is a crypt.”

“And the animals are not the worst part,” he said, “though I swear there must be a whole dog civilization in here to have this kind of stink.” He opened another cupboard and started tossing medicines into Kira’s piles, knowing exactly which was which without even looking. “No,” he said, “the worst part is the dust. Whatever else we collect from this place, I’m taking a pound of it home in my lungs.”

“It will build character,” said Kira, laughing as she tried to impersonate Nurse Hardy. “I’ve been on nine million-billion salvage runs, intern, and you just have to learn to deal with it. Breathing corpse dust is good for you—it activates the kidneys.”

“Salvage isn’t just good for you,” said Marcus, launching into a dead-on impersonation of Senator Hobb, “it’s essential for the very survival of all mankind. Think of the part you’ll play in the glorious new page of history!”

Kira laughed out loud—Hobb was always talking about the “new page of history.” Like all they had to do was keep writing, and the book would never end.

“Future generations will look back with awe at the giants who saved our race,” continued Marcus, “who threw down the Partials and cured RM once and for all. Who saved the lives of countless infants, and…” His rant died off, the room feeling suddenly uncomfortable, and they worked in silence. After a while Marcus spoke again.

“I think they’re getting more nervous than they let on,” he said. He paused. “They didn’t mention it in the meeting, but they really are talking about lowering the pregnancy age again.”