I grabbed Dr. Summers’s arm and kicked up from the floor, dragging her cold-stiffened body with me, using the dead man’s shoulder as a step. He was infected, he was infected, the thought was a drumbeat in my mind, but I needed the boost. I was growing light-headed, and every piercing shriek of the alarm was like a knife in my ears. I kicked too hard and floated right by the vent to hit the ceiling. Dr. Summers’s white hair was a cloud of dandelion puff around me. I coughed as strands drifted to my mouth, flinched away from its feather-soft touch on my skin. Her face was close to mine, close enough that I could see every wrinkle around her eyes, every hair of her eyelashes.

She jerked away, and I yelped, the noise lost beneath another wail of the alarm, but it was only Malachi tugging her down. He had figured out what I was trying to do. Together we positioned her body over the air evacuation vent.

“It won’t stop it completely,” Malachi said, gasping on every word.

I knew that. I only wanted more time. My mind was racing, my thoughts punctured by the siren, by fierce awareness of every breath, by the aching, clawing cold. The glass wall might be breakable, but we had nothing to break it with. There was only the one door.

One door. A single human-sized door.

I looked at Malachi. “How did they get it in here?”

The alarm shrieked over his answer, but he grabbed my hand and pulled me toward the floor, catching a support strut with his free hand. Urgency made his motions more focused, chasing away the doubt that normally accompanied his every choice.

“There’s space between the levels,” he explained. “Find the panel that opens.”

We traced the edges of the floor panels with our fingertips, but we could not pry anything loose. The cold made my fingers feel fat and numb, and my vision was beginning to blur. I found four small screws holding one panel in place. I pointed, and Malachi nodded—we were too short of breath to waste words.

I pushed myself back up to the workstation. We needed a tool. A screwdriver, or anything that could be used as one. I fumbled with the strap of tools, not bothering to search through them, just tugged the entire collection down to the floor again. The room swam around me, and my head throbbed with crescendoing pain. I began coughing—rough and dry, an uncontrollable urge—and in spite of the cold, a sweat broke out all over my skin. I struck my head on the hull of the probe when I misjudged the distance, but the sound of the impact was muffled beneath the siren and the cotton-stuffed feeling in my ears. Malachi was a blurry shape before me, moving with underwater slowness as he searched through the tools.