But Xiomara was right: with Ariana incapacitated, even temporarily, we might have a chance to help her. We had only one infected person, not hundreds. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t stop thinking about the words she had parroted to us, her voice so empty of intonation it was as though she was making sounds that had no meaning to her.

“She’s still in there,” Xiomara said. “Jas. She recognized you.”

“I don’t think she did,” I said.

“She did say your name,” Baqir pointed out.

I shook my head. “No. That’s not what that was.”

“Well, it wasn’t all fucking Archaic Chinese,” Xiomara snapped. “Maybe she was still—hallucinating, or something, but she was talking to us, she saw you and—”

“No. She wasn’t. She didn’t.”

“You don’t know—”

“Yes, I do,” I said, cutting Xiomara off firmly. “I know because what she said were the exact same words my parents said right before my father died. The last time they spoke to each other.”

I looked at Xiomara, at Baqir, both of them silent, and willed them to understand.

“There’s no recording of those words. I’ve never told anybody. Not the investigators. Not the doctors. Not my aunt. Not you.” I looked at Baqir. “I never told anybody. But Ariana repeated them exactly.”

“She said something about a knife,” Baqir said quietly.

Our breath was creating clouds of mist, tinted red by the dormancy lights. Ariana drifted, the toe of one boot rustling over a dried and frostbitten cluster of leaves.

“I was in my room,” I said. “I didn’t know anything was really wrong yet. I knew people were getting sick, but not . . . like that. They thought it was a chemical leak in the research labs or something. There was no quarantine yet. My dad had come back to stay with me, and when Mum came home . . . that’s what she said. She said, ‘Vinod . . .’” My voice cracked on my father’s name. “‘Vinod, what are you doing with that knife?’ I went out to see what was going on, and she told me to go back to my room.”

I rubbed my hand through my hair, knocking loose shards of frozen sweat. I didn’t want to remember the fear on my mother’s face, the dawning horror on my father’s in the brief moments of clarity before the panic took him.

“He was infected,” I said, “but he was aware enough to know he was infected. He closed himself in the bathroom. We didn’t see what happened. But we could hear it.”

The struggled breathing, the thumping. A quiet gurgle. He had not cried out.

“How could a virus do that?” Baqir asked. “Or—whatever it did to Ariana?”