“Low-power dormancy lighting,” Malachi explained, although nobody had asked. “It’ll have to do until we can get the regular lights on. The environmental controls are still functional, so the power sources are still intact, but I can’t access the full system from here.” Then he added, quieter, “Sorry. Didn’t mean to interrupt.”

Now was not the time to scold him, not when he was doing exactly what he was supposed to be doing. I turned back to Bhattacharya. He had not moved, but he was looking at me now, not the corpse.

“That woman didn’t die from the virus,” I said.

“Yes, she did.”

“No. Someone attacked her.” I paused. “Or she injured herself. That’s not a virus.”

“Yes, it is. What happened to her is what happened to all of them. Exactly that.” There was a weariness in Bhattacharya’s voice that made him seem so much older than his twenty-two years. “SPEC decided it had to be a modified version of Zeffir-1 because that’s what doctors here came up with before they died. With how quickly it acted, how it spread, it was their best guess. But what it did to Dr. Chin—that’s what it did to everybody.”

I looked at Chin’s corpse again. Her shriveled hands were caked with blood where the glass shards had sliced into her flesh.

“Explain,” I said. “What, exactly, did it do?”

Bhattacharya took a breath. “When they got infected, it was like . . . one minute they were fine, and the next they were out of control. They were hallucinating, having delusions. Seeing things that weren’t there. SPEC kept the symptoms classified because they had no idea where Dr. Lago got it. They never found out what kind of laboratory was modifying ancient viruses to do . . . that.”

My father’s name on his lips was like an electric shock. I did not let myself react.

He was speaking softly, but there was a roughness to his voice that sounded, to me, like the onward edge of tears. “They didn’t know who they were. They attacked each other. They attacked themselves. They used any weapon they could. It didn’t make people sick. It made them insane. Suicidal and violently insane.”

There was a long silence after he finished speaking.

“What kind of pathogen could do that?” Malachi asked. “That’s not anything I’ve ever heard of.”

“Me neither,” Boudicca put in. “Not even a rumor.”

“Fuck, that must’ve been something to see,” Henke said.

Bhattacharya leaned away from him, and I felt the same flash of revulsion. I pushed the feeling aside. I could not be distracted.

“And the vaccine?” I said.

He moved one arm, half a shrug. “It was a precaution in case Lago had planned another attack. SPEC thought it would work, but it’s not like they could ever test it with the modified virus. They didn’t have a sample.”