It seemed even darker on the other side of that terrifying door.

A shoddy flashlight between them, Leslie and Corday were forced to press themselves together in the confined space; both inhaled and exhaled air that might kill them. After ten ordinary minutes, Corday actually smiled.

Leslie smiled right back, reaching forward to embrace him in their triumph.

His clothing was still stained from his encounter with Senator Kantor’s corpse, he smelled vile and was laden with dust, but she didn’t seem to care. Leslie pressed closer, thanked him in repeated sweet whispers at his ear.

He could not help but hug her back. “Let’s remain vigilant. We still don’t know what waits inside.”

Enthusiastically, she pressed a kiss to his cheek, a happy tear running through the dirt on her own. “But there is no virus here. We’d both be coughing by now if there were.”

It was a victory Corday sorely needed.

The deeper they got into the mansion, with its private gardens and warmth, the more they realized this segment of the Dome was still intact. There were no cracks, no ice. Trees in the atriums bore fruit in the environment’s false summer.

Surrounded by thriving plant life, Corday reached for an orange, stared at the overripe fruit’s dimpled peel. At his feet were its rotting brothers, each one having been wasted with no one to tend the garden or gather the produce. In those fallen fruit, he saw a parody of the resistance, the waste of lost souls, and the foolishness of almost a year of inaction.

How many good men and women had died while Senator Kantor had been extolling caution?

They had only grown weaker...

Leslie claimed he’d known of this place. Why had the old man been so afraid of a door he must have recognized would not have led to the infection of civilians... not when it was underground and difficult to approach. Teams could have been sent, communication via radio established, and a cave-in organized should the volunteers fall ill with infection.

Walking through those silent, elegantly appointed rooms, Corday begin to feel the stirrings of anger towards the old man. Why had he been so afraid of this place?

Claire was also there in his thoughts, her timid smile and faith. How much more had she suffered because Senator Kantor had refused to open a single door?

Room by room, hall by hall, Corday and Leslie found more than fruit.

There were decomposed bodies that had sat so long in the heat, they had putrefied, then mummified. The elite Enforcer guard of the Premier, every last one of them lay dead. But, it was the way they had died that was most unnerving.

No virus had been there.