The man’s lips moved dryly, saying, “He is here.”

“Who is here, Captain Redfern?”

Redfern’s eyes stared, as though witnessing a terrible scene being played out before him.

He said, “Mr. Leech.”

Much later, Nora returned, finding Eph down the hallway from radiology. They spoke standing before a wall covered with crayon artwork from thankful young patients. He told her about what he had seen under Redfern’s flesh.

Nora said, “The black light of our Luma lamps—isn’t that low-spectrum ultraviolet light?”

Eph nodded. He too had been thinking about the old man outside the morgue.

“I want to see it,” said Nora.

“Redfern’s in radiology now,” Eph told her. “We had to further sedate him for MRI imaging.”

“I got the results from the airplane,” said Nora, “the liquid sprayed around there. Turns out you were right. There’s ammonia and phosphorous—”

“I knew it—”

“But also oxalic and iron and uric acids. Plasma.”

“What?”

“Raw plasma. And a whole load of enzymes.”

Eph held his forehead as though taking his own temperature. “As in digestion?”

“Now what does that remind you of?”

“Excretions. Birds, bats. Like guano. But how…”

Nora shook her head, feeling in equal parts both excited and bewildered. “Whoever, whatever was on that airplane…took a giant shit in the cabin.”

While Eph was trying to wrap his mind around that one, a man in hospital scrubs came hustling down the hallway, calling his name. Eph recognized him as the technician from the MRI room.

“Dr. Goodweather—I don’t know what happened. I just stepped out to get some coffee. I wasn’t gone five minutes.”

“What do you mean? What is it?”

“Your patient. He’s gone from the scanner.”

Jim Kent was downstairs near the closed gift shop, away from the others, talking on his mobile phone. “They are imaging him now,” he told the person on the other end. “He seems to be going downhill pretty fast, sir. Yes, they should have the scans in just a few hours. No—no word on the other survivors. I thought you’d want to know. Yes, sir, I am alone—”

He became distracted by the sight of a tall, ginger-haired man wearing a hospital johnny, walking unsteadily down the hallway, trailing along the floor IV tubes from his arm. Unless Jim was mistaken, it was Captain Redfern.

“Sir, I…something’s happening…let me call you back.”

He hung up and plucked the wire from his ear, stuffing it into his jacket pocket and following the man a few dozen yards away. The patient slowed for just a moment, turning his head as though aware of his pursuer.

“Captain Redfern?” said Jim.

The patient continued around a corner and Jim followed, only to find, when he turned the same corner, the hallway empty.

Jim checked door signs. He tried the one marked STAIRS and looked down the narrow well between half flights. He caught sight of an IV tube trailing down the steps.