There was a long silence as Margaret absorbed what he had just told her. She was aware of the blood pulsing behind her eyes, in her throat, in the pit of her stomach. She felt sick. “You mean it’s still there in the rice?” she asked eventually. He nodded. “The stuff that people are growing and eating?” He nodded again. “And anyone who eats it has got, or is going to get, this virus . . . this RXV?”

He dragged his eyes away from his feet for a moment to stare off into the trees. His voice was trembling. “Of course, it won’t show itself for another couple of years yet. Chao was eating it long before it went into production.”

Margaret simply found herself unable to deal with the scale of what he was saying. “But that’s more than a billion people,” she gasped.

He shrugged. “More than that. They’ve been exporting super-rice all over the world. And once the virus is out there, who knows how else it’s transmitted? We could be looking at half the world’s population or more.”

And in that moment, Margaret was struck by the sickening realisation that she, too, had eaten the rice. For a moment she simply couldn’t believe it. There had to be a mistake, some way of undoing it. She couldn’t be going to die just because she’d eaten some rice. It was like the moment she had heard that Michael was dead. She couldn’t accept it. It just didn’t seem possible. She wheeled round on McCord, fear turning to anger turning to rage.

“You fucking people!” she screamed at him, her voice echoing back from every marble surface and rising into the hot pine-scented night. “You stupid fucking people! What nature took three billion years to achieve, you thought you could do in three. You thought you could play fucking God!”

McCord flinched, but he did not speak for a long time. “Irony is,” he said finally, “I haven’t eaten rice since I was a kid. Got an allergic reaction to the stuff.”

Margaret was riven between despair and anger. She wanted to fly at him, punching and kicking and tearing at his face. But her despair robbed her of strength and she stood helplessly in the night, crushed and burdened by the weight of what she knew—that she had eaten death and there was no way back; that before she died she would see two billion people, maybe more, die ahead of her; that there was nothing she could do about any of it.

Hot, salty tears filled her eyes, blurring and distorting the image of McCord in front her. “Why are they even bothering to try and cover it up?” she asked hopelessly. “What’s the point?”