The view suddenly brightens and she understands that Jack has found a spotlight above. Its beam cuts the dark and homes in on the whale. There is a gash near its fin where the boat struck it. A wave rolls over and buries the whale from view for a few seconds, and when it bobs up again, the foam frothing off it, she sees something that stops her breath.

She initially mistook the white clumping its skin as barnacles. But she was wrong. It’s fungus. Mushrooms bulge out of its eyes and blowhole and coat the tongue of its gaping mouth.

24

Dr. Johnson gets on the phone with the mayor, and Director Ricketts gets on the phone with DC. The Pentagon approves the National Guard deployment of one thousand troops. More immediately, Sea-Tac airport has been shut down, all incoming flights diverted, and the police are working to barricade the interstate corridors. But borders are porous. A true quarantine won’t be possible, but they can at least slow the spread.

While they talk, Isaac busies himself with his own work, scanning the bloody glyphs with his phone, uploading them onto his laptop. He asks for a quiet space to study, and Dr. Johnson puts him in the hospital chapel.

He sits in the front pew, bent over his computer. The windows are dark when they’re not lit up with the red flash of an ambulance. A backlit cross hangs over the pulpit.

When he worked as a genome engineer, he spent his days reading and modifying the sequence and expression of genes. He developed programs and systems, one of them called SPLICER, that calculated possible cleavages and unions between biology and synthetics. Trying to make a stronger seed. To bully evolution. Any nucleus was programmable. DNA was up for negotiation.

He boots up SPLICER now. He doesn’t have all the information he needs on proteins and transcriptional activators and catalytic domains of this fungus, but he has a rudimentary pattern. If the rings of a tree can tell you about the history of a forest, then the swirl of these ciphers can point toward a larger narrative. A genetic sequence that will tie back to a source. An origin. A kind of motive for the crimes currently being committed.