He is listed as an inmate at the Black Creek Correctional Facility, located on an island on the Sound, and their chopper is whisking them there now. Beneath them the gridwork of the city is lit up red and blue with the rack lights of emergency vehicles. But the chaos seems far away, and Director Ricketts is rigid and silent in the seat beside him as they leave Seattle behind, cutting through the gray nowhere of the clouds over the water.

* * *

The Black Creek Correctional Facility appears more flesh than stone, as if mortared with fungus. The hallways are so thickly pasted they appear rounded instead of squared, like the passage of a digestive system. Pulsing cauliflower formations bulge from the floors, walls, and ceilings. Jack says, “I think these are the spore catapults. A kind of bursting cell. And I’d need to do an autopsy to know for sure, but I bet if we checked the respiratory system of an affected person, we’d find smaller versions of the same. Imagine this hallway as a throat.”

“I don’t want to,” Nora says.

Spores snow the air. Jack trails behind Nora and Mia, studying a coral-like formation with black hairs spinning out of them. “Hmm,” he says, and she says, “Jack. Enough.”

“Okay.” He jogs to catch up and nearly slips more than once. “Sorry.”

They find the occasional face or arm sculptured out of the gray. Some of them blink or reach, their fingers trembling like anemones in a tide pool. Along one section of wall there are five mouths with gray tongues lolling out from between teeth. A black syrup dribbles and oozes from them.

Down one corridor comes what sounds like the mewling of a thousand voices. Something bangs against a metal door so hard, it bulges outward. They startle and look around worriedly, but for a time they believe they might travel through this necrotic womb unmolested.

Then the light dims and the end of the hallway seems suddenly to retreat. They realize then that a kind of sphincter is tightening before them, closing off their passage. They hurry forward—too late. The way is blocked. A puckered gray swirl prevents them from traveling any farther.

Jack and Nora kick and claw at it, and then they stand aside and let Mia have a turn. Her fist hardens into what looks like a conch. “Go ahead,” they say. “Just like the window in the lab. You’ve got this.”