“Couple of things,” he says, as he guides her toward another room in the ICU. “First of all, there have only been eight plague-related deaths today.”

“And that makes you smile?”

“There were eleven yesterday.”

Alana sees his point. In epidemiological terms, any decrease in the number of daily deaths or new victims in the acute phase of an outbreak represents a potential indicator of containment. But she’s not ready to concede. “The day’s not over.”

“Will be in fifteen minutes.” He nods to the digital clock above them that reads almost midnight.

“And you’re not even counting new cases in Naples,” she points out. “At least six more, with two deaths already.”

“We can only manage this outbreak city by city,” he says, undeterred. “If our model works here, then we can replicate it elsewhere.”

Alana isn’t buying it. “What are you not telling me, Byron?”

He steers her to another one of the rooms and motions to the patient who lies on the stretcher on the other side of the glass. With all the lines running into him, it takes Alana a moment to notice that he isn’t connected to a ventilator. Only a simple oxygen mask covers his face.

“This is Pietro Molaro,” Byron announces. “Pietro is the fifth patient to contract antibiotic-resistant plague. The other four are dead. Yesterday, it seemed certain Pietro was about to join them.”

Alana watches the patient reposition himself on the bed without help. “You mean he’s improving?”

Byron’s smile brightens.

“How?”

“Thanks to Claudio Dora.”

“Claudio? What does he have to do with this? He only left hospital today.”

“Yes, but the lab managed to extract the antibodies from the blood of a few survivors, including Claudio. Specifically, the immune globulins active against Yersinia. From that, they were able to genetically engineer enough antiserum to treat Pietro.”

“And it worked?” She waves the question away. “Well, obviously it did. But I thought it was going to take weeks or months to produce antiserum.”

“Originally, so did we. But the lab used an experimental technique. They cloned the DNA for the specific antibodies, then expressed them in a non-secreting myeloma cell line and purified the immune globulin from the supernatant.”

To most ears, the explanation would have sounded like gobbledygook, but Alana listens with growing excitement. She understands it means that scientists were able to splice the genetic information from Claudio’s antibodies into the genes of cancer cells and then use those rapidly multiplying malignant cells to produce enough of the protective antibodies to treat another patient.

“How much antiserum did they produce?” she asks.

Byron’s smile dims. “Enough for just one patient. But they’re ramping up to make more. With any luck, they’ll be able to produce hundreds of doses in the next couple of weeks.”

“Hundreds? That’s good. Very good. But it’s not a silver bullet. Not yet, at least. We’re going to need many more doses, and sooner than a couple weeks. By then the dam might’ve already burst.”