The phone vibrates on the bed. Alana wonders if it might be Olin calling back to light into her a second time, but instead, Nico’s name pops up on the screen. His three-word text—“Hospital. Come now!”—sets her heart thumping.

Alana bursts through the doors of the Ospedale San Martino. Staff and visitors flow through the lobby as usual. A medical supplier has set up an exhibition in the middle, and several people linger to inspect the wares. But she isn’t fooled by the apparent calm.

Remembering her earlier long wait at the hospital’s elevator, she rushes up the stairs to Nico’s fourth-floor office. Inside, she finds only his receptionist, who speaks no English. The matronly woman tells Alana, through a series of hand gestures, that Nico has been called away. “Where? Dove?”

“Il obitorio!”

Alana doesn’t require a translation. She whirls around and races down the stairs to the basement. She spots the sign for the morgue, but below it two security guards in masks and gloves block the door. Undeterred, she heads for them. The nearer guard shoos her away with a backward wave.

“I’m Dr. Alana Vaughn. I need to see Dr. Oliva right away.”

The guard steps forward with palms held up. “No! No! Solo personale autorizzato.”

“Nico! It’s me!” Alana shouts over his shoulder. “Are you in there?”

The other guard moves closer. “Signora. It is not safe!”

The door behind them flies open and a man in biohazard gear steps out. She recognizes Nico by his gait. Experience alone stops her from following the instinct to dart around the guards to get to him.

Nico addresses the guards briefly and then switches back to English. “These men will get you a PPE kit, Alana,” he says before disappearing behind the same door.

The first guard watches with suspicion as Alana suits up, a few feet back from the door. The otherwise tedious drill is second nature to her: wash hands with the sanitizer from the wall-mounted pump, gown, apply mask, goggles, hood, wash again, and then slip on two pairs of gloves. Donning and doffing the personal protective gear in the correct order has been programmed into her brain stem, reinforced by the memory of the Liberian doctor she watched die of Ebola after he deviated from only one of those steps.

As she slips the gown over her shirt, her damaged shoulder shifts and, for a moment, she fears it might pop out of joint, but it doesn’t.

When she’s done, the English-speaking guard opens the door to the morgue and points her wordlessly down a corridor toward a room at the far end. Her goggles mist under the hood and the cotton booties shuffle over the tiled floor. Her sense of foreboding grows with each slippery step.

The room is refrigerated, but Alana feels a different sort of chill as she glimpses the body on the table. It’s not Vittoria Fornero. The woman lying on the slab looks to be in her early thirties. Her hair is shorn on one side of her head and streaked blue in a tint that almost matches her skin’s lividity. Her sunken eyes stare lifelessly up at the ceiling.