Byron lets the uncomfortable clip run on a bit longer than necessary, Alana thinks, before the screen finally goes blank. “The bubonic plague only spreads through infected fleabites, not via person to person,” he says. “The pneumonic plague can begin as a skin infection, with the usual buboes, that travels to the lungs. However, more commonly it spreads from one person to the next through coughing, and it’s as contagious as the flu. So far, we have two confirmed cases of pneumonic plague in Genoa. Patient Zero is a forty-two-year-old construction worker who presented four days ago. She developed her first skin symptoms, buboes in her armpits, two days prior to hospitalization. Once there, she had direct contact with the second case, a thirty-one-year-old lab tech. The second victim had no skin involvement of any kind, only chest symptoms. She, like Patient Zero, died from respiratory complications.”

“So we can presume respiratory spread from the first victim to the second,” Nico says.

“We can, I suppose,” Byron says with a cursory glance at him. “It doesn’t mean we would be correct to do so.”

“We would be foolish not to,” Nico fires back.

“Foolish . . .” Byron grins. “Say, like not immediately placing a feverish woman who presents to hospital coughing up blood on full isolation precautions?”

“Easy to say in hindsight,” Nico snaps. He turns to the person on the other side of him and mutters something in Italian, loud enough to be heard by everyone. The room erupts into a medley of unintelligible voices.

Byron holds up his hands. “Point taken,” he says, in the tone of someone appeasing an irrational toddler. “You were astute to diagnose the plague. Besides, what’s done is done. Why don’t we finish taking stock before we move on to the next steps?”

There are a few reluctant nods and the din settles.

“We do not as of yet have a confirmed source for the Yersinia pestis bacteria,” Byron continues. “We do know that Patient Zero traveled to Menagesha National Forest in Ethiopia twenty days prior to showing her first symptom.”

“And that park is chockablock full of high-risk critters,” Dr. Justine Williams pipes up. The petite woman of Asian descent with the dark eyes and long lustrous black hair has made an impression with her job description alone—Alana had never before met a rodentologist, let alone “one of the world’s leading zoologists in the study of rat behavior,” as Byron had introduced her.

“All kinds of potential endemic plague vectors could be hiding among those lovely juniper bushes,” Justine continues. “From Desmomys harringtoni—better known as Harrington’s rat—to Praomys albipes, aka the white-footed rat. Though their feet aren’t any whiter than mine.” Her giggle is almost contagious. “And don’t forget, our dear old friend Rattus rattus—the common black rat—is also found in the same park. Word on the street is that black rats have had a brush or two with the plague in the past.”

Byron eyes Justine with a mixture of amusement and annoyance. “The usual incubation period for the plague is two to seven days, not twenty,” he says.