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Ben froze. I cocked my head to the side, making no effort to cover myself. It wouldn't change anything. If this was how I died, well, so be it.

“It was a good run,” I said, philosophically, before I raised my voice and said, “Well? If you're here to shoot us, shoot us. That's a much more neighborly thing than standing there, all silent and militant, and waiting for us to do something interesting.”

“Is either of you infected?” asked one of the soldiers. Their voice was distorted, probably by an air filter. No one's ever found a way to make those fully operational without also making people sound like Darth Vader. Which may have been part of the point, now that I thought about it.

“Not to the best of my knowledge,” I replied.

“Has either of you been exposed?”

I rolled my eyes. “We've all been exposed long since. We breathe air, remember? If you're a mammal and you breathe air, you've been exposed. Ask a slightly less useless question.”

“Dammit, Ash, can you be serious for once?” Audrey's voice wasn't distorted. She walked in from behind the soldiers, and she wasn't wearing body armor, but she was wearing a black tactical suit, with a Kevlar vest over the top of it. She was holding the largest gun I'd ever seen in her hands. “This is not a good situation.”

“No, it's not,” I agreed. “Do you know what's going on?” I felt strangely peaceful all of a sudden, like this made perfect sense—or, if not that, like this had crossed a line into making so
little
sense that I no longer had to worry about it. I was Alice down the rabbit hole, and madness had become the new sanity. There was something faintly reassuring about that. It meant I didn't have to worry myself about the details anymore. The details could worry about themselves.

“I do,” she said stiffly. “I'm sorry, but there's something I have to do first.”

I raised an eyebrow. “And what's that?”

She said possibly the last thing I would ever have expected to hear come out of my girlfriend's mouth: “By the authority vested in me by the Epidemic Investigative Service, you are under arrest for falsification of test results and crimes against the government of the United States.” Audrey sounded calm, if mechanical, right up until the end, when she said, “All of you will be coming with me.”

“I don't—” I began, and then the tranquilizer dart hit me in the middle of my chest. This time, I lost consciousness. This time, I was glad.

T
ranquilizer dreams are like nothing else in this world. There are people who say the best, most vivid dreams come from oxycodone and absinthe, and maybe they're right about the “best” part, but the most vivid dreams? Those definitely come from high-test tranquilizers, the kind developed by the government to knock a person out before they can twitch. The kind that don't just
put
you under, they
shove
you under with the force of a geologic shift. I ran through the unending dark for hours, pursued by the decaying phantoms of everyone I'd ever loved and lost. Mat was at the head of their cruelly rotted army, a sniper rifle in their hands and a cold expression in their eyes. Every time I slowed down, even a little, they would fire on me and howl, keeping the rest of the dead on my trail.

I whipped around a corner and nearly slammed into Audrey, as dead and rotting as the rest of them. Like Mat, she still seemed to have human intelligence, because there was recognition in her eyes—recognition, and loathing. She looked at me like I was less than nothing.

“You should have been the one who died,” she hissed, and hit me in the center of the chest, and I was falling, falling forever, down into the dark where I belonged.

The thing about dreams is that no matter how vivid they are, they end. I woke up facedown on a soft surface, with my hands cuffed behind me and my legs zip-tied at the ankles. I made a small sound of protest when I realized what had been done to me, and another when my attempts to flip over caused the hem of my hospital gown to ride up, and I realized that someone had undressed and redressed me while I was knocked out.

“Not all right with this,” I said, voice muffled by the fabric beneath me. Stretching my arms as far back as I could, I found the edge of the mattress. It was thin, covered with scratchy, industrial sheets. A cot, then, probably not anchored to its frame. I grabbed the edge, using it to anchor me while I pushed my legs in the opposite direction. They found empty air. I let go of the mattress and rolled, winding up stretched across the center of the cot and staring at the ceiling. From there, it wasn't
simple
to sit up—“simple” would have implied it was easy, or enjoyable, and not harder than I cared to contemplate. Insult to injury, when I did finally get myself into a seated position, my hair was in my face, blocking the majority of my vision. I got the impression of an empty room, white walls, and industrial lighting.

“I know I'm being watched right now,” I said, trying to sound brave and tough and fierce, and not like a handcuffed woman with her hair covering her face. “You people don't tranq someone and then dump them in a room without supervision. A little help here, if you'd be so kind? Before you get me
really
ticked off?”

There was a long pause. I heard the sound of footsteps coming toward me. The cadence was familiar, but the echoes were not. Whoever it was, they were wearing unfamiliar shoes, weighted in a way I couldn't reconcile with my vague memories of someone who walked that way. These were heavy boots, field-rated by the dull thud of them, with metal toe and heel protection. It clinked, ever so faintly, every time a foot hit the floor.

“God
dammit
, Aislinn, why did you have to dig without telling anyone what you were doing?” The voice was Audrey's, filled with weary exasperation. “I could have helped you. Or steered you away from something that you shouldn't have been prodding. This isn't the way I wanted you to find out.”

“Audrey?” Hope warred with betrayal in my tone, filling the syllables of her name with conflict. That was good. That matched what I was feeling, and quite nicely. “What the fuck is going on here? Why am I cuffed? Why did you have me tranquilized?”
Why did you claim to have authority with the EIS? What have you been hiding from me?

“You're cuffed because that's standard protocol when dealing with a prisoner in an unsecured location. I had you tranquilized because you were a walking biohazard zone, and I couldn't risk you touching or attempting to touch anyone who hadn't already been exposed. It was the kindest way.”

“The kindest—!” I tried to stand without thinking about it. My zip-tied ankles refused to hold my weight, and I toppled back to the cot, glaring through my hair in the general direction of Audrey's voice. “There's nothing
kind
about waking up in the middle of a bizarre medical bondage scenario with my girlfriend saying things like ‘standard protocol.' As to why I dug in without telling you, you weren't
speaking
to me, remember? I kept trying—Lord, how I kept trying—and you just kept going back to your bloody sulking place. I'm sorry I nearly got eaten in the woods, and I'm sorry I wouldn't leave my colleagues for dead while I hied it up the nearest tree, all right? Now don't you damn well go blaming
me
if you didn't know what I was doing. The silence started with
you
.”

There was a long pause before Audrey said, “You're right, and I'm sorry. I shouldn't have frozen you out like that. You'd never scared me that way before. I still wish you'd tried harder to tell me what you were doing.” Her tone shifted slightly, moving away from coldly official, and toward the warm concern I'd always heard there. She sounded like the woman who had kissed my bruises and massaged my shoulders after a bad field run. She sounded like the woman I
loved
, and somehow, that just made me angrier. She didn't get to sound like that anymore. Not after she'd betrayed us.

“Why? So you could have stopped me?”

“I would have tried.”

That brought my thoughts to a screeching halt. I hadn't been expecting honesty: not from her, not under these circumstances. “Why? Why in the world would you want to stop me from pursuing a story? Pursuing stories is what I
do
. And you—what are you doing claiming to have authority with the EIS? Audrey, what's going
on
?”

“Because I knew this story would get people killed, that's why,” she said. There was a clumping sound, boots against the floor, as she came closer. “This isn't the sort of story that changes a local government or protects a state park, Ash. This sort of story changes everything, and that makes it dangerous. Too dangerous for people like us.”

“I don't think there's an ‘us' here, Audrey,” I said. I didn't raise my voice. I didn't shout. The words fell between us like stones, and I knew that the wall was under construction at last. When it was finished, there would be no breaching it.

“Ash…” She stopped, not seeming to know how to continue.

That was fine. I could continue for the both of us. “You need to start answering questions, and you need to start answering them
now
, or there's going to be a reckoning when I get untied. Why are you speaking for the EIS? Where am I? Where is Ben?”

Ben was dead. That was the only reasonable explanation for why Audrey had separated us. I hadn't been careful enough about preventing blood exposure, and he'd managed to catch Kellis-Amberlee from the smears I'd left all over our gear. Ben was dead, Mat was dead, Audrey was apparently working for someone else, and I was the last man standing. I had always suspected that it was going to end like this—well, without the “my girlfriend sells us all out” part. That, I hadn't seen coming.

I'd just hoped it would take longer for me to wind up alone.

“Ben's in another room, still sleeping,” said Audrey. A ripple of amusement moved through her voice. “Congratulations. Your system shrugs off tranquilizers faster than his. Don't get too impressed with yourself, though. You're still within the human norm. Once he's awake, we'll be able to debrief you both.”

“I don't want a debriefing, I want an
explanation
,” I said. “You know those aren't the same thing. They never bloody well have been.”

“No, they're not,” she said. “As for what you said before… you can hate me, you can break up with me, you can do whatever you want, but there's always going to be an ‘us,' because we're not as different as you're currently thinking we are.” Audrey's hands brushed my hair away from my face, clearing my field of vision. I glared at her. She didn't look away. “I'm one person. One person is an easy thing to kill. So yeah, this is the sort of story that gets people like us killed.”

She was still wearing the black tactical suit and Kevlar vest she'd had on when she came into the visitor's center—that, or she was wearing another suit exactly like the first. Her hair was pulled back in a severe ponytail, the bleached streaks from decontamination radiating around the outside of it like the world's worst highlights. Her boots were knee-high, but not in the sexy way; in the “I might need to wade through rivers of blood, and I want to be ready for every eventuality” way. She didn't look anything like herself. In some ways, she looked more like herself than she ever had before. This was what she'd always been meant to wear, not her paint-stained jeans and comfortable T-shirts. This was the real version of her.

The room was as I'd assumed from the short glimpses I'd been able to catch before: small, white, square, and effectively featureless. The only furniture was the cot beneath me. It looked like the sort of thing that could be put up and torn down in an hour, a mobile interrogation unit. There were two doors, both in the wall opposite where I was sitting. Both of them were closed. Neither was flanked by a blood testing unit. That just reinforced the impression that this—whatever it was—was a temporary thing, somehow assembled around me. Everything was spotless, but the smell of bleach was faint, like no cleansing protocols had ever been carried out here.

“You said you were ex-military,” I said. “You said you'd been given an honorable discharge because of your PTSD, and that you'd changed your name to keep anyone from connecting you to your past. You lied to me.”

“I edited for you,” she said. “I
am
ex-military. I
do
have PTSD. I don't take all those antidepressants for show. They're the only things that get me through the day. But I was a military doctor, and I went to work for the CDC after I left the service. That's what broke me. Not the army; the people who were supposed to be protecting us here at home. The CDC… they're not the angels everyone makes them out to be. They're not our friends.”

“So blow a whistle next time, instead of betraying your girlfriend,” I snapped.

Audrey just looked at me, expression so profoundly weary that the part of me that was accustomed to comforting her immediately sprang to attention, demanding I make it better. The fact that my hands were cuffed behind me was the only thing that kept me from reaching for her before my rational mind could step in and remind my instincts that I was angry.

“People who blow this whistle die,” she said. “They aren't martyrs to the cause. They don't change the world. They don't reveal the big truths and make everything different. They die.”

“How's that any different from any other story we've ever told?” I demanded. “Maybe fiction doesn't get you killed—although we both know
that's
not true, you Fictionals have had your share of obsessive fans who think they deserve you more than anyone else—but chasing down the news has always had the potential to end badly. We signed up for that. We knew what we were doing when we logged in.”

“You're not
listening
,” she said, sounding frustrated. “The people who chase these stories die, and they don't come back, not even virtually, because they get discredited on their way out the door. Remember that big scandal last year? The Newsie in New Hampshire who hung himself right before the FBI revealed him as the head of a child pornography ring? His wife and kids didn't get the insurance money, because it was a suicide. They've been harried out of their hometown, they're living with her sister in Oklahoma now. They're probably going to have to change their names and disappear, once they realize this is the sort of thing that doesn't go away.”

“He blew the whistle?” I asked, horrified.

“Someone who was good—
really
good, better than Mat, God rest their soul; we'd need a Georgette Meissonier—might be able to find his original reports. The ones where he talked about corruption at the CDC, and conflicting accounts about research into the cure for Kellis-Amberlee. He'd been talking to the wrong people. People who knew too much, and weren't as careful about sharing it as they should have been. Most of them are dead now, too. It's a real shame. There were some brilliant minds on his contact list.”

“You can add Georgette Meissonier to the ranks of the dead,” I said. “There was an attack on the Ryman convoy. She was killed.”

“I know,” said Audrey. “The rest of her team is in CDC custody right now. They may not get out alive. It depends on what kind of long game the people in charge are trying to play. And that's my point, Ash, all right? If the Masons had known where to look, if Meissonier had known where to dig, they
might
have been able to get the information out before someone shut them down. They had a chance of getting the real data and going viral. We never had that. We were the second ring of this circus, and no one was ever going to watch us when they had the chance to watch the elephants.”

I looked at her for a long moment before I said, “You could have warned us.”

“I did my best.”

“You could have warned
me
.”

“I couldn't risk it.” She shook her head. “You kept my secret, and I am and will always be grateful for that, but the secret I gave you to keep was full of holes. It wasn't
dangerous
. You could have told the world I was ex-military and hiding in a commune in Alameda because I couldn't stand the smell of cordite, and it wouldn't have changed anything. A few Newsies might have come sniffing around to find out whether I'd been involved with any of the big cleanups that weren't open to the public. You and Mat would have shut them down, Ben would have threatened to start writing about the things
they
didn't want to have shared, and it would have passed. It would have blown over. If you'd been able to say that I was EIS, on leave, not actually retired, people would have come looking for secrets, and
these
secrets are the things that get you killed. How many ways do I have to say that before you'll start listening to me?”