eyes.
“You can borrow my shirts, my man, but you’re going commando before you’re borrowing my boxers.” I slung my arm around his shoulders and started walking toward the kitchen door. “Coffee awaits, unless you’d rather have tea. You look like shit, by the way.”
“Yes, I’ve gathered,” said Mahir wearily. “Tea sounds fantastic.”
He kept trudging onward as I glanced back at Maggie. Kelly had emerged from the van and was standing next to her, frowning thoughtfully. Maggie nodded, signaling her understanding. I answered her nod with a brief, relieved smile. I needed a few minutes alone with Mahir before he fell into an eight-hour coma, and Maggie was telling me she’d keep Kelly out of the way until I was ready for her.
The kitchen was empty. Alaric and Becks were still off-site, and all the bulldogs were outside, probably harassing Maggie into playing catch with them. I guided Mahir to a seat at the table. “You have a tea-based preference? Maggie has something like five hundred kinds. I think they all taste like licking the lawnmower, so I really can’t make recommendations.”
“Anything that isn’t herbal will be fine.” Mahir collapsed into the chair, his chin dipping until it almost grazed his chest. “Soy milk, no sugar, please.”
“You got it.” I kept one eye on him as I filled the electric kettle and got down a mug.
“I got that,” I muttered. Mahir raised his head enough to blink at me. I offered an insincere smile. “Sorry. I was just—”
“I know what you were doing. Hello, Georgia. I hope your ongoing haunting hasn’t driven your brother too far past the edge of reason to justify this visit.”
The idea of getting into that particular argument was too ludicrous to consider, especially given my position. I got the soy milk from the fridge instead, answering, “George says hey. Your tea will be ready in just a minute. Want to tell me why you decided to be a surprise? We could’ve at least made up the couch for you, if we’d known that you were coming.”
“I didn’t want to broadcast it anywhere,” Mahir said, with a calm that was actually chilling. This wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment decision. I hadn’t really expected it would be, but still, the tone of his voice, combined with the exhaustion in his face, made me want to put away the tea and break out the booze. “I purchased a flight from Heathrow to New York via an actual travel agency, rather than online, and flew from there to Seattle, where I switched from my own passport to my father’s and caught a flight to Portland. From there, I took a private flight to Weed. The gentleman who owns the plane took payment in cash, and his manifest will show that I was a young woman of Canadian nationality visiting the state for a flower show.”
“How much did that cost?”
“Enough that you should be deeply grateful I’m paid in percentage of overall site income, rather than drawing a salary, or you’d owe me quite a bit of money.” Mahir removed his glasses in order to scrub at his eyes with the heel of his hand. “I’m not going to be useful much longer, I’m afraid. I’ve been awake damned near a day and a half as it is.”
“I sort of figured.” The kettle began to whistle. I turned it off, dropping a teabag from Maggie’s disturbingly large collection into a mug and covering it with water before walking the mug and soy milk over to Mahir. “Give me the short form. How bad is it?”
“How bad is it?” Mahir took a moment to doctor his tea, not speaking again until he was settled with both hands wrapped firmly around the mug. Looking at me steadily, he said, “I took the data you gave me to three doctors I was reasonably sure were reputable. One laughed me out of his office. Said if anything of the sort were going on, he’d have heard about it, since the trending evidence would be virtually impossible to overlook. Further said that if anything of the sort were going on, the national census would reflect it. I challenged him to prove that it didn’t.”
“And?”
“He stopped taking my calls three days later. I’d wager because the national census reflected exactly what he said it wouldn’t.” Mahir sipped his tea, grimaced, and continued: “When I went to confront him about this in person, he was gone—and he didn’t leave a forwarding address.”
“I had more luck with the second doctor I approached—largely, I think, because he was Australian and didn’t really give two tosses what the local government thought of his work. He said the research was sound, if a bit overly dramatic, and that he’d rather like a chance to test its applications in a live population.”
“It had applications?” I asked, mystified.
“In the sense that… Well, look, it’s sort of like the research they were doing on parasites at the turn of the century. They found quite a few immune disorders that could be controlled by the introduction of specialized parasites, because the parasites provided a sufficient distraction for the immune system as a whole. They kept the body from attacking itself. Part of what makes Kellis-Amberlee so effective is that it acts like a part of the body—it’s with us all the time, so our immune systems don’t th. There’d be no point; they’d rip us apart trying to kill it. The trouble is that when the virus changes states, the body still doesn’t think of it as an enemy. It still regards it as a friendly component.”
I frowned. “You lost me.”
“If the body regards the sleeping virus as a part of itself, it isn’t prepared to fight the virus when it wakes. But people who somehow survive a bout with the activated virus—those who get exposed when they’re too small to amplify, for example, or those with a natural resistance—can ‘store’ a certain measure of the live virus in themselves, like a parasite. Something that teaches the body what it’s meant to be fighting off.”
“So this dude wanted to, what, go expose a bunch of kangaroos and watch to see what happened as they got bigger?”
“Essentially, yes.”
“What happened with him?”
“He got deported on charges of tax evasion and improper work permits.”
Silence stretched between us as I considered what he was saying—and what he wasn’t. Even George was quiet, letting me think. Finally, I asked, “What about the third guy?”
“His files are in my bag.” Mahir looked at me levelly as he sipped his tea. “He read the files. Three times. And then he called me, told me his conclusions and where he’d sent his data, hung up the phone, and shot himself. Really, I’m not certain he had the wrong idea.”
“What… what did he say?”
“He said that were we braver and less willing to bow to the easy path, we might have had India back a decade ago.” Mahir put his cup down and stood. “I’m tired, Shaun. Please show me where I can sleep. You can read what I’ve brought you, and we’ll discuss it later.”
“Come on.” I stood and started for the hallway. “You can use my room. It’s not huge, but it’s quiet, and the door latches, so you shouldn’t wake up with any surprise roommates.”
“That’s a relief,” he said, following me up the stairs. His presence, strange as it was, felt exactly right, like this was exactly what had to happen before we could finish whatever it was we’d started.
We were all refugees now. None of us would stop running until all of us did.
BOOK IV
Immunological Memory
