projectors, which should at least slow an uncontrolled nanobot if not destroy it outright, and the air-conditioning could brie†y jump to eighty-mile-per-hour winds if necessary, vacuuming up any stray particles. It didn’t bear thinking about. The radiation would be bad enough for anyone inside the lab. Ruth expected the vacuum would also lift the scopes and machining tools in an upside down rain of metal, hard plastic, and lashing power cords — and of course if that didn’t eradicate any threat, they could just weld the box shut forever. It was like working inside a cof ‚n.
“Let me out,” she said.
“What’s up?” McCown asked.
Ruth touched her white gloves to her mask. “I forgot my notes, I’m an idiot,” she said, ‚ghting to hold down the cold, bright edge of her claustrophobia.
Most days, that particular fear was only a scratching at the back of her mind. She had been enthralled to return to her work. It was unspeakably good to be in control again and Ruth had always excelled at ignoring everything beyond her microscopes, at least while she was making progress. Sometimes she lacked momentum. More than once her nerves leapt with a memory of planes or gun‚re. Another time, she saw ants that didn’t exist from the corner of her eye.
Ruth thought she had been very brave to step into this cramped box day after day, but now it was all that she could do to keep her heartbeat from affecting her voice.
“Please,” she said. “I know it’s a hassle.”
“Why don’t we have somebody get your notes for you,” McCown said. “We can read anything you want.”
“No.” The word came out too fast. “No,” she said carefully. “I should have worked through a couple ideas before I even bothered today. I was too tired after dinner.”
“Um. All right.” McCown sounded like he was frowning. “Give us a second.”
Ruth sagged against the workbench but caught an atmosphere hood with her elbow, a small glass sheath meant to snap onto the tunneling scope. The hood clanged and Ruth jerked and hit her head on a shelf. “Oh!”
McCown came back on the intercom. “Ruth?”
“Oh, shit,” she said, with just the right tone of casual disgust. “This place is like a shoebox.”
“Five minutes, okay?” McCown said.
“Yes.” Ruth looked up at the harsh lights in the ceiling and then back and forth at the cluttered walls. Trapped. Then she leaned over the slim, elegant shape of the microscope again. It was her only escape.
McCown would probably be ten minutes, in fact. First he had to call for power to ramp up the air ‚lters in the prep room outside the lab. Then he’d run his clothes and especially his hair and hands against a vacuum hose before he stepped inside, locked the door, and repeated the process with another vacuum. Next he’d take his clothes bag down from the hooks on the wall and don his hairnet, mask, gloves, and baggy clean suit. It was only after this meticulous checklist that he would unlock Ruth’s door and help her stow her own suit.
She didn’t want him to see her panic. She needed to bury the feeling deep, but her best-learned coping mechanism left her in direct confrontation with the source of her fear.
The ghost was beautiful in its way and Ruth brie†y forgot herself, caught in the mystery. She couldn’t help but admire the work it represented. Her quick estimate was that the ghost was built of less than one billion atomic mass units, which was damned small. The vaccine was barely under one billion AMU itself and as uncomplicated as they’d been able to make it. Could the ghost be a failed effort? Maybe the pair she’d found were only fragments of something larger. No. The two samples were identical. Even more interesting, the ghost had the same heat engine as the vaccine and the plague, which meant it had been built after the plague year by someone who was both capable of identifying the design work and reproducing it. The heat engine was a top-notch piece of engineering. Like Ruth and her colleagues, the ghost’s creator had seen no reason to reinvent the wheel. He’d put his energy elsewhere. This was obviously a functioning nano and it was biotech just like the vaccine, designed to operate inside warm-blooded creatures.
What if the individual ghosts were meant to combine into a larger construct? Its helix shape could lend itself to a process like that. The trigger might be nothing more complicated than a heavy dose. Saturation. Cam appeared to have a low and ineffectual amount in his blood, but what if he absorbed more? Would it activate?
“Don’t touch a fucking thing,” she said.
* * * *
Ruth walked through the cold white sun in her Army jacket and thin pants, needing air, needing him. For the past three days she’d imprisoned herself for hours at a time. She’d barely seen Cam at all, which she regretted. They’d been so close to a relationship, but her schedule was practically nonstop — work, work, collapse, more work. Cam had moved out after the second morning, joining an effort to trap and inoculate rodents and birds in an attempt to reestablish some kind of ecology below the barrier.
The vaccine was widespread in Grand Lake. Cam had won that battle quickly, even though he’d appeared to be nothing except helpful and obedient. All of his coughing in the med tent. He’d outsmarted Shaug as easily as that, which was sort of funny. He always found a way, and she missed him now that their paths had separated.
Other people were moving apart, too. The exodus had been limited so far, but McCown said there were deserters in the military and Ruth could see for herself that the refugee camps were quieter than usual. Normally the two peaks across from her were busy with farming efforts. Today one of the terraced gardens was empty, and the work crews on another were de‚nitely understrength. Ruth understood. The temptation was too great. She was surprised that so many stayed. The new supplies were a help. Scavenging efforts had increased beneath the barrier, from organized convoys and helicopter runs to small handfuls of people who carried up as much as possible. Grand Lake had retained most of its population, at least for the short term. The habit was long ingrained. No one who’d survived would ever trust the world below ten thousand feet again, and the vaccine did not offer complete immunity.
At meals, she heard talk of relocating everyone to Boulder. Denver was much bigger, but it had taken fallout. There were also rumors that the Air Force would take a more aggressive stance and move a number of their people down into Grand Junction, a hundred and ‚fty miles to the west. Maybe it was even happening. Fighters and larger planes constantly roared away from the mountain and came back and left again and she couldn’t say if the amounts were the same. Some of them never returned because they were shot down, but maybe others were ‚nding new stations.
Snap decisions were a way of life up here and Ruth supposed she shouldn’t have been surprised to ‚nd herself propositioned by one of McCown’s assistants and then by the man who had the room next to hers in her shelter. They all felt like they had nothing to lose, and she was new and seemed unattached.
She stopped at the nearest mess hall. Snares and wire cages had been laid along the base of the long tent. A rat thrashed at the end of one line and Ruth stared at it with a weird mix of disgust and something else — her loneliness.
There had never been much living up here, chipmunks, marmots, elk, and grouse and several other species of birds. Nearly all were extinct. The human population had tracked and killed every species beyond the point of sustainability. There might be a few grouse and chipmunks left in the region, but nobody had seen one for months. Occasionally birds still †itted overhead. And there were vermin. Rats were not indigenous to this elevation, but there must have been a few among the endless crates of FEMA and military supplies that were airlifted into the area during the ‚rst days of the plague.
