I paused at the door, smiling a small, private smile. It wasn’t meant to be shared, because it would have required too much explanation. I hadn’t traveled with a team since the last time I went to North America—the last time I saw Shaun Mason in the flesh. I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed it.
“Did you save me anything?” I asked, finally stepping inside.
“He lives!” Jack thrust his hands into the air, grinning ear to ear. “There’s pancakes and toast and oatmeal and fried egg and fried tomato and fried mushroom and croissant with cheese. Sit down and stuff your face.”
“What Jack means to say is that he tried really hard, but not even he could conquer my ability to keep ordering more food,” said Olivia. “We did save you a seat, though, even if the food is mostly here because Jack is a failure at life.”
“Well, thank you all,” I said, and moved to sit. “Is there tea?”
“There’s tea,” confirmed Juliet, and pushed the pot over to me.
“Then this morning is truly perfect.” I busied myself with preparing a plate. The table was set family-style, with bowls and platters of food, rather than individual servings. As I reached for the mushrooms, I glanced to Olivia and asked, “What time is our appointment for the biological containment center?”
“Half an hour,” she said. “If you hadn’t shown up when you did, I would have come looking for you with a go-box. Have you got a recorder on you?”
“I never leave my bed without one.”
Olivia nodded, looking satisfied. “Good.”
“Meanwhile, we’re going to be making sure that our escape route is still fully intact and ready to fly our handsome butts out of here,” said Jack, making an airplane gesture with one hand. “You’ll call if anything really interesting happens, yeah?”
“Yeah,” confirmed Olivia. “You can play grease monkey with impunity.”
“Don’t worry,” said Juliet. “I intend to work the stupid out of him.” She stood and walked toward the door without looking back or saying good-bye.
Jack laughed, pushing his own chair away from the table. “I recognize a hint when I hear one. See you lot later.”
“Bye, Jack,” said Olivia cheerfully.
“See you soon,” I said, and reached for my fork. With only half an hour before I needed to be fed, presentable, and professional, I intended to eat as fast as I could. A man must have his priorities, after all.
5.
The biological containment facility—helpfully identified by a large sign reading RABBIT-PROOF FENCE BIOLOGICAL CONTAINMENT #17—was an attractive, white-walled facility that could easily have been repurposed as a museum, had the need ever arisen. Only the four men standing outside the door with rifles at the ready disrupted the illusion that we were on our way to a day of education and enlightenment. Which was perhaps not such an illusion after all, once I stopped to think about it.
“ID?” said the first of the guards.
Olivia produced her photo ID. I did the same. The guard took them both before pulling a small scanner out of his pocket and running it over our names. He squinted at the screen. I maintained a carefully casual posture, wondering what would happen if he didn’t like the results. Something unpleasant, no doubt.
“Here you go.” He handed back our IDs. “You’re on today’s list. Will you be entering the airlock separately or together?”
“Together,” said Olivia, before I could formulate a response. “We haven’t done anything that could have resulted in an infection.”
That seemed to be the right answer. “On you go, and have a nice visit,” said the guard.
“Cheers,” said Olivia.
“Thank you,” I said, and followed her through the facility door into the airlock on the other side. It was a fairly standard design, with three testing units arrayed against the glass wall in front of us. As I watched, yellow lights came on above two of the test units, while the third remained dark. Olivia walked calmly to the unit on my right. I moved to take my position in front of the other one.
“I hate these high-security places,” she said, slapping her hand down on the test panel. “It’s such a waste of time.”
“If we were anywhere else in the world, this would be our sixth blood test today,” I said, mimicking her gesture.
Olivia wrinkled her nose. “Everywhere else in the world wastes an unconscionable amount of time.”
“You know, I actually cannot argue with that.” The light above my testing panel blinked green, and a lock disengaged somewhere in the glass wall with a soft hiss. A second later, the same thing happened with Olivia’s testing panel. This time, the hiss of the lock letting go was followed by the entire glass wall sliding open, allowing us to finally step unencumbered into the lobby of the biological containment facility.
Olivia walked to the middle of the room and stopped. Lacking any better idea of the protocol, I did the same. She looked to me and smiled. “Rey should be here in a moment,” she said. “He’s going to take us on a tour of the necropsy lab, the specimen storage unit, and the viewing lounge. That should give you a solid grounding in what they do here.”
“Rey is a doctor? A scientist? A government employee?”
“All of the above, but he was my boyfriend before he was any of those things, so I still get to abuse him mercilessly,” said Olivia. She brightened, suddenly focusing on something past my head. “And there he is now.”
I turned. Rey was a tall man of apparently Pacific Islander descent, with long, dark hair pulled into a ponytail and dangling over one shoulder. He was wearing a lab coat, tan slacks, and a black button-down shirt, and he looked surprisingly relaxed for someone working in the most secure facility I had thus far encountered in Australia.
“You must be Mahir Gowda,” he said, walking toward me and extending his hand. “I’m Dr. Reynaldo Fajardo. Olivia’s told me quite a bit about you, all of it remarkably positive. I was starting to think you were the boss version of ‘my girlfriend who lives in Sydney.’”
“Is that like ‘my girlfriend who lives in Ireland’?” I asked, shaking his hand.
“Or Canada,” agreed Rey amiably. “So how much has Liv told you about our work here?”
“Virtually nothing,” I said.
“I wanted him to get the story without my biases,” piped up Olivia.
Rey smiled. “Same old Liv,” he said. “Are you coming on the tour, at least?”
“If you don’t mind.”
“I don’t.” He turned, motioning for us to follow. “As I’m sure you gathered from the sign outside, this is research post seventeen on the fence line. There are thirty-one stations, all told. Most are manned. The unmanned ones are checked on three times a week, to be sure the cameras are in working order and that there’s nothing we need to investigate further within their designated territory. Each station is responsible for between four and twelve kilometers of fence monitoring. That includes the visible land inside the fence.”
“Are there research stations inside the fence line?” I asked.
“Yes, but none of them have permanent staff. Everyone who works there goes on a voluntary basis and receives hazard pay. They’re very picky about who can volunteer. No one with children, no one with dependent parents, and no one who is currently in a serious relationship.”
“That’s why we broke up,” added Olivia.
Rey nodded, mouth twisting a little. “I wanted to do deep research. Can’t do that with a girl waiting for you back at port. It might split your attention when it needs to be singular, and you’re not the only one who’ll get killed in a situation like that one.”
“I see,” I said. “Are you enlisted?”
“No; we’re employed by the government, but the researchers are not technically part of the armed forces, since we’re studying the structure of the virus, and any breakthroughs we have could be considered an attempt to weaponize Kellis-Amberlee if we were part of the army.” Rey’s mouth twisted further. “It’s remarkable the hoops you have to jump through if you want to do proper medical science without joining the World Health Organization.”
“At least WHO wasn’t involved in the CDC conspiracy,” I offered.
“Doesn’t change the part where I’d murder for their resources.” Rey stopped in front of a door and produced a key card from inside his lab coat, swiping it through the reader next to the doorknob. “Please do not lick anything past this point. Do not touch anything that looks like it might be dangerous, which really means ‘don’t touch anything at all,’ and try not to scream if something jumps out at you.” On that encouraging note, he pulled the door open and motioned for us to step inside.
“Yes, thank you, that’s quite terrifying,” I said, and went where I was bid.
The next room was actually more like a viewing area, roughly the size of a stretched-out closet with a solid glass wall separating us from a second, larger room, in which the two kangaroos from the night before were laid out on tables, their bodies split down the middle by tidy incisions before being pinned open like frogs in biology class. Three figures in hazmat suits moved between them, taking notes, extracting organs, and making measurements.
Rey stepped up beside me, the door swinging closed behind him. “The necropsies began immediately, and continued through the night,” he said. “They’ll be finished sometime around noon, when we’re positive that there’s nothing left to learn from these bodies. At that point, the remains will be cremated and put into storage. We’ve been arguing for years that the ashes should be used to fertilize the land on the other side of the fence, since we’re removing bodies that would otherwise enrich the soil, but there are some silly buggers in Parliament who believe that it would be a health hazard.”
“They don’t think it would be a health hazard,” said Olivia. “They think it would upset people unduly, and they’re happy to keep buying fertilizer if it comes with a little peace.”