Immunity Index, Sue Burke [accelerated reader books txt] 📗

she said, and pointed to another, more complex set of colored charts. “And it seems to recognize the other virus, too, the Sino cold.” She persisted in calling it Sino, not delta. That told me something.

“What we ought to consider is where this attenuated virus came from,” I said.

“I don’t know,” she said tonelessly. She was lying, because if she truly didn’t know, she’d be anxious to find out, and I’d have heard that appetite in her voice. “It’s a good thing to see that it’s working. How will it interact?” She asked that question again, the same one she’d asked the day before, and now her voice was anxious. But why was she lying? Had she been trapped into this work like me?

“How is it interacting in China?” I said, a hint of fire in my words.

She looked up at me a bit too quickly, a bit too startled, unable to find the means to answer a question she didn’t expect.

“I asked the Node 1 team for some data, and they knew how to get it. The mutiny is contagious and has been spreading fast into many low-level positions, the ones who do the actual work. It seems that potential hosts were primed by years of injustice, and mutineers were willing to provide information to us that should have been secret.”

She frowned, perhaps doubting that something so basic as injustice had fueled the mutiny or perhaps that I could have made a conclusion about the source of the virus from evidence that sat in plain sight for those who knew what to look for.

“This attenuated vaccine virus in fact came from China. According to what has been reported by our intelligence services, China’s vaccine virus is working well. They did extraordinarily clever work when they created it. For all its modifications, its external appearance was made to look almost unchanged, no more different than one zebra to another, just slightly different stripes. To a lion—or to an immune system—they all look like lunch.”

She frowned, annoyed, then slipped a neutral expression over her face. “That was very clever on your part. I didn’t think of that as a way to find out, to check what was happening in China.”

Her remark told me both that she knew it came from China and that she had been entrenched in the government bureaucracy long enough to be assimilated into a silo. She was no sudden recruit, then. She still might have been unwillingly recruited.

“The data also tell us about the interaction between the viruses,” I said, “that is, the viruses circulating together in China. The vaccine is working there.” I brought up another chart and let her study its good news. “Here, however, I think the outcome could be different.”

“What do you mean?”

Ah, now things would get tricky.

At that moment, although the door to my cell stood open, someone knocked: a soldier in full combat gear.

“Excuse me, Dr. Peng, I’ve been assigned to guard you.” The voice and face, despite the obvious youth, allowed for no disagreement from me. “I hope I won’t disturb your work.”

The soldier took up an alert stance that would keep me in a line of sight. I decided to ignore the guard politely and not ask questions, such as whom I might be protected against or, conversely, who was being protected from me.

“First,” I told Vita, “I have epidemiological data for the United States, and it explains a lot.” I switched to a simple map that marked known cases of the attenuated virus shown in yellow, and those places were also known to have political leanings in favor of the Prez. “You will notice that this data has been compiled from several days ago. The virus was released here first.”

The release had been extensive, although perhaps not everywhere, as I had overheard her say what seemed like ages ago. But everywhere was a nebulous term. I brought up a second map whose interpretation would permit no equivocation.

It showed the deadly virus in magenta, clusters of dots that centered on places where, as everyone knew, the Prez faced opposition. I overlaid it with a map of occurrence of the vaccine virus. “This data started coming in just hours ago. It was a deliberate attack against the opposition, knowing that immunity would have already been developed in areas that supported the Prez.” Although I tried, I couldn’t say those words without my teeth clenched in the rage I had spent hours containing.

She looked at the map with a hint of disappointment but no outrage at all. “Yes, I suppose that’s why there’s a mutiny.” Her halo instantly lost all remaining luster to me. She was either lying or stupid.

“Or rather,” I said, “it’s a weapon against a mutiny.”

She didn’t look at me. “I suppose.” She didn’t seem to want to say those words. She was lying, then. I’d have preferred her to be stupid.

“And this virus, designed to kill the political opposition, isn’t going to work as well as hoped in the long run.”

Now her head swiveled. So did the guard’s.

“I’ll be glad to explain.” I said. “To everyone.”

Berenike walked out of the AutoKar office—goodbye, forever!—and into the truck waiting at the bay. She felt the thrill of terrified exuberance, maybe the way a soldier felt waiting for battle to begin.

“I’ll pray for you!” Summer called.

Berenike waved her thanks and hid her doubts. If some god somewhere had a plan, it was opaque to her. She climbed into the truck and told it to go to City Hall. The latest news—the limited news available—was either useless official bluster or real and bad. A forest fire was burning in California, hard to tell how big. In a couple of places, armed resistance had sprung up to fight local independence movements, hard to tell how bloody. Airports were shut down to passenger traffic. The U.S. Postal Service had closed—for the first time ever—as had most private businesses. Hospitals were mobbed and creating emergency rooms and wards in parking lots.

Berenike’s eight-block trip