“They can’t get through,” Rice assures us.
I glare at him, still angry that he prevented me from helping Kay when she needed me most. Even if Ken was already bitten, I could have been at Kay’s side.
“Where’s Ken?” Brenna asks. “I can’t believe he let you guys in here. I haven’t seen anyone but him for days.”
“He didn’t make it,” I say softly, glancing at Kay. Her face tightens, but she closes her eyes and takes a breath. I know she is fighting her pain, trying to push it down until later.
“Oh, hey.” Brenna’s eyes widen. “You must be Ken’s sister?” Brenna asks. “Holy crap, you look just like him. Sorry about what happened. . . . I mean, despite the fact that he kidnapped me. He talked about you a lot. He wished he could have spoken with you more.”
Rice nods. “He was a good guy. He was a brilliant researcher.”
“Yeah, he was great,” Brenna says. “You know, except for the whole holding-me-against-my-will thing.”
I push Brenna with my elbow and shush her, but Kay just stares at us. For a moment I think she’s going to break down again, but instead she lets out a small bark of a laugh. “Ken was . . . complicated,” she says, her voice strong and clear.
“He was a genius,” Rice says quietly. “When I first met him four years ago, when this was still a university, he was one of the few people who was nice to me. Over time, though, he just got more and more secretive, more locked down into himself. Dr. Reynolds tends to bring that out in people.” He looks at me. “Amy, what do you have there?”
I’m still clutching Ken’s notes to my chest. “He wanted to save these. . . .”
Kay stares at them, then says to Rice, “Well, have a look. See what Ken thought was more important than his life.”
I hand the notes over to Rice, who takes them back to Ken’s desk and starts reading.
“I guess he did try to make me comfortable,” Brenna tells us, eyeing Kay. “He brought me books, which were way boring, but at least he tried. He talked to me about you, too,” she tells Kay. “The stories were pretty exciting. He was proud of you.”
“Maybe,” Kay tells us, her jaw tight, “you should all stop trying to comfort me about Ken for a moment and spend your energy trying to figure out how we’re going to get the hell out of here alive.”
We listen to the Floraes scratch and snuffle at the door and watch Rice riffle through Ken’s notes.
“This is pretty remarkable,” he says, bending low over them, oblivious. “He was getting somewhere.” He looks up at Brenna. “Did any of the other researchers visit you?”
Brenna shakes her head.
Rice looks around at the room and the door with its triple locks. “He was keeping you all to himself. If he’d collaborated, if he’d set a team to work . . .” He shakes his head, flips back a few pages, then starts forward again with growing excitement. “There’s an antigen found in both Baby’s and Brenna’s blood. I think the antigen, in conjunction with the original vaccine, is what saved them both when they were bitten. It makes them carriers, but immune to the effects. That’s why they didn’t change. This antigen is rare; do you know how remarkable this is?”
“I knew there was something different about the original batch of vaccine. . . .” I say. “But it wasn’t the formula—it was the patients!” That’s why they could never get it to work. The problem wasn’t in the replication. It was having the correct subjects.
“I’m one in a million?” Brenna says with a smirk. “I always knew I was awesome.”
“It’s actually more like one in ten thousand. . . . But this is just . . . amazing,” Rice continues. “That’s why we never caught it before. We could vaccinate thousands of people and try turning them all and not one could have the right antigen to combat the infection.”
“So . . . ,” Brenna says, holding up her bandaged hand. “Amy didn’t need to chop off my fingers?”
“We don’t really know for sure,” Rice says, looking from her to me and back again.
“Brenna, I was just trying to do anything to save you. Your fingers were shredded. I don’t think you would have ever been able to use them again, and I thought it might stop the infection from spreading.”
Brenna stares at her left hand, the space where her middle and ring fingers should be. “It’s okay, Amy. I don’t blame you. At least I’m alive . . . and I have my pointer finger,” she tells me. “I can pull a trigger.” She looks at me with a grin. “But I sure will miss the middle finger. Who knows? Maybe it did help the infection spread more slowly . . . letting that anti-thingy kick in.”
“It’s amazing that both Brenna and Baby carry this antigen. Maybe we would have even known right away if they had been in the same test group.”