Reached

to see it through. But that doesn’t mean you have to risk it. I can ask him to reassign you someplace else.”
    She shakes her head. “I’ll be all right.” She smiles at me. “After all, you talked him into including the courtyard as part of the quarantine area. That makes a difference.”
    “We’ve got the cafeteria, too,” I say, and she laughs. None of us spend much time there anymore, except to take delivery of our meals.
    The virologist comes in to examine the patients himself. He’s intrigued, too. “The bleeding occurs because the virus is destroying platelets,” he tells me. “Which means the spleen is likely to become enlarged in the affected patients.”
    A female medic near us nods. She’s conducting a follow-up physical exam of one of the first patients. “His spleen
is
enlarged,” she says. “It’s protruding beneath the costal margin.”
    “And the patients are losing the ability to clear the secretions in their lungs and respiratory tracts,” another medic says. “We’re going to run into trouble with pneumonia and infection if we can’t get them better soon.”
    Farther down the row of patients, we hear a shout. “We’ve had a rupture!” a medic calls. “I think he’s bleeding internally.”
    I call out over the miniport for a surgic. We all gather around the patient, who has gone pale. The vital-stats machine screams at us as the patient’s blood pressure drops and his heart rate speeds up. The medics and surgics yell out instructions.
    This patient, and all the rest, lie completely still.

    We can’t save him. We don’t even have time to get him to a surgical room before he dies. I glance around at the patients nearby. I hope they haven’t seen too much. What
can
they see? The weight of the patient’s death settles over me as I pick up my miniport, which beeps insistently with a private message from the head physic. He’s watched the whole thing from the main port.
    Sending patient data now. Review immediately.
    He wants me to look at data now? When we’ve just had a death? The entire team looks rattled. The point of the medical center, and the Rising, is that we save people. We don’t lose them like this.
    I walk over to the side of the room to check the data. At first I don’t understand the urgency. It’s data from the patients who’ve come in sick, and the information looks like basic medical workups. I’m not sure what it’s supposed to tell me.
    Then I get it. The workups are all recent, from when the patients were immunized.
The patients were immunized, and they still got the mutation, which means a huge segment of the population is at risk.
    “I’m going to have to lock down your wing completely,” the head physic says from the miniport.
    “I understand,” I tell him. There’s nothing else they can do. “We’re going into lockdown,” I tell the team.
    They nod, exhausted. They understand. We’ve all been through this in drills a million times. We’re here to save people.
    Then I hear footsteps behind me, running. I spin around.
    The virologist is heading for the main doors to the wing. Have they had time to lock it down yet? Or is he going to expose an entire new cluster of people to the mutated plague?
    I take off, running back down the rows of patients, as fast as I can. He’s older than me. It’s short work to catch up and I tackle him, throwing us both to the ground. “You don’t
run
,” I say, not bothering to keep the disgust out of my voice. “You stay to help when people are sick. That’s part of your job.”
    “Listen,” he says, struggling to sit up. I let him but I hold on to his arm. “We may not be safe from this mutation. Our immunizations may mean nothing.”
    “That’s exactly why you can’t risk exposing anyone else,” I say. “You know that better than anyone.” I haul him up by the back of his uniform and walk him toward one of the wing’s storage closets. I don’t want to lock him up, but I’m not sure how else to deal with him right now.
    “Unless,” the virologist says, sounding either crazy or inspired, “the people with scars are safe. The
small
scars.”
    I know what he means. “The people who had the first round of the Plague,” I say. The Rising told us to look for the marks, and Lei and I talked about them—those small red scars between their shoulder blades.
    “Yes,” he says eagerly. “They could have had a slightly mutated version of the earlier virus, and their variant is close