Tunnels 03, Freefall

wish I could have done more for him."
    Closing his eyes, Will pressed his eyelids with his fingertips. His headache didn't seem to be getting any better. He longed to go back to the shack and bury himself in the oblivion of sleep, somewhere he could shut all this out.
    "You have to believe me, Will -- I was forced to do all those things, all those awful things. I had no alternative."
    Will finally opened his eyes.
    "How can I convince you I'm telling the truth?" she asked.
    Will shrugged.
    "What if I were to give you this?" she said. She pulled at the shirt collar around her neck with her gravy-stained fingers then lifted out a thin cord on which hung two small glass phials. "What if I give you Dominion and the vaccine, as a gesture of good faith?" With a flick of her wrist, she snapped the cord and offered the phials to Will. "Here, take them. They're the only specimens we had, and... and now they're yours."
    Unspeaking, he reached over to take the phials, then held them up by the light so he could examine the clear fluid in them. "How do I know if it's really Dominion?" he finally asked.
    "Because it is," she said with a small shrug. Her leg irons rattled as she shifted her position in the dirt so she could see Will without straining her neck.
    "But why would you and your sister have these in the first place? Why you?"
    "Because we're important," she said casually.
    "What do you mean?"
    "I'm sure you gathered in the Colony that we don't have family units, not like Topsoilers do. When my father lost his life at the hands of your uncle Tam--"
    "The Crawfly?" Will interrupted. "So he was your father!"
    For an instant Rebecca's eyes were suffused with a fiery light, as if she was about to release an incandescent fury on Will. He knew then that by repeating the unpleasant nickname that Uncle Tam and his gang had bestowed upon him, he'd insulted her dead father. But she blinked, and quickly looked away from Will. She was calm and collected when she resumed. "It was left to my sister and me to see the purge through with out grandfather. That's why we had the phials."
    "Purge? What do you mean?" Will asked.
    "Our plot to release Dominion Topsoil, to carry out the word of the Book of Catastrophes."
    As Will racked his brains, trying to remember if he'd seen her grandfather or heard anything about him during his time in the Colony, a question leapt out at him. "At the Pore, you and your sister each had a phial. So how did you manage to come by both of these," he quizzed her.
    "She gave me hers for safekeeping. The one with the black wax on the stopper is the virus. The other -- with the white wax -- is the antidote."
    "Hold on," he said. "That doesn't make sense. If you had both of the phials, why did she push you down the Pore? Why would she do something as dumb as that?" he asked, thinking he'd caught the twin out.
    "Because we were having a flaming row. We fought, and she must have been so mad with me, she didn't stop to think about the phials," Rebecca said, without a moment's hesitation.
    "What were you fighting about?"
    "I told you already -- after you and the others were blasted over the edge, I was upset. I said to her that I couldn't go along with her plans any longer. That I'd had all the killing I could take. She went crazy."
    "How do I know if you're telling the truth -- what if your sister and grandfather still have some of the virus left, and they're going ahead with the plot while we're stuck down here?"
    "They don't. The virus you've got in that phial is all we had of it, and all that's needed for a full-blown pandemic."
    "But why don't they just make some more?" Will asked, staring intently at the black-topped phial.
    "It's not that simple. They might try to re-engineer it, but it will take time to produce the same strain -- months, possibly years. Anyway, whether or not you choose to believe me, I swear to you that phial is all there is." She paused, wiping her face with her filthy hand. "So now you have the key."
    "I have?" Will said.
    "Sure." Rebecca's jet-black eyes were supremely confident as she answered. "Deliver those specimens to the right people on the surface and they'll be able to vaccinate the Topsoil population. Then if, by some miracle, more virus is manufactured and the purge is restaged, it won't have any effect -- none at all. You have the power to stop Dominion in its tracks."
    "Yeah, that's all great, but how on earth do I get this to the surface?" Will asked.
    "You'll figure it out,