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“What questions do you have?” Special Agent Herron wandered to the table Ramon sat on, dragged a chair back on the tarp they’d laid on the floor, and sat down. She crossed one leg over the other, calm even though she also had that hyperaware demeanor of an agent waiting for the situation to explode around them.
Kenna took the chair opposite.
Ramon hopped off the table where he’d have had his back to them, grabbed a chair, and straddled it so he could lean against the back. One knee jogged up and down until Kenna wanted to push against it to get him to still.
But she felt the same on the inside.
“What was in those vats?” Kenna crossed one knee over the other, proving to this agent she could be just as calm in the middle of a crazy situation. “We were exposed to it, right? When some of it leaked out.”
“Part of the reason you’re in here is that you were exposed to a substance we believe is an infectious disease Doctor Buzard was creating.”
Kenna bit the inside of her lip. “Are we infected?”
“Limited exposure seems to have little effect compared to direct contact. The preferred method of infection is through animmunization, which is, in fact, a dose of the disease designed to infect everyone in the world with the contagion.”
Kenna frowned. “He was going to tout the disease as the cure so he can targeteveryone?”
Ramon said, “As if people don’t have enough distrust of medical companies already?”
“What does it do?” Kenna asked. “He isn’t just trying to kill everyone, right?”
“According to information contained on the hard drive you kindly turned over to us,” Special Agent Herron said, “the disease will kill a third of the world’s population. The other two-thirds will recover with stronger immune systems and every function of the body operating at optimum. It’s designed to alter the genetics of the person infected, but if it doesn’t kill you, it makes you some kind of?—”
“Superhuman? I mean, not powers but better. Stronger. Faster. Smarter.”
Special Agent Herron nodded.
“I think I might already have been given it.”
The agent didn’t seem surprised.
“More master race crap?” Ramon shook his head. “Where have I heard this before?”
“In the last hundred years or recently?” Kenna asked him.
“Maybe they’re one and the same.”
He thoughtDominatusconnected back to Hitler? Or at least the eugenics research that the Nazis based their philosophy on. She wouldn’t put it past them, considering how long the organization had been in existence. But it was far more subversive than that.
After all, they had gone this long without being discovered.
Kenna squeezed her eyes shut. Had Jax been rescued? They had taken her phone, so she had no way to contact Maizie or Bruce. She prayed that her associate was only going to make surethe lawyers did the right thing and didn’t mess up in a way that cost Jax his life. She hadeverythingriding on this, and all the trust she needed to have for Bruce stretched thin. So taut it was about to snap if anything went in any way other than perfect.
I’m still learning how to trust. No matter what.
Maybe that was the point of all this. A test, a way to grow in her reliance on God. Because who knew what was going to happen to her in the future? She might be called to go through things so much worse than anything she’d ever faced before, and she would need a robust foundation of relying on God and the fact that He was in control of everything.
If that meant she had to walk the road ahead of her without Jax? To bury him and have to keep going with her life, keep fighting the good fight?
This time, she would have God. So it wouldn’t be like losing everything, even if it certainly felt that way.
“Doctor Marcus Buzard is dead,” Special Agent Herron said. “We have recovered his body, and we are in the process of shutting down this operation. All of his people have been arrested, and those he was experimenting on are safe now.”
Ramon glanced at Kenna with one eyebrow quirked up.
“What?” she asked.
He shrugged one shoulder. “Maybe he wasn’t experimenting on those kids. Maybe he was infecting them, and the ones that lived, he was going to release them back into the world so they could spread the disease.”