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She could see the half smile on Jonas’s stern mouth. The hope in his eyes where before it had been nothing but that darkness. “Bethan and I have forty-eight hours. Then the painful death begins.”

“Before that party starts,” Bethan continued, “I’d kind of like to find this guy and hurt him. And while we’re at it, locate the Sowandes and see if maybe they have an antidote.”

“That works for me,” Isaac said, sounding official andaliveand in charge, the way he was supposed to be. “You two hold tight. Everyone else, lock down that house. Then tear it apart. I want anything and everything. We’ll be there within the hour.”

“We found a few things of potential interest here in the death lab,” Bethan said, because Jonas was too busy smiling. “I’m guessing that now Oz knows we’re all alive and kicking, he’ll get it all out to everyone shortly.”

“You all need to hurry up and figure this out,” came Oz’s voice, all the way from Alaska, and he, too, sounded different. Because the worst had happened, but then hadn’t, and they were all still reeling. She knew she was. “And then come back to Alaska, where you’re all obviously safer with the grizzlies.”

Templeton’s laugh boomed in Bethan’s ear then. Miles away, she and Jonas smiled at each other, the way they had when they were locked up tight in her cabin. And she knew that everybody here in this farmhouse probably had that same half-goofy smile on their faces.

And for the rest of that hour, it was almost easy to forget her own death sentence. Oz kept feeding in updates and clarifications as he worked overtime to track the transmission that had come into the lab, find the remote detonation trigger down in New Jersey, and try to run diagnostics on the clues they’d sent in.

Inside the farmhouse, the team tore each and every room apart, looking for anything that could give them a clue as to what had gone on here. Bethan and Jonas had to sit it out, trying to out-calm each other when she knew he was probably as close to coming out of his skin as she was.

Then the containment team arrived, and everything was hazmat suits, invasive checkups, and stripping down naked while pretending not to notice or care that Jonas was doing the same, so they could get sprayed down. Repeatedly.

Anthrax wasn’t contagious. SuperThrax showed no signs of being contagious, either—people couldn’t share it between them like a virus; they had to be exposed the way Bethan and Jonas had been. Still,abundance of cautionwas the watchword in situations like this.

By the time they’d been hosed down enough to start taking it personally, examined repeatedly, and tested so many times that Bethan was surprised she still had any blood left in her body, another few hours slid by.

Given that she currently had so few left, Bethan found she resented that. Deeply.

She and Jonas had been moved from the lab to a makeshift quarantine unit set up out in the field in front of the old farmhouse. It looked like a crime scene. Isaac and the warehouse team had taken a chopper up, allowing medical attention only once they’d arrived. The containment team had come in a different helicopter, and an Alaska Force support unit in a third, so everywhere she looked, there were very serious people doing very serious things, while her life had turned into an hourglass.

And she was sure that she could feel each and every grain of sand as it slipped away.

“They need to let us out of here,” Jonas growled from behind her.

They’d been issued new clothes because theirs were potentially contaminated, and Bethan chose to focus on how annoyed she was by that. She’d had to surrender herweapons as well as her clothes, each and every item of which she had personally selected and, more, relied on. Better to let herself feel grumpy about that outrage than to focus on her own impending death.

They were both wearing gray T-shirts and cargo pants now, but Jonas looked much better in his. The shirt wasn’t quite big enough for him, so his biceps were doing the Lord’s work, there against the sleeves that strained to fit him.

If that was the last thing she was going to get to see, Bethan couldn’t complain.

“Here’s what I keep thinking,” she said before she lost it and either touched Jonas or broke down into sobs. “Why dose us with SuperThrax?”

Jonas looked suddenly intense in that way he got when his head started spinning out strategies.

Bethan pushed on. “That was a sealed room. If he wanted us dead, surely there were more efficient ways to do it.”

“Good point. Why two to three days?”

She considered. “I guess it’s possible he just wants to torture us.”

“Back in the desert he blew up the convoy, then came in on foot to finish the job. He doesn’t strike me as a hands-off kind of a guy. In Santa Barbara, he made sure he shook hands with both of us.”

“Literally hands-on,” Bethan agreed.

While Jonas turned that over in his head, Bethan watched their friends and colleagues outside. All a little bit battered and bloody, maybe, but alive. Her comm unit had been confiscated with the rest of her gear, and a part of her wondered if that was for the best. No chance for sentimentality that way. Isaac had come and put his hand on the other side of the thick plastic walls that kept Jonas and Bethan quarantined. Jonas had lifted his in return. Bethan had only smiled, so bright and wide she thought her jaw might crack.

Templeton was putting on a show out there, laughinggood and loud while Blue pretended to be irritated, and that, too, was comforting.

“I have to think that he didn’t leave random pieces of paper behind by accident,” Jonas said. Bethan shifted around to look at him.

“Maybe it’s an invitation,” she suggested. “That address at three o’clock.”

He nodded. “I’m sure we’re supposed to think that the recipe is an antidote, but I’m betting it’s not.”