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…fifth week of curfew, city councillors deny rumours that full quarantine of Toronto being considered…

…source in Prime Minister’s office hints that War Measures Act may be reactivated…

…Center for Disease Control consultants report possible breakthrough in identifying primary ‘Duster’ vector…

Curfew; well, that explained the empty streets. Rice got off the main drag, double-quick, and used alleys to work her way back while thinking about hazmat-suited strangers ransacking the loft, disassembling Horatia’s lab, shredding the mattress she and Horatia had slept on. She stopped across the street from “home” and its piss-stained concrete front steps, next to the pay phone, and felt a weird impulse—dug out change, dialed. By about the fifteenth ring, she’d almost convinced herself the man on the other end had long since done what she would have, in his shoes, and high-tailed it down to Gran-and-Grandad’s condo in Florida—

Click. “Hello?”

No air in Rice’s lungs. It was an act of will just to breathe, to force out the words—

“Hello?”

—but then she managed it, without even a crack in her voice to show for all her effort: “Hi, Dad.”

A long, long pause. “Clarice?” And…shit, it didn’t sound like Gilmore Petty at all. He had never sounded like that. “Clarice, is that you? They told me—” A wet, indescribable cough, almost a…

(sob?)

Yeah, right.

“They told me you were…dead,” he said. And all she could think to say, in reply, was:

“…I guess…I sort of am,” Rice told her father, before hanging up.

—

It was drizzling when she came in, sky beginning to go grey with morning; she found Horatia working by the wavering glow of a few tea-lights over a series of slides and eyedroppers. Alkaline catalysts, if Rice was reading the labels on the nearby bottles right, breaking up reA doses in different ways; measured by no more than hand and eye, with all Horatia’s ridiculous, incredible precision. She looked up at Rice’s entrance, and Rice wasn’t sure exactly what that look meant.

“Well?”

“I figured it out. The molecular key to let reA hook right into a cell’s master DNA, for full-on regeneration—so we can actually repair damaged tissue, not just shellac it up until it disintegrates. So nobody else will ever go Dust.”

“Regeneration.” Rice wondered if this was how other people felt around her, that stumbling feeling, perpetually out of step, too slow to catch up. “Like, eternal life-type regeneration?” The grin took her over, like something alien. “That’s—holy shit, ‘Rache, that’s great! You fucking did it!”

“Yeah.” Horatia nodded, not looking too triumphant, for someone who’d just broken the Grim Reaper’s back and made it say “auntie.” “‘Did it’ for the next batch of users. Not so much for anybody who already...” She covered her face with one hand. “I mean, um...”

“...Not for me,” Rice finished, toneless.

Horatia stared miserably at her, too upset even to nod. And right then—

—was when DD stumbled out of the bedroom, holding his throat with both hands, as if choking on something. Eyes so wide with fear and fury Rice could actually see the madness brewing, he advanced on Horatia, who recoiled, slipping backwards off her stool. “Yah, fahk’ng, bihhhhtch,” he wheezed, and Rice saw thick, dark drops of blood squeeze between his fingers, as blood flaked off his sodden shirt. “Cuht mah fahk’ng hroaght—”

Then let go of his neck and lunged at Horatia, mouth still working—but the gash across his larynx gaped wide, shrinking his voice to a bare wheeze. Living Dead Girl-fast, Rice snapped out an arm; they wrestled for a second before Rice pinned him, face to the floor, open throat whistling. Rice shot Horatia an exasperated look, and Horatia just shut her eyes, comprehension dawning.

“Riiight, ‘course. You shot him up too, didn’t you?”

“Well, duh. But he would have hooked himself up anyway, I hadn’t—am I right, D-man?” She put her head down next to DD’s: “I let you up, you gonna behave?” This induced a renewed bout of struggling, but Rice had far too good a grip to break, without risking further injury. “One more time, Dieter. Behave.”

Helpless, DD finally nodded, so Rice turned him loose; he stood up, shooting Horatia a hateful glare, and pinched his throat back together. To Rice: “Hwheeerre…th’fahk…hyouhh bihn?”

“Out; who’re you, my—?” Rice stopped, remembering the phone call, and began again. “Doesn’t matter. You missed the big news, dude; Horatia cracked the code. Now we got something that’ll buy our records clean of anything, even the Dust-plague. Isn’t a government on this planet won’t set us up for life, once we start shopping immortality to the highest…”

But here, suddenly, she stopped. DD lifted his head too, a dog sniffing prey, as sick dismay whitened Horatia’s face.

Screeches of rubber on wet asphalt; the clunking slams of car doors; the hammer of boots on the ground. The grey light filtering in through the filthy, half-shuttered windows began to wash with alternating red and blue.

And a megaphone-enhanced voice whipcracking through the morning quiet, all the old standbys: “This is the Ontario Provincial Police…building is surrounded…exit through the front door, hands above your head…”