Page 13 of Spread Me

Kinsey wakes in the morning to the sound of Mads pacing in the hall outside her door. She doesn’t know how early it is. She doesn’t have a window in her bedroom, doesn’t have a bedside clock, hasn’t charged her cell phone in months. Here at the station, she gets up when Mads gets up—their footfalls are her morning alarm. It could be midnight. It could be noon. All she knows is that the wind outside is still hammering at her wall, and Mads is up, so she is up.

She opens the bedroom door and pokes her head out.

“What time is it? Is that storm still going? Did you figure out how to read Weatherman?”

Mads, who had just finished stomping past her door, whips around. Their face is wild with relief.

“Oh, good, you’re awake.”

They hand her an unopened packet of wild berry Toaster Strudel.

“There’s breakfast. Come with me.”

Kinsey, still in the tank top and underwear she slept in, stumbles down the dim hallway after them. The research station is strange with the lights off. Liminal. It feels like a bus station, or a movie set, or a shopping mall after all the stores have closed for the day.

“Where are we going?”

she asks, her voice still thick with sleep.

“Lab,”

Mads answers.

“Storm’s been going all night. Hell out there.”

Kinsey frowns. Mads isn’t usually this short with her. Mads isn’t usually short with anyone. They’re not a huge talker, but they’re also perma-calm, existing in a state of enormous sanguinity. Before they burst into the exam room the other day, she’s never seen them so much as shout. Now, they’re curt and hurried, stalking toward the lab like they’ve got a pot boiling in there.

As they hustle past the exam room, Kinsey notices that someone has taped cardboard over the window. There’s more duct tape on the door than there was when she sealed Domino inside the day before, too—a lot more. So much that the door itself is no longer visible.

“Is Domino still in there?”

she whispers.

Mads doesn’t answer. They keep moving, down the hall and through the open door of the lab, ignoring the whine of the wind on the other side of the exterior wall. She realizes that Mads is still wearing the clothes they had on yesterday. She wonders if they’ve slept at all.

The lab itself isn’t substantially different from the canteen, with the food swapped out for equipment and tech. Wire shelves line the walls. Stainless steel lab tables stand in two rows in the center of the room. They’re on rubber-footed legs instead of locking casters, built for stability instead of mobility, but otherwise there’s no discernible difference between them and the exam table in the room next door.

Weatherman stands in one corner, looking for all the world like an arcade game. The big glass screen shows a stream of incoming storm data in shades of red and green and amber. It fills the lab with a flickering glow. Kinsey watches the flow of numbers and coordinates, wishing she’d done more than a cursory training session. She knows the numbers indicate danger, but she has no idea how much danger she and her team might actually be in.

One of the lab tables is littered with the detritus of a long night’s work: crumpled paper towels, discarded pipettes and wadded nitrile gloves, paraffin wax on a cordless warmer, hydrogen peroxide, dye, droppers, formalin in a dark brown glass bottle, a jug of ethanol with Jacques don’t drink me! scribbled on a stripe of masking tape across the front. The other table is bare, with the exception of two compound microscopes and a lab notebook.

The wind is loud in here. It’s on just the other side of the wall, same as in her bedroom. It yanks at the wall like it wants to get inside, banshee-yowl and scouring sand. On the other side of that wall, Kinsey knows the sky is either pitch-black or Hell-red.

Mads hurries to the microscope, ignoring the mess behind them and the noise around them.

“While I was in the exam room, after you left—”

“Sorry, by the way,”

Kinsey interrupts.

“I shouldn’t have left like that.”

She’s not sure how embarrassed she should be, not sure how much Mads saw. She wonders what Domino told them.

They look up at her and all she sees in their eyes is understanding.

“It’s fine. I shouldn’t have made you collect the sample all on your own. That wasn’t fair to you.”

“None of this is fair,”

she responds gently.

Mads looks back to the microscope. “Well,”

they say, adjusting the focus minutely.

“anyway, after you left, I made sure Domino was okay, and I grabbed the tissue sample you took from them. It was a great one. Kind of a lot of tissue, actually. Like … way too much. I’m not sure how they weren’t seriously injured.”

They pause for a moment, leaving a gap that Kinsey knows she’s supposed to fill with some kind of explanation. She lets the silence hang until Mads continues.

“But they seemed fine, so. While I was in the room, I figured I might as well take a tissue sample from the specimen, too.”

It takes Kinsey a moment to remember the specimen they found in the desert, the creature that started all the chaos.

“That would have been good practice for me before I stabbed Domino in the armpit, huh?”

That draws a short, humorless laugh out of Mads.

“You have no idea how right you are. Come look at this.”

They lean back from the microscope, gesture for her to take their place.

Kinsey peers into the eyepiece.

“This doesn’t look like a tissue sample,”

she says.

“What is it?”

“That’s the sample I took from the specimen,”

Mads says.

“What do you see?”

She glances up at them, surprised. Mads doesn’t usually get didactic, isn’t one for leading questions or theatre. But she realizes quickly that they’re as far from theatrical as a person can get. They don’t have the smug time to teach you something look that Saskia gets when she’s about to make a member of the team play Socratic Seminar with her.

They look scared.

Kinsey studies their expression for a moment. They’re reality-testing, she realizes. Just like she did, when she needed the team to tell her that they could see that something was wrong with Domino. Mads needs her to tell them what she sees, so they can be sure of what they think they saw.

She looks again. She can feel the shriek of the wind outside in her back teeth. Her eye adjusts slowly to the view through the microscope lens. There’s a tangle of branching filaments on the slide.

“This looks a lot like a slime mold,”

she says.

“If it went through the dryer by mistake. There’s so much overlap in the hyphae. But—jesus, it’s moving fast.”

As she watches, the filaments twitch their way out of view, then come back again.

“Fungus doesn’t move that quick.”

“That’s what I thought too.”

Mads sounds a little more grounded now, bordering on excited.

“But look. Look at the crossroads.”

It takes Kinsey a moment to understand, but then her eyes land on the places where the filaments cross over each other. Pinkish clusters hide at every intersection, tucked into corners and crevices. Kinsey thinks, just for an instant, of Domino’s armpit. She steps away from the microscope, trains her eyes on Mads. “Okay,”

she says.

“What is that? Bacteria?”

“Viruses. I think. It’s hard to say anything definitively, obviously. But—I think the fungus is trapping droplets of moisture at those intersections, and the virus that got us all sick is hanging out in those droplets.”

“You’re suggesting, what? The fungus is … farming the virus?”

Mads looks at her sidelong. They study her for several seconds before speaking.

“You remember how I didn’t call you crazy when you said you thought you saw a mouth on Domino’s chest?”

“It was four mouths,” she says.

“The point is, I listened. Right?”

They wait for her to nod.

“I’m going to need you to return the favor.”

“Just tell me.”

“Okay. Okay.”

They draw a deep breath, shake out their fingers.

“Here goes. I think … it’s a lichen.”

Kinsey almost laughs, catches herself at the last second. “What?”

“It’s possible.”

“No, it’s not.”

She understands now why Mads wanted her here, so she could tell them they’re being ridiculous. She’s happy to oblige.

“Lichen is mutualistic. A virus can’t participate in that kind of exchange.”

“I think it can, though.”

“How? A virus has nothing to bargain with. It only knows how to invade and multiply itself. A lichen needs something to hold structure and something to make energy. The fungus here has structure, sure, but it obviously isn’t making energy, and it’s not like a virus can photosynthesize. Unless you saw that specimen turn green at some point and I just missed it?”

Mads cracks a smile.

“No Incredible Hulk moments in the exam room as far as I’m aware. But—the energy thing? It’s not totally impossible for the virus to be an active participant in that. I mean, at Aix-Marseille, they found those giant viruses that were making their own energy. And we’ve seen that they can communicate with each other, and we know that fungi can communicate with, like, anything. There’s no reason to think this fungus wouldn’t be able to communicate with the virus, maybe exchanging moisture for energy? That weblike structure seems really efficient at trapping water. Out here, there’s no better bargaining chip.”

Peering through the microscope again, Kinsey can make out movement in those pink clusters.

“Those pink things can’t be viruses. It’s not possible to see a virus with the naked eye,” she says.

“This isn’t your naked eye,”

Mads points out.

“It’s a microscope.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I do, and you’re still wrong. Here.”

Mads scoots in next to her, increases the magnification by 400x.

“Can you see that?”

“Almost. But c’mon, Mads. An optical microscope’s usefulness bottoms out at … what, two or three hundred nanometers across?”

Kinsey makes a few small, halfhearted adjustments to the focus.

“Unless you’re getting involved with lasers and radiation and shit, which I know TQI isn’t sending our way.”

“Yeah, three hundred nanometers. Giant viruses are bigger than that. Four, five hundred nanometers, and that’s just the ones we already know about.”

Kinsey finally gets the resolution right, and in that moment, she stops listening to Mads. Hell, she stops breathing altogether—because Mads is right. She can see them clearly now: giant viruses, easily six hundred nanometers in diameter, clustered together in what looks like a bubble of fluid at the intersection of two strands of fungal hyphae. They look hexagonal from above, but she knows that they’re more complex than that—icosahedrons, made up of twenty triangular faces, covered in minuscule filaments that help them find their way through the world.

Rare as precious gems. Massive. Gorgeous.

Kinsey’s only ever seen them in pictures, never in real life. Her legs go weak. Her tongue feels heavy in her mouth. She is suddenly very aware that she’s in her underwear. The thin cotton doesn’t feel like enough of a barrier between her and the cool air of the lab, not now that she’s seen this. She shifts her weight from one foot to the other, then stills, not wanting to create any more friction than she already has.

“Do you see it?”

Mads asks. They’re very close.

“I see it,”

she whispers.

“Yeah. That’s a virus, alright.”

Kinsey thinks of Domino tasting the air, saying that everyone could tell when she wanted something. She presses her thighs together hard.

“So. Okay.”

Mads seems so absorbed by the possibility of this lichen that Kinsey realizes they probably wouldn’t notice if she started rubbing herself against the lab table.

“I think we’re looking at a new form of lichen,”

they say.

“The fungus forms the structure, kind of a protective skeleton, right? Plus it captures water. And the virus keeps the whole thing mobile, provides some energy. Helps the fungus gain entry.”

“Entry?”

“Yeah.”

“What does that mean?”

The crackle in the air curdles.

“You know what it means. You know what viruses do.”

Kinsey does know what viruses do. She forces herself to look away from the sample, meets Mads’s eyes.

“Lichens grow on surfaces, though. You said you got this sample off the specimen, right? Was it in the hair, or…?”

Mads shakes their head.

“This is the tissue sample. I took it from the specimen’s thigh, and another one from the back of the neck. They’re the same. They both look just like this.”

“That can’t be right. That would mean this is what the specimen’s skin is made of.”

She looks at Mads urgently.

“That can’t be right,”

she says again, more insistent this time.

Mads lifts their shoulders in a high shrug and doesn’t lower them.

“It is, though. And look at this.”

They gesture to the second microscope.

Kinsey peers into the eyepiece.

“I see what you mean,”

she says, not wanting to admit what she’s seeing.

“It does look the same. So this is the sample from the neck, then?”

Mads doesn’t answer.

“Mads? This is from the neck sample you took off the specimen?”

Still no answer.

Kinsey looks up to see Mads staring at her. Their gaze is hollow, their mouth slack. “No,”

they say at last. They look like they want to continue, but they don’t.

It takes Kinsey a moment to understand, and when she does, she wishes she didn’t. She asks a question she knows the answer to, if only to buy herself a few seconds before the truth becomes true—before she learns something she can’t back away from.

“Is this more of the sample you took from the thigh, then?”

Mads shakes their head again. “Kinsey,”

they say softly.

“Don’t,” she says.

But they do.

“That’s from Domino,”

they tell her.

“That’s from the deepest part of the sample you took. I checked the entire thing, and there was no human tissue anywhere. This isn’t just contamination. As far as I can tell,”

they continue.

“that’s what Domino is made of now.”

Kinsey looks back down into the microscope. Her eyes land on the cluster of viruses. A muscle deep within her sex clenches at the sight, even as dread hisses across the surface of her mind. She remembers the strange way she responded to Domino—the irresistible frisson of attraction between them, the way she wasn’t able to look away from the deft movements of their fingers. It’s the same feeling she has now, looking into this microscope.

She knows that Mads is right. She knows that her instinct from earlier is right, too.

The Domino she knew is gone. And whatever’s left—whatever took their place—some part of her recognizes it for what it is.

A virus.

A virus she desperately wants.

And it seems to want her right back.