Page 15 of Spread Me
Kinsey looks around the lab, meeting each of her team members’ eyes as she tells them what she and Mads have discovered. She explains the structure of the lichen.
“If you’d like to see it for yourself, Mads brought the microscopes in here for you. So, um.”
“So you can sit down after you look,”
Mads finishes for her.
“If you need to.”
They take turns looking into the microscopes on the coffee table, one by one.
Nkrumah goes last.
She takes a long time peering down into the lens.
When she returns to her seat on the patched love seat, her gaze remains locked on the microscope, like it might turn to her and speak.
Kinsey continues.
“Given how easily the lichen took Domino’s shape, and the shape of the specimen we found—we think it can look like anything.
Anything living, at least, although I suppose we shouldn’t rule out nonliving things as well.”
She sees most of her own feelings reflected on their faces.
Nkrumah looks focused and interested; her mind will be racing, Kinsey knows, with the scientific possibilities opened up by a mutualistic collaboration between fungus and virus.
Nkrumah is always looking for the roads that might unfurl as a result of the team’s fieldwork.
She’s always hoping for broader horizons and brighter futures.
Jacques, meanwhile, is pale and tight-lipped.
He’s already compartmentalized his grief and heartbreak about Domino.
Rather than feeling the weight of loss, he’ll be focused on considering the ramifications: the dangers of a fungus that can move with the speed and flexibility of a virus, the horrors of a virus that has the longevity and stability of a fungus.
Jacques is the soothsayer of the team, the one who sees trouble on the horizon while everyone else is busy staring at a hole in the ground.
He always knows when to be worried.
Kinsey can see that he’s worried now.
Saskia is tougher to read.
That’s not unusual.
Her face tends toward stillness.
She’s stroking the Eastern Orthodox cross around her neck with her middle finger, long slow strokes that make Kinsey feel like she shouldn’t be watching.
Saskia is a thinker.
She takes her time, assesses situations slowly, combs through information until it falls in shining waves she can run her fingers through easily.
The information Mads and Kinsey have delivered to her today is simple in content and complicated in its ramifications.
It’ll take time for her to organize it in her mind, but once she has, she’ll deliver some scathingly concise answer to everything, something that will make the rest of them wonder how they didn’t see it sooner.
Mads looks exhausted.
Kinsey guesses they’ve been awake for thirty hours, maybe more.
They clear their throat, and all the remaining eyes in the room snap to them.
“I, um.”
They hunch their shoulders, jam their hands in their pockets.
“I can’t figure out a gentle way to put this. Domino.”
They stop and don’t seem to know how to start again. Their eyes lift to the ceiling, like they’re listening to the song of the storm raging outside.
“You can say it,”
Jacques says. His voice is rough.
“Domino is gone.”
Nkrumah shoots up out of her chair, her arms crossed over her chest.
“No, they’re not,”
she snaps.
“Stop it. Just because they have, what, a fungal infection? That doesn’t mean they’re dead. They’re in the exam room right now, probably hungry and thirsty because you idiots haven’t brought them any—”
“They’re not hungry,”
Saskia says in a low, even voice.
“They didn’t ask for anything when Kinsey went in to take the sample from them. Remember?”
“That’s right.”
Jacques rocks forward in his seat, rests his elbows on his knees.
“And they didn’t join us for breakfast yesterday morning. Neither did you, Kinsey. I guess because you were with them.”
She frowns to herself, remembering.
“Yeah, I was with them. They wanted to go look at the specimen—at least, that’s what they said. I think they just wanted to get me alone, though. We went straight into the lab from the shower. Our hair was still wet. Well,”
she says, considering.
“mine was. Theirs was already dry.”
“The fungus would be efficient at trapping and storing moisture,”
Mads offers.
“Maybe it was already distributed throughout the primary body.”
“Don’t talk about them that way,”
Nkrumah pleads.
“Listen to yourselves. ‘The body’? That’s not how we talk about our—our colleague.”
Her voice breaks, her eyes dropping to the floor. Domino’s never been just a colleague to Nkrumah, and she’s never been good at pretending otherwise.
“It sounds like that’s not our colleague in there anymore,”
Jacques says gently.
“The sample Kinsey took—”
“Oh, so we’re deciding that based off one sample? A sample we got from someone who doesn’t even know how to take one properly?”
“I do know how to take a sample,”
Kinsey replies.
“Not in a way that wouldn’t hurt a living person, so yeah, Mads was talking me through it. But I didn’t get the chance to follow Mads’s instructions, because Domino, um. They took the needle from me. They took it, and they pushed it in.”
She bites back the memory of how much they’d seemed to enjoy the penetration of the wide-bore needle as it slid into the moist cavern of their body.
“It went deep. Way too deep. That needle went in far enough that honestly, I was scared it might kill them.”
“It probably wouldn’t have killed them,”
Mads says.
“Probably. But at the very least it would have hurt. A lot.”
“You sound disappointed that you didn’t manage to murder them with your incompetence.”
Nkrumah starts pacing, her arms still crossed, her shoulders taut.
“You sound like you want us to abandon them just because they’re freaking you out.”
Mads lets out an exasperated sigh.
“Nobody wants Domino gone. You know that.”
“I get what you’re saying, though. And I’m sorry.”
Kinsey makes sure she’s facing Nkrumah head-on, looking her square in the eyes. She doesn’t want to say what comes next, but more than that, she doesn’t want to leave Nkrumah alone with it.
“But what I’m telling you is, with how far Domino pushed that needle in, they should have been incapacitated with pain. But they weren’t. They didn’t seem to notice that it was happening at all. Whatever’s going on with their body, they’re different now. And not in the way that change is the only constant of biology,”
she adds, seeing Nkrumah’s rebuttal before it comes.
“I’m telling you that they’re fundamentally transformed on a biological level, and we need to figure out what that means before we can figure out what to do with them.”
Nkrumah’s shoulders sag. It looks like she’s nearing acceptance—but then Jacques weighs in.
“We just need to accept the reality of the situation,”
he supplies.
“We discovered something new. Discovery comes with consequences. Domino would understand that.”
Nkrumah looks at him with stark disbelief for a few seconds before turning and walking out of the room. A moment later, there’s the beep of the card reader on the interior airlock door, then a second, fainter beep as Nkrumah storms outside.
“She shouldn’t be out there,”
Kinsey says.
“It’s dangerous.”
“She knows the risks. Let her go,”
Mads says softly.
Kinsey doesn’t like it—the idea of a member of her team standing out in the storm. The wind is quieter now, but the sand out there will still be whipping across the desert hard enough to strip the top layer of flesh from anything that stands still for too long. She hopes Nkrumah grabbed eye protection on the way out, at least.
“Fucks sake, Jacques. Was that necessary?”
Jacques frowns and mutters.
“It’s true.”
Saskia doesn’t make a sound, doesn’t move—but somehow, something about her shifts to convey that she’s ready to share a thought. Jacques, Mads, and Kinsey all turn to her, attentive.
“What’s up?”
Kinsey asks.
Saskia doesn’t hesitate in her reply.
“Do you already know what you’re going to do with it? The thing in the exam room, I mean? No? I didn’t think so.”
She says it matter-of-factly.
“And what about the rest of us?”
Mads blinks at her, their eyes sharp with the adrenalized alertness that comes on the other side of extreme fatigue.
“The rest of us,”
they say. It’s not a question.
Jacques drops his head into his hands.
“Fuck. She’s right.”
Whatever understanding the three of them are sharing, Kinsey’s on the outside of it. She’s tired, sure—her brain has been fried by several days of near-compulsive masturbation, on top of the shock of what’s happened to Domino. She can understand all the reasons for her lack of comprehension and still hate the outcome, especially when the outcome puts her behind the rest of her team.
“Let’s not make any assumptions,”
she says, which is what she always says when she needs someone to explain something to her but doesn’t want to ask for clarification.
Saskia gives her a knowing smirk that says I’m onto you. It’s gone before Kinsey can ask what it’s about. “Right,”
Saskia says slowly.
“Well. This lichen went into Domino’s body, got them sick, and then—this is the idea, isn’t it?—consumed and replaced them?”
“Duplicated them,”
Mads says. They sound nauseated.
“It made a copy. I don’t know how that’s even possible, but—”
“We don’t need to know how it’s possible right now,”
Jacques says.
“That’s a question for later, when we’ve got it contained. When we’re safe. Right now all that matters for our purposes is that it can happen.”
“And we need to make sure it didn’t happen to any of us,”
Saskia says with an elegant nod.
“Because we all got sick, too, which means the lichen probably infected us the same way it infected Domino.”
Kinsey’s stomach sinks. This is the thing they all understood before she did. It probably came to mind for them right away, she realizes, because they did all get sick. Saskia, Mads, Jacques, Nkrumah, and Domino all had the same vomiting, the same coughing, the same fever.
None of them know that it didn’t touch her. I’m different, she thinks, and the thought has an unwholesome glow to it, a smugness and a certainty that she doesn’t want to let herself embrace. She can’t help wondering whether the virus passed her over for the same reason it turned Domino’s underarm into a wet, fuckable hole. It likes me. Warmth climbs her throat, radiates into her cheeks. She covers her face with her hands, tries to look devastated.
When she looks up, Saskia is staring at her. Smiling at her. It’s a small, secret smile, a barely there smile. An I know what you’re thinking smile. But she can’t know, Kinsey thinks—and then Saskia is looking at Mads and Jacques, her expression returning to its usual calm neutrality. A moment later, Nkrumah comes back coated in dust and announces that she’s calmed down, and the moment is so thoroughly gone that Kinsey can’t be sure it ever really happened at all.
“Everybody gets a biopsy,”
Nkrumah announces.
Jacques jumps to his feet.
“Absolutely not.”
“It’s the only way to confirm who’s infected.”
Mads nods at Nkrumah.
“I think it’s the right call.”
“Boss?”
Jacques glares at Kinsey.
“Tell them we’re not doing that. I don’t want—”
“Even in a clinical setting,”
Saskia cuts in before Jacques can finish.
“biopsies are risky. If something goes wrong, you could introduce the pathogen into our systems. Why don’t we start with a visual inspection first, to see if we can spot any obvious signs of infection?”
Jacques gives a single, decisive nod.
“See, that makes sense. That’s what my dermatologist does—plays spot-the-differences. The only thing working in our favor right now is the fact that the lichen’s not good at this,” he adds.
“Oh, now you’re willing to listen to your dermatologist?”
Mads mutters.
“I don’t know if I agree that it’s ‘not good at this,’”
Kinsey says thoughtfully, ignoring Mads.
“That Domino duplicate was a decent first draft. It was flawed, sure, but that’s just because the lichen couldn’t have known yet that there’s such specificity to the distribution of mouths and eyes on the human body.”
Nkrumah pulls Jacques’s rum out of the storage closet. The sound of the wind outside howls into the room as she opens the door, gets swallowed up again when she closes it.
“Whether it’s good or not isn’t the point. The point is that it’s not perfect.”
She grabs a packet of powdered apple cider mix, studies it, puts it back unopened.
“The lichen is still figuring out what goes where. Or maybe it doesn’t care what goes where.”
“Fine, that works as a starting point. We check to see if we all look like we’re supposed to, right?”
Mads says.
“Nkrumah, there’s cocoa mix behind the plates.”
“That’s not better.”
She pours a generous amount of rum into a mug and takes a pull.
“We should lock down until we know who’s who. Nobody leaves the station, nobody goes anywhere alone. We stay in pairs at the very minimum. Sound good?”
“Keycards,”
Jacques says decisively.
“Everybody put them on the table.”
Kinsey hesitates.
“If we give up our keycards, we won’t be able to run away. Unless we prop the airlock doors open, which doesn’t feel safe, either. Especially with the sandstorm.”
“The sandstorm is starting to chill out. It’s red outside, so shouldn’t be too long before we’ve got daylight out there,”
Nkrumah says, and it’s too easy for Kinsey to picture her standing outside in the bloodred whirlwind, screaming into the storm as sand scours her throat.
“It’s just for now,”
Nkrumah continues, slapping her keycard down onto the table. Saskia follows suit right away, followed by Jacques and Mads. They all stare at Kinsey until she gingerly sets her own keycard on top of the pile. Nkrumah gives a nod of satisfaction.
“Okay. Let’s do it. Clothes off.”
Kinsey freezes. The others have seen her naked before, sure, but not the same way they’ve seen each other. They know each other’s bodies intimately. Mads knows what Saskia tastes like. Jacques knows how Saskia’s thighs feel against the sides of his head. Nkrumah has felt Saskia’s throat beneath her palms. Kinsey isn’t part of that body of knowledge. For them to see her naked, up-close, intent—that will be new for everyone.
She realizes she’s staring at Saskia, wrenches her gaze away. Scolds herself for getting distracted by things that aren’t her business.
“You heard Nkrumah,”
she says.
“Clothes off. Are we doing this in pairs, or by committee?”
“Pairs,”
Mads says.
“That makes the most sense. Me and Jacques, since we’ve never been romantic. No emotional conflict of interest to keep us from being honest about what we see, right?”
Jacques holds a hand to his heart in mock outrage.
“You wound me, Mads.”
Nkrumah clears her throat.
“We can’t do pairs. There are only five of us.”
There’s a long silence as everyone realizes Mads’s mistake—pairs would have worked perfectly, if Domino was around. But they’re not around, and they never will be again.
“I don’t want to strip in front of everyone,”
Saskia finally says.
“I’d prefer to be one-on-one with somebody.”
Kinsey speaks before she realizes what she’s saying.
“I’ll pair with Saskia. Nkrumah, are you okay being a trio with Mads and Jacques?”
“Wouldn’t be the first time,”
Jacques says, flashing a sudden grin.
Nkrumah frowns.
“We shouldn’t split up.”
“It doesn’t count as splitting up if nobody’s alone.”
Mads’s tone is so calm and reasonable that Nkrumah’s frown falters.
“As long as we’re all on the same page, right?”
Everyone is silent until Nkrumah nods.
“Okay. As long as we’re on the same page.”
Kinsey is about to head out of the room with Saskia, but pauses.
“Make sure you count each other’s teeth,”
she says after a moment.
“Look for extras.”
Jacques’s smile fades. “Will do,”
he says softly, then drops his head to attend to the button fly on his jeans.
Saskia and Kinsey head out of the canteen and walk to the lab together. Saskia trails her fingers along the wall, humming a low tone in harmony with the song of the storm that rages just a few inches away from her fingertips. “Teeth,”
she says, dropping the tune.
“I wouldn’t have thought of that.”
“I noticed yesterday. On Domino.”
Kinsey is determined not to look at the cardboard-covered exam room window as they pass it.
“It was subtle, though. I like the way Nkrumah put it—”
“Not a matter of not being good. Just a matter of not being perfect,”
Saskia finishes.
“I liked that too. Seems more respectful. Speaking of respect,”
she adds, holding the door to the lab open for Kinsey.
“I didn’t get a chance to tell you, I was very impressed by your work yesterday.”
Kinsey steps into the lab, hits the light switch, waits for the fluorescents to slowly flicker to life. Only half of them turn on. In the corner, Weatherman glows with red streams of data.
“My work? You mean how I completely botched that sample?”
Saskia closes the door and leans against it.
“No. I mean how you manipulated Domino.”
“I’m not following you.”
“You made them think you were aroused by the idea of taking a biopsy. It was clever. All you had to do was connect the tissue sample to the promise of sex.”
She’s toying with her cross necklace again, sliding the pendant slowly back and forth on the chain. Half her face is tinted red from Weatherman’s display.
“You exploited that brilliantly.”
“Exploited isn’t the word I would use,”
Kinsey says, although she knows it’s the right word.
“I didn’t even do that on purpose. Wait, how did you hear that? Were you on the headset with Mads?”
“They weren’t using the headset, just the walkie speaker.”
Saskia’s mouth spreads into a painfully wide smile.
“I love the way you took advantage of Domino’s desire for you. You used it to make them vulnerable. You could have eaten them alive and they would have thanked you for it, so long as you moaned while you took the first bite.”
Kinsey stares at Saskia, counting teeth. There’s something she doesn’t like about the idea that Mads had her on the walkie’s speaker while she was in the exam room. But the longer she looks at Saskia, the harder it is to connect with that discomfort. She finds her eyes lingering on Saskia’s long after she’s lost the mental thread of their conversation, and in the end she simply turns away, pulling her shirt over her head.
“Let’s get this over with.”
Saskia removes everything except her necklace. Kinsey inspects her closely, tells herself this is no different than checking someone for ticks. Saskia’s skin is as smooth as spread butter. There’s a mole nestled into the soft down of her armpit hair, another in the crook of her neck. A scar zags down the back of one calf. She attributes it to a childhood accident, a fall from a rooftop.
“I should have been hurt worse,”
she says when Kinsey runs a fingertip across it.
“I’m glad you weren’t,”
Kinsey answers. She cups Saskia’s ankle in one hand, lifts her foot, studies the curve of her arch and the plump cushions of her toes. It’s hard to look away, she finds. This might be the most beautiful foot she’s ever seen.
Saskia reaches down, runs her fingers through Kinsey’s short hair.
“What’s the verdict? Am I good, or am I perfect?”
Kinsey looks up. Saskia is staring down at her with that same knowing smirk from before, that look that says I know what you’re thinking. But she can’t know what Kinsey is thinking, because in that moment, Kinsey can’t seem to form a single thought. She’s never considered that Saskia is beautiful before, except maybe in the abstract, the way she generally appreciates the loveliness of a bird or a rare fossil. But now, on her knees, on top of her folded-up sweatshirt in the middle of the lab, she’s finally seeing clearly.
“Perfect,”
Kinsey whispers.
Saskia grins again, wide enough to show off her flawless molars. She helps Kinsey to her feet. “My turn,”
she says.
“Close your eyes.”
“Wait, why—”
“So you can’t intimidate me. I won’t have you taking advantage of me the way you did with Domino,”
she teases.
“Go on. Close them.”
Kinsey obeys. She’s facing Weatherman, and the darkness behind her eyelids flickers red from the light of the display. She can feel her heartbeat hammering hard in her chest. She jumps at the touch of Saskia’s hands on her shoulders.
“So nervous,”
Saskia purrs.
“Are you the monster?”
“No.”
Kinsey laughs. It sounds nervous even to her own ears.
“No, but check anyway.”
Saskia’s fingers skate across Kinsey’s shoulders, trace their way down her arms, turn her hands over and caress the insides of her wrists.
“Your hands are shaking. Do you need some of Jacques’s rum?”
Kinsey doesn’t answer. She feels feverish. Her skin is so sensitive that she can feel Saskia’s breath stirring the air in front of her, can feel the shift in temperature when Saskia comes closer for a more minute inspection. Cool fingers lace between hers, tug her hand upward.
“You have a birthmark on your palm,”
Saskia whispers, and Kinsey could swear that she feels lips moving just nanometers from her wrist.
“Are you a vampire?”
“Do vampires have birthmarks on their palms?”
Kinsey asks, startled enough that she almost opens her eyes.
“How should I know? I’m not a vampire.”
Saskia allows Kinsey’s hands to fall to her sides. She takes Kinsey by the shoulders again, turns her around. Her hands on the back of Kinsey’s neck elicit a sudden shiver.
“Are you cold?”
The entire building shakes as the wind slaps a firm palm against the broad side of the research station. “No.”
“Mmm. You’re such a mystery. What’s this?”
Saskia rests her palm against the swell of Kinsey’s hip on the left side.
“You have a bruise.”
It takes a moment to remember.
“From the exam table,”
she says.
“I ran into it when Domino cornered me in the exam room. It’s funny, I didn’t even feel it, but it must have left a hell of a mark.”
“A hell of a mark,”
Saskia agrees softly. She gives Kinsey’s hip a gentle squeeze, as if she’s reluctant to let it go.
“I’m sorry that happened, Kinsey.”
Kinsey shrugs.
“It’s okay. It wasn’t really Domino, you know?”
“Still.”
Her hands travel again, tracing a path across Kinsey’s belly. Her breath is warm on the back of Kinsey’s neck.
“It shouldn’t have happened like that.”
Eyes still closed, Kinsey turns her head as far as she can, until she feels Saskia’s lips brushing the cusp of her ear.
“What are you doing back there? You’re not going to be able to see if you’re behind me,”
Kinsey murmurs, her voice rough.
“I can see everything I need to see,”
Saskia replies. Her arms are around Kinsey’s waist. The skin of them is velvet as her hands dip lower on Kinsey’s belly, trailing gooseflesh behind them.
“You and I both know you’re still Kinsey.”
“And you’re—Saskia,”
Kinsey says, the name gasping out of her as she feels the sudden crush of breasts against her back, the slip of a thigh pushing between hers from behind, the chill of Saskia’s necklace at the nape of her neck.
“What are you—”
“Shhh.”
Saskia’s fingers shift lower still, impossibly soft, impossibly cold.
Kinsey’s heart is in her throat. Her skin is on fire. Need floods her, fills her from the bottom up, starting right where Saskia’s fingertips are just brushing the coarse hair between her thighs.
She doesn’t fight it. A feverish buzz dizzies her entire body. The feeling takes her. She lets it happen, tipping over into thoughtless, wordless need. She shifts her weight, leans back into Saskia’s chest, tilts her head to expose her neck in hopes of Saskia’s lips and teeth finding their way to the tender flesh there, raises her hips, eager, shameless.
Saskia pours a whispered yes yes yes into the cup of Kinsey’s ear. She presses in close, her tongue tracing a line down the side of Kinsey’s neck. Her fingers sink into the softest part of Kinsey’s belly, leaving a cool trail of something damp behind them, a slow drift of sand falling between Kinsey’s thighs as they find their way home—
Kinsey’s eyes snap open, her arousal congealing into dread. Saskia freezes at the sudden tension that thrums through Kinsey’s body. “Wait,”
Saskia says, but Kinsey doesn’t wait, because it’s already too late. She already knows the truth. She just has to look down to confirm what she can feel.
Saskia’s hands are still where they were resting just a moment before. One cups the small swell of Kinsey’s belly; the other is nestled in her pubic hair, a mere breath away from her undoing.
The one on Kinsey’s belly looks just like Saskia’s hands are supposed to look: slim, pale, nails bitten to the quick.
“I should have known sooner,”
Kinsey says, closing her eyes.
“I should have known the second I started thinking about what it was like for Jacques to fuck you. I don’t have those thoughts. Not about you.”
“It’s okay,”
Saskia says, her lips against Kinsey’s shoulder. A few grains of sand slip down over Kinsey’s collarbone.
“Just ignore it. It doesn’t have to be a problem if we don’t make it a problem.”
The hand that rests at the cusp of Kinsey’s sex shifts. Kinsey lets out an involuntary whine at the damp pressure it exerts so close to the core of her desire. She can’t deny what she feels—she wants this. Her body wants this so much she could scream.
But she also can’t deny what she sees. She forces herself to open her eyes again, to look at the thing she’s struggling so hard to resist.
Saskia’s right hand no longer has the slender, clever fingers that traced their way across Kinsey’s shoulders, down her back, over her hips. There’s still a wrist, still a palm—but that palm doesn’t terminate, doesn’t split into five independent digits. Instead, it stretches into a thick rope of muscle, slick and pink, knotted with veins and tendons.
As Kinsey stares, Saskia turns her hand over, showing Kinsey the rest. On the side where Saskia would normally have fingerprints, there’s an expanse of wet, bumpy flesh, divided down the center by a faint line. It flexes as Kinsey watches, lithe and supple, questing, tasting. Promising.
“You made a tongue.”
She makes herself say it out loud.
“Your hand has a tongue.”
Saskia turns the hand back over, so Kinsey can see the underside of the tongue. “I know,”
she says.
“You were supposed to keep your eyes closed. Tongues aren’t nice to look at.”
There’s a smile in her voice.
“But they feel good, don’t they? Let me taste you, Kinsey.”
With all the will she possesses, Kinsey takes a step forward, out of Saskia’s arms. “I can’t.”
Saskia takes a step too, wraps herself around Kinsey tighter than before. “You can.”
She covers Kinsey’s eyes with the hand that has fingers, reaches around to let the tongue trace a circle around one of Kinsey’s nipples. Without the heat of a mouth to warm it, the tongue is cold. It leaves a wet trail of chilled spit behind to pinch at Kinsey’s breast. Saskia clutches Kinsey close, grinds against her, bites down on her earlobe—it’s overwhelming, too much all at once, and Kinsey can’t help letting out a throaty moan.
“That’s better,”
Saskia breathes.
“Just don’t look. It’s better if you don’t look. I understand that now. I made a mistake with Domino, but now I know—”
That name is what finally snaps Kinsey back to herself. She jerks away from Saskia—from the thing that’s pretending to be Saskia, she reminds herself like a slap to the face—and bolts for the door.
“Wait—”
“No,”
Kinsey says, scooping up her clothes as she skids across the lab on bare feet, sand crunching under her heels, red light at her back. She doesn’t look behind her because she knows that if she does, she won’t be able to resist whatever she sees.
“No, you killed Domino, you—you killed Saskia—”
“Wait!!”
The lichen yells with Saskia’s voice, chases Kinsey with Saskia’s feet. It’s fast—easily as fast as Kinsey, maybe faster. But this rejection has taken it by surprise. Kinsey’s out the door before it’s halfway across the lab.
She slams the door shut behind her and leans her full weight against it, panting, clutching her clothes to her chest, staring at the wall that still screams with a smothering wind that’s pressing dunes of sand against the base with every passing moment. She can’t decide if she hates herself for nearly giving in, or if she hates herself for missing her chance. Her skin puckers in the chill of the hallway. It’s not a problem if we don’t make it a problem, Saskia had said.
It made so much sense when she said it. And now Kinsey has confirmation of what she suspected before: the virus wants her. It sees her, exactly the way she sees it, and it wants to be with her.
The door at Kinsey’s back doesn’t have an exterior lock. The handle rattles, the door shoves against her back hard. Saskia—the creature—wants out. It takes all Kinsey’s strength to keep it trapped inside. It takes all her will not to dive back into that room with it.
She knows better than to trust herself to resist it. She screams for help, competing with the wind outside. She hopes her team hears her and comes to her rescue—and just as powerfully, she hopes the thing inside the lab will break the door down, pin her to the floor of the hallway, and push that long ropy tongue into her as deep as it can go. She screams, pressing her thighs together to stop herself from dripping with need. She screams and screams and screams.
It’s only once Mads arrives that she realizes she’s been screaming Saskia’s name.