Deadline

He pulled open the van’s rear passenger-side door without saying anything, putting his carry-on bag on the seat before he climbed in and pulled the door shut again. Even then, he didn’t say anything, just fastened his seat belt and met my eyes in the rearview mirror, clearly waiting.

I started the engine.

Mahir held his silence until we were half a mile from the airport, and the rest of us stayed silent just as long, waiting for him to say something. Finally, closing his eyes, he pinched the bridge of his nose and said, “Magdalene, how far is it from here to your home?”

“About ten miles,” she said, twisting in her seat to look at him with wide and worried eyes. “Honey, are you okay?”

“No. No, I am not okay. I am several thousand miles from okay. I am quite probably involved in divorce proceedings even now, I am present in this country under only the most tenuous of legal umbrellas, I am entirely unsure as to what time zone I am in, and I want nothing more than to rewind my life to the point at which I permitted myself to first be hired by one Miss Georgia Mason.” Mahir dropped his hand away from his face, eyes remaining closed as he sagged backward. “I believe that if I were any more exhausted, I would actually be dead, and I might regard that as a blessing. Hello, Shaun. Hello, Dr. Connolly. I would say it is a pleasure to see you again, but under the circumstances, that would be disingenuous at best.”

“Hello, Mr. Gowda,” said Kelly. I didn’t say anything. I kept driving, listening to George swearing loudly in the space between my ears. If there had been any question about what Mahir had found—whether it was good, bad, or just weird—his demeanor answered it. There was no way he’d look that beat down over anything but the end of the world, and somehow, I was starting to suspect that the end of the world was exactly what he represented.

Maggie looked around the car, a crease forming between her brows as she considered the expressions around her. Then she reached for the remote and turned the volume on the radio up. Somehow, that seemed like exactly the right thing to do, and we drove the rest of the way home without saying a word, blasting the happily nihilistic pop music of a dead generation behind us as we went.

Mahir opened his eyes when we reached Maggie’s driveway, watching with interest as we passed the first and second gates. As we approached the third gate, he asked, “Does it know how many people are in the vehicle?” I hit the switch to roll down the van windows as I glanced to Maggie for her answer. Metal posts telescoped up from the bushes around the driveway, unfolding to reveal small blood test units with reflective metal panels fastened to their sides. The tiny apertures where the needles would emerge glittered in the sunlight.

“The security grid runs on biometric heat-detection, equipped with low-grade sonar,” Maggie said, with the sort of rote precision that implied she knew because she’d read the manual, not because she really understood what the security system was doing. At least she read the manual. Some people trust their safety to machines without even doing that much. “It always knows how many people need to be tested. We ran a bus up here once, when we did the group trip to Disneyland, and the gate wouldn’t open until all thirty-eight of us had tested clean.”

“It made you run all thirty-eight?” I asked, punctuating the question with a low whistle. “That’s impressive.” Also terrifying, since I was willing to bet the designers hadn’t considered all the possible loopholes in that model. Maggie’s security system made us each lean out the window long enough for a blood test, but it didn’t actually make us get out of the car and walk through an air lock while everyone else was tested. It would be entirely possible for someone to test cleang togo into amplification while the rest of the group was still being checked out. The ocular scan at the next gate would catch them—probably—but it would increase the number of potential infected from one to everyone in the group.

Maggie smiled blithely, missing the subtext of my comment. That was probably for the best. “It’s the best on the private market.” She stuck her hand out the window as she spoke, pressing it down against the passenger-side testing panel.

“It’s not on the private market,” said Kelly. I twisted to look at her as I slapped my hand down on my own testing panel. She shrugged, sticking her hand out the window, and said, “This technology isn’t supposed to be available outside of government agencies for another two years.”

“Oopsie,” said Maggie. She flashed a smile at Kelly and pulled her hand back into the van as the green light next to the testing unit flashed on. “I guess Daddy must have pulled some strings.”

Again, added George dryly. I swallowed a chuckle.

“He did an excellent job,” said Mahir. The light next to his testing panel flashed green. Withdrawing his hand, he slumped in his seat and closed his eyes again. “Good lord, this nation is enormous. Wake me when there’s coffee.”

“You’ll need to open your eyes for the ocular scan in a minute,” said Maggie.

Mahir groaned.

I glanced at him in the rearview mirror, taking in the fine stress lines etched around his eyes. Those weren’t there a year ago. George’s death was almost as hard on him as it was on me—something I wouldn’t have believed possible for almost anybody else. Mahir had been her beta blogger, her colleague, and her best friend, and sometimes I got the feeling he would have tried to be more if they hadn’t lived on different continents. At least I had the constant reassurance of going crazy. He just had the silence, and now, thanks to me, the strain of whatever it was he’d learned that was bad enough to drive him out of England.