Chapter 2: The Unseen Threat

Ava stayed at the window until her eyes ached from trying to distinguish one patch of darkness from another. Nothing moved. She turned back toward the bench, leaving the window at the edge of her vision.

She switched the bench lamp on again. Its light caught the sample container and the unused slide beside it. A sequence she knew: gloves, scalpel, specimen, cover slip. Her hands could still do that.

The objective clicked into place. Ava adjusted the focus over a sliver of fungus and found branching filaments, their faint light visible when she lowered the microscope’s illumination. She sketched a junction, then another. The pattern resisted the categories she knew.

She grabbed her notebook and scribbled furiously:

• Luminescent filaments… biological energy transfer?

• Cellular structures suggest unique adaptation… possibly extraterrestrial influence?

She underlined the question mark after extraterrestrial. A meteor and an unfamiliar fungus did not prove a connection. Still, she left the question on the page. By the time she put the tools down, she was too tired to wash the soil from her sleeve.

The next morning, Ava woke drenched in sweat. At the sink she found faint black veins running up her forearms. She rubbed one, then held it beneath the tap. It was under the skin. When she called the nearest hospital, she read the exposure notes aloud so she would not forget anything. They sent transport.

The hospital gown smelled of hot laundry. Her field clothes lay folded in a bag beneath the examination table, a brown stain from yesterday’s soil showing through the plastic. She kept looking at it while the staff changed gloves between tests.

Ava lay on the examination table as doctors performed countless tests. Their faces grew more grim with each result. Finally, her attending physician, Dr. Laird, entered the room with a folder in his hands, his expression heavy with concern.

“Miss Ava,” he began, his voice carefully measured, “we’ve analyzed your samples and compared them with the symptoms you’ve described. I… I’m sorry to inform you that you’re suffering from an aggressive, unidentified illness. Whatever this is, it’s attacking your immune system and spreading rapidly through your body.”

Ava’s heart sank. “Unidentified? What does that even mean? Is there a treatment?”

Dr. Laird shook his head slowly. “We’re doing everything we can to understand it, but the prognosis isn’t good. Your condition is… terminal. I’m so sorry.”

Ava stared at the folder. Dr. Laird had closed it before saying terminal, as if there were nothing left to consult.

No. He skipped something.

She waited for the rest of the sentence. Terminal unless they tried something. Terminal according to a test that might be wrong. The doctor was still there, still holding the folder; surely he had another word to give her.

Yesterday she had wanted a bath. She had been annoyed about the weight of her equipment. Those complaints now seemed to belong to an impossibly fortunate woman, someone she would have begged to exchange places with. She could not understand how she had been that woman so recently and failed to notice.

“How long?”

“I can’t give you a reliable answer yet.”

Then how could he give her the other one? She wanted to shout it. Instead she found herself trying to sit straighter, to look like a patient worth the trouble of another test.

“The sample,” she said. “Someone needs to seal my lab.”

He wrote that down. She wanted him to cross out the diagnosis instead. Two nurses arrived to take her to a private room.

That night, she watched fluid collect and fall inside the IV chamber. She thought about asking someone to contact her family, then about the words they would have to use. No diagnosis she could explain. No treatment she could ask them to bring her home after. She kept postponing the request until the next nurse came, as though there might be better news by then.

Call them. Pick up the phone and call them.

She reached once. Her hand stopped above the receiver. She could not bear to hear a familiar voice become frightened because of her.

Once the footsteps outside passed without stopping, she cried. Quietly at first, because she could hear someone talking in the next room and felt absurdly rude. Then she could no longer manage quietly. She wanted her own bed and the option of wasting another day. She wanted years she had never made plans for.

She counted the drops until she lost her place, started over, and eventually slept. In her dreams she kept trying to close the sample container. The lid would not catch.

Heavy footsteps woke her. Three figures entered without turning on the overhead light. Their masks were not the ones the nurses wore. Ava reached for the call button.

“Who are you?” Her thumb found the button, but one of the figures pinned her wrist before she could press it. Another approached with a syringe. “No. Get the fuck away from me.”

She kicked at the mattress, too weak to lift her knee far. The needle entered her arm. Cold spread from the puncture.

They lifted her with the sheet. Her bag of field clothes remained beneath the bed. Ava tried to ask for it, for Dr. Laird, for anyone who knew she was here. Her mouth would no longer form the words.

“Help—”

The masked face above her did not turn.