“What do you mean? Do you know something I don’t, Timon?”
“What do you know, Jamie?”
She struggled to find words for something she couldn’t explain even to herself. “I may be crazy,” she said, “but I know there’s something else going on behind Nereus’s death. Something’s wrong at the heart of the Conclave.”
“How can you be so certain? What evidence do you have?”
“Only what you already know about.” She bit her lip. “If you’re still willing to work with me—”
“If your instincts are correct, maybe I can still do something to help this Conclave succeed.”
“Does that matter to you now, Timon?”
“Something has to matter,” he said quietly.
“And this does, Timon. For all of us.”
“Then if you still trust me—”
“I’ve never trusted anyone the way I trust you.”
Timon looked away. “We’re friends, aren’t we?”
Relief flooded through her. She hadn’t lost him. She’d pushed him away, but he’d accepted her decision. “Of course.” Her tongue and lips felt stiff, as if they knew she was telling a half-truth. “That will never change, Timon. Not from my side.”
“Then it’s settled,” he said. “I can’t stop you from pursuing whatever it is you think is wrong, but at least you won’t be doing it alone.”
Chapter 27
Jamie longed to kiss Timon, but she cut the thought short. He’d lost something he’d cherished...a life he would never have again. Something even her love could never replace.
Taking hold of herself, she turned her thoughts to more practical matters. “You need somewhere to stay,” she said. “They can’t drive you out of the encampment, can they?”
“No,” he said. “My Wanderer friend offered me free room and board, if I choose to accept it.”
“Your Wanderer friend?” she asked, glancing beyond him at the wagons.
“Caridad. You remember her?”
Oh, she remembered: lush lips and black hair and eyes that sparkled as they caught some stray light.
“I remember that you took her blood,” Jamie said, deeply uncomfortable. “Have you found a way to break our blood-bond?”
“There is an antidote, but it works slowly. If you can give me a little more time...”
“Of course. You can continue to take my blood whenever you need it.”
“Perhaps.”
“Will you stay with Caridad, then?”
“If you’d rather, I can set up my own camp just outside the perimeter.”
Does he still think I’m jealous? Jamie wondered. If he was playing games with her, it was nothing less than what she deserved. But if this was some kind of test...
“You should do as you think best,” she said.
“Then I’ll camp to the south of the wagons. It’s closer to the human side, so you won’t have to go near the Opiri when you visit. I don’t know if—”
He broke off, turning toward the west and the center of the encampment.
“Something’s going on,” he said, narrowing his eyes. “People are shouting.”
Jamie could barely hear anything above the wind, but she didn’t doubt Timon for an instant. “Let’s go,” she said.
Together they jogged along the central lane toward the Assembly and Administrative tents. Others were running alongside them, and groups of humans and hooded Opiri, on either side of the road, were talking in hushed voices.
At last Jamie and Timon reached the edge of a crowd gathered around a place near one of the donor stations. Timon pushed his way through, making room for himself and Jamie.
A body lay at the center of the crowd—Opir, his face uncovered and badly burned by the sunlight. But his position was not that of an Opir attempting to shield himself from deadly light. He was simply sprawled there on the packed dirt, arms and legs splayed.
And he bore all the physical attributes that Nereus had had before he’d attacked Jamie...exactly as if he’d starved to death.
Timon met Jamie’s gaze, took her arm and pulled her away from the mob.
“Did you see?” Jamie whispered. “He looked like Nereus. Gaunt, sickly.”
“Yes,” Timon said. “Something is wrong here. And now that there’s been a second death, the problem won’t just go away.”
“Then we need to find out how it happened,” she said. “Let’s meet at the med clinic tonight, when I can sneak back in without anyone asking questions.”
“Why there?”
“Maybe I’ve missed something, and being in the lab may help. Three a.m. should be safe enough. Wear a daycoat, just as a precaution.”
Timon turned and left immediately. Jamie watched him go, struck again by his stoic ability to accept the loss of the way of life he’d known for so many years, the people he had worked with, his friends, his mentor.
* * *
The lab was quiet and dark, save for a single lamp just bright enough to read by. Jamie pulled her mother’s journal from inside her jacket. Some memory pressed in on her, only a scrap of recollection, one connected in some way to the writings she had carried since Eileen’s death.
“I told you that my mother was a biologist,” she said to Timon as she thumbed through the journal. “She worked with human diseases.”
“Human diseases.” Timon rested his hand on her shoulder, and she almost forgot to breathe. “What are you looking for?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. She paused at a page near the center of the journal and studied it intently. “Not here. But somewhere...” She riffled through the pages and stopped abruptly. “Here!”
She showed the book to Timon, who crouched with his cheek nearly touching hers. “Look at this drawing. It’s my mother’s work.”
“What is it?”
“An infectious agent called a virus. In this case, a retrovirus.” Trying to ignore Timon’s earthy, masculine scent, she read the tiny notations next to the sketch. She read them again and then a third time, blinking to make sure she was seeing the words correctly.
Her hand trembling, she let the journal fall into her lap.
“Jamie,” Timon said, turning her face toward him. “What did you find?”
“The virus,” she said. “I think it’s what killed Nereus.”
“A virus in an Opir? Illness among Opiri is virtually unknown.”
Jamie lifted her head. “I know. It seems fantastic. But this—” she pointed to the neat sketch on the page “—was almost certainly what caused Nereus to starve to death, and it’s probably the cause of the other Opir’s death, as well.”
“How can you be so sure? Can you see it in his blood?”
“It takes special equipment for that. But I can put two and two together.” Tears spilled out of her eyes. “This virus isn’t some unknown disease. Timon, it was created to kill Opiri.”
He pulled back, and she could feel his stare. “Created?” he said.
“By humans. Humans who held the belief that they could only survive in this world if all Opiri were wiped out.”
“You’re talking about genocide.”
“Only a few in the Enclave would ever have been a part of such an abomination.”
Timon went very quiet. “I’ve heard of this,” he said slowly. “Rumors, whispers of a deadly disease that affected only Opiri. No one ever spoke of it out loud.”
“I only knew what my father told me,” Jamie said, folding her arms across her chest. “The pathogen was supposed to have been wiped out before it could be used—destroyed at a secret lab facility by a team of Enclave agents.”
“And your mother was involved?”
“No! My mother had nothing to do with it.”
&nb
sp; But Jamie had no way to be sure. Here, in her mother’s writing, was a full description of the virus, and a notation that Eileen had had access to a sample after it had supposedly been destroyed.
“No,” she said, more softly. “My mother was a good person. She would never have accepted what those people did. And she was only a child when they made the virus.”
“I believe you.”
Timon’s quiet words brought the world out of its wild spin. She met his gaze. His eyes were sympathetic, but there was calculation in them, too, as if he didn’t completely trust her.
“How does this virus work, Jamie?” he asked.
She swallowed several times. “It causes the infected Opir to starve to death by altering and destroying his digestive enzymes so that he or she can no longer take nourishment from blood.”
Turning his back on her, Timon strode across the tent, passing the row of microscopes and lab equipment. “Then the virus wasn’t destroyed,” he said. “It’s here.” He spun around to face her again. “How does it spread?”
She stared at the ground, afraid to meet his gaze. “It can be administered directly, but it can also be transmitted through human blood. A human is infected but doesn’t suffer any illness. An Opir who takes blood from him or her not only becomes ill but passes the virus on to any other human he bites. And that human also becomes a carrier, able to infect the next Opir in turn.”
“Then this was done deliberately, by humans, just like before,” Timon said.
Jamie swiped at her cheek. “Judging by Nereus’s symptoms, he was already infected before you and I met with him.”
“By whom? Did he and his delegation meet with infected humans before we found them?”
Horrified by the idea that sprang into her mind, Jamie studied her mother’s notes again. She jumped up and made the necessary preparations to test her own blood. Timon watched with eerie patience as she examined the sample carefully.
“My mother made a brief notation of what to look for in infected human blood,” she said, sinking back into her chair. “I think I’m infected, Timon.”
They stared at each other as all the implications raced through Jamie’s thoughts. The San Francisco Enclave had created the virus, and apparently not all of it had been destroyed. Someone still had it. Eileen McCullough was dead, but if there had been one sample that survived, there could have been others. Hidden away, until the right time came to use them.
And there was another, terrible consequence.
“You took my blood,” she said, nearly gasping. “Timon, you could be infected, too.”
Chapter 28
Timon froze, head tilted and eyes closed as if he was taking stock of his own body. “There was nothing wrong with me that taking your blood again didn’t fix,” he said. “I’m fine now.”
“You could be infected and not know it,” she said. “You’re a half-blood. That could make all the difference. You attributed your own problems to the blood-bond, but since you’re deriving benefits from my blood, that doesn’t prove anything. The virus might not directly affect you, just as it doesn’t affect humans. But you could be a vector for the virus, like any human.”
Timon crouched, his arms folded across his knees. “Then I might pass on the virus to other humans?”
“As long as you take blood only from me or another infected human, you aren’t a danger to anyone.”
“But every time an infected human gives blood to an uninfected Opir, or an infected Opir takes it from an uninfected human, the virus spreads.” He met Jamie’s eyes. “Is this what you sensed, Jamie? This disaster looming over the Conclave?”
She shivered. “I’m not psychic. Nereus’s death... I just couldn’t accept it as some kind of natural occurrence.”
“And it wasn’t.” He reached across the space between them and laid his hand on her knee. “You’re a scientist. We both need all our analytical skills to figure this out.”
“And stop it,” Jamie said. There had to be some kind of faction behind this, as there had been behind the original creation of the virus so many years ago.
“Let’s take it one step at a time,” Timon said, steady and calm. “Who could have done this? When could you have been infected, Jamie?”
“If you do have the virus—and I think we have to work with the assumption that you do—then I had to be infected back at the Enclave. Someone involved with the delegation, or the planning of it, had to play some part in this. I was infected without my knowledge, maybe when they inoculated us against several illnesses before we left.”
“Then we have no idea if any of the other San Francisco delegates actually know what’s happened, or if they’re infected, as well.”
“No. The only way for me to learn more is to check the blood of every member of the delegation.”
“And if one of them is in on some kind of conspiracy, they might object.”
She jumped up from the chair again. “I can’t believe it,” she said. “It had to have been started by someone who wanted the infection spread at the Conclave, where nothing could stop it.”
“Is there a cure?”
“If there was, there’s nothing about it in my mother’s journal.”
Timon rose. “Jamie, there must be someone in your delegation who knows what’s going on. Cahill. Your godfather...”
“My godfather? Never.”
“But you can imagine Cahill involved in this.”
“You’d have no trouble imagining it,” she snapped, and then immediately regretted the words. “We don’t have nearly enough information to begin making accusations. I refuse to consider anyone guilty without proof.”
“Who in your party hates Opiri enough to commit genocide?”
She sank back into the chair. “No one. We’re here on a peace mission.”
“A perfect pretense.”
“Do you want to find one of us guilty?”
“If it will help us stop this somehow.” He paused. “We know that Cahill and the rest of your delegation met the Tenebrians the day before we did.”
“And you think Greg could have arranged to—” She couldn’t complete the sentence. “That would make him worse than evil, Timon. I’ve known him all my life.”
“Will you follow where the facts lead you?”
“Yes. Will you?”
He came up behind her chair and rested his hands on the back. “I was a Rider,” he said. “I won’t let personal feelings cloud my judgment.”
“Then you have to consider that I might be guilty, too.”
“I know you aren’t.”
His certainty warmed her chilled skin. “You aren’t being objective,” she said. “But thanks, anyway.”
Kneeling before her chair, he took her hands. “I’ll stay by your side every moment until this problem is solved.”
“That means finding a cure. My God, Timon, we don’t have the resources here to make one!”
“But maybe whoever started this has a way to stop it.”
“Why would they want to, when humans aren’t harmed?”
“I don’t know. But we’d better hope they do.”
“Yes.” Jamie realized that she was gripping Timon’s hands too tightly and let go. They rose at the same time.
“The first thing we have to do is search this clinic,” she said. “We don’t have much time.”
“What are we looking for?”
“Anything that might suggest intensive research—obscure notes, equipment out of place...whatever catches your eye. I’ll check the stored blood samples myself.”
Working separately, they covered the clinic in less than an hour. Timon found nothing of interest. Jamie tested all the blood in the refrigerator unit and found no more of the virus.
“It’s not here,”
she said when she finished. “If a supply of the virus is at the Conclave, it’s hidden somewhere else.”
“Or maybe enough humans are already infected that they don’t need a supply,” Timon said grimly.
“I’m going to invent an excuse to test the blood of all my colleagues. I can tell them that I’m afraid they might have been exposed to some kind of parasite on our journey from San Francisco.” She met his gaze. “You have to leave before it gets light. Do you need blood?”
Timon hesitated. She stepped up to him and offered her neck.
“You have nothing to lose,” she said, bracing herself.
He put his mouth to her throat, his tongue laving her skin to numb it. A great wave of sexual pleasure rushed downward and settled between her thighs. He bit, and the pleasure increased to the point that she thought if he touched her she might come right there.
He’s not doing this on purpose, she told herself. It’s natural. But she wanted him so badly then that she didn’t dare react. It was life in the face of death. She was giving life, but if she wanted something in return, she could never ask for it.
Jamie bore the throbbing discomfort of her desire until Timon was finished, and then she stepped quickly away. He had a sated, almost dazed look about him, but when his gaze focused again, the full weight of it fell on her. She didn’t have to look hard to see that he was aroused.
“You’d better go,” she said, trying to control her voice. “I’ll come find you as soon as I have anything new to report.”
“And I’ll try to learn more about this recent death,” Timon said. “Be careful, Jamie. Be very careful.”
* * *
Was this the secret all along? Timon thought, adjusting his daycoat as he strode away from the tent. Was the virus the thing the Riders’ employers had been looking for, the hidden danger Cassius had sent him to find?
But if these anonymous employers had any idea, he thought as he left the area of the clinic, why would they have left it for the Riders to discover on their own?
Those employers must have heard rumors, but needed evidence.
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