Clare’s brain felt as though it had been put on ice. Thoughts were frozen there, painful but refusing to budge. She took a stuttering breath. “Is it going to get worse?”
“Hah. I have no idea.” Peter pulled his legs back under himself. “Right now, I’m really just taking each day as it comes. I’ve been trying to calculate how many people might have survived the stillness… that’s what they’re calling it, you know? The stillness. At first, I thought it was a stupid name. There’s nothing especially still about those hollows. I can’t stand going down to the lower levels because of how loud they are. But now I’m starting to think it’s actually kind of appropriate. The hollows aren’t still, but the humans are. Once, you could turn on the radio, turn on the TV, turn on your smartphone or laptop, and have instant contact with other people. Now, you’ve got to search for it. Hunt through the radio, looking for any kind of life you can find. I feel it here, in the city, especially. You used to have to fight for even ten minutes of peace. But now…”
Fresh lightning, painfully bright, spilt through the windows. Clare found she couldn’t pull her eyes away from the blinds. A horrible paranoia wormed through her. “We’re in the city.”
“Hm?” Peter lifted his eyebrows, following Clare’s eyes to the window, then looked back at her curiously.
“The… the thanites, there are going to be more of them in the city—” Why didn’t I think of this before? Why did I let us come here? Are they infecting us right now?
Her throat burned, and her eyes stung. She became convinced she could feel them, scratchy and rough, clinging to the mucous in her lungs.
Peter stared at the window. Clare wanted to scream at him. He’d pacified her before; she wanted him to do it again, to promise that, despite all the signs, they would be safe.
“They’re not active right now,” he said.
Clare fought the urge to hurl her water bottle at him. “What do you mean? Are they infecting us? Are they going to become active?”
Peter blinked rapidly, seeming to shake off some bad memory, and chuckled. “No, no, don’t panic. We’re fine. I’ve been living here for weeks, and I’m still human. See?” He held up his hands and wiggled his fingers, grinning broadly.
“But there are thanites here. You said they collected in cities. Is it a matter of time? Did you call us here so that we could die with you?” Clare leaned forward. She knew she sounded aggressive, but she couldn’t calm down. Dorran’s arm around her shoulders was normally comforting, but at that moment, it only made her frenzy more urgent. If she was being infected, then so was he. The image of his beautiful face, deformed and mutated, haunted her. She needed to expunge it. She needed Peter to tell her everything would be okay.
“Hey, hey, relax. I know how stressful this must be. And I can only imagine what you’ve been through already. But I swear, I wouldn’t have called anyone here if the city was toxic. You’re right—there are thanites everywhere. After the stillness event, they started to replicate themselves again. Like they were designed to. But they’re not hurting us right now, and they never will, if I have anything to do with it.”
Dorran stirred uneasily beside her. He was equally wary. Peter picked a candy bar out of the pile of food and tossed it to Clare. She caught it with her good hand.
“Eat that. Get some sugars into you, because you could probably really do with some right about now.” Peter’s smile was sad. “There isn’t much left to my story, but once you’ve heard it, you’ll probably understand everything a little better.”
Clare gave a short, stiff nod, encouraging him to go on. Peter pointedly stared at the bar she held, and she struggled to open it with shaking fingers. Dorran eased it out of her grip, tore off the top, and handed it back to her. He then reached for the first aid kit and examined the supplies while Peter resumed his tale.
“Okay. You know how the thanites were created. And you know that at one point during the development period, one of them escaped containment. Not one of the earliest models, but not the more recent ones, either, from what I can work out. Once outside, it populated itself without Ezra’s knowledge. Meanwhile, he was under immense pressure. The end of his grant was racing towards him, and he needed a working model. He’d been so paranoid about having his work stolen that he hadn’t breathed a word to anyone—not even the Aspect commissioners, or else they probably would have imposed more stringent safety measures. He’d confided some of it to me, but even I didn’t know the extent of his experiments. About three weeks before the end of his grant, he woke me in the middle of the night.”
The chocolate bar was too sweet. Clare’s stomach threatened to revolt as she chewed it, and she put it aside half eaten and picked up the water. Dorran splashed some antiseptic across the cuts, and she hissed. He murmured quietly as he dabbed the liquid, then he began wrapping a fresh bandage across it.
Peter watched from a distance, shifting his position. He looked uncomfortable. The memories were probably unpleasant for him. To be so close to the source of the stillness and be unable to stop it…
“Like I said before, I spent most of my nights here. Not because my own work was very high pressure, but, well…” He laughed, but it sounded pained. “Easier to stay here in rooms cleaned by janitors than travel home to my own poky apartment. I guess it saved my life. Most of our other co-workers were home that night. Ezra had been routinely sleeping at the tower for efficiency’s sake. He woke me around four in the morning and said he needed my help. He wanted a witness.”
Dorran tied off the bandages but kept his hand resting over Clare’s shoulder. She was grateful for the warmth.
“I guess I was excited for him.” Peter took a deep breath then let it out as a heavy sigh. “After how hard he’d worked, I was hoping his invention, whatever it was, would succeed. So I followed him up to the labs. At his request, Aspect had constructed several containment units. Airtight glass rooms where you could watch your experiments. Inside one of them was an older Korean woman. Wrinkled, wearing her best coat and hat, sitting on this white plastic chair patiently. ‘Who’s that?’ I asked. ‘My neighbour,’ he said.”
Peter chuckled, but the sound wasn’t cheerful. “He must have been violating a hundred ethics regulations. You need all sorts of permissions for human trials—but I guess Ezra didn’t have time. He needed proof of concept. And he was willing to cross a few lines to get there. He explained that his neighbour had a terminal lung cancer and had agreed to test the thanites. If they worked, they would repair the damage it had already created. ‘It’s very safe,’ he kept saying.”
Clare didn’t want to hear the rest of the story. She could see the direction it was taking, and the nightmare was too close and too painful to stand. But Peter’s eyes were turned to his feet, distant and tight as he unravelled his memories.
“He had to upload some code to activate the thanites. They might have been mostly biological, but they still had enough machine in them that they needed a command to switch on. Ezra explained what was happening as he worked. Thanites had been released into the room with the subject. They floated through the air, being inhaled and expelled with every breath, but ultimately dormant. When activated, they would seek out a host. Their biological nature meant they needed to find a hospitable environment to survive—specifically, a human. They could enter the body through any mucous membrane, such as the eyes, throat, and lungs. They would be nearly painless. Ezra would allow them to work for several hours and had a second code lined up to deactivate the thanites before his neighbour was allowed out of the room. Then we would run tests to see whether any repairs had been made, and if so, how much.”