grabbed her phone again, squinting as she stabbed at the maddeningly tiny letters with her fingertip. It took forever, but she managed to type out the most important details, namely that Grant was here and she didn’t know how to deal with him. She pressed Send and leaned back, feeling a weight lift off her shoulders. Of the three of them, Mallory was the most practical. She’d have the perfect advice for dealing with this situation.
Now Avery just had to find a way to pass the time until she responded.
Sleep would be the best choice, but her mind refused to cooperate. Now that she had sent Mallory her worries about Grant, she was free to focus on the details of the investigation. And even though her limbs felt heavy with fatigue, Avery knew she wouldn’t be able to rest until she’d at least looked at the patient records. The pathogen was still out there, and she couldn’t afford to waste any time. Too many lives were at stake.
She sat up and reached out to flip on the small lamp located on the night table, then kicked the blankets off and swung her legs over the side of the bed. Even though she was wearing sweatpants and thick socks, the air in the room was still too cold for her liking. She had cranked the heater in the small, dorm-style room as high as it would go, but she was so used to the warmth of Georgia that the lingering chill in the air was enough to make her shiver. Eyeing the stack of folders sitting on the narrow desk opposite the bed, she decided working under the covers was the only way to stay warm.
“How do these people stay here for months on end?” she muttered. It hadn’t been a full twenty-four hours yet, and she already felt like a Popsicle. She couldn’t imagine staying for months, the way most of the researchers did. But she might have to do just that if it turned out there was a new strain of influenza here. Better to be a little cold than risk introducing this disease into the wider world. Still, she hoped it didn’t come to that.
She grabbed the folders and snuggled back under the blankets. It wasn’t worth wasting energy worrying about a possibility that might not happen. First, she had to isolate and identify the bug. Then they could deal with the repercussions, whatever they may be.
It only took a few minutes for Avery to get sucked into the work, her tiredness and concerns about Grant fading into the background as she lost herself in the clinical language of the medical records. There was a lot of information in the files, including detailed descriptions of symptoms, medications administered and patient responses. She was immediately struck by the severity of the symptoms and the rapid speed of decline for some of the patients. Avery was used to the realities of diseases, but even the dry, dispassionate medical vocabulary couldn’t disguise the horror of what these patients had suffered. Whatever this pathogen was, it didn’t pull any punches.
But where had it come from? Pathogens didn’t just materialize out of thin air. If this really was a new strain of influenza, her best bet was to look at the birds of Antarctica. Normally, such viruses circulated through migratory bird populations such as geese and other waterfowl, and in urban settings it was often found in chickens and pigs. But none of those creatures lived on this continent, which meant she’d have to go beyond the normal understanding of the virus. Antarctica had penguins. Was it possible the virus was native to those birds?
The more she considered the idea, the more it made sense. Penguins were an isolated group—since there wasn’t a lot of regular human interaction, the virus might have been circulating through the population for years before making the jump to a hapless researcher. And if the virus didn’t cause disease in the birds themselves, no one would think to make a connection between a sick researcher and his study subjects...
Her fingers flying, Avery flipped through the medical records, searching for background information on each patient. The first page of each file was a basic biographical sketch, and she skimmed through them all, hoping to find that at least one patient was a biologist of some kind who interacted with penguins or any other type of bird on Antarctica.
A moment later, she leaned back with a sigh, disappointment settling in her stomach like a small lead weight. None of the patients appeared to have had contact with any type of wildlife, at least not according to their histories. The patients ranged from astrophysicists to support staff, and the one thing they had in common was that their job duties were all localized on-base. Since Antarctica wasn’t exactly teeming with points of interest, it was unlikely any of the men had ventured away from the comforts of civilization. How, then, had they become infected?
A biologist could still be involved, she mused. Perhaps someone had contracted the virus and exhibited a mild infection, or no symptoms at all. It wasn’t unheard of for some pathogens to remain quiet in a host, effectively turning a person into a silent spreader of the disease—Typhoid Mary, the woman who had unwittingly spread typhoid fever throughout New York City in the early 1900s, was perhaps the most famous example of this phenomenon. But given the severity of symptoms displayed by the ten patients, she rather doubted that was the case here. This virus—if it really was a virus causing the infections—seemed incredibly aggressive. Based on the medical records, this appeared to be more of a scorched-earth type of pathogen rather than a live-and-let-live bug.
“So we have a dangerous, unknown pathogen on the hunt for new hosts and a base full of potential victims,” she muttered. “What could possibly go wrong?”
And who else is infected? It was tempting to think that three days without a new patient meant the outbreak was over, but Avery refused to fall into that trap. Without knowing the incubation period of this pathogen, she had no way to determine if other people had been infected and had yet to develop symptoms. Even the virulence of the pathogen didn’t necessarily provide any clues. Until she knew the identity of the pathogen, it might be better to assume more patients were forthcoming. She made a mental note to talk to Grant about it in the morning—perhaps they could put out a base-wide notice, informing people to come to the hospital at the first sign of illness no matter how mild the symptoms. Better to be inundated with cases of a seasonal cold than miss one or two patients with a more serious condition...
Stifling a yawn, Avery rubbed her eyes and rested her head against the frame of the bed. She should really try to get some sleep if she wanted to be at all useful tomorrow. It was tempting to spend the night working, but logically she knew she had reached the limits of what she could accomplish with the information she had. Tomorrow she’d interview the surviving patients and talk to Jennifer, the lab technician, about any preliminary results she’d obtained.
And as for Grant?
She shook her head, frustration rising as she pictured his face, still handsome after all these years. It wasn’t fair that he looked good to her now, in spite of everything that had happened between them.
But the thing that bothered her the most was the hold he retained on her. One of the things Avery liked best about her job was the logic behind it—disease outbreaks had a cause, and by working methodically, she could usually identify the source and respond accordingly. No emotion required. But the situation with Grant wasn’t like that. He complicated things, made her feel when she didn’t want to. No matter how much she wished otherwise, he’d gotten under her skin again.
She just couldn’t let him know.
* * *
“Higher, Daddy!”
Grant smiled and gave a little push, just enough to make the swing rise a few more inches. His little girl was turning out to be quite the daredevil, and while he appreciated her sense of adventure, he couldn’t shake the ever-present fear that it was going to get her hurt someday. He knew he couldn’t protect her forever, but he wasn’t ready to let her go just yet...
She laughed, and the joyous sound burrowed into his chest and made his heart swell. She
