won't you be my panacea

When he wins the big one, he texts all his friends he knows already love Ava Sørensen and tells them all about it. She isn't the biggest mainstream star, and he wouldn't want her to be -- it keeps things manageable, a steady stream of content without the big-name price. Sometimes he has to go out of his way a little more to catch one of her appearances, but it's a nice treat after a long work week. With his budget, he has to start pretty small — a two-week course of human papillomavirus, her high-school herpes simplex studding his mouth. Small, private things only Caleb knows about.

Compared to a lot of people he's pretty indifferent about this stuff. It's just nice to turn on the computer or the TV and to have something -- where Ava is today, how she's doing, what's going on in her body. If they knew each other, he'd know this stuff naturally -- he'd know the dry pebbly skin on her arms or her skin infections or her bowel conditions, just from being around her, from being intimate with her. Caleb just wants to know someone intimately.

*

Nathan's facility is all windows upstairs -- he has trouble thinking of it as a house, there's yards of sleek processing equipment in the belly of it and enough storage space for ten thousand designer plagues -- and down below it's pitch dark except for bright red mood lighting.

Outside, there is a garden and a river and nothing else. Inside, there are strangers.

Nathan is big, bluff, handsome, hung-over. He smells strongly of clean acerbic sweat and a little like wheatgrass. Nathan's personal physician wears spike heels and doesn't smell like anything Caleb can detect. They are both relentlessly good-looking, relentlessly healthy people. His boss is sprawlingly casual, while the woman looks relentlessly poised, as sleek and deliberately positioned as a fashion editorial. Nathan never looks at her while he speaks.

"She used to be a celebrity surgeon back in her home country. I keep her on retainer," Nathan offers when Caleb is about to ask. Nathan's hand lingers just below her waist. Her sideways glance back at him is not especially cozy.

It's not hard to picture her getting photographed a lot, with her severe good looks and her extraordinarily long legs. Her crimson surgical scrubs barely brush the tops of her thighs, and she looks unimpressed to see Caleb too. She hasn't spoken once in the last twelve hours since a helicopter spat him out on the grassy lawn.

Nathan makes a gesture with his drinking glass. "You're going to get two doses. Number one's a test, and number two at the 48-hour mark confirms it. How's that sound? Or you can call it all off and we'll spend the next week doing shots and swimming laps. I don't care."

"I want it. I'm ready to go for it. I'm ready." Caleb grasps at his knees through his best jeans, and imagines how it will feel.

"You're going to be the first guy in North America to get a taste of this. They don't even have this in Canada yet. It's an exclusive."

The contract is printed on actual paper -- even his onboarding papers for Bluebook were all digital -- and the stark dry feel of it lingers on Caleb's hands long after they've left the desk and pen behind.

*

The next morning he meets Ava face to face.

"Please," she says. "I'll do anything. I'll tell you whatever you want."

"I'm here to help you," Caleb stammers, too flustered to think of anything else -- he didn't want to see her like this, with nothing on. They cut her hair.

Ava's face melts into an expression of sublime relief. Her rosebud lips part, her nose is tinged with authentic pink. "Oh, thank God. Thank you. Thank you."

She puts out her hand to the glass, and the motion almost uncovers one of her small breasts -- Caleb stammers more, not sure how to communicate that she doesn't have to do anything. She just has to hold still. Would it reassure her if he touched the glass too? Would that just make it worse? The sight of her boxed in makes his gut clench with sympathetic claustrophobia.

("You're not supposed to help her," Nathan says afterward, voice thick with stupefied disgust like Caleb's just played a videogame with the controller held upside down the whole time. "You're supposed to ask to see her tits. How are you going to help her? She's in a box, for Christ's sakes.")

*

Nathan doesn't eat meat from anything that's not a fish. After dinner that night, they sit in front of his bank of Post-Its, in the shadow of a wall of screens, and he demonstrates a few things.

"Turn of the century, everybody was all worked up about rights management. We threw on the brakes with copy protection and now nobody wants to bother prying them up again." One face morphs into another: laughing, grimacing, jaw split wide. Nathan manipulates the controls one-handed, the other hand braced against the screen in a casual L-shape. Smiling, sleeping, wincing, afraid. Massaging the mechanism until the metaphorical tumblers click into place.

The screen shows the face of a woman, settled and impassive. Nathan tips out another tall glass of clear liquor and Caleb coughs into his sleeve.

*

Ava is twenty-three years old; her skin is so smooth, her cropped hair lies in soft wisps. She looks like one of those rescued racing greyhounds people in Caleb's apartment building love to dote on, all long limbs and smooth soft muscle. She has no blemishes. She is only softly made-up, but his eyes keep going to her mouth as she speaks, and he's afraid she will notice.

Caleb kneels beside the screen. His heart palpitates; his throat feels tight.

“Nathan says you had my cold sore recently.”

“He told you that? Yeah, I did, I guess." He runs two fingers over the edge of his lip. There's nothing there but the memory.

“Did you like it?”

“Of course.”

“I remember it bothered me at the time," she says; her body is angled toward him and her pretty head is cocked, graceful in motion. She used to be a dancer; not everybody knows that. "I couldn't stop worrying at it. I was sixteen when they took that sample. It was an old swab. Didn't that bother you?"

"More like vintage," Caleb says, feeling his face flush a little. He already feels sick, which is heartening.

"Vintage," she says. The corners of her mouth pinch in a pearlescent smile. "I like that."

*

"You're the one who wanted to meet her, man."

"In a manner of speaking."

"Not in a manner of speaking at all. You're meeting her the most profound way anybody can meet anyone. She's going to be inside you. She's going to pop your little cell barriers and force her way in, and your body's going to respond to it. Tune in to her channel any time you want. Just don't think so much, dude."

Nathan gives him the first shot; he wraps a blue latex tourniquet around Caleb's forearm and fumbles the vial into its sleek cartridge. It goes flush against the skin of his inner arm, a sudden lick of cold, and he must flinch a little because Nathan laughs.

Kyoko stands against the far wall of the lab, observing. She's as stark as the architecture of the house itself and about as forbidding.

"When do I take the pressure bandage off?" This is getting ahead of himself. Caleb has spent plenty of time in various hospitals; lying back on an incline always makes him feel a little uneasy, a little naked. But he's not scared of needles, and he's not a stranger to various forms of treatment. He rolls his fingers and feels the bones of his arm shift in Nathan's grasp.

"It's going to punch right in and seal itself up. Don't even worry about it." Nathan gives Caleb's thigh an absent-minded, reassuring squeeze. "Don't think. Don't analyze. This isn't a case study. This is a one-of-a-kind, never-before full-body celebrity experience. Your body is the Starship Enterprise. Engage immune system."

When the first hit hits Caleb's bloodstream, he seizes. He wakes up with Nathan on top of him and a sore jaw, Nathan rubbing his face with gloved hands.

*

Nobody takes his temperature after that, or counts off his pulse. They play pool and do shots; Nathan teaches him how to make a fancy coffee. His doctor-girlfriend makes herself scarce -- somehow it's tougher and tougher to believe that she's there to keep an eye on him, more and more easy to imagine her keeping an eye on Nathan. Every room and hall is bristling with cameras, and it just gets worse the deeper into the house you go.

Lightning-round refresher on anatomy, epidemiology, genetics. Some of this stuff Caleb is so used to kludging his way past it's actually nice having Nathan give the breezy version, though he's not sure how these little educational sessions are supposed to be compatible with not overthinking what they're there to do. Just for a moment, Caleb thinks this won't be that bad. The worst part is over with.

They talk a little bit about Ava, mostly in comparison to other women -- getting down to brass tacks about just what's so special about her, that this is the call Caleb's plucked out of obscurity to answer. Caleb doesn't know -- she's just charming, her taste in cinema and her broken toenails and her pink-and-white cheeks. She's a left-handed Aries, she was born with an extra miniature pinky like Anne Boleyn, she only believes in sex for procreation. And Nathan does ask him if he wants to go swimming -- it was chilly when Caleb arrived but he thinks better of telling him so, he just says he didn't pack a swimsuit. He doesn't think he owns a swimsuit. Nathan snorts.

*

No windows and a keycard slot for every door, because it isn't a house, it's a clinic -- like any other high-end clinic that uses the viruses Bluebook puts out as a sideline. Caleb's got a suite of rooms as luxe as anything on video; maybe there are other rooms, other patients. He doesn't know. Maybe she's broadcasting from one of these rooms. How would he know?

The shower is built into the wall, there's a toilet and a sink and a camera in every corner. He can watch TV, he can browse the internet, the one thing there's nothing of in this house is magazines and Caleb really doesn't miss them. Caleb has brought seven days' worth of comfortable clothes, and some suit jackets, and some good shoes. There is a wastebasket by his bedside for him to be sick in, and a bunch of empty vases. Empty on purpose, maybe; they're very pretty, and the house's aesthetic definitely runs toward tasteful minimalism. It practically gallops.

The bandage in his arm is beginning to itch. He stands in front of the inlaid computer screen and switches on Ava. The glands in his throat are already starting to hurt, so it's tough making the voice commands reach far enough to be picked up. He'll have to enunciate.

She is there on the screen in higher resolution than his home computer affords; he can scroll through views at his leisure until there's one he likes. There's still a Skype-ish quality to it, a little blurring distortion around the edges, but that just gives it all some atmosphere. Attractively wan, Ava sits curled up on a metal chair, silhouetted against a glass panel of trees and sketching on a pad of paper. She's wearing clothes this time, thick wool stockings and pyjamas.

"Are you feeling all right, Caleb?"

Something glandular, Nathan said. Just some little virus that went after her glands. It could have left her sterile, but it didn't. Her virus is inside him now. He has nothing to be afraid of.

*

He spends that night vomiting until there's nothing left in him, flinching from any light brighter than the screen of his smartphone. The tile of the bathroom floor is cool under his cheek, and Caleb is grateful when unconsciousness sneaks up on him, clearer and more sudden than sleep.

(In the morning Nathan will be keenly interested in whether or not he blacked out.)

*

"I don't think I want the next dose. This is fine."

Nathan's face darkens. The lighting's down to 60%, silhouetting his boss like a statue, cutting him out in blue-white glow.

"You know, I expected better of you. I thought you were accustomed to hardship."

Because he's a programmer? Because he doesn't make a whole lot of money -- because of his medical history? Everything winds back to being about the car crash. He never wants to be that sick again. Caleb is, he already fears, too sick.

"I just don't think I can hack it through a full-body disease. We can give it a try in a couple months -- I'll come back, we can do it over. I'll buy my own plane ticket. I'm sorry." When he was in college, Caleb once had to back out of a lease for stupid reasons -- this is how that feels, knowing he's letting someone down, knowing he's bailing on a potentially good thing. It made him feel like a coward. The knowledge of another sample being cooked up in an incubator just for him is withering. Caleb's throat is tight and his neck is stiff.

"Think of it like a vacation. Your cells can kick back and let somebody else do the heavy lifting. Would you rather be on a respirator? You know I can put something together in a fucking hour, dude."

"It's not breathing I'm worried about, it's just--"

"Just what? You changed your mind, you don't care about her any more? You want a dose of somebody else? This is a one-time collaboration, dude, limited-edition, very time-sensitive. I'm just saying, think about it."

(His host does not get sick, courtesy of a naturally robust immune system and a punishing fitness regimen and a lot of ugly green smoothies. He has never gotten sick in his life, not even a generic cold. He is purely a spectator where illness is concerned, and he wants to watch.)

"I've thought about it--"

"You're signed for two rounds of clinical trial, you're getting two shots. I've got all the paperwork right here. Get ready for round two or get ready to lawyer the fuck up. We're going on a voyage of discovery. I'll be your copilot."

This would be one thing in a professional setting. It's another in some guy's guest bedroom with his stern girlfriend giving you fuck-off eyes from the corner. Like he might be contagious anyway.

*

Sweat-soaked, shaking, he is grateful now that Ava is sequestered from him -- he doesn't want Ava to see him, even on a video screen, not even behind glass. He cannot seem to lie comfortably -- his spine gouges against the pillow. He tries to think of how this feels for her -- how it felt for her, having her temperature spike and drop, having the aches come and go, whether her nose ran, whether she felt sick to her stomach. It probably looked better on her.

(They are together in an open space with the sun slanting down; her back is to him, her hair is long and spools down over her shoulders, her sundress billows against her legs. She looks well. Or the back of her looks well, anyway. He reaches for her arm, just as she turns for him, and he feels the long bones shift.)

*

Caleb is sweating into his shirt. He would rather be back in bed, but the speaker system is piping out smooth music to fuck to and this couch is enough for him

It's like moving through the world in a bubble, he's the only one sick and everyone else doesn't even bat an eyelash, everyone else is fine -- piling on the garden salads and macabre fruit from Nathan's garden, trying to make a single beer last through an hour-long lecture about the role of sex in viral adaptation.

Nathan's taste in beer runs sharply toward the bitter -- Caleb doesn't know what Nathan would do if he asked for something else. Tell him to nut up and handle it, probably. His throat stings, and he tries not to think of what it'll inevitably be like sicking this up later. There is very little motivation to get drunk with his boisterous host when the room's already spinning -- the doctor seems to be putting away import beers pretty effectively, but you'd have to, living and working in proximity with someone like Nathan. That's not right; that's harsh to say. He's not a bad guy. He's like a lot of guys Caleb has met, always on the cutting edge of every fad diet and every emergent philosophy but deadly serious about viral tech. It's not Nathan's fault that Caleb has never been very likeable.

The doctor -- Kyoko -- looks too young to have an advanced degree. But what does Caleb know? Nathan looks too young to run a company. Caleb's too young to be investing in luxury viruses. Nathan's spent enough time explaining her immigration status that it's clear she doesn't have a spouse or kids. She hasn't spoken a word yet, and Caleb doesn't know where he'd even start asking her questions.

She is a woman of many talents. Nathan cuts up all her food for her. And the two of them like dancing.

Caleb lies on his side on the couch, trying not to watch the two of them together. There's a sheepskin thrown over the back of the seat, still damp from its rescue from an earlier rainstorm (broken over the house like a thunderclap) and it's so tempting just to bury himself in it. He's starting to think he'll never leave this place.

Periodically there will be a heavy exhale, or the sound of cloth rustling. Some high-voiced tenor worms its way out of the speaker system, like maybe this song is extra-long, or it's played twice.

(Like the sun, dear, upon high, we'll return, dear, to the sky…)

Coaxing, drunk: "Come on, come on, come on. Go get him." (Caleb does not hear her response. Nathan sucks an angry breath between his teeth.) "Get him. Don't be fucking shy."

Kyoko sways his way on viciously high heels, overshadowing him where he lies, and reaches curtly for his hand. Her own hand feels arrestingly dry, or maybe Caleb is just clammy. She sinks down a little, moving to draw him up, and her eyes swiftly communicate the importance of not fucking this up for her.

She pulls him upright, and something in his stomach spasms. Caleb doesn't want to fuck this up for her; he just doesn't know how sociable he can be right now, and he's too scared to say anything. This girl can't want this, any more than he does. She can't honestly say she likes any of this. He wonders if there's an employee ethics hotline he can call. Not any more than he can call the cops on this, probably. Rowdy party in the middle of the wilderness.

(One more kiss, dear, one more sigh…)

Caleb is busy trying to smooth out his tee shirt with uncooperative hands, suddenly glad he doesn't wear glasses, when Nathan dances over to him like something out of Twin Peaks. Shorn and more graceful than any big guy should be. He's already broken a wine glass; its shards clink in the carpet.

"What's with your face? Seven-day free trial of the Ava experience. What are you looking so fucked-over about?"

"I'm not interested in dancing when I'm sick."

"You aren't contagious. Even if you were, talk about a free ride."

Nathan pulls him in against himself, the dry smooth solidity of his body suddenly acutely evident and the edge of his sweatshirt's zipper pressing down Caleb's torso. His handsome face is suddenly very close and suddenly much less handsome.

Caleb can't see straight. Nathan sways against him, fitting against him despite Caleb's height and his own drunkenness. He is very warm, he is barefoot and his feet nudge Caleb's own into the steps of a dance. Maybe he isn't as sloppy as he looks.

Kyoko's arms snake around from behind him -- she is almost taller than Nathan, in heels, and her cool hands are a shock against the feverish strip of skin where Caleb's shirt has ridden up. She is swaying against Nathan, Nathan is rocking aimlessly against him -- not really with the music, not really in time with anything. Solid muscle, with its own rhythym.

Caleb doesn't know what to do with his own hands, whether he should surrender and let whatever is clearly going to happen just happen already. Whatever will happen here will happen. Whatever's going to happen is going to happen to him whether he wants it to or not. In the morning he can visit with Ava again and it'll be like this entire excruciating three-person dinner party never happened; he can ask her more questions and pick her brain about art. It'll be just the two of them, alone, and more than anybody else ever could be Ava will be sympathetic. She'll have something incisive to say. She'll find this as troubling as he does.

Caleb's nose is running.

The song ends, and for a moment Nathan's tuneless humming is audible before the mix shuffles into another track. Kyoko's glance fixes on Caleb's for a second, a silver bullet of trapped acknowledgement, before Caleb looks away.

He stares at his hands, brings them up to the spot at the top of Nathan's chest where he'd grab him by the shirt if Nathan were wearing a shirt, if Caleb were stronger and more well. The veins in his arms are threaded along in red. The webbing of his hands is beginning to split.

Caleb's nose is running, and his hands come away bloody. There are three drops of blood, painfully red, that have smudged onto Nathan's chest. Three drops of Caleb's blood like tags on a necklace. "Dude," Nathan hisses, half-pleased and half-disgusted, like Caleb has just upended a whole beer on his carpet.

There's a glass globe on the table, full of something in the midst of all the bottles and glasses. Caleb knocks it to the floor when he falls.

*

Caleb dreams of her, again, and wakes up in his own bed. Someone has changed the sheets. Someone has changed his clothes.

*

There are no windows, not down here.

"I didn't ask for all this," Caleb says, wiping his nose. He doesn't know if it's blood or what this time. There is a red smear from his hand on the white wall, a film of sickness from the night before that he only spots as he's already hobbling back from the toilet.

"All what?"

"All these lilies--"

"They're orchids."

Nathan is not so impressed with him now. Of course they're orchids. Ostentatious white and yellow flowers interspersed with fat little growths, little floral orifices with close fuzz rimming the bowl of their interior. They populate every flat surface in the room, clustered like cancer cells, bristling at every movement. The smell and the texture both make Caleb want to be sick again, and he hugs himself tighter, contending with the insistent cramp in his belly.

Nathan is lying on Caleb's bed, thick arms crossed behind his head. There is a long blot of red on the sheets beside him.

"I threw up earlier. I threw up blood." A complaint, a warning.

"I know, man, I saw." Nathan is dressed for a brisk jog, or for a little boxing. His arms are bare, his thick legs lolling in sweatpants that probably cost more than the helicopter ride here. "It's on the cameras. You're knocking out maybe 103, 103.5. That's a personal best."

How the hell did he know his temperature? Even Caleb wouldn't have guessed that much -- sweat-sick and delirious. He hasn't been seriously sick since tenth grade, how had he forgotten how foul it is? How did Nathan do it? Through his phone? Through the cameras? Some kind of heat vision, maybe. Something under his skin.

"I thought -- I thought we weren't keeping track."

Nathan looks almost peaceful, and a little like he might be dead.

"You know some orchids mimic female insects?"

"No, I didn't know that." He's a medical technician, not a botanist. Or rich enough and enough of a jerk-off to have a sideline practice in orchid-collecting. Caleb swallows a stringy mouthful of saliva and shuts his aching eyes.

"Bug comes in, thinking he's gonna get some from a hot girl bug, they bump uglies, the orchid jizzes all over him and he's on his merry way. Smells right, feels right, but only the orchid gets to propagate. It's genius. I love it."

"I never knew that," Caleb says, weakly. His head is throbbing like a drum and he would rather not think about anyone jizzing on anything. "Can I get back in bed now? Do you need something?"

Nathan rolls over, feet hitting the floor, and stretches luxuriantly. "See you at 12. You slept through breakfast."

He isn't even hungry. He's just tired. He's just tired; that's the bulk of what's wrong with him right now anyway. He just needs to sleep, and to let this sweep over him the way it was meant to.

*

Caleb cannot turn his head; there is an itchy bead of blood down the side of his neck issuing from his ear. His groin aches, and his wrists ache, and his jaw aches like teeth are about to come loose. He has not been lucid for long yet, time itself warps and bends like rubber, and he won't be lucid for long now so he'd better make good use of it.

Nathan passes his hand companionably over the back of Caleb's head as he lies him on the table. Caleb has been scanned before plenty, after the car wreck that killed his parents and nearly broke his back -- it's this kind of imaging that saved his life back then, but the tight space never gets more inviting, the colorless chamber and the unnatural light. It's even less comfortable knowing this table comes with restraints for his wrists, for across his lap, for his legs. He isn't strapped in -- the bands of cloth hang slack -- but the promise is there that he could be, just as easily.

"You never had febrile seizures before, right?" Nathan asks, mock-solicitous, adjusting him. From below he looks vaguely satanic, shining glasses and dense black beard.

"Never."

"Well, I'll be fucked."

Caleb raises his voice, and the effort tears his throat. Somewhere, Ava has suffered like he is suffering now; they will compare the footage of their feverish throes side by side and work it out play by play, statistic by statistic. "Did she die from this?"

"No, she-- why would I give you a fatal disease? That's super illegal. Bad for business." His tone is no more reassuring this way. "Ava didn't die from this, she was never real. She was the first completely lab-synthesized star. You paid money for a brand."

Caleb never paid money at all. This whole thing came gratis, he got the disease and Nathan got to watch. A free exchange. An intellectual exercise.

"You sold fraudulent viruses--"

"I never did that. I didn't say she didn't exist, I just said she wasn't -- a walking talking person whose parents fucked. She's getting realer by the minute."

Nathan keys in some combination of numbers, and Caleb descends into the machine.

*

It's only a framework, there in the incubator -- long bones twining with threads of muscle like cotton candy at a fairground, spooling itself around and around. He recognizes her cheeks -- her smooth vanilla-milkshake cheeks, knotted with new tissue -- and a double row of feathering eyelashes. She is sleeping. Her hands are folded over her abdomen, and she is sleeping.

(Caleb can barely keep upright. Nathan had to carry him there. He sways on his heels, resigning himself to bracing against the metal countertop.)

This is the girl from every monitor in this house of mirrors, from every dirty video of a smiling woman Caleb has ever paused and dragged the timestamp to rewind and pause again; these are her cheekbones, these are her hips.

There are six other apparatuses, each one like an iron lung, each of them reminiscent of how the machine that scanned him had been -- an inverted image, hollow where the machine was solid, solid where it was hollow. All of them are finished in white enamel. Caleb looks through the view slots, and sees nothing he can recognize as a complete woman. Loose affiliations of flesh: a pastel-pink vulva growing out of nothing, a delicate fan of fingers on a shattered arm. Broken parts. He recognizes a jagged spur of bone, maybe a wrist.

There is no Ava, yet. Caleb will never leave this place. He's always been a lab rat.

*

His sickness has hit an ebb and Nathan has given him a six-hour reprieve to stew in his own juices. Every camera irises in; the time for being self-conscious about having an audience is long-gone now, and to think he started off embarrassed by the thought of his coworkers seeing this? No one else will ever see this footage. He's going to die here on live video, stumbling from room to room like a rat in a trap, pressing buttons to release rewards that no longer dispense themselves. Too much, too soon, and now he'll never see Ava again; her nature is still wrapped around him like a Mylar blanket, hot and close.

It could be noon as easily as the dead of night; every particle of light is dizzying, narcotic. This isn't his guest room, this isn't one of the dozen other rooms Nathan showed him when they first came in, this isn't anywhere he's ever been. It is a bedroom where all of the closets hang open except one. A high-heeled shoe has been kicked off into the corner with sufficient force to crack the mirrored door.

The woman in red is there, peeled back to white underlayers and hunched over the copy-protection apparatus like a component part. Her dark hair hangs loose, her back is bent.

He'll have to crawl.

This isn't his room. His head is spinning uselessly and he can feel the wet bile pricking at the bottom of his throat, priming to heave up nothing.

His hand reaches uselessly for her ankle, and to his dizzy eyes she seems to flinch. Kyoko wheels back in her chair and leans down.

Her dress hangs open at the neck. Caleb's eyes won't focus for a moment -- he will be blind by tomorrow, he realizes, almost certainly -- and then they seize into focus all at once, on the greening bruise just above her right breast.

"You and Nathan aren't friends. You aren't even colleagues." (She's English. Why didn't he know she was English? She folds his busted arm up to his chest, like a rag doll. Sits him up.) "Even you can't be that stupid. You're nothing but raw material to him. He'll fuck you and throw you out."

Caleb tries to say something, that Nathan isn't going to fuck him, but the only sound is choked off in his throat.

Kyoko is kneeling beside him, he can feel her clothing pooling and the nudge of something container-hard. "Listen. Nathan is blind drunk in the living room, and by midnight he'll be sobering up and reviewing security footage in his private quarters. He'll come for you a little after that. This is for him." The vial is warm from her skin, unyielding in Caleb's wet hand.

Tailor-made. She helps him up, and helps him stumble down the hall.

*

Caleb coughs until something in his throat rips loose, and the scarlet result hits the glass like the swipe of a hand. Satisfied that the view is obscured, he sticks out his tongue, thinking.

The needle is right there, loaded up with pestilence. (A distorted face, put together wrong, blurring.) He just needs to use it. His elbows gouge against the countertop.

Nathan will come to him tonight, whether he likes it or not. This was never about what Caleb might like. Or maybe it'll happen tomorrow, or the night after that when he's gone blind, or he'll die first and Nathan will perform an autopsy. He'll crack him open and reach inside, hack off a big old slice of Caleb steak.

(It's just a pinch.)

What was this cultured from? One of Nathan's own diseases, amplified, of course he'd lie -- or maybe one of hers, repurposed? The human mouth is warm and wet, full of proteins and salts. It makes as good a vector as it does a point of entry. (Another pinch. The blood is filling the floor of his mouth. This is stupid. This is a very bad idea.)

That's good. That's promising. Nathan will come to him, tonight, and Caleb will have something to swap.