Luis put it best. “It’s not that I don’t think you’re doing the right thing. I know you. You’re doing the only thing you can. But people are going to get hurt, and I can’t afford to be one of them. I have a family. I’m sorry.” And then he was gone, disconnected like half the Fictionals and most of the administrative staff.

We were left with less than half of our original connections when the disconnections stopped, and the only windows not outlined in white were those belonging to Magdalene and Mahir. I looked to the window that held my anxious, former second-in-command and said, “I’ll call you when this is over,” before tapping out the code to close the connection. “Magdalene, you can stay, if you understand that you’re not currently employed by this site.”

“I’m assuming you’re about to go over the current risk situation, and that you’re not hiring me right away because my contract needs review, since you want me to do Buffy’s job,” said Magdalene, matter-of-factly. “Sound right?”

“Sounds exactly right,” said Rick.

“I’ll stay. It’s my problem as much as it is yours, and my department’s going to need me to know what’s going on.”

“Thank you,” I said. I meant it. She’d never really replace Buffy, but her response told me that she was willing to try. “Rick, transmit the files.”

“Done.”

“Everyone, please check your mail. You’ll find an attachment detailing what we currently know, including that whoever ordered Buffy’s death was highly placed in the current government. Tate is involved. This information isn’t just sensitive; it’s potentially enough to get any one of us killed. Read it, transfer it to off-line storage, and wipe your mail. Whether you’re involved with our ongoing efforts to find out what’s going on is going to be up to you, but if we’re convicted of, say, treason against the United States government, all of you have just placed your asses on the line. Welcome to our party.” I stood. “Shaun and Rick will be remaining to answer any questions you may have; Shaun speaks for the Irwins, and Rick, as my new second, will be speaking for the Newsies. Thank you for coming. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to make a phone call.” Ignoring their protests, I walked into the bathroom, turning off the interior lights before closing the door behind me.

While Dave and Alaric were cobbling together a new conference room, Shaun and I had been isolating the bathroom in its own frequency screen, creating an envelope that could only be broken by transmissions made on a very specific set of bandwidths. Most of my equipment was as good as dead on the other side of that door, which was exactly how I wanted it to be. If I had that much trouble dialing out, the rest of the world was going to have one hell of a time dialing in.

Even with the screen’s keys coded into my PDA, it took almost five minutes to establish a connection with Mahir’s phone. His first words were delivered in a sharp, wounded tone: “What the hell was that about? Have I given you some reason to doubt my dedication to this site? Have I ever done anything other than precisely what you asked of me? Because I’m not feeling terribly valued at the moment, Miss Mason.”

“Hello to you, too, Mahir,” I said, leaning against the bathroom sink and removing my sunglasses. The glow from my PDA was enough for me to see by. It wasn’t enough to relieve my headache, but it was a start. “You are terribly valued. That’s why I fired you.”

There was a long pause as he tried to sort through that sentence. Finally, he admitted, “I’m afraid I’m not following you.”

“Look. There’s every chance in the world that things are going to go wrong.” I wished that I was lying to him. I’ve never wanted to be a liar so badly in my life. “We’re playing in an arena we’re not equipped for, and there’s nobody we can call who has the tools we need to get equipped for it. We’re either going to find what we’re looking for, or we’re going to go down in flames.”

“What does that have to do with firing me? You seem happy to take everyone else down with you. What robs me of my right to a seat on the Titanic?”

“The fact that I need you to be receiving the signals in the Coast Guard tower.”

There was a pause. Then: “I’m listening.”

“If this goes as badly as it has the potential to go—if it goes all the way wrong—we could wind up dead, and everyone who works for the site could wind up charged with treason against the United States government. If whoever’s behind all this can somehow turn it from their plot into our plot, that means every employee of After the End Times is in a position to be charged with terrorist involvement in the use of live-state Kellis-Amberlee to bring about human viral amplification.”

“ oh, my God,” said Mahir, sounding horrified. “I hadn’t considered that.”

“I didn’t think you had,” I said, grimly.

The Raskin-Watts ruling of 2026 didn’t impact just America. How could any country, however opposed to the United States government it might be, afford to look like it was soft on the matter of the infected? It couldn’t. Every industrialized nation in the world with an extradition treaty had stepped forward by the end of 2027 to state that any individual found guilty of using or conspiring to use Kellis-Amberlee as a weapon would be turned over to the government of the affected nation or nations in order to stand trial. Being outside the boundaries of a country no longer protected you from that country’s laws, if you were foolish enough to cross the one line everyone had agreed to draw in the sand.

The United States doesn’t apply the death penalty to many crimes these days. Terrorism remains an exception to this particular rule. Use Kellis-Amberlee as a weapon and die. That plain. That simple. That universal.

“Georgia, I appreciate the thought, I truly do, but I don’t think sparing me is going to save the rest of you.”