“I’ll try to have someone find out for you,” he replied.

“Thank you.”

“Now, on to another subject,” he said, and leaned back in his chair. “How long have you been aware of your strength?”

She felt a sense of relief. She was ready for this question.

“Not long. I first noticed it around graduation.”

“And did you go to a doctor?”

She shook her head. “I never felt sick—I felt great. Plus, it didn’t come on all at once. It grew a little every day. At first I just thought I was in good shape—that it was finally summer and my body was all excited to be outdoors again. By the time that I realized it was more than that, I didn’t want to waste time going to the doctor. I was having too much fun. I’d go to Rocky Mountain National Park and run the hikes to the peaks—I mean, flat-out sprint. I’ve always been active—I did gymnastics and track in high school—so this was perfect. I loved it.”

Some of that was true. She had practiced running the peaks, and she had loved the freedom, but her abilities had come on two years before, and she wasn’t just running for pleasure. She was running with her “dad” at the bottom of the trail, timing her, over and over again. She’d free-climbed the Keyhole Route of Longs Peak, going early in the season to avoid onlookers. Cold and ice had blistered her skin, but she pushed through.

She wasn’t going to let this temporary quarantine camp stop her only three weeks into the attacks. She’d trained too long and too hard.

The soldier across from her leaned forward and put both arms on the table. “And at no time did you ever think ‘this is abnormal—I should go see a doctor’?”

Laura laughed, and she knew she nailed it—warm and pleasant, the all-American girl. “If you could suddenly do anything you wanted to—be any Olympic athlete you wanted to be—would you stress about what was wrong with you? Or would you enjoy it?”

He smiled at that. She’d finally made him smile.

“One last question for now,” he said. “You were living the dream, and then you got picked up by some local police and put in our flimsy warehouse. Why didn’t you ever try to escape?”

“I never wanted to escape,” she said, her face fading from gleeful to somber. “I saw what happened to Denver. I’ve watched the news. You’re the good guys, right? Why would I fight you?”

THIRTY

AUBREY WOKE UP IN A large room. She was lying in something like a hospital bed, with metal handholds on the sides, but the rest of the place looked oddly . . . homey. The sixteen beds all had clean, brand-new quilts, and each was next to a dresser with a lamp. She was the only teenager in there. At her feet, dropping a syringe into a red plastic box, was a man dressed in a lab coat.

“Aubrey Parsons?” he asked.

She ached all over, and her sight wasn’t quite right. Something heavy was wrapped around her ankle.

“Aubrey?” he asked again.

She wanted to disappear, but for some reason her head felt cloudy, like she couldn’t remember how to do it.

“Who are you?” she finally asked.

“Dr. Eastman. I have to say, you put on quite a show.”

“Where am I?”

For the first time, she noticed that her wrists were bound to the sides of the hospital bed with heavy Velcro straps. Even if she could disappear, she’d be stuck here. An IV was in her left arm, connected to a bag of yellowish liquid. Electrodes dotted her fingers, arms, chest, and head.

The door was metal, and thick, with a small, square window indented and bolted into the steel.

“You’re not far from where you were apprehended. I’d ask how you managed to get past the testing center, but I think that’s fairly obvious.”

Her eyes began to focus on the far wall. Despite the soft lighting and comfortable furniture, the walls were bare white cinder block. And there were cameras—as she craned her neck to look around the room she saw at least six.

“Yes,” he said. “You’re being watched. Does that bother you?”

She’d failed. She was captured, being interrogated, and she hadn’t been able to do anything to help Jack. Dr. Eastman glanced down at his clipboard.

“Why did you run?”

“I didn’t know what was going to happen to me,” she said, her voice hoarse.

He nodded. “You realize that it doesn’t look good for you.”

“What doesn’t look good?”

“You ran from the army when they entered your town—”

“They shot my homecoming date,” she snapped.

He ignored her. “And when you were detained, you faked your test results. Then once you were in the quarantine area—spreading the virus in a clean zone, mind you—you escaped and tried to infiltrate an army facility.”

She stared at the ceiling. This wasn’t how any of this was supposed to happen. She was supposed to sneak in and sneak out. She was supposed to find Jack.

She was supposed to be back in Mount Pleasant enjoying high school, in a world that wasn’t collapsing around her.

She was supposed to be with Jack.

“Did you do tests on me?” she asked, fighting to hold back tears.

“Yes,” he answered. “Extensively.”

She let out a long slow breath. She didn’t like Dr. Eastman.

“Do I have a brain tumor?”

He laughed—he actually laughed. She wanted to slap him.

“No,” he said. “You don’t have a brain tumor. You have the Erebus virus. Interestingly, there’s quite a pocket of infected people in your area. Well, that’s not interesting—there’re infected people everywhere—but your town seems to have produced some of the more potent presentations of the virus.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means you can do incredible things,” he said, with genuine wonder in his voice. “It means that you just escaped a quarantine zone that was designed specifically to look for people like you, and then you snuck into a highly confidential military research facility. You evaded capture for hours. You made highly trained soldiers look like fools.”

She snorted. “Someone propped open the door with a rock.”

“I’m told,” he said, “that corporal is now a private.”

Aubrey didn’t care about that. She’d done all the things that he’d said, and yet she’d been caught. She hadn’t found Jack, let alone freed him.

“What was Nate Butler?” she asked.

“Excuse me?”

“Nate Butler. What was he?”

He flipped through the papers on his clipboard while she continued to stare at the cement ceiling.

“Nate Butler was killed trying to escape.”

“He was my date.”

“Were you aware—”

“No,” she snapped. “I wasn’t aware of any of this. I wasn’t aware of a virus or that there were any others or that the army was allowed to tie teenage girls down just because they’re sick. Have I been arrested?”

Dr. Eastman sighed, but she refused to look at him.

“Aubrey,” he said. “You don’t get it. You’re a medical miracle.”