Cibola Burn (Expanse 4)

“I see,” Elvi said. She smiled at the boy. He didn’t smile back. “So, Jacob —”

“Jason.”

“Sorry. Jason. How long have you had trouble seeing things?”

The boy shrugged. “Right after my eyes started hurting again.”

“And everything looks… green?”

He nodded. Lucia touched Elvi’s arm. Silently, the doctor shone a light into the boy’s eye. The iris barely reacted, and Elvi caught a glimpse of something in the fluid behind the boy’s cornea, like a badly maintained aquarium. She nodded.

Lucia stood up, smiling at the woman. “If you’ll wait with him here, Amanda. I’ll be right back.”

Amanda nodded once, sharply. Elvi let Lucia draw her through the examining room door and down a short hallway. Outside, a stiff breeze had picked up, rattling the clinic’s doors and windows.

“He’s the only one I’ve seen like this,” Lucia said. “There’s nothing in the literature.”

“His mother doesn’t seem to like me very much,” Elvi said, trying to make it a joke.

“Her wife was shot and killed by RCE security,” Lucia said.

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

The testing array was good, but it was old. Ten years, maybe fifteen. A long scar ran across the bottom of its screen where something had gouged at it. Elvi could believe it had made the long trek from war-torn Ganymede to come here. She was surprised it still worked, but when Lucia thumbed in her access code, the screen came to life. The sample was beautiful in its way. A branching of elegant green like a pictogram meaning tree.

“It began in the extracellular matrix,” Lucia said. “Low-level inflammation, but nothing worse than that. I hoped it would clear up on its own.”

“Only now it’s in the vitreous humor,” Elvi said.

“I was wondering…” Lucia began, but Elvi had already taken out her hand terminal and started syncing it to the array. It only took a few seconds to find a match. Elvi tapped through the data.

“All right,” she said. “The closest match is some of the rainwater organisms.” Lucia shook her head, and Elvi pointed up. “You know how the clouds are greenish? There’s a whole biome of organisms up there that have found ways to exploit the moisture and high ultraviolet exposure.”

“Like plants? Fungi?”

“Like them,” Elvi said. “It’s not where we’ve been burning most of our cycles. But it looks like a pretty crowded niche. A lot of species fighting for resources. I’m guessing this little fella was in a raindrop that dropped into Jason’s eye and found a way to live there.”

“He’s had several eye infections, but they all came from familiar organisms. This thing. Is it contagious, do you think?”

“I wouldn’t guess so,” Elvi said. “We’re just as new to it as it is to us. It evolved to spread in open air through a water cycle. It’s salt tolerant if it’s living in us, and that’s interesting. If his eyes were already compromised, he may have been vulnerable to it, but unless he starts throwing his tears at people, wouldn’t think it would go too far.”

“What about his eyesight?”

Elvi straightened up. Lucia looked at her seriously, almost angrily. Elvi knew it wasn’t directed at her, but at the terrible ignorance they were both struggling under. “I don’t know. We knew something like this was bound to happen sooner or later, but I don’t know what we can do about it. Except tell people not to go out when it’s raining.”

“That isn’t going to help him,” Lucia said. “Can you ask the labs back home for help?”

A hundred objections filled Elvi’s mind. I don’t control the RCE research teams and All the data analysis is planned out and running months ahead of where we are now and I just got another sample of a third biome this morning. She tapped at her hand terminal, saving a copy of the array’s data, then translating it into RCE’s favored formats and sending it winging through the air back to the Israel, and then the Ring, and then Earth.

“I’ll try,” she said. “In the meantime, though, we need to let people know it’s a problem. Has Carol Chiwewe heard about this?”

“She knows I’m suspicious and that I wanted to bring you in on it,” Lucia said.

Elvi nodded, already trying to think what the best way would be to bring the issue to Murtry’s attention. “Well, you let your side know, and I’ll tell mine.”

“All right,” Lucia said. And then a moment later, “I hate that it breaks down that way. Your side and mine. One of my teachers back in school always used to say that contagion was the one absolute proof of community. People could pretend there weren’t drug users and prostitutes and unvaccinated children all they wanted, but when the plague came through, all that mattered was who was actually breathing your air.”

“I’m not sure if that’s reassuring or awful.”

“There’s room for both,” Lucia said. “This scares me as much as anything that’s happened. This little… thing. What if we can’t fix it?”

“We probably can,” Elvi said. “And then we’ll fix the next one. And the one after that. It’s tricky and it’s hard, but everything’s going to be all right.”

Lucia lifted an eyebrow. “You really believe that?”

“Sure. Why not?

“You aren’t scared at all?”

Elvi paused, thinking about the question. “If I am, I don’t feel it,” she said. “It’s not something I think about.”

“Take what blessings you can, I suppose. What about the third side?”

Elvi didn’t know what Lucia was talking about, and then she heard Fayez’s mocking voice in her memory and her heart leaped. She hated it a little that her heart leaped, but that didn’t stop her.

“I’ll tell him,” she said. “I’ll tell Holden.”

In the commissary, Holden sat hunched over his hand terminal. He’d shaved and his hair was combed. His shirt was pressed. Cleans up pretty, a voice in the back of her mind said, and she pushed it away.

A woman’s voice came from the terminal, crackling and sharp. “— squeeze all the balls I can get my hands around until someone starts crying, but it will take time. And I know you’re thinking of taking this public, because you’re fucking stupid, and that is what you always think of. You and publicity are like a sixteen-year-old boy and boobs. Nothing else in your head. So before you even begin —”