Cibola Burn (Expanse 4)

“Few enough that our immune systems could identify them as foreign and kick them out,” Lucia said.

“Can they do that?” Fayez asked. “I thought these things were a completely different biology. Do our immune systems even work on them?”

“Not as efficiently,” Lucia said. She sounded tired. “But if the storm was loaded with them, they’d swamp what defenses we do have.”

“And then,” Elvi said, “everyone gets it.”

“Yes,” Lucia said. “Only no.”

Elvi opened her eyes again. Lucia was smiling. “Good and bad, remember? We have one man with no growth.”

“None?”

“Even if it were only massively delayed growth, I know what the early signs should look like. Nothing.”

“Could he… could he not have been exposed?”

“He was exposed.”

Elvi felt a bubble of pure joy open in her chest. It was like getting an unexpected present. A flash of lightning brightened the room for a moment, and she wondered why it was green until she remembered.

“So we’ve got the one-eyed man who’s going to be king?” Fayez said. “I mean, better one than none, but I’m not seeing the long-term solve here.”

“We’ve found treatments and vaccines for any number of diseases by studying people who were naturally immune,” Elvi said. “This is a toehold.”

“Right,” Fayez said, rubbing his eyes. “I’m sorry. I may not be at my best right now. I’ve been under a little stress lately.”

Elvi smiled at the little joke. “Will he consent to testing?” she asked.

“Do we care?” Fayez said.

“I haven’t had the chance to ask yet,” Lucia said. “It was hard enough getting the initial screening done.”

“Why?” Elvi asked. “Who is it?”

~

Holden was at the entrance to the main room. Whatever hues his clothes had been, they were the color of mud now, same as for everyone else; mud, exhaustion, tears, and fear were the new uniform for the RCE and the citizens of First Landing alike. His hair was slicked back and greasy. The beginnings of a spotty, moth-eaten beard mottled his cheeks and the top of his neck. Her failing vision softened away the lines of age and stress and left him a pleasant-enough-looking but unremarkable man. She remembered all the times she’d generated excuses to spend time in his company. It hardly seemed plausible that it was the same person.

She steeled herself and crossed the room.

“Captain Holden? Can I have a moment?”

“I’m really busy right now. Is this something that can wait?”

“It isn’t,” she said.

Holden grimaced, the expression there and gone again almost too quickly to register. “All right. How can I help you?”

Elvi licked her lips, thinking about how to present the explanation. She didn’t have any idea how much background he had in biology, so she figured it was better to start low.

“Captain, you are a very special, very important person —”

“Wait.”

“No, no, I —”

“Really. Wait. Look, Doctor Okoye. Elvi. I’ve been feeling a kind of tension between us for a while now, and I’ve just been pretending not to. Ignoring it. And that was probably a bad call on my part. I was just trying to make it all go away so we wouldn’t have to say anything, but I’m in a very committed, very serious relationship, and while some of my parents weren’t monogamists, this relationship is. Before we go any farther, I need to be clear with you that nothing like that can happen between us. It’s not you. You’re a beautiful, intelligent woman and —”

“The organism that’s blinding us,” she said. “You’re immune to it. I need to get blood samples. Maybe tissue.”

“I’ll help any way I can, but you have understand that —”

“That’s why you’re special. You’re immune. That’s what I was talking about.”

Holden stopped, his mouth half open, his hands out before him, patting the air reassuringly. For three interminable heartbeats, he was silent. And then, “Oh. Oh. I thought you were —”

“The eye assessment that Doctor Merton did —

“Because I thought… Well, I’m sorry. I misunderstood —”

“There was. The tension? You were talking about? There was some tension. But there’s not anymore,” Elvi said. “At all.”

“Okay,” Holden said. He looked at her for a moment, his head turned a degree to the side. “Well, this is awkward.”

“It is now.”

“How about we never mention this again?”

“I think that would be fine,” Elvi said. “We will need you to come let us take some blood samples.”

“Of course. Yes. I’ll do that.”

“And as my vision starts failing, I may need you to come read some of the results to me.”

“I will do that too.”

“Thank you.”

“And thank you, Doctor Okoye.”

They each nodded to the other two or three times, apparently unable to break free of the moment. In the end, she spun on her heel and headed back, navigating between the knots and clusters of people camped on the floor of the ruins. One of the squatters was weeping and shaking back and forth. Elvi stepped past him and trotted back to the lab. Yma had arrived in her absence, sitting cross-legged on the floor with Lucia as they compared data. Elvi didn’t think her eyes were getting markedly worse until she tried to look over their shoulders. Yma’s hand terminal was a blur of white and blue, as empty of usable information as the clouds.

“Did he agree?” Yma asked, her voice tense as stretched wire.

“He did,” Elvi said, sitting down at the chemistry deck. The water bag needed to be refilled. A time was going to come – and soon – when the little deck was going to have to stop generating drinking water so that she could use its full resources to run her tests. It wasn’t yet. She swapped out the water bags.

“Did you get a history?” Lucia asked.

“A medical history? No. I was thinking perhaps you could do that.”

“If you’d like,” Lucia said, levering herself up from the ground. “He’s back in the main room?”

“He is,” Elvi said, kneeling at the deck controls. A smear of mud darkened the readout, but when she wiped it away, she could still make out the letters. “I’ll set up a few screenings for his blood.”