up at night, and there’s not enough decent sleep to go around. Don’t get me wrong, I admire your optimism. Well, maybe not admire—that might be too strong a word. But I do understand it. There was a time when I wasn’t so very different. But those days are passed. What I have is this picture. I look at it every day. For now, that’s what I have to content myself with.”
Peter picked up the drawing again. The woman’s shining smile, the lift of her hair on an unseen breeze, the little girls, wide-eyed, hopeful like all children, waiting for their lives to unfold. He had no doubt that this picture was the center of Tifty’s life. Looking at it, Peter sensed the presence of a complex debt, allegiances, promises made. This picture: it wasn’t just a memorial; it was the man’s way of punishing himself. Tifty wished he’d died with them, in the field. How strange, to find himself feeling sorry for Tifty Lamont.
Peter returned the picture to its place on Tifty’s desk. “You said the trade was only part of what you do. You never told me what else.”
“I didn’t, did I?” Tifty removed his glasses and rose. “Fair enough. Come with me.”
Tifty manipulated another keypad and the heavy door swung open, revealing a spacious room with large metal cages stacked against the walls. The air was rank with a distinctly animal scent, of blood and raw meat, and the high-noted aroma of alcohol. The light glowed a cool, violety blue—“viral blue,” Tifty explained, with a wavelength of four hundred nanometers, at the very edge of the visible spectrum. Just enough, he told Peter, to keep them calm. The builders of the facility had understood their subjects well.
Michael and Lore had joined them. They passed through the room of cages and ascended a short flight of stairs. What awaited them was obvious; it was just a question of how it would be revealed.
“And this,” said Tifty, opening a panel to reveal two buttons, one green, one red, “is the observation deck.”
They were standing on a long balcony with a series of catwalks jutting over a metal shelf. Tifty pushed the green button. With a clatter of gears and chain, the shelf began to withdraw into the far wall, revealing a surface of hardened glass.
“Go on,” Tifty urged. “Look for yourselves.”
Peter and the others stepped onto the catwalk. Instantly one of the virals hurled itself upward against the glass, crashing into it with a thump before bouncing off and rolling back to the corner of its cell.
“Fuck … me,” Lore gasped.
Tifty joined them on the catwalk. “This facility was built with one purpose in mind: studying the virals. More accurately, how to kill them.”
The three of them were staring at the containers below. Peter counted nineteen of the creatures in all; the twentieth container was empty. Most appeared to be dopeys, barely reacting to their presence, but the one who had leapt at them was different—a full-blown female drac. She eyed them hungrily as they moved along the catwalks, her body tense and her clawed hands flexing.
“How do you get them?” Michael asked.
“We trap them.”
“With what, spinners?”
“Spinners are for amateurs. The gyrations immobilize them, but such devices are no good, really, unless you want to crisp them on-site. To take them alive, we use the same baited traps the builders of this facility used. A tungsten alloy, incredibly strong.”
Peter tore his gaze away from the drac. “So what have you learned?”
“Not as much as I’d like. The chest, the roof of the mouth. There’s a third soft spot at the base of the skull, though it’s very small. They bleed to death if you dismember them, but it’s not easy cutting through the skin. Heat and cold don’t seem to have much effect. We’ve tried a variety of poisons, but they’re too smart for that. Their sense of smell is incredibly acute, and they won’t eat anything we’ve laced no matter how hungry they get. One thing we do know is that they’ll drown. Their bodies are too dense to keep them afloat, and they can’t hold their breath very long. The longest any of them lasted was seventy-six seconds.”
“What if you starve them?” Michael asked.
“We tried that. It slows them down, and they enter a kind of sleep state.”
“And?”
“As far as we can tell, they can stay that way indefinitely. Eventually we stopped trying.”
Suddenly Peter understood what he was seeing. The work of the trade was really just