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He glanced over at Shannon. She had one arm crossed to support her elbow, the other hand at her face, the tip of her thumb just between her teeth. Her eyes drank the room. Funny—he’d seen her naked, seen her kill, seen her make herself invisible, but he couldn’t recall if he’d ever seen her just stand somewhere. It struck him as oddly intimate.

She sensed him looking—her gift, he supposed—and glanced over.

He said, “Let’s get out of here.”

The location was her idea.

When Erik had activated his Proteus virus, the first casualties had been three state-of-the-art fighter jets that were buzzing Tesla. Two of the Wyverns had collided midair, the debris raining down. The pilot had ejected from the third, and her bird had done a backflip into the side of the central building, tearing a hole four floors high and forty yards across, the jet fuel starting a fire that had consumed most of the furnishings before the auto-suppression system got it under control. The bodies had been removed and the gaping rip in the building had been sealed with plastic sheeting that billowed and popped in the wind, but little else had been done to repair the damage.

They looked at each other, then at the torched interior, the blackened remnants of desks and chairs. Shattered solar glass sparkled amidst the ash. Shannon stepped gingerly through a pile of debris, bent to pick up a metal picture frame. The glass was cracked, the image burned away. “Can you imagine sitting at a desk, just doing your job, all of a sudden an airplane comes through the window?”

“Kind of.”

“Yeah,” she said, threw him a glance not easily parsed. “Me too.”

Cooper picked his way across the ruined floor. The stink of scorched plastic hung in the air even now. Translucent sheeting reduced the world outside to blurry shapes backlit by the setting sun. “A couple of miles away, an army is waiting for darkness to fall.” He shook his head. “How did we get here?”

“Gradually, I guess.” Shannon’s voice was soft. “One lie at a time.”

“You and your whole truth fetish,” Cooper said. “Ever since the first time we talked, in that shitty hotel after the El platform. I had been very heroic, saving your life—”

“Funny, I remember that differently.”

“And you said something like, ‘Maybe there wouldn’t be a war if people didn’t keep going on television and saying there was one.’” He shook his head. “And now here we are.”

“Yeah.” She tossed the picture frame. The remaining glass tinkled. “Here we are.”

Gunfire sounded in the distance, steady and slow. Going to hear a lot more of it tonight. He sighed, rubbed at his face. “My kids are in a bunker right now. They must be so scared.”

Somehow Shannon was beside him, then. One hand on his arm. “Hey,” she said. “We’ve saved them before. We’ll do it again.”

Before he could reply, his phone vibrated. He glanced at the display. “It’s Ethan.”

She straightened. “You should answer.”

Cooper nodded, hit a button. “Hey, Doc, you’re on speaker.”

“I . . . is it . . .”

“Just me and Shannon. Have you found the missing canisters?”

“What? No. I haven’t been looking for them.”

“Doc, come on, I need you to focus—”

“You’re the detective,” Ethan said. “What do you want me to do, go door to door? I’ve been working the epidemiology of the virus instead. It’s a sonuvabitch, man, a real monster. A modification of the flu, airborne, long-lived, but with R-naught estimates in the twenties. That means each case could result in twenty or more secondary cases. And since there’s no dependable influenza vaccine, if this gets out, pretty much everyone is going to catch it.”

Cooper winced. “How bad is the illness?”

“It’s not. Pretty much the sniffles. The flu isn’t the problem. I’ve been reviewing the research notes, analyzing blood and tissue samples, trying to figure out why Abe died.” Ethan’s voice caught on that. “Cooper, it was the serum. Our work. Becoming brilliant killed him.”

“I don’t understand—”

“Abe vanished before we could do proper trials. And then he injected himself, which was crazy, you just don’t do that, but he was so paranoid, so sure he was right . . . anyway, you saw how effective it was.”

“And that killed him?”

“Not the serum itself, but his mind’s reaction to it.” Ethan took a breath. “You’re tier one, right? And so is Shannon and Epstein and that Soren asshole. But you’ve had your gifts from the beginning. They were part of you as a child. Now imagine that suddenly you also saw the world the way Shannon does. And the way Epstein does. And the way Soren does. That it all happened at the same time, in a span of a couple of days.”

“It would be confusing, but—”

“It wouldn’t be confusing,” Ethan said. “It would be shattering.” He paused. “Okay, look. Imagine you were born underground. A pitch-black cave. You grew up there, connecting with the world by touch and sound and smell. Completely unaware of vision. That was your normal for sixty years.