Mercy 6

On the panel with Dmir were two other men she did not recognize. One had broad shoulders and did not fit into his lab coat. Some kind of security head. Mendenhall would leave before it was his turn. She eyed her exit path, over and around Mullich, back into the darkness. There would be clanking.

“I figured that chair was for Thorpe,” she whispered. “Where is he?” She scanned the paltry audience, all of them mere silhouettes in front of their laptops and handhelds.

Dmir rose from his panel chair and took the podium. Mendenhall suppressed a groan. She took a granola bar from her coat pocket.

The paper wrapping crackled. Heads turned. She put the bar back in her pocket and slid lower in her chair, imagined herself hidden beneath Mullich’s tall shadow.

Dmir began. “Six demises in twelve hours.”

She whispered to Mullich. “Six deaths in one second.”

The architect straightened. Onstage, Dmir paused and peered into the audience. Mendenhall slid lower.

Dmir cleared his throat and continued, “We have reports of other possibles. From the Boston area and Reykjavik.”

“The hell?” She looked at Mullich.

Dmir paused and peered. Silhouettes moved.

Mullich turned his screen to her. There was a page set up for this meeting. The first line was about Boston and Reykjavik. She looked at all of the other screens, all on the same page. Her name was all over it.

Dmir proceeded. “Dr. Thorpe is speaking with the Centers for Disease Control.”

With DC? With them? Outside? She resisted another whisper.

Mullich was looking at her, the blue light carving the side of his face into angles. Mendenhall’s hands felt empty, the space in front of her gravitational.

She stole the laser pen from Mullich’s pocket. She fired its beam into her cupped palm. Showed him. Six deaths in one second. She aimed the pen toward Dmir. She could put a red dot on his big forehead.

She pulled Mullich’s laptop toward her. “I need to use this.”

She only breathed the words, mouthed them carefully. “Yours. Not mine. Capice?”

Mullich squinted at her. Dmir’s speech became nothing more than a drone, a recap of their cases, a vent sputtering somewhere.

As Dmir went on, she began her research. Mullich did something to his screen, some function she did not understand. The screen changed color, to a kind of dull orange.

Mullich saw everything.

Mendenhall found one site, then another. Mullich reached over to help. Forty thousand tons of cosmic dust falls to Earth every day. Every day. This was the average. She found the most scientific sites, ones full of equations. She eased her eyes on the calculus, felt Mullich doing the same. They saw a photo of three cosmologists from the Kivla Institute crouching over a collection pool, a type of radar dish filled with water, mirroring the sky. They saw microscopic photos of the particles, some globular, some crystalline.

Somewhere in the middle of Dmir’s speech, his notes on Albert Cabral, she found a local cosmologist who was somehow connected to the Kivla Institute. A consultant. Not a cosmologist, technically.

An astrochemist. A chemist. Someone who had covered childhood sketch pads with the periodic table while listening to the purple dinosaur sing. Someone crude and molecular.

“Him,” she whispered to Mullich. “I need to go see. Him.” She pointed to the name atop the website: Dr. Jude Covey. Below the name was another photo of cosmologists crouched around a collecting pool, two men and a woman. The caption didn’t name the scientists, just said we. The sky and its reflection in the circle of water appeared Scandinavian, broken clouds with rims of light.

When it became clear that Dmir was not going to discuss the outside possibles, was not going to take them to Iceland, Mendenhall knew she would not be able to stay quiet. If he wasn’t going to present bodies, occlusions, scans, she had to leave. She clambered over Mullich, her breasts skimming his forehead. Mullich took hold of her hips and helped ease her over. She struggled through the equipment in the darkness, her coat snagging on an old EKG

monitor, the kind with suction cups. Dmir paused, visored his hand over his eyes. Everyone turned to her.

She found Claiborne’s silhouette, scanned the seats, sort of bowed.

“Everything,” she said. She firmed her voice. “Everything on One is ready for you. Whatever you need. I have a call. Sorry. ER, you know?”

She finished her exit, let them see her hop, slide, and stumble through the remaining obstacles.

38

The Higgs boson used to be called the God Particle, a force predicted by the math of subatomic physics. The math led to an absence, a particle that had to exist due to the behavior of the subatomic sphere, that behavior defined by a weakening.

Mendenhall began reading the math, had to stop herself. She would have liked nothing more than to sip tea and see how far she could follow it, the expression of the Higgs boson.