“It explains everything,” I said. The elevator stopped on our floor, and we stepped into the hall. Potash was already there, telling the same thing to Kelly, but they stopped to listen to me. “It explains why she targets kids,” I continued, “because it’s easier to give them her sickness. It explains why the deaths all appear to be natural causes—because they are natural causes, just like any other disease. It explains why they die on such a weird schedule—because she’s not the one killing them. She’s just giving them a disease and then that kills them.”
“But the timing is too close—the correlation between her health and their deaths is too close to be random,” said Ostler. “There might be a variance of a few days, but that doesn’t account for some of the seven-week gaps we’ve seen in the timeline.”
“This theory explains that, too,” I said. “The Withered are defined by what they lack, and we know from Brooke that Mary Gardner lacks health. We thought she had to steal it from other people, but then why steal health from sick children? That’s like … eating gum off the bottom of a table: it might help a little, but it’s the most inefficient way of getting the job done. Our problem is we didn’t think it through: if she doesn’t have any health, what is she going to do? Think about it. What’s going to happen to her all the time?”
Ostler closed her eyes, in an expression that said she felt as stupid as I did when I finally figured it out. “She’s going to get sick.”
“Exactly,” I said. “We were so worried about the gun in those photos, we didn’t pay attention to the real clue: she’s wearing a paper face mask in almost all of them, even at home. If she has no health of her own she’s going to get sick all the time. She wears a face mask and slathers herself in hand sanitizer and does every other precaution she can think of, but sooner or later she’s going to catch something and it’s going to hit her hard. A cold could kill her. Those seven-week gaps are just the times she caught an innocuous disease that wasn’t lethal to anyone else when she gave it away.”
“Then why does she work in a hospital?” asked Ostler. “She’d be exposed to all kinds of pathogens in there.”
I nodded. “But she’d be able to dump them off immediately, without arousing any suspicion. A hospital is dangerous to her, but it’s also the only place she can live without showing up on every epidemic tracking program there is. She’s trapped in a feedback loop, always getting sick and always getting better. She couldn’t leave the hospital if she wanted to.”
“Immortal,” said Ostler, “but only because she gives her death away, over and over and over.”
“What does this mean?” asked Kelly. “Now that we know how she works, can we move on her?”
“We move immediately,” said Potash. “She works afternoon shifts this week; surveillance suggests she’ll be at home right now, sealed off from the rest of the world, which we now know to be a defensive tactic against germs. She’ll be at her weakest, and she’ll be isolated. We leave in fifteen minutes.”
“I want heavy protocols on this,” said Ostler, though everyone was already moving, collecting the others and gathering equipment for the attack. “Cleaver on the street out front, Lucas positioned behind the house with her rifle, Potash and Ishida at the front door.” She looked at me. “We don’t need you to verify a trance, like with Cody French, and Ishida has more combat experience. You’re sure Mary Gardner won’t hulk out or grow claws or … anything like that?”
“She’ll have a gun,” I said, “but that’s it. Worst-case scenario she gives us pneumonia or something, but none of us are children with compromised immune systems, so we should be fine. We ought to hit the hospital after, though, and chug vitamins like a sewer worker, but we should be fine.”
“Pray that you are,” said Ostler. “No matter how much you think you know, never forget that these are demons.”
“I thought you didn’t like that word.”
“I don’t like killing, either,” said Ostler, “but we do what we have to do.”
*
Kelly drove again, and I sat in the back seat, breathing deeply, counting out my number pattern: one, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen, twenty-one. We were on our way to kill again—we were on our way for Potash to kill again. They made me plan it and they made me watch, but they never let me have that moment.
Kelly Ishida had her hair up in a ponytail, showing the back of her neck through the gap between her seat and her headrest. I could see the bumps of her spine pressing up under the skin, see the tiny wisps of black hair too small to get tied up in the ponytail. The subtle imperfections in her skin, the pores and follicles and one pale chicken-pox scar at the base of her hairline. I would stab her right there, just beneath the scar, between the two tendons connecting the skull to the collarbone. Sever the spinal column with a single strike. If I did it right now, while her eyes were on the road, she wouldn’t even know what I was doing until it was too late.
Thirty-four, fifty-five, eighty-nine, one hundred forty-four, two hundred thirty-three.