Free Viral Nation by Shaunta Grimes

glanced up at a chandelier, bigger than she was with at least a hundred lit bulbs. Bennett followed her gaze.
    “How much do you know about Waverly-Stead, Miss Donovan?” Bennett asked as he guided her through the door into office 1812.
    Clover guessed she knew as much as anyone did about the Company. They’d taught her some in primary school. She’d studied in the library for the entrance exams. “Edward Waverly and Jonathon Stead started the Company to manufacture and distribute the suppressant.”
    May eighth was a day of celebration for the whole country. That day, Waverly and Stead released the suppressant. Three weeks earlier, on Clover’s birthday, Ned Waverly stumbled into a portal deep in the ancient waters of Lake Tahoe—a doorway between present day and exactly two years in the future. When Waverly came through it, he found that a drug had been developed that cured the virus and kept healthy people from being infected. He got his hands on a sample, brought it back to his own time, and found the chemist, Jon Stead, who had developed it. With Waverly’s help, the suppressantwas discovered two years early and ended the Bad Times eighteen months ahead of schedule.
    They saved millions of lives. According to the histories, fewer than twenty thousand people were left in the United States when the suppressant was developed in the original time line. Waverly and Stead were able to save almost that many just in Nevada by developing it early.
    They won the last Nobel Prize in medicine, or any discipline, ever granted. People all over the world practically worshipped them. They were heroes. After the Bad Times, once the virus was controlled, their Company privatized nearly every part of what remained of the United States of America.
    They worked with the government to build a wall around a single city in each state to create safe places for survivors to grieve and start to live again. Clover had no idea what was outside the walls of Reno now. When she thought about it, she pictured a jungle, growing wild and overtaking whatever human-made things might have gotten in their way over the past sixteen years.
    She knew from reading the classified ads that some of the walled cities thrived; others struggled. But it had never occurred to her to want to venture outside her city. The idea that she’d see beyond the walls today erased any last bits of guilt she felt over not going home before meeting with Bennett. If she’d waited for West to come home and then argued with him, there might not have been enough light to really see.
    “Well, you do know something about Waverly-Stead,” Bennett said, stopping her in the middle of wondering out loud how the absence of people had affected the black bear population in the Sierra Nevada. He held out his hand and Clover hesitated before letting go of Mango’s leash to shake it.
    Bennett pulled his hand back and wiped it on his slacks. “I believe that letter is for me?”
    “Oh.” She passed the envelope, now hopelessly crushed, to Bennett. “It’s from Mr. Kingston at the Academy.”
    “Yes.” Bennett led her into his office, already lit with three lamps even though it was empty before they walked in, and offered her a seat before he opened the letter and read it. Took his time, too, making Clover sit, squirming in her chair, for what felt like an hour but was probably only five minutes. Too bad his curtains were drawn. What a waste of energy, using electric lights when the sun was shining. And leaving those lights on when no one was even in the room?
    “Very interesting, Clover,” Bennett said as he set the letter on his desk.
    The switch from
Miss Donovan
to her first name probably meant something. “What’s interesting?”
    “Your entrance exams were extraordinary.”
    “I know. You’d think Kingston would want me there, wouldn’t you?” Clover rested her hand on Mango’s head, and he propped his chin on her knee. “My dog does
not
bite, by the way. Mango is