Free Year Zero by Jeff Long

finished. “You’ve caused havoc at Jax, but the director has agreed to clean up your mess. The sheriff has been taken care of. This whole thing never happened.”
    “This morning?”
    “Your bags are packed.”
    “You can’t do this.”
    “You’re going to Los Alamos. The University of California oversees operations there. Elise has found a spot for you. They say you have golden fingers.”
    “But Winston….” she began.
    “I can only save you,” he said.
    “I can’t just abandon him. He needs me.”
    “It will be safer for you there, Miranda.”
    “He would never hurt me.”
    “It’s not your creature that I’m worried about.”
    She hesitated. His voice had retreated into his bureaucratic shadows. Again she heard it, his fear. Profound fear.
    “You’ve heard about these micro-outbreaks in Europe?” he asked. “A mystery virus.”
    “And in South Africa,” she said. “But that was weeks ago. And they were confined to two or three labs. It’s over.” With a shrug, she quipped, “Ebola happens.”
    “It wasn’t Ebola,” he said.
    Each of the outbreaks had involved reputable labs specializing in DNA typing, not disease research. None used more than rudimentary bio-safety measures. The real mystery was why any of them had been handling a virus in the first place. There was quiet talk that ecoterrorists might have mailed the deadly samples, or a Unabomber with his own private stash of contagion. In the scientific community it had become common wisdom that the outbreaks had been hemorrhagic fever of some type, probably Ebola. Transmission was by contact, she’d heard. But it might also be aerosol. The authorities had gone into standard defensive posture, neither confirming nor denying the accidents. They had let the tabloids exaggerate it to flesh-eating absurdity. The public quickly quit believing it was anything more than entertainment. Miranda had quit paying attention.
    “They did contain it, though,” she said.
    “Slammed the door shut on it,” her father said firmly. “But it was a close call.”
    She felt an edge of fear, less for the “close call,” than his adamant closure. “What was it?”
    “We don’t have a fix on it yet. It attacks the skin. Then it goes straight for the brain.”
    She thought about that for a moment. Skin, then brain, what was the connection there? The symptoms started with the most external organ, and then jumped to the most internal organ.
    “Of course,” she realized. “They originate from the same tissue.” She wanted to dispense with his riddle, demonstrate her virtuosity. Cowboy! He was watching her.
    “In early development, the outer layer of the fetal ball envaginates,” she recited. “The outside becomes the inside. The ectoderm creates a tube, an empty space, that becomes the spinal cord and brain. At the cell level, skin and the nervous system are the same thing. That’s why melanoma is so deadly. It shows up on the skin, then goes straight for the nerve cells.”
    He was impressed, she could tell. But impressed enough? Would he grant her probation, let her follow through with her slippery creation? “That’s probably what’s at work with this new disease,” he said.
    “Skin,” she went on. “Touch. Contact. Is that how it spreads?” What about aerosol transmission? Was it blood-or water-borne? How long can it survive outside its host? Where does it come from? Have you mapped its proteins?” The questions bubbled out.
    “We haven’t figured out its natural reservoir,” her father said. “No one has seen it. We have no idea if it’s even a virus. We don’t know.”
    Not for lack of trying, Miranda guessed. The international effort must have been fantastic—and fruitless—to earn his anxiety. “What else could it be?” she asked. Bacteria and rickettsias were too large to miss. Given the state of modern immunology, they would be like elephants wandering through Lincoln Tunnel. A prion, then? They were the next new thing