Free Contain by Saul Tanpepper Page A

devices. No centrifuges or
microscopes. And no access to material that has been exposed to the
Flense.
    Which is certainly a good thing, given
how easily it's transmitted. But after three years, it also means
we know essentially nothing new about the disease or how to stop
it.
    The door is closed, but I can hear
voices on the other side of it. I can't make all the words out, but
I do hear 'blood' and 'synthetic.' The conversation abruptly stops
when I knock. After a brief pause, Doctor Cavanaugh says to come
in. I open the door.
    “ Finn? There you are,” Dad
says, when he sees me. “You were up early this morning.”
    “ Are you busy?”
    “ I was just talking to Gia
about Eddie.”
    “ H  how is he?” I ask,
directing my question to the doctor.
    “ Healing.” She shakes her
head, as if she can't believe it herself. “Still in a coma, but
he'll live. Last night he finally stopped needing assistance to
breathe.” She and my dad exchange meaningful glances.
    “ It's why I've been gone so
much,” he hurriedly explains. “The doctor and I have been splitting
time pumping air into his lungs.”
    “ You and Doc Cavanaugh?” I
say. “I would've helped if you'd asked.”
    “ We thought it would be
best to keep this . . . between just the two of
us.”
    And that glance confirms what I've
been suspecting these past few days. They're keeping something from
the rest of us.
    “ I heard you talking,” I
say. “I heard what you said about his blood.”
    It's a bluff, and I don't know if it's
even close. I cross my arms and wait to see if one of them will
bite.
    “ We're not sure,” the
doctor finally says.
    “ Gia?” Dad says,
warningly.
    “ It's me, Dad. You said it
the other day: I'm not a kid anymore.”
    He sighs, then gets up and shuts the
door. “I want you to keep this to yourself for now, Finn. We don't
want to . . . send the wrong message.”
    “ What message?”
    “ False hopes?” the doctor
suggests.
    Dad shakes his head. He passes his
fingers through his hair and seems torn. “Panic.”
    I lift my eyes in alarm. The best way
to cause a panic is to suggest that there might be a reason for
one. “Is it the Flense? Is Eddie infected? Is that
what's—”
    “ No!” Doc Cavanaugh quickly
says. “No no no.” She jumps up from her stool and comes around the
bench toward me. “It's not the Flense, Finn. That much we do know.
If it was, we'd all have been infected
and . . . . Anyway, it's not. It can't
be.”
    “ Then what is
it?”
    She gestures at the table behind her.
“Eddie's recovery has been highly unusual, since the very start. By
all rights, he shouldn't be alive, and yet he is, and not just
alive but growing stronger every day.”
    “ But that's good,
right?”
    “ The rate of healing is
highly unexpected. It's . . .
unprecedented.”
    “ You mean unnatural?
How?”
    “ That's what we've been
trying to figure out. We know it's at the tissue level, but without
any instrumentation, I've been working blind. So I asked Kari to
help me out with the optics, and with Eddie's earlier help with the
electronics, I was finally able to convert the ophthalmoscope into
a crude microscope.”
    “ Kari doesn't know what
we're about to show you,” Dad interjects. “Nobody else does.” His
implication is clear: This is a secret, a big one.
    I nod.
    “ We found something in
Eddie's blood this morning.”
    “ A virus?”
    She shakes her head. “It's much too
large for a virus. It's the size of cells. The problem is, the
resolution of the optics and detector still aren't good enough to
see much detail, and the image contrast is terrible.”
    “ I'll ask Seth to have
another go at the programming, Gia,” Dad offers. “See if he can
improve the image processing. He says with these security cams, the
resolution is very bad. But even just feeding it into a larger
screen might help.”
    Doc Cavanaugh nods. “This
thing — well, things , actually — in Eddie's
blood, they appear to