Malik and Magaly sat in the car, staring at the light shining into the garage.
“I’m sorry that you’ve gotten involved.” Malik sighed.
“None of this is your fault,” she said.
“I don’t know. I could have postponed after that weird contact tracer incident at the office earlier.”
“Why would you have done that?”
“I wasn’t completely honest with you about why I decided to decline that job offer.”
Magaly was silent while Malik went on. “All I wanted was to work for Confidence Biotech, thinking it was my best chance at discovering a cure for the virus. It was my final year of college and my fourth year interning with them. My boss was awesome. I told him about my theory on the trees, and he took me under his wing. He helped me think of different ways to test my theory, but he insisted that we never do anything in the office. He lived in Westchester, New York, and every weekend, I’d meet him out there and we would spend the weekend running different simulations. He and I made huge strides on my project. He cautioned me that any work being done at corporate would be considered corporate property, even though we never used any of their resources, and he didn’t trust that the company would do right by me. That should have been enough of a red flag about the company. At the end of every year, he made sure that I mailed the latest prototype and all my notes back home. Well, he insisted that I send everything to Callie’s address.”
“Why?” Magaly asked.
“I just always thought he was paranoid. But it turned out the company monitored the mail that employees, even interns, sent and received. Corporate espionage was a big deal.”
“Were you able to confirm that your idea worked?” Magaly asked.
“We got close,” Malik said, “but it was still quite laborious. I can get an antidote, aerosolize it, and put it into atomizers. But I can only do this in relatively small quantities, about one hundred to one hundred and fifty per week. And that’s if I’m pushing it. I need to find a way to scale up. To reach more people.”
“It sounds like you were on to something, though,” she said. “Why didn’t you and your boss branch out on your own?”
Malik’s eyes watered as he shook his head. “My boss went missing.”
“What? Do you think the company had something to do with it?”
“I know they did. You see, one day in the office, we were running some trials on people who were infected. My hazmat suit got snagged, and I was exposed to the virus. My mentor freaked out, but I told him that there was nothing to worry about because I was an ASIM. I went into his office afterward to complete an incident report. Everyone who was exposed to the virus had to fill one out. When I went into his office, he said he didn’t have access to the incident report system. The next day he acted as if nothing ever happened.
“At his house that weekend, he told me that I shouldn’t let anyone know that I’m ASIM, especially anyone at the company. And that was that, for a while.
“When there were just a few weeks left in my internship, my mentor and I decided I should send home the latest prototype, and then we’d have a celebratory dinner at his house. I went to the post office in the city and hung out around there for the afternoon. I caught a later train out, and when I got to his house, a couple of black vehicles were out front. I went ahead anyway and walked in through the basement door, thinking I’d do a little cleanup and make sure I wasn’t leaving our workstation in a mess before dinner. Then I heard a conversation upstairs and started up just to let my mentor know I was there. He saw me and motioned me to head back downstairs. From what I could hear, there was an emergency in the lab, and they needed him and his wife there right away. They had received data that the next wave was coming, and it was more mutated than before. To keep everyone safe and ensure that the best minds were on it, they needed to isolate them somewhere else. My boss said that he needed to grab his notebook from downstairs. When he came down, he was worried and insisted that no matter what happened, I needed to go to work and finish my internship as if nothing happened. No one must know that I was at their house that night or ever. He said that he feared that the company found out that he and his wife were ASIMs. He went back upstairs, and I never saw him again.”
“What do you think happened?” Magaly asked.
“There were rumors about the cure to the virus being in the plasma of people who are ASIMs and that Confidence Biotech was trying to identify the gene. Have you noticed how rare it is to find people who are ASIMs now?”
“I haven’t thought about it,” Magaly said. “But that sounds like something ConBullish would do.” Magaly froze, then whispered, “Look!” She pointed at the window. “The light’s out. We need to go.”
The two drove around I-285 for a while. The roads were practically abandoned, which allowed Malik some time to think.
“Where should we go?” Magaly asked.
“We need to find a place where we can see what’s on this pen,” he whispered.
“We could head to my house,” Magaly said.
“No, I’ve gotten you involved enough. I don’t want them to have a reason to involve your family.”
Malik focused on the road, trying to think. Magaly turned on the flashlight from her phone and looked through the contents of the bag.
“What else is in there?” Malik asked.
“There’s an old notebook, a photo of the old office staff, and this. This is interesting—” Magaly’s voice trailed off.
“What?”
“Didn’t Ronnie say that you guys were going to clean up some old, wrecked car in the park tomorrow?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Is it blue?” she asked.
“Yes.” Malik turned to Magaly. “How did you know that?”
“Because there’s an old article in here about a crashed car in the Mason Mill trail area. The police were still looking for the car thief who stole a blue rental car and crashed it. They believed it was a couple of kids on a joy ride.”
“Wonder why that’s in there?”
“I’m not sure. Wait,” Magaly said, “it says here that the rental company said that the car was registered to a journalist. There’s a sticky note with ‘J. Ifill question mark’ circled. Do you think this could be your grandmother?”
“I’m not sure,” Malik said.
“She was a journalist?”
“When she was young, but not since I’ve been alive. She still journaled a lot, but I thought that it was a way for her to deal with her dementia. She was diagnosed well before I was even born. There were a lot of references to ZC in her journals. Now I’m wondering if that stood for Zach Carver.”
“This is creepy,” Magaly said.
“I keep thinking about what Dr. Patel said about the Global Breadth system, that the algorithm perhaps wasn’t complete, or had an intended flaw. I have an idea. We need to go to Callie’s house.”
Magaly pointed to the dashboard, and Malik followed her fingers to the green glow coming from the clock. 12:43 AM.
“It’s way too late to go there, right?” Magaly said.
“No, we should be good.” That’s the only place I know I can go this late. “Callie had the same computer as I do with a port like this.”
Malik parked the car on a darkened street with a wooded area on one side and houses facing the woods on the other.
“Where are we?” Magaly asked.
Malik pointed down the street. “We are at Callie’s house.”
“Which one?” Magaly asked.
“It’s down the street and around the corner.”
“Just trying not to draw attention?”
“Yeah, and if we parked on the other side, we would have passed by my house, and I’m not sure if the Biotech tracers are watching it. Ready?” Malik opened the car door, took the bag off Magaly’s lap, and got out.
There were no clouds in the sky, and the full moon was bright, providing all the light they needed. Callie’s house sat atop a slight hill. As the two approached the hill, Malik spotted the dim blue glow from the living room windows. He paused, and he felt Magaly stop moving too. “Callie’s mom always falls asleep in front of the TV,” he said. “There.” Malik pointed as if Magaly could see his hand. In the distance, he saw some movement in the kitchen. “That’s Aunt Lily. She’s a night owl and is always on the phone with someone.” They watched as she opened the refrigerator door, took something out, and closed it again.
“Okay, let’s go,” Malik said before he moved again. Rather than heading directly for the house, he led them around the side. They walked to a side door and waited.
“Now what?” Magaly whispered.
There was a flowerpot next to the door. Malik bent down and reached his hand inside the clay pot. He pulled out a whistle and blew it.
The sound that came out wasn’t what Magaly expected. “What is that?”
“It’s a duck call,” Malik said before he blew into the whistle two more times. He then stopped and waited.
“Are you sure we should be here?” Magaly asked.
“That car,” he replied, “the blue one from the article, they are volunteering to clean up that car because Callie was obsessed with it. Every time we would walk by it, she’d rattle off some new theory about how it got there. Near the end, she became determined to learn the truth. Callie would go on these rants about VINs being missing and gaps in the police report.” Malik laughed. “How she got access to those, I don’t know.” He paused as he thought about his lack of involvement in his friend’s last adventure. “I barely listened. I—I was just so focused on trying to find a way to make the project viable.”
He felt Magaly’s hand touch his back. “It’s okay.”
He cleared his throat. “Callie was convinced that the car wasn’t there from some botched robbery.”
“Why did she think that?”
“Because it was a low-end battery electric vehicle in an area where there were way more valuable cars. So why go to the trouble? She told me that she found proof, but she was put on a ventilator before she had a chance to show me.” Malik squeezed his eyelids tight, trying to prevent his tear ducts from doing their job. He shook the memories out of his head and inhaled deeply. “I haven’t been to her house since.”