Behind her, Metal looked amused and resigned in equal measure. He bent down and whispered something in her ear and her fair skin turned pink. Kay sympathized. She had the exact same kind of skin. It showed all your emotions, good and bad. Judging from the sexy sideways glance she shot Metal, it was good.
"What was in it?" Kay leaned forward. "Did you go over it?"
"Oh God, honey." Felicity cocked her head, straightened it, as if listening to a secret internal voice. "I have no idea what's in it. There was almost a terabyte of info and it's all biochemistry and virology and genetics. Most of it anyway. I did isolate a video made by Priyanka, and some emails between her and Mike Hammer. Also, she did some research on him, so there's about ten of his environmental articles and a couple of documentaries he made for his webzine. He doesn't appear, only as a slightly modified voiceover. He's good. He manipulated the recordings and there would be no way to obtain a voice match without sacrificing too much quality on the recording itself. I didn't have time to watch all the docs-meatspace time is different from digital time-but I gathered they were all hot topics where big companies are polluting. One was about a flu vaccine scam."
Kay nodded. She knew what that was about. A pharmaceutical company that invested ten million dollars in drumming up a flu scare and then delivered thirty million doses on the market of a vaccine that didn't work. There had been 150 deaths and the company had made seven billion dollars, which it promptly deposited in Panama.
Scam was too mild a word. It had been criminal.
"Can you please send over the information?" Kay asked.
Felicity looked blank for an instant. "Uh, Kay … "
"She sent it immediately," Metal pitched in. "And it was sent securely, you don't need to worry about that. We have an internal system. Check the log. It's along the top of the image."
Kay looked and found it. She clicked on the log and immediately Felicity and Metal were reduced to a small box next to the image of herself and Nick. Data started scrolling down the screen.
"Whoa," Nick said behind her. "Looks like the Matrix. What a mess."
Kay was studying the screen intently. "No, not a mess. There's a lot of data from Bill's drive, and it's standard research, going back years. But here," she tapped the screen with a stylus, "and here, and here and here," she looked up reassuringly at Nick, "those are the formerly encrypted files, where we'll find what he was secretly working on. It shouldn't be too hard to sort them out. And Priyanka will have already arranged the files in an easy-to-follow order. It's just a question of time, now. We have the yellow bricks and they're laid out on a road. I just have to walk it."
"Hm. If you say so." Nick's voice was full of doubt. "Hell of a lot of info there."
"It's what I do-what we do at the CDC." Did at the CDC, Kay thought with a pang of pain. What they did at the CDC. Studied all of nature, in its unfathomably huge details, to find what could harm humans, and fix it.
Until someone inside the CDC-and that never failed to astonish her-used data to harm humans.
"Okay. This is your thing, Kay." Felicity was scowling on the screen. "If anyone can figure this out, it's you. You go, girl."
"Oh, I will," Kay promised softly. Priyanka and Mike Hammer, good people, had died for what was in those files. She'd find out what it was and ASI would go after them. Of that she had no doubt. Maybe call in the FBI, too. Nick trusted the FBI. At this point, Kay herself didn't trust any institution.
"Good. I think that-" She frowned.
"Felicity?"
Felicity had turned sheet white. Like flipping a switch. From its usual pale rose, her complexion had turned to dirty ice, dead white with a gray undertone. Felicity slapped her hand over her mouth and disappeared from the screen. She could be seen in the background, running.
"Good God!" Kay leaned forward. "Metal! Is Felicity okay? Is something wrong? Is she sick?"
"Is it official?" Nick asked behind her.
She swiveled. "What?"
"Yeah." Metal's super-broad chest lifted on a sigh. "We told everyone."
"So … you know what it is?" Nick asked.
What what is? What were they talking about?
"Twins." Metal flashed a quick grin, then it disappeared from his face. "Boys, we think. The next sonogram should be definitive. But she's been sicker than a dog. I hate it."
Kay, who had a master's degree in biology, finally got it. Her jaw dropped. "She's pregnant? Felicity's pregnant?"