“Insolent!” the second noble said. He reached for her, too, and she had to dodge in the opposite direction.
“Leave me to my work,” Euanthe said. She looked around the kitchen, but no slave would stand up for her against the noblemen.
“I do not take orders from slaves!” the first nobleman said. “Least of all, slaves of that lowborn cur Cleon.”
They had backed her against the long wooden table now, and both men reached for her.
Euanthe summoned the special pox, the contagious one she had prepared for the destruction of Pericles and Athens. She was meant to infect Pericles directly, but launching the plague in his household would have to be close enough. She was not going to let these drunken noblemen drag her off and have their way with her.
She lashed out, filling them both with the pox. Sores and tumors ruptured open along their arms and spread to their faces and legs.
The noblemen fell to the ground, howling in pain and surprise. Now the other slaves paid attention, closing in from all sides to see what was happening.
Euanthe breathed out a cloud of black spores, infecting them all. She felt bad for the other slaves as they writhed on the ground, but they were all doomed to die anyway. Archidamus, her king, had ordered it.
She pulled the contagious plague back into herself, as much as she could. As the slaves fell to the floor, Euanthe found the biggest, juiciest leg of lamb and grabbed it for Cleon.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Heather strapped on a cleansuit, sealing herself from head to toe in plastic, with a breathing mask connected to a bottle of oxygen at her hip. Since the pathogen's means of transmission remained as unknown as the pathogen itself, the Fallen Oak specimens were treated as maximally dangerous and maximally contagious. A high level of security clearance was necessary to enter the lab dedicated to the investigation.
The entire situation was still tightly stage-managed by the President's special adviser Nelson Artleby. The test samples had all been collected here in Atlanta. In a fairly bizarre move, the White House had ordered all the bodies stored in a guarded facility outside the city. The warehouse had been quickly configured for refrigeration in a special contract given to SyntaCorp, LLC, a giant defense firm where Nelson Artleby happened to sit on the Board of Directors.
Heather couldn't imagine how gruesome that place must be. She imagined shelf after shelf of dead bodies, each one wrapped and sealed in layers of plastic. She wondered how their families would react if they discovered what had happened to their missing loved ones.
Heather shook her head to try and clear away those thoughts. She was here to gather data.
It amazed her to find the lab deserted. It had run round the clock for weeks while the samples were analyzed, but it looked like nobody was even assigned here full-time anymore. Nothing had been discovered by all the testing, which was the scariest fact of all.
Heather located Jenny's blood sample in a refrigerator full of them. They were labeled with tracking codes—each person in Fallen Oak had been assigned one.
She extracted one red drop and dripped it onto a microscope slide, then laid a clear plastic slide cover on top of it.
She peered at Jenny's blood cells.
Jenny had the world's rarest blood type, she knew, AB negative. Jenny's little boyfriend Seth had the opposite, O positive, the universal giver. Heather had developed a related interest in Seth, because he was either immune to the pathogen or he was a handsome teenage boy who didn't mind having a girlfriend he couldn't touch. Heather wasn't sure which of those possibilities was more far-fetched.
Heather zoomed in closer. She couldn't see anything unusual here. Just normal, healthy blood cells, floating sluggishly because they'd been stored at freezing temperature. She knew there was nothing unusual about Jenny's white blood cells or platelet count.
“Okay,” Heather whispered. “Tell me something new.”
Since she couldn't find anything, and every standard test had already been run, she decided to try a slightly crazy experiment.
Heather brought out a clean sample of AB negative from a different person, a blood donor from somewhere around Chicago, someone who had almost certainly never been exposed to Jenny before. She added a couple of drops of the sample to the slide with Jenny's blood, then returned the slide to the microscope.
She watched the sample blood mingle with Jenny's blood. Nothing happened. She'd contaminated the diminishing specimen of Jenny's blood for nothing, she thought.
Then, some of the blood cells began to quiver, their outer membranes vibrating like guitar strings.
In front of Heather's eyes, some of the cells shriveled, others contorted into strange, spiky shapes, and others burst altogether. Other blood cells—Jenny's, she guessed—remained perfectly healthy as they floated among the destroyed ones.