The Society by Karen Guyler (best ebook reader android txt) 📕

“They’re after us, we just can’t see them.”

“Who?”

He looked around as if he expected whoever it was to leap out of a building or from behind a parked car. “We won’t know them, they’re just there with orders to kill.”

“Why?” Did he know that what happened to Eric was meant to happen to her?

“I can’t tell you.”

Why was he putting up this wall between them? “Then we’ll go to a police station, we’ll be safe enough there.”

“No, we won’t. These people, you don’t understand.”

“Tell me then, so I do.”

But he was off again, loping down the street.

She limped after him, stopped after a few steps. Enough. “Charles.”

He came right back at her call. “Ssh, no names.”

Eva grabbed his hands. “Let’s go to your lab. You have decent security there.”

“Absolutely not, no.” He broke away from her, was halfway across the road.

He’d been behaving so weirdly since he’d lost the Nobel nomination. Maybe he was having a breakdown or something. She knew nothing important about his long dead parents, his family medical history.

“Are you okay?”

“What kind of question is that? Come on.”

She gestured at her knee. “I can’t run.”

In the streetlight something flitted over his face, but from the distance she couldn’t tell if he was upset or angry at her or himself.

He came up to her again, whispering, “We can perhaps get a train out of London—”

“I’m not leaving Lily.”

“It’s only—”

“Not doing it.”

The headlights of a car had Charles ducking into the front garden of a mock Tudor house. “Eva, here.” The bush didn’t quite conceal them both, a toddler would see past their flimsy camouflage. Eva’s knee protested.

The car passed by.

“Enough.” She limped back to the pavement. “We’re grown-ups, Charles, not actors in a spy spoof. Are you going to tell me what’s going on?

He looked up the dead street, down. “It’s safer if you don’t know.”

Maybe it was Charles’ odd behaviour, maybe how ridiculous the night had been finally hitting her, it didn’t matter what or why. Hysteria nudged at her, she was close to screaming, crying, laughing, probably all three. “I’m not spending the night out here. Up to you if you come with me.”

16

“Late night or early start?” Eva didn’t recognise the security guard at the entrance to the building where Every Drop had its offices. But even she didn’t normally come to work at this time.

“I’ve been wondering that myself.” She pretended he wasn’t inspecting her face, the dressing on her forehead, concentrating instead on signing Charles into the building with a scrawl no one would be able to read.

“Lock it.” Charles said when they reached her office.

“We’re behind two card swipes in an access controlled building with a security guard and a direct response alarm company, that’s why you agreed to come here. I don’t need to lock this door too. Now explain.”

He checked the blinds she’d closed against the darkness before the ball, then at the all-glass door and the floor to ceiling windows that looked into the corridor. The blinds she never closed rattled against the glass, bucking into place when he released them.

“Now you talk to me.” she said.

He nodded, pacing around while his brain wrestled with whatever this was. Was it so hard to share? Eva dropped onto her chair, smoothed her jeans, pressed her lips together. She wanted to give him the time he needed, pretended to ignore the hurt that he had something he couldn’t bring himself to say to her.

The sudden ringing on her laptop made her start. Too cheerful, the Skype incoming call tone.

“That’s probably urgent.”

At that time of night he was right.

She woke up her laptop, scrabbling to click the right places when she realised who it was.

“Milo, where are you?”

His profile picture was an echo of every borrowed memory she had for her father when he’d spoken to her through patchy comms, the shots that made the evening news, a shorthand to the viewer something awful was coming: a tumbledown building, everything flat yellow, bleached by a harsh sun, unforgiving heat and blinding light by suggestion.

Milo appeared on her screen, his image a little fuzzy. “What happened to you? I’m the one supposed to be in the danger zone.”

Eva should have disabled her video. “Are you?”

“I’m not sure. There’s more sickness at Seitu, cause still unknown. I was sorting travel there but people are falling sick in Tirupudur.”

That’s what Amelia Moore was talking about when she’d said sites. “Is it the same?”

Milo looked to his left, back at his camera. “It’s hard to say with no one on the ground in Africa. What do you want me to do?”

Seitu, smaller than Tirupudur, was logistically more of a challenge, but any sickness would spread in Tirupudur faster. Africa losing out again to another part of the world, but she had to follow the logic.

“Do we know it’s the water? Could it be an outbreak of disease?”

“I’m talking to people, nowhere near enough yet to establish anything beyond doubt, but so far the common denominator is the water.”

Eva pushed her hair back, brushed her bruised cheek. Shouldn’t do that. “Stay in Tirupudur, can you get labs run? Once we’ve identified what we’re dealing with, we’ll have a better idea how to treat it, and that’ll give us a benchmark for Seitu. Any of the other agencies have anything yet?”

Milo shrugged. “On the ground it’s taken us by surprise, hundreds sick already.”

Hundreds? How could they get ahead of that, a sickness spreading that fast would be impossible to contain. “Have there been any fatalities?” Eva discounted the conclusions her brain was lining up. They didn’t know enough yet, but what were the chances of a pathogen leaping from Africa to India so directly?

He shook his head.

“What are you doing to stay safe?”

Milo’s face froze, his voice had stuttered to silence.

“Milo, can you hear me?”

She disconnected, pressed recall, letting a minute tick by, two, giving him the chance to call her back, tried again, again, half a dozen more times. The line stayed stubbornly silent, India not