2| Poetry and maps and lipstick

2| Poetry and maps and lipstick

OTTILIE

G RAN'S DIALYSIS BEGINS the next day.

The machine is installed in the Roosevelt Room by a team of staffers who wear full hazmat gear. A woman whose face I can barely make out behind her protective equipment sets it up.

Gina and I, fully aware that this nurse may never return, video the process on our phones, watching every movement closely, asking questions, making notes.

The nurse comes on the second day, but, ominously, not the third.

After that, Gina and I run the dialysis machine ourselves, and I work hard to forget that the president-elect is somewhere on the other side of the building, fighting for his life, hooked up to fifty machines, while we attempt to govern what feels like a sinking ship.

The pills helped with Gran's fatigue and breathing, but with the dialysis, the swelling in her ankles goes away entirely. She seems as good as new again, enough to let me convince myself that Dr. Bakshi was wrong. She'll have more than a decade. She'll be okay.

Beyond that, the fact that she got sick a month early, causing Gina, Knox, and I to mask up and limit her exposure to anyone outside of our sphere, was a strange twist in fate that may allow us to survive this thing.

Maybe we weren't exposed because we were already distancing.

Each day, while the machine whirs, a slow rhythmic humming as it cleans Gran's blood, we go over our daily agenda, which mostly means taking in problems and considering options.

The power grids are operating at emergency capacity and run by a dwindling skeleton crew, and we focus on keeping them going as long as possible, as well as getting access codes to necessary officials so they can resume activity when the illness runs its course.

We gather access codes to weapons lockers and armories within two hundred miles of DC and suggest all governors do the same for their own states.

We contact heads of departments and gather access codes for NSA, FBI, CIA, NGA. Though we will still need to get energy to the ground stations used by the US government for its defense intelligence, and they are housed in a secret undisclosed location—and the only person we're certain knows its location other than the unconscious president himself, are the Secretary of Defense, the Chairwoman of the Joint Chiefs, and the Director of the NSA. The Secretary of Defense hasn't responded to a message in two days. The Chairwoman is dead. The Director is hiding out in an undisclosed bunker.

It's at the end of a dialysis session, a couple weeks in, that Gran sets her phone carefully down beside her laptop and removes her face mask.

After a second, Gina and I meet eyes and follow suit.

Breathing air in the same room as them feels terrifying but also freeing.

Gina smiles tremulously at me. I forgot she had a tiny gap in her teeth, and somehow seeing that relaxes me. I never met my mom. I never had a good friend, but Gina sits somewhere between the two, like an aunt or a big sister.

"We've been isolating for long enough now." Gran's lips, carefully painted her typical dignified mauve, press together into a flat line. "I think perhaps a cup of tea is in order. Tilly, my love, would you do the honors? Gina's hip has been bothering her."

"Of course." Tilly, my love, is reserved for we're no longer working, for when I'm her granddaughter, not her employee. It means we're going to get personal.

I'm halfway to the door when she says, "Four, love. We need four mugs."

Four means Knox.

I prepare four mugs, my hands shaking with a combination of nerves and forgotten breakfast.

The president must be dead.

It's the only explanation for why we need no masks and tea and Knox and Tilly, my love .

I put the four mugs on a tray and carry them back like a server in a coffee shop. The surfaces of the tea ripple like four tiny oceans, reflecting back the overhead skylight windows and the raging winter sun outside. Two of the handles knock into each other like they're vibrating with my every step, making a foreboding ripple of sound that fringes on a dirge.

I arrive at the same time Knox does. Gran must have texted him.

He stands now in the open doorway to the left of the fireplace and its painting of Teddy Roosevelt himself astride a bucking stallion in blue and yellow.

It's a sharp contrast to the man standing beside it, wide shoulders in a black suit, a crisp white shirt. It accentuates his lean energy and swagger and unconscious grace as he enters the room.

"Gina, looking lovely," he says, and Gina puffs up like a male bird in mating season. "Viola, you too." He inclines his head at Gran and then turns toward me. "Hello … you."

My brows draw together because I'm not sure what to call him. In the past, I always said Agent Silva, but that feels bizarre now. So I say nothing.

"I brought cookies," he says with a wry shrug, and somehow, despite the jocularity of his words, his body manages to convey an odd degree of sorrow and understanding, like he's acknowledging with incongruent words the horror that has come and will come and the fact that we stand on a balance beam smack between the two. He'd be very good at delivering speeches.

"Seemed like a cookie kind of day." He tips a box of chocolate-peanut butter fudge cookies that probably have about four hundred calories each. "And you can't have tea without cookies. Isn't that a rule?"

"It's not." I know rules generally and rules specifically, and I know them well, and that's not one. Peanut butter and tea sound wrong together.

Gran tuts at me. "Ignore my granddaughter's rudeness."

"It wasn't rude …" I trail off when his grin amplifies into a laugh. "It's just true."

It is.

Gran gestures delicately to the conference table. "Cookies are perfect. As is your timing. Sit. Both of you."

I set the book with its four mugs down as he ambles into the room, unbuttoning his suit coat and dropping into a chair opposite us. He glances at me, and I can feel the weight of his dark eyes as they scan my face briefly, dipping, just for a second, down to the gray sweater I'm wearing, then back up to my lips, without a mask, and it's a strange hyper-awareness that has me conscious that he hasn't seen my lips in weeks either.

And all I can think is my lips and his lips. Exposed, like a Victorian woman showing a glimpse of a scandalous ankle.

Gran gestures at the chair beside Gina, opposite us.

Gina sniffles and discretely moves a tissue off her lap to wipe it under her nose before taking her tea off the book. Whatever she and Gran discussed in my absence, it wasn't good.

It's clearly not the time for me to be looking at Knox's lips.

Or his eyes.

I push his mug toward him. He reaches out to take it. For a single second, his fingertips touch mine and zap like an electric shock. I jerk my hand back away and tuck it into a fist under the table.

"I just received an email from Jim Helios," Gran says, her knuckly hand, covered in age spots and rings, coming up to settle over the hollow of her throat, gold and diamonds glittering icily. Helios is the head of NIH. "Official estimates for the flu have come in. Unreleased as yet. The mortality rate is … higher than anticipated."

We've been waiting for clear figures since the first man died in Paris, the whole world, our collective hearts sinking with every new death, every new city to announce an infection.

"How high?" I ask.

"You need to prepare yourselves," she says crisply. "The figure is … alarming. Far more so than what's been reported on the news."

Gina's chin rumples.

Knox leans back in his chair, and it squeals out a long protest.

"Just say it," I breathe.

"Ninety-nine percent," Gran says.

"No," I whisper.

"Unfortunately, yes. Far worse than anyone could have imagined," Gran adds.

Gina's gasp breaks off into choked silence as her hand comes up to cover her mouth.

"That has to be a mistake." I blurt, knowing it's not. The latest estimates have been closer to sixty percent.

"It's not. Ninety-nine percent fatality." Gran lifts the teabag from her mug and drapes it carefully over the rim. "Death."

Knox leans forward to rest his elbows on the table, his head dropping to his hands.

Even the bubonic plague only killed twenty-five to forty percent at its absolute worst. Spanish Flu killed less than two percent, Covid less than a fraction of one percent. The worst viruses of all, Ebola and Marburg, only kill around fifty percent, depending on the degree of medical intervention. These are facts I know because I looked them up when I wrote her last address.

"The numbers have been corroborated across China, Japan, Australia, France, Brazil, and Nigeria," Gran says.

My tongue sticks in the back of my throat, instant images rising up in my consciousness, bodies piling up in hospitals, mass graves, skeletons too small to contemplate. "That can't be right."

"It is," Gran says firmly, her voice returned, and she smooths the lapels of her navy cardigan.

Her hands are shaking, too.

That strikes me like a physical blow.

Gran is shaking.

Gina blots her tissue under her nose again.

My skin flushes hot and then cold, and I'm somehow aware, deeply aware, of Knox watching me, his dark gaze boring into mine again, and I have the strange sensation of someone knocking at a door I don't ever want to open.

I avert my gaze sharply, and when I look back, he's staring over the fireplace, at that painting of Teddy and the storm that ripples, electric and threatening, behind him.

"Ninety-nine percent is—" I break off, unsure of words, at a loss.

It's too many.

Far … too … many.

"It's a cataclysm," Gran says, lifting her chin, the papery skin of her forehead lined with grief. "A turning point in human history. It's the end for most of us, but … not … all. One percent is still a lot of people."

I shake my head. Earth's population is nearly nine billion. One percent leaves … "Ninety million survivors." That's a lot to watch one social media video or sign a government petition. It's not a lot of people to survive . "That's less than the number of Americans who vote in the primaries. We're talking worldwide."

And they'll be scattered across the globe, ashes in the wind, stars in the sky.

Statistically, no one at this table is even likely to live.

99% is nearly everyone.

"Do you know the last time Earth's population was ninety million?" Gran asks. "I had to look it up."

"No," I can barely find my voice.

"Five hundred years before Christ. By then, we'd had dams and pumping systems, poetry and maps and lipstick, not to mention the Olympic Games, algebra, libraries, philosophies." Her mouth shakes. "On the individual scale, there's no other word for this but tragedy, but on the grand scale, this is not the end of humanity. It's a turning point. And we … are at an advantage."

All of us look up at that, me from where I've been gaping at the wall over her head, and Knox from staring at the carpet between his feet, and Gina from behind her hands, which have migrated up from her mouth to cover her eyes.

"We isolated early because of my kidney problem. It is my belief that will have saved our lives."

Same thought I've had.

"It will fall to us to sew together whatever tattered remains of society survive. We know from government reports and from natural disasters that there will be gangs, there will be violence, people will descend into their worst selves. We will need to unite them and focus them on cleaning up, healing, rebuilding."

I find my mouth slightly agape that she's already catapulted forward into a future after this thing is done, but somehow, my brain shifts with her, traveling forward to view a monstrous life.

Millions of corpses.

Waterborne illnesses.

Struggle to find clean water.

People hoarding.

Psychopaths free to act with impunity.

Gran lifts her tea. "They're recommending any survivors wait three weeks from last exposure before venturing out, and we can use that time to make an outline of necessary tasks, but I need to know you're with me. If not, this is a good time to leave. I have a personal job for Gina. She's going to take a car and set out. Just for a day, and when she returns, she'll isolate in a private area."

"Wait, what?" I say. "Where?" She can't send Gina off? It's a mess out there. "She'll get stopped at blockades or caught in a riot."

"She'll have a government vehicle and government credentials," Gran says calmly. "With any luck, she'll be back in two days."

"Where is she going?"

"I'll tell you when the time is right," Gran says cryptically. "I wouldn't ask it, dear friend, if it wasn't essential."

Gina reaches across the table to squeeze her hand briefly, looking to me, her eyes so full of sorrow my heart clenches.

My friend.

Gran shifts focus. "Knox, you have a family of your own."

"I do," he says. His parents retired in California. He also has a sister in Texas, where he grew up, and a brother in Georgia. "They don't need me."

"You're sure?" Gran asks.

"Positive." His battering ram eyes shift to me. "My place is with you."

Gran's hand settles on my arm in silent acknowledgment. She knows I have no one else. It's been the two of us since my mom left when I was a baby, and her husband, my Uncle Harry, died a decade ago. I tear my gaze from Gina, and remind myself I'm not emotional. And she's a smart woman. She'll isolate and she'll be fine and so will I.

"I'm staying." I busy myself lifting my tea so I won't cry.

Gran and I don't cry.

At least not in front of each other.

"With this great cataclysm will come a great opportunity. The clearing of a slate. It will take strong leadership." She looks around the table at each of us in turn. "The lines of succession are clear but meaningless at this degree of fatality, as are the contents of the Doomsday Protocol since hiding in bunkers would only spread more disease. Any senator or congressperson left alive can and probably will make a claim," she says, taking a peanut butter fudge cookie from Knox's cookie box and taking a tiny bite. "Once the dead have died and chips have fallen, the greatest threat to humanity will be other humans. I intend to hold this building."

How, I want to ask.

She's in her sixties.

She weighs less than a hundred and twenty pounds.

She has a bad kidney and needs pills and a dialysis machine or she gets loopy.

She just described chaos, and she thinks she can hold it, lead it?

With what army?

My phone pings, interrupting my thoughts, and instantly, so do Gran's and Knox's, a chorus of chiming.

I reach reflexively for my phone, and at the same time, they reach for theirs.

Together, we all read the text that came through from Wendell Crandall, Chief of Staff to the president.

"The President just died," I breathe, turning toward Gran.

She knew before the rest of us.

That's why she called us here.

"Whatever happens," she says firmly, lifting her chin to expose the soft, thin skin of her neck. "We are the leadership of this country and will protect it, and the constitution, with everything we have."

Gina buries her face in her hands.

Knox shifts in his chair, and his foot bumps mine under the table.

I want to argue.

But I know better.

"Excuse me." I push away from the table.

I avoid looking at any of them, head for the exit, taking my laptop, leaving my tea barely touched, unsure if I'm hoping for life after this plague—or for death.

"Ottilie," she says when I'm just near the door. "We're going to need a lot of talking points. Ten or eleven different cogent arguments we can use to sway each new group of people we meet."

I never see Gina again without a door between us.

She dies two weeks later.