“I’ve been telling myself the same thing, but we can’t know that for certain. That said, he wouldn’t know what we even housed here for viruses unless he hacked our system, which is entirely possible.”
Iris paused her typing to glance at the woman next to her. “That’s not true.”
“What now?” Bec asked, setting the mug down. “What’s not true?”
“That he has no way of knowing what’s here. Have you ever googled this place?”
“I haven’t needed to,” Bec answered defensively.
Iris motioned at her phone with her chin. “Do it.”
Bec reached for the phone, and Iris noticed her fingers shaking. After a few moments, she glanced up from her phone. “There’s very little here other than Walter’s interview with a science journal.”
“Click it,” Iris ordered with her fingers still tapping on her keyboard.
Bec was silent for several minutes before she inhaled sharply. “Nightmares are real, and one resides in my lab.” With a heavy sigh, Bec tossed the phone onto the desk. “What was he thinking? He knows better than that!”
“It was a science journal. Maybe he thought no one else would see it?” Iris asked, her fingers still typing even as she spoke.
“I suppose that’s possible, but he knows everything ends up on the internet. When was that dated?” Shegrabbed the phone again and checked the date. “April. I got here in May.”
“Was there a head research scientist before you?” Iris asked, and Bec nodded. “Yes, but he didn’t last long. I think he started in February but was gone by April. That was when I was hired.”
“Do you know why he left?”
“I don’t,” she said with a shrug. “It could have been the isolation of the job, inability to work closely with Walter, or fear of the viruses themselves.”
“Or did he get the information he wanted regarding the deadly viruses to leverage against the center?”
“I guess anything is possible,” Bec agreed.
“Do you remember his name?”
“Yes. Samuel Gill.”
Iris nodded as she typed. “When I finish this line of code, I need to call Secure Watch for my midnight check-in. We can give Mina his name, and she can look into him while we keep working.”
Bec reached over and put her hand on Iris’s shoulder. “You have to sleep, Iris.”
“I’ll sleep when this is over,” Iris said, not breaking pace. “Or at least once I get the most important functions under our control again.”
“What if you can’t?”
“Then I’ll die trying.” She stopped looking at the computer long enough to glance at the woman beside her. She read the terror in her eyes and held her gaze longer than anyone she ever had before. “How do you do that?”
“Do what, Iris?”
“Make it so easy for me to make eye contact.”
“I can’t answer that question. Only you can. It mightbe easier for you to answer this question. Why do you struggle to maintain eye contact with others?”
“Judgment,” she said without hesitation. “I’m always worried they’re going to judge me.”
“Then maybe the answer to your first question is that you aren’t worried I’ll judge you.”
“I’m not,” she agreed immediately. “You already said you wouldn’t.”
“And you believed that without even knowing me.”
