Triple Helix: Part Three

Warehouse Complex

The room is dim, narrow, long, and cold.

Cold in every sense of the word: it is physically cold—cold enough for Plague to see his own breath when he exhales—but it’s also cold in the abstract. The floor is bare concrete, the walls and ceiling metal—dull, brushed metal, treated to prevent frost.

The medical gurneys are set lengthwise against the longest of the walls, twelve to a side. The test subjects on the gurneys sleep—Plague prefers to think of it as sleeping—and equipmen...