Infected: Shift by Andrea Speed Read Free Book Online

but was apparently a microscopic photo of a virus. She had a half-dead ficus tucked away near the window, which had a fantastic view of the back quad parking lot.
     
    No family photos? No personal photos of any kind. Did she even have a family? There was something about her intensity that screamed “meddling grandma” to Dylan, but on the other hand, that single-minded focus and dedication to her work could have left her alone. Considering the sheer number of degrees and awards on her wall, he had no idea when she would have had time to get married or start a family. That just ate up too much time.
     
    As soon as Dylan sat in the worn, padded chair she had in front of her chipped wooden desk, she started typing, her fingers flying over the keyboard, chewing on a pencil like she wanted a cigarette. Just as Dylan was about to break the silence, she took the pencil out and said, “I’m just gonna give it to you in layman’s terms, okay? Roan doesn’t need to be here. He never needs to be here again.”
     
    Maybe it was sleep deprivation, but that made no sense to him. “Huh?”
     
    “He’s out of viral sequence. Permanently, as far as I can tell.”
     
    She was speaking neither English nor Spanish; she wasn’t speaking a language he could understand. “What? Are you saying he’s cured?”
     
    “Oh God no! How would that happen? I’m just saying he isn’t a slave to his viral cycle anymore. I think it’s a slave to him.”
     
    “Again—huh? What are you saying?”
     
    “I’m saying he’s not changing this month, not without conscious thought. There are certain hormones, viral proteins, and neurotransmitters that increase when a change is imminent. Did Roan ever tell you he almost agreed to a clinical trial a few years ago? It was during Paris’s last days. He only came in to test for it ’cause he wanted to see if it would save Paris, but he was too sick to participate, and Roan wasn’t gonna do the trial without him. I took blood samples then, and I compared them with blood samples I took from Roan just an hour ago. And his virus has changed shape. In the last couple of years, it’s… mutated. Or been forced to mutate, perhaps by the increase of CD8+ T cells in his system. He can change basically at will. We all know that, right? By doing this, he’s disrupted the natural rhythm. There isn’t one anymore, not for him. His viral protein levels, hormones, and neurotransmitter levels are now naturally higher than normal because he needs to be ready to go at any point. His body and the virus have both adapted to this new reality.”
     
    Dylan decided he was going to be like stone, and the information, like water, would flow over him, and he would make sense of it as it went by. He tried very hard. But the conclusions he reached didn’t make much sense. “You’re saying he doesn’t need to change a few days a month anymore? He doesn’t need the cage?”
     
    “Exactly. No point.”
     
    “But he just changed last month. For four days!”
     
    She nodded, like she expected to hear this. “Yes, because he thought he was going to.”
     
    Being stone was just as hard as being water. There was surely a lesson in that. “What? Are you saying he… he did it to himself?”
     
    “In a sense. Not deliberately. He expected it to happen, and it did, because he was expecting it to. Call it a self-fulfilling prophecy, if you will. He’s probably been psychosomatically changing for… well, fuck if I know. But for a bit, certainly.”
     
    “This is insane,” he blurted, too confused to worry about offending her.
     
    But she just nodded. “Isn’t it? I don’t get it at all. Medically, this is a first. But then again, Roan has been a medical oddity since I first started seeing him. He’s fairly atypical, unique. If I actually introduced these findings to the world at large, he’d be an instant celebrity in medical circles overnight. But I don’t want to see him as an animal in a freak show