Please Do Not Taunt the Octopus by Mira Grant Read Free Book Online Page B

been before she stumbled, half starved, to my doorstep, she was the sort of person who freckled when she went out in the sun, and must have spent her life drowning in SPF-40. The fact that she wasn’t burnt now told me that she had traveled mostly at night; she’d been filthy enough when I found her that she definitely hadn’t been keeping up any sort of skin care regimen.
    “So who are you, strange girl?” I asked. “Why are you here? Why did you come looking for me?”
    She didn’t answer. She just slept on.

Please Do Not Taunt the Octopus
    There are people who will tell you that the ends justify the means, right up until they’re talking about their own ends. Then, suddenly, morals and ethics matter. Funny thing, that.
    —Dr. Shannon Abbey
    Good morning, class. Who’s ready to learn?
    —Elaine Oldenburg

1.
    “Dr. Abbey?” Not-Daisy’s voice was soft, almost hesitant, like she was afraid that I was going to sic Joe on her for daring to come near my office. For a moment I entertained the fantasy of doing precisely that: unleashing my faithful hound and shutting her up before she found a way to tell the CDC about our mystery guest. I’d always been fairly relaxed about the presence of spies and infiltrators. No matter how often I moved the lab, being connected to the supply chain meant being vulnerable to discovery: The CDC was always going to find me, and having found me, they were always going to send their people in to try to learn what I knew.
    Most of the time, what I knew either wasn’t worth reporting, or wasn’t worth protecting, or was hidden behind closed doors and managed by my more loyal staffers. But something like our mystery woman had been vulnerable to discovery from the start. How do you hide a stranger who falls out of the forest and virtually lands on your head? The answer was sadly simple. You didn’t. Mystery girl had been sleeping for two days, and we’d managed to block all of not-Daisy’s attempts to message her government masters in that period. But we weren’t going to be able to stay on high alert forever. Eventually, either not-Daisy was going to get something past us, or we were going to have to make a decision about her probable retirement situation.
    “Yes, Zelda?” I asked, looking up and away from my computer. If I was thinking about having her killed for security reasons, it seemed only polite to use her name, at least to her face. She was always going to be “not-Daisy” to me.
    “Um, you said that we should notify you if there was any change in, um, our visitor’s status? And there’s been a change.”
    I stood, knocking my chair backward in the process. “What kind of change?”
    Not-Daisy’s eyes were sad and resigned. She understood what she was saying. That was the moment when I realized that she knew she’d been set up by her employers. They weren’t showing faith in her by sending her to me: They were saying that she was, on some level, essentially expendable. “She’s awake.”
    “That’s certainly a change,” I said, trying to keep the excitement out of my voice. I stepped around the desk. Joe rose to follow me, and I shook my head, accompanying the motion with the hand gesture that meant, “Stay.” “No, Joe. I’m sorry, buddy, but you need to stay here.”
    Joe’s butt hit the ground while his face was still composing itself into a look of pure bewilderment. I was going somewhere. I was his person. If I was going somewhere, he was supposed to be going somewhere with me. That was the way the world worked . But I was telling him to stay, and when I told him to do a thing, it had to be done. That was also the way the world worked.
    “I know, buddy,” I said, and scratched his ears. “Stay. Guard. We’ll do something fun later, okay?”
    Joe slowly sank back to the floor, resting his head on his massive forepaws. He looked at me so reproachfully that I almost went back on my decision and told him to come along. But the last time our