The storage building crouched at the edge of the compound, one of those structures you pass a hundred times without really seeing. Inside, the air was thick with the earthy scent of root vegetables and cured meat, cut through with the sharp bite of antiseptic. Zuhra navigated the narrow aisles like she could walk them blindfolded, past shelves sagging under the weight of preserved foods and neatly folded textiles.
"Back here," she said, leading me to a shadowed corner where cardboard had been broken down and stacked against the wall. "Everything from the last few months. That donation was the only one to come in right before..." She didn't finish. She didn't need to.
I dropped to my knees, the concrete floor cold even through my jeans. My hands trembled as I began sorting through the pile. Generic brown shipping boxes. Plastic bags emblazoned with church logos and cheerful slogans about community outreach. Nothing, nothing, nothing—
And then my fingers froze.
White cardboard. Clean edges. A logo stamped in the corner that made my blood run cold.
Franklin Memorial Hospital.
The same crisp white boxes I'd walked past at the nurses' station. The same address label format. The same everything.
I pulled it free from the stack, and the world seemed to tilt sideways.
The memory ambushed me—Mrs. Henderson's AP History class, junior year. I could practically smell the dry erasemarkers, feel the afternoon sun warming the back of my neck as it slanted through those tall windows.
"Fort Pitt, 1763," Mrs. Henderson had said, advancing her PowerPoint with a click. "The siege was brutal. But what happened next..." She'd paused, making sure we were all paying attention. "Traders gave blankets and a handkerchief to Lenape and Shawnee representatives. Gifts, they called them. Acts of goodwill."
She let that sit for a moment before adding: "The items came from the smallpox hospital."
I remembered the collective intake of breath, the way everyone had sat up straighter.
"The commanding officer wrote about it in his journal," Mrs. Henderson continued. "Used the word 'extirpate.' Anyone know what that means?"
Silence.
"To destroy completely. To eradicate. To wipe from existence."
Jake Morrison had muttered from the back row: "Shit, that's evil."
For once, Mrs. Henderson hadn't told him to watch his language. She'd just nodded slowly and said, "Yes. Yes, it was."
The memory dissolved, snapping me back to the present. I was still kneeling on the cold storage room floor, that pristine white box cradled in my trembling hands. Franklin Memorial's cheerful logo smiled up at me—the same hospital where I'd walked those sterile corridors, where I'd watched Darla and her team pack up boxes just like this one. Nadine's pet project, Darla had called it.
My stomach lurched.
No wonder we couldn't find patient zero.
Therewasno patient zero. No mysterious traveler who'd brought the disease from outside. No unlucky villager who'dpicked it up at a market or clinic somewhere beyond our borders.
Someone hadsentit here. Packaged it up in cheerful white boxes with smiling logos. Disguised it as charity, as goodwill, as humanitarian aid. All of it contaminated. All of it weaponized.
History repeating itself, centuries later, with the same calculated cruelty.
My vision blurred at the edges. I thought of everyone who'd gotten sick—the children crying in the night, the families huddled in quarantine. I thought of how quickly it had spread, how it had seemed to appear everywhere at once. Because ithadbeen everywhere at once.
"Zuhra." The word scraped out of my throat like gravel. "I need you to gather everything that came in these boxes. Every blanket, every tin of food. All of it. Right now."
She froze mid-reach, her dark eyes snapping to mine. "What? Jordan, why would—"
"Just do it. Please." I couldn't keep the urgency from bleeding into my voice. "And then lock it somewhere. Somewhere isolated. Somewhere no one can accidentally touch it."
"Jordan, what is wrong?" But even as she asked, she was already moving, her hands flying across the shelves, checking labels with growing alarm.
I set the box down with exaggerated care, as if it contained a live grenade. My hands wouldn't stop shaking. "I need to make a phone call first. But Zuhra—" I caught her wrist as she reached for a stack of blankets. "Don't touch anything with your bare hands. Use gloves. Double up if you have to, and when you're finished, scrub yourself down with disinfectant, hottest water you can stand."
The color drained from her face like water from a broken vessel. "Oh my ancestors." Her voice dropped to a horrified whisper. "You think—" She couldn't finish, just swallowed hard, her throat working. "You think it has something to do with the disease? With what happened to us?"