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the most interesting thing to happen to me in ages.
    From an attaché case, Louise removed a (fully collated and alphabetized printed-out) dossier on me. She flipped through it. The noise from the chopper wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t good, either. “I have all the basics here: your name, credit data, old emails and all Internet searches from the past two years, your work history, your medical data—and by the way, don’t worry, we have lots of asthma inhalers where we’re going. What else? A list of known sexual partners—”
    “ What the fuck? ”
    “Please, just bear with me here. We also have a list of all your fitness centre clients, their medical and occupational histories—”
    “Louise, Jesus, why do you even need me here?”
    “My dear, because you were stung. I didn’t get stung. Nobody else in New Zealand got stung. You did. Now, tell me everything you’ve eaten or ingested in the past forty-eight hours.”
    Right. So I rattled off my sad little semi-anorexic list, throwing caution to the wind. I went into minute detail, right down to how many times I shook the cinnamon shaker over my coffee.
    One question really threw me: “Samantha, have you recently picked any scabs and eaten them?”
    “Okay, I confess, I did.”
    “Your own, I take it.”
    “A small one that was on my elbow.” I showed her the almost-healed patch. “Louise, this is getting creepy.”
    “We have to cover all our bases.”
    As we approached Auckland Airport from the south, I felt about as pure as an oil spill. The drought had been going on for ages. The city was brown and I felt I embodied the spirit of whatever it was that had made the place die.
    I was expecting a luxury jet, but instead our plane for the trip was a U.S. military transport craft with a flat grey fuselage and maybe six windows where there ought to have been forty—the sort of vessel that could contain secrets as well as answers. When our chopper landed, we walked maybe ten steps to a wheeled aluminum gangplank that led into the plane’s interior, a huge, hollow echoey mess—like the inside of the van my old friend Gary used to keep for his bungee jumping business: scratched metal panels, cords and snaps and canvas duffel bags. All that was missing was fast-food litter and cum rags. A few rows of thrashed grey leather seats bearing the Alaska Airlines logo were bolted onto the floor.
    “You know how the economy is these days,” Louise said when she saw my face. “In any event, you get the clean room.”
    She ushered me towards the rear of the plane, where she opened the door to a smallish Plexi-walled room.
    It was, if nothing else, clean. White on white on white, with a custom mattress to allow for sleep during turbulence. “How long is the flight?”
    “Fourteen hours. You can remove your suit now.”
    “Louise, do me a favour, can you give me some drugs to make it go more quickly?”
    “Drugs?” She closed the door behind us. “Samantha, everything that enters and leaves you for the next month goes into sample jars and will be scanned beneath electron microscopes. No drugs today, especially none from your regular ganja supplier . . .” she rifled through some pages, “Ricky Ngau at the chip stand on Ruahine Street. By the way, their fish isn’t fish. It’s textured tofu.”
    “Jesus, why is it so important for you to look at me so closely? My bee sting was random!”
    I got a reproachful look. “Your sting may have been random—but what if you were, well, for lack of a better word, chosen.”
    “Chosen?”
    “Selected. Or located. Or sought out.”
    “I hardly think so.”
    “We’re not taking any chances. Aside from you and Zack, there hasn’t been a bee sighting for five years.”
    “Is Zack still in quarantine?”
    “He is.”
    “In Atlanta?”
    “No. In North Carolina—a place called Research Triangle Park. Dreadful name for a city, but there you have it.”
    “Did you see his . . . clip ?”
    Who hadn’t? “More