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young, like a teenager, instead of his twenty-four years. He looked like his little brother, Charlie. He ran a hand through his dark hair, wiping back the dampness on his forehead that he knew was more than just rain.
    “Pull it together, Danny.” He tore his eyes from the mirror. Daniel tried to remember the boy his brother Charlie had been before the Delta Fever set in. The happy kid with a snaggletooth and a love of banana-flavored candy, comic books, and, surprisingly, movies about horses. Danny and Charlie. A nine-year age difference, yet somehow they’d still always been a team. Daniel had been off at school when the Fever swept through Charlie’s class. They never traced the route of the disease. But it didn’t matter how it had arrived, just that it was there.
    Daniel had returned home to find his little brother in quarantine, sealed in a white room at a hospital, where he scratched at the floor with bloodied fingers, his scarecrow-thin shoulders shaking, unable to stand. Daniel had asked if he could bring him anything, candy, comics. Charlie had barely been able to speak, but he’d asked for one thing: dirt. He was so hungry and it was the only thing that sounded good anymore.
    Daniel knew Charlie hadn’t been hungry for dirt, but for the minerals it could provide, minerals being stripped from his own blood by the Fever. Anemia had ravaged him and iron was only a temporary solution. Daniel had given blood, there had been transfusions, but it would never be enough.
    Charlie had died before his eleventh birthday. And Daniel immediately went to work on a cure. How many other Charlies had died since? The Fever seemed unstoppable, but so was he.
    He changed his thesis to target Delta Fever specifically. After graduating with multiple degrees, he went to work for the military. They had the best laboratories and access to viral cultures of Delta Fever. Daniel started adapting methods used for cancer therapies at the turn of the century. Retargeted viruses, they were called. A way of invading a disease and altering it so that it attacked itself, or alerted the body to fight back before it could take hold.
    It was careful work, retargeting a virus, but he had done it. Daniel had bioengineered a new virus with one purpose—to attack Delta Fever in the bloodstream. It was a subtle invasion that attached a new protein to the infected cells. Like pulling a fire alarm, this new protein signaled the body to attack the infection with everything it had.
    At least, that had been the plan.
    What actually happened was something much more dangerous. Daniel’s cure for Delta Fever had created an even deadlier strain of the disease. Charlie had taken over a week to die. Daniel’s virus would have killed him in less than twenty-four hours. It was worse than a laboratory mistake. It was a weapon, a time bomb that only killed Delta Fever carriers, which now included every inhabitant of the Delta Coast.
    The United States economy was suffering. If the Delta could be recovered, stripped of Delta Fever and harvested for its natural resources—timber, oil, shipping lanes, and more . . . If the military knew about Daniel’s virus, they might very well use it. Genocide in the name of money. And it would be his fault.
    His first instinct had been to destroy it, to run his samples through a steam autoclave, a machine designed to cook viruses and bacteria until they were dead. Or he could have drowned the whole batch in bleach. But he hadn’t done it. Daniel had looked at those six tiny vials, each no bigger than his little finger, and seen years of effort, money, time, and determination. And something else: a key. One that could unlock the doorway to a cure. As dangerous as this step was, it was also necessary. Now Daniel was on his way to break through the quarantine, into Orleans.
    A line of military trucks barred the entrance onto the freeway, an olive drab caravan of canvas-covered stake beds and flatbeds bearing heavy equipment.