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was later traced to a piece of playground equipment that had become contaminated during an earlier recess session. We know that the virus was carried into the school by Nathan Patterson, age 10. He was a student in Mr. O’Toole’s fourth-grade class. He weighed 78 lbs., putting him well above the Kellis-Amberlee amplification threshold. He was not infected when he passed the checkpoint protecting the classrooms.
    Hand swabs and sterilization would be introduced in the state of Washington in 2037 as a direct result of the events at Evergreen. Since then, these procedures have saved an unknown number of lives. There have been no further Evergreens.
    I doubt this is any comfort to the parents of the students who died. It would certainly not have been a comfort to me.
    â€”from Unspoken Tragedies of the American School System by Alaric Kwong, March 19, 2044
    *  *  *
    Wednesday, March 19, 2036, 11:23 a.m.
    Elaine Oldenburg’s class was deeply involved in reviewing their vocabulary lists when the windows locked down.
    It was a small sound, intentionally calibrated to cause as little dismay or panic as possible: just a clunk from the base of the window as the small bolts that usually hung suspended above the metal frame suddenly descended, forming an effectively unbreakable seal. Elaine looked up, eyes widening briefly. That was the only sign of surprise that she allowed herself to show. For a teacher, keeping her students from panicking always had to be her top priority. If she betrayed any dismay over the situation, they would pick it up, and she would risk losing control. That was something she couldn’t afford.
    â€œEveryone, heads down and read quietly,” she said, pushing away from her desk. “I need to make a quick call to the office.”
    The students grumbled but did as they were told. Those who sat close enough to the window to have heard the locks deploy assumed that it was a drill; why else would their desks still be open? They bent their heads like all the others, pulling out their readers and focusing on the text.
    Elaine Oldenburg walked briskly to the corner where the phone hung, old-fashioned and obscurely menacing in this world of cell phones and wireless headsets. The school phone wouldn’t have looked out of place twenty years ago, with its big, heavy buttons and curly brown cord. She plucked the receiver off the wall and brought it to her ear.
    She didn’t need to dial. The school’s basic emergency broadcast was already playing, and she paled as it washed over her: “—repeat, do not panic. We are investigating the reported outbreak. Please remain in your classrooms. Please do not allow any students to leave the classroom. Please do not inform the students that there is a problem. We repeat, do not panic. We are investigating—”
    Elaine carefully set the phone back in its cradle and turned to look around the room at her students. They were reading, or at least pretending to read; some of them were no doubt just staring at the pages, wishing that the confusing jumble of numbers and letters would resolve itself into words. All of her students were reading at the required grade level, but it was harder for some than it was for others. Just like it had always been. The Rising couldn’t change everything, I suppose , she thought, and reddened a little, annoyed by her own flippancy. There was an outbreak on school grounds, or at least there might be. That was what she should have been thinking about, not how well her students were or were not reading.
    Keeping her movement as calm and casual as possible, she walked over to the door and tried the knob. To her surprise, it turned easily, and the door—designed to open from the inside and not the outside, no matter how hard the knob was twisted—came open when she tugged. She took a deep breath before sticking her head out into the hall, looking both ways for signs that anything was