Chapter 3
Lucilla
Luci rubbed her temples as the automated lab report scrolled across the screen
Again.
She let out a sharp breath and stood up so fast her stool fell behind her.
The thud was loud but no one came running.
They never did. Over the past few days, her lab had become a graveyard of petri dishes and failed formulas, each one ordered, labeled precisely, and yet, still totally worthless to her.
She reset the centrifuge for the hundredth time that week, muttering under her breath as the machine beeped at her for inputting settings it had memorized by now.
The pipettes were beginning to ache in her hands and her gloves were starting to stick together from the sweat collecting at her palms. She had already changed lab coats twice: once after spilling an unstable reagent solution on herself and again when she realized she’d been wearing yesterday’s coat.
Trial 1218.
She watched it mix with the Hollowed virus under the microscope, pulse once with promise, then fracture under the pressure like every other strain before it.
A soft whine escaped her lips, and she slammed her hand against the metal table, not with enough force to break anything but enough to stop herself from screaming.
How the hell was she supposed to find a viable vaccine when she couldn’t even get a modified protein chain to hold?
She slumped in her chair, eyes burning as the screen loaded yet another data sheet filled with red alerts and error warnings. Her notes were starting to blur together in her mind. It felt like the cure was hovering just out of reach, mocking her with every near success that ended in failure.
But still, she refused to walk away.
She removed her gloves, disposed of them, then reached up to untie the messy bun she’d thrown together that morning.
After smoothing out the flyaways, she retied it tighter so she’d have one less distraction.
Taking a soothing breath, Luci stepped toward the secure isolation room just ten paces from her desk.
Her arms folded tightly across her chest as her gaze locked onto the infected patient restrained on one of the cold, stainless steel morgue tables brought up from downstairs.
Its body lay still as it was kept in a medically induced coma through a potent cocktail of concentrated morphine and xylazine.
The latter was a tranquilizer typically reserved for large animals like horses but it still required a high dose to subdue a patient like this.
Luci liked to think of it as a subject rather than a monster, but the truth was that it hardly resembled a human anymore.
The virus had a way of increasing the rate of decay, making the infected go frail and thin, their skin a strange hue of purple.
She could tell that her subject had been young from the lack of wrinkles on his face, and the first time she’d seen the man her gaze had caught on his uniform.
It was the same one Noah had worn for years.
When the outbreak first began, Luci had spent weeks drowning from the heartbreak of being unable to locate her brother.
The chips implanted in their hands years ago should have offered some reassurance, a location ping or faint signal of life, but every time she asked, the answer was the same: there was nothing.
Eventually, she stopped asking. The only explanation left was that he’d either been torn apart, or worse, he was out there, mindless and lost in a horde of the Hollowed.
Neither possibility offered her any peace.
Still, human nature demanded purpose in the face of devastation, and so, she’d poured herself
into the desperate hope of a cure. Her superiors had dismissed her ambition as delusional, and whispers of insanity from her peers followed her throughout the quarantine.
But Luci had long since grown used to being underestimated.
When she suggested capturing and studying an infected subject, the pushback had been even fiercer.
It was Alex who’d convinced them. He’d believed in her when no one else had.
The infected patient before her, held under layers of sedation and steel restraints, was his doing. A gift in some way — proof that she wasn’t entirely alone in this.
Every virus had a weakness, a loose seam in its armor. She just had to find it.
Luci drew closer to the glass, letting her breath fog the window before she raised her sleeve to brush it away.
What remained of the corpse was being kept alive through an IV line dripping clear fluid and nutrients into its withered arm.
Human medicine still worked despite the fact that the virus had taken over its mind.
That had to mean that there was a solution to all of this.
A soft knock at the door pulled Luci from her thoughts. Alex stepped inside with two trays from the cafeteria balanced in one hand while Luna trotted faithfully at his side.
“I brought food,” he announced casually, holding up the trays like a peace offering. “Before you forget and try to survive on instant coffee and water again.”
Luci cracked the faintest smile and pulled up an extra stool for him. “How considerate.”
“Don’t act so surprised. I’m very nurturing,” he said playfully as he set everything out on the metal desk and pulled out two forks from his pocket. Luna curled up at Luci’s feet without a sound, waiting for something to drop from their plates.
They ate at her desk in silence, save for the soft humming of the air vents and the occasional metallic cling of their forks against their trays. It wasn’t until she was halfway through her zucchini noodles that Luci finally said something.
“What happens when someone gets bitten?” she asked, not looking up. “I mean…how fast does it happen? When they turn.”
Alex glanced up from his food, chewing slowly before answering. “It varies. Some go down in minutes, others fight it off for longer, hours if they’re lucky, but they always turn.”
Luci’s brow furrowed and she nodded slowly. “So no one has ever survived a bite?”
“Not that I know of,” he admitted. “Why?”
She didn’t answer immediately but her gaze drifted downward as she thought of more questions to ask. Then, she looked at Luna.
“Has she ever been bitten?” Luci asked, gesturing toward the German shepherd.
Alex raised an eyebrow, then shook his head. “No. She’s been scratched up a few times and there’s been some close calls, but she’s never been bitten.”
“What about the other way around?” Luci pressed. “Has Luna ever bitten one of them? Has she gotten infected blood in her mouth or eyes?”
Alex paused, caught off guard by the question. “Yeah…actually. The first time I got cornered on a run, she went for the guy’s neck. Why?”
Her fork hovered mid-air like she’d forgotten she was eating.
There it was, the loose seam she’d been looking for.
“I’ve been using the wrong base,” she whispered, more to herself than to him.
“All my recombinant trials — of course they’re unstable.
The original source cells are all wrong.
I’ve been using human protein strands because they’re clean, but…
they’re not compatible because humans turn but animals don’t,” Luci explained, dropping her fork.
“They can’t turn. That’s why Luna’s fine.
That’s why the infection didn’t spread through the animal population. ”
Alex blinked. “Wait — what are you saying?”
“I need to use something closer to us,” she responded, already moving towards her computer. “Something human adjacent, like pigs. We share so much of our genome with them, from our organs to our immune responses.”
Behind her, Alex exchanged a look with Luna. “Guess lunch time is over.”
Alex had returned from his patrol shift in the towers above the hospital by the time Luci finally reformulated a new vaccine strain.
One she believed with certainty would work.
All it had taken were a few blood samples from Luna, a couple hours bent over her microscope, and that bright mind Alex insisted was her greatest weapon.
They stood in absolute silence as the centrifuge spun, until a loud ping made both of them flinch. Luci pulled on a fresh pair of gloves and her fingers trembled as she removed the vial, pipetted the sample, and fed it into the flow cytometry machine sitting crookedly on the counter.
She inhaled slowly, counting the seconds as her computer screen came to life.
Colored peaks and scatter plots mapped the activation of T-cells, while a rising curve tracked elevated cytokine levels. It was evidence that the immune system was finally responding. For the first time, the screen showed success.
It was working.
The holographic screen blinked, freezing briefly before a box appeared reading, Trial 1219: Viable. Recombinant strain stability detected.
Luci held her breath.
Alex leaned over her shoulder, his voice barely above a whisper. “Did it work?”
She gave a small nod despite the disbelief still clouding her mind.
Alex exhaled slowly, like he’d been holding his breath for days. “Holy fuck,” he whispered. “You did it Lucilla, you fucking did it!”
Luci took a step back from the screen and nodded again, slower this time.
A deep, shaky breath escaped her lips, followed by a short laugh of disbelief.
She’d spent nearly three years buried in that lab, drowning in failure and false hope.
And now, against all odds, she’d figured it out.
More tests needed to be run and there were protocols that needed to be followed, but she’d done it.
This was her ticket out of the reproduction program.
Without wasting another second, she printed the preliminary readings and hung her lab coat on its hook with renewed purpose.
“We’ve got to show Doc. He’ll know what to do next,” she said, already heading for the door.
It didn’t matter that it was the middle of the night.
Some things were worth losing sleep over.