35
They hadn’t found Dr. Terry Shae—not yet anyway—but his life’s work escaped Tizoc unscathed.
Emergency crews restored cellular to the island on the same day Shae’s data hit the web. Dan’s shattered phone was bombarded with the images and videos of himself and fellow guests across news sites and social media. He sat on the edge of the mega-cot, hands trembling. There he was, inciting a riot on TikTok. And there was Rico Flores on Fox News, executing an old woman in a pixelated video. Then there was Lilyanna Collins—it must’ve been that first night—rallying visitants of Building A to commandeer the island’s supplies.
Dan grinned for the first time in days. She couldn’t run from that.
There were terabytes of data—or gigabytes, whichever’s larger—and next came the text messages and the phone calls and the emails, and now the president was commenting on Tizoc, the disaster had its own Wikipedia page, and Marvel Maids let Dan know he was out of PTO and wouldn’t be paid for any additional time away.
In a press conference, the Space Telescope Science Institute condemned Shae’s actions in the clearest possible terms, but then a hot mic caught the director whispering, “The data is invaluable. You’ve gotta admit that.”