Margo Holland's Arc

Chapter 8 of 13

Margo was halfway through loading the medical kit when she heard boots on the hospital stairs. She didn't look up until the footsteps stopped at the doorway, familiar enough that she knew who it was before the voice confirmed it. "Dr. Holland." The woman held up a folder with military stamps across the front. "I brought proof you were right about the transmission risk." Margo recognized the voice first—clipped, precise, the kind that cut through radio static without losing a syllable. Then the face. Dr. Chen had worked two labs down from her in the research facility before the bombs fell. The wedding ring on her finger was scratched dull now, the band worn thin where it used to catch light under fluorescent fixtures. She'd driven in on a faded blue truck Margo could see through the window, parked crooked like she'd been in a hurry. The folder hit the desk between them. Inside was Margo's own signature at the bottom of a report recommending immediate halt to human proximity testing. The date showed she'd filed it three weeks before the facility went dark. Margo picked up the report and scanned the text. She'd documented six cases of cellular breakdown in lab personnel with no direct FEV contact, all presenting identical mutation markers to what she was seeing now in the courier and the soldier. The military had classified it, buried it deep enough that she'd assumed every copy went down with the facility. But Chen had kept one. "Why now?" Margo asked. Chen leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed. "Because I've been tracking the same mutation pattern you found. Four settlements in the last month, all within fifty miles of Sierra Army Depot. Lab Three wasn't sealed—it was staged to look sealed while they kept running tests through the back access." She pulled a second document from the folder, this one showing supply requisitions dated two years after the supposed breach. "They needed someone to blame when it spread, so they made sure your report disappeared." Margo set the papers down carefully, her hands steady despite the weight settling in her chest. The mutation wasn't an accident or a new variant—it was the same contamination she'd tried to stop decades ago, still spreading because the military had chosen secrecy over containment. Chen was offering her the proof she'd need to justify the mission to anyone who questioned it, but it came with a cost. If Chen knew about Lab Three's active status, she knew Margo was planning to go in. "You want something," Margo said. Chen nodded once. "A sample from the source. Whatever's still running in Lab Three, I need tissue evidence to prove the transmission chain. You get your diagnostic equipment, I get my proof." Margo looked at the keyring in her kit, then back at Chen. She'd planned this as a surgical extraction—get in, grab the equipment, get out before the mutations spread further. Now Chen was asking her to collect evidence from the contamination source itself, which meant going deeper into Lab Three than she'd intended. "Deal," Margo said, and pulled the Lab Three key from her kit. She held it up so Chen could see the military insignia, then tucked it back with the others. "But we leave at dawn, and you follow my route. I've got access through the mining entrance and keys to the restricted areas. You try to improvise, you're on your own." Chen's expression didn't change, but she pulled a worn notebook from her jacket and opened it to a hand-drawn map of Sierra Army Depot's underground layout. "I've been mapping their supply routes for six months. The pneumatic tube system connects Lab Three directly to the server room—that's where they stored the transmission data." She tapped a junction point on the map. "We extract there, we get both the equipment and the source documentation