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The strangest thing about the dreams isn't even the fact that she's somehow psychically linked to a growing alien population. She's made her peace with that. Either it's a sign of her psychological health, or it's a coping mechanism. She hasn't decided.
The hard part is having to share every dream she has with Cavennaugh and Lucas and compare notes, just in case something that seems innocuous -- like the time she dreams about playing Wheel of Fortune with Neil Diamond -- turns out to be meaningful.
Most of the time, though, she knows. When she wakes from a dream shuddering and fighting the urge to turn on the light, when she's afraid to look at the dark corners of her once-familiar bedroom, when she can't face her own reflection in the mirror...she knows.
***
She runs into Cavennaugh on her way to the briefing room. One look at the dark circles under his eyes confirms that he had the dream too. A forest of glass, spires reaching into a dark sky, that part is almost always the same. But this time, the sense of people behind her and around her, in the corner of her eye, hiding everywhere but where she's looking. A quiet hum of voices, whispering something she can't quite hear, but something she understands nonetheless.
She takes comfort in the fact that Cavennaugh doesn't speak, just falls in next to her. She's learning to distinguish which of his actions arise from his personality, rather than his military training. He's generally so guarded that it's difficult to pick up on any sort of body language, but they've shared enough dreams for her to recognize the tension in his shoulders, the crease between his brows.
Lucas, on the other hand, is never hard to read.
"You guys had this one too, right?" he asks, walking backwards in front of them and illustrating with his hands. "With the glass trees and the whole creepy crowd?"
"Yeah," she says, exchanging a glance with Cavennaugh. "We had it too."
***
The Red Team gathers, not because of the dream, but because they've discovered what the dream means. J.T. stands at the head of the table like, delivering the latest information like a judge pronouncing sentence.
"Hospitals in Austin, Texas, are dealing with a mysterious outbreak. They're trying to keep it quiet and limit public panic, but the data miners found a blog posting by the sister of one of the victims. She was with her brother at the hospital, and she says that he 'exploded'."
"Exposure to the signal?" Fenway asks worriedly. "On a scale large enough to look like an outbreak?"
J.T. nods and clicks the tiny remote in his hand. The video screen displays grainy footage of a man sitting on a flimsy folding chair, an image projected onto the wall behind him. The sound is muted, but none of them needs to hear it to recognize the alien signal. "One of the two remaining Big Horn crewmen, Miguel Pena, somehow got on to an Austin public access program. The only thing that saved us from a full-scale disaster is the fact that the program aired at three A.M."
Ramsey twists a paper clip in his hands, folding it into a spiralling shape that echoes the fractal pattern they're all so familiar with. "The audience probably consisted of insomniacs and stoner college kids."
J.T. glares down at him, and Ramsey tosses the paper clip onto the table and looks over at her, slightly abashed. Molly shakes her head, as much at J.T. as Ramsey. For all his ability, J.T. hasn't learned how to handle the other team members yet. The more caustic Ramsey gets, the more worried he is.
"We're looking at a thirty deaths," J.T. says. "Maybe more. And if the rate of mutation is anything like what we've seen, there could be at least fifty infected people loose in a metro area of over a million. This might be the disaster that tips the scales."
Molly doesn't like the quality of the silence that falls over the room after that. "Fenway, we'll need you to collect the corpses from the morgues and arrange to ship them back here. You'll also have to come up with a plausible explanation for the doctors."
"Stonewalling. Right." Fenway scrubs a hand across the bristles of his hair, twitching unhappily. He, more than any of the others, makes her feel guilty for pulling him on the Red Team. She knows that he's unhappy with the secrecy, the underhandedness of it all. His discomfort doesn't arise out of some perverse dislike of government, but out of true conviction. And she has become the person who makes him violate those convictions, every day.
"Lucas, Ramsey, you two need to analyze the signal that was broadcast. Take it apart, make sure we're not dealing with some new permutation."
"Great," says Ramsey. "Road trip! Everyone pile into the car."
There's a time to acknowledge his discomfort and a time to ignore it; she doesn't want to give him any more reinforcement. "Cavennaugh, you and I will try to track down Pena before he finds another opportunity to infect more people."
Cavennaugh flips through Pena's file. "He's a graduate of the University of Texas, minored in communications. We should look up some of his old classmates or teachers, or see if he's got family in the area. I'll work up a cover for us."
"As what?" Fenway asks sarcastically. "The FCC?"
"We want to capture him, not fine him for indecency," Molly says. "We leave in four hours."
They file out of the room, Ramsey and Pegg already bickering about signal strength and refresh rates, Fenway and Cavennaugh trailing silently behind.
"You know the strain is really starting to wear on them. And you."
Molly starts. Maybe J.T. is more perceptive than she's given him credit for. "I know," she sighs.
"We should think about getting a psychiatrist on staff. You've got to have someone to talk to besides each other."
"How many psychiatrists do you know with a high enough security clearance?" And a high tolerance for eccentric geniuses and aliens, she thinks to herself.
J.T. smiles. "More than you might think."
***
It's the last day of finals, so the campus is nearly deserted. It makes their job easier; clearing the Communications building only takes ten minutes. They split into teams of two to search, and Cavennaugh assigns a man named Folse to go with Molly. Folse is well over six feet tall, solid muscle. Molly feels like she ought to protest at being so obviously coddled, but she won't pretend that she's not grateful.
As they search the third floor, the hallways harsh with fluorescent light, she has to fight the urge to turn around. The silent crowd from her dream haunts the spaces behind her, as if their breath is brushing across her shoulders and stirring her hair.
"I'm pretty sure he's in the building somewhere," she says to Folse, who nods and double-checks his gun.
They come to a door marked "Computer Lab", and the window set in the door isn't dark. Folse reaches out a hand to stop her, then silently indicates that he'll go through the door first, down low. She re-anchors her sweaty fingers around the grip of her gun and nods. She knows how to do this.
Folse takes two deep breaths before he kicks the door open and rolls inside. He's barely upright when Pena steps out from the shadows and descends on him. Molly gets off a shot and misses, and taken from behind, Folse doesn't have a chance. She hears his neck snap with a sickeningly wet crunch.
She thumbs the panic button on her radio just before Pena backhands her into the opposite wall. He's insanely strong, more than any other infectee they've encountered, and if she'd known, she'd have made Cavennaugh bring more men, split them into larger groups, but it's too late to revise the plan now. He twists the gun out of her hand so violently that her fingers spark with pain.
"Why do you keep fighting us?" The gun clatters as he tosses it away; he cups her face with the other hand, his thumb pressing against her jawbone with brutal force.
She tries to get enough breath to answer, hoping if she keeps him talking, he won't kill her. Over Pena's shoulder, she sees shapes moving in the computer lab.
"We're trying to help you," she manages to gasp.
"We don't want your help. None of us." The shapes resolve themselves into figures, into the oppressive crowd from her dream. They gather just inside the lab door, watching. All of the people who've been infected in this city, they've found each other. And they've found her. They want her to become part of them. She can feel that even now, in the waking world. They want her skills, her connections.
Pena's hand moves down to her throat and starts to squeeze. Her breath starts to catch, then to seize in her lungs. "You should join us," Pena says. "It will only take a minute, and then you'll understand everything."
This is the part that scares her the most about the dreams. They make her want to understand. If she just understood more about these aliens, maybe she could figure out a way to stop them, or to communicate with them. She knows herself, how far she'll go to gather that kind of information, and it would be so easy to convince herself that it would be for the greater good. To believe that she'd retain enough of her personality to share what she learned with Fenway or Pegg.
Then she looks into Pena's vacant eyes.
She hears Cavennaugh shout "Molly!", and she wrenches herself out of Pena's grasp, even though it feels like her throat is being crushed. She stumbles down the hallway and hears the whine of a stun charge passing over her head. Hands grab her, and she pushes against them until she realizes that they belong to Cavennaugh's men, and the walls blur as they drag her away, through the hallway, down the stairs, out into the sunlight and away from the relentless crowd.
***
She's aware of the smell before she opens her eyes; hospital antiseptic is unmistakable. Monitors beep quietly, and she decides that as long as no alarms are going off, it's probably safe to open her eyes.
Cavennaugh's sitting in a chair near the foot of her bed, watching a football game on the muted TV.
"Hey," she says, but it comes out as a croak. Rivers of pain run down her throat.
He turns around with more emotion than she's seen on his face in a while, then levers himself out of the chair to stand next to her. "Hey."
"What happened?"
"You've got a sprained wrist, a couple fractured fingers, and a concussion." That wasn't what she meant, but she goes along with it. If it wasn't important to him, he wouldn't have said it, and she doesn't need any psychiatrist to tell her that he's blaming himself for what happened.
"And a bruised throat," she whispers.
"Yeah," he admits. "That too."
"Did you get Pena?"
He snorts. "Hell, no. Did you see how many people he had? We retreated."
"You ran?" It surprises her that she can still smile, although maybe it shouldn't, not any more.
"We retreated," he repeats, with emphasis. "There were too many of them, and you were hurt. I think I might have killed Pena, though. I shocked him twice."
"Did you find a body?" She coughs after she finishes the sentence, and he reaches over to a table next to the bed and pours her a cup of water. She hears ice rattle in the pitcher, and the cold water hurts and soothes her throat at the same time.
"No. The others might have taken it with them. The building has too many exits to cover, and there are too many other buildings in close proximity where they could have fled."
She nods and tips the cup up to finish the water. When Cavennaugh says, "We found Folse's body, though," she wishes she'd kept talking, as if she could just keep talking forever and not have to remember what happened to him.
"I'm...I'm so sorry."
He doesn't tell her that it wasn't her fault, and she's so grateful for that she almost starts crying. Ever since they discovered the alien signal, horrible things have been happening to people, some of them her friends, and all anyone says to her is, "It's not your fault." Not her fault, but her responsibility, and maybe Cavennaugh's the only other person in a position to understand how she feels.
"I didn't even know his first name," she says, almost as an afterthought.
He takes the cup from her hand and replaces it on the table. "Ricky."
"Does it seem to you like things just keep getting worse?" He starts to answer, but she keeps talking. "They keep finding new ways to infect people, and we're not even close to a cure yet. We're holding fifteen people in a secret detention facility and lying to their families about what's happened to them. Fenway's not sleeping, Pegg's marriage is already breaking up, and J.T.'s about to punch Ramsey."
"It's a tough job," he says, but she doesn't want to be consoled.
"They're gaining new abilities. Pena was stronger than anyone else we've encountered, and we have no idea how many people he managed to infect. I'm supposed to be the person who sees the contingencies. I'm supposed to make the plans that keep people safe!" She stops and swallows, because if she says another word, she probably will cry, pain and sorrow mingling in her throat.
She can see him thinking, deciding what to say. This is not his strength, and she thinks she shouldn't have laid it on him. It should have been J.T., who shared the burden of leadership, or Fenway, who'd been pessimistic from the beginning. But Cavennaugh reaches out for her hand and puts her to shame.
"Molly, they probably expected a cakewalk. The only reason we have a chance is because of you. Without your plan, they would have taken over half of the world before we even knew we were at war."
"But we're losing," she says desperately, adding the name "Ricky Folse" to her own secret list. Brian Janklow, Libby Drennan, Karen Reynolds. Lucas Pegg, Arthur Ramsey, Nigel Fenway. And Angela Hatton.
"No, we're not," he says, squeezing tightly, as if he can press belief into her skin. "We're fighting."
She swallows, and tries to banish the image of that silent crowd, reaching out to her. "That's not much of a difference."
"It's what we've got," he says. He grabs her hand even tighter, and maybe she does believe him.