It had taken some time to summon the group from their assorted corners of the building, but by the time everyone had gathered in the workshop the close-knit grapevine had done its work and the atmosphere was both tense and extremely confused.
Andrea was standing off to one side, her back against the wall, watching Sidney and Hoffman through red-rimmed eyes. Sidney was sat on a table with her hands clasped in front of her and her feet swinging from time to time, looking almost girlish in her composure as she waited for everyone to settle down, although something about the movement of her eyes suggested that this apparent serenity was a carefully crafted act. Hoffman remained some distance away, hardly seeming to be a part of events, but as he flicked his gaze at Andrea, she looked away. There was nothing there that she wanted to see.
By degrees, the group fell silent, and now they were all focused on Sidney, who shifted a little as she felt the weight of that combined stare, but eventually restrained herself and began to speak.
"Before I say anything," she said, slowly, "I want you all to know that everything you're about to hear is conjecture on my part. I don't have the time or the facilities to confirm my conclusions, but it's a chance, and a better one than you've had so far."
She hesitated now, as if pausing for questions or comments, but in their absence, she went on.
"I tested the subject for the Babinski and Hoffmann reflexes," – here she ignored a soft, amused grunt from beside her – "and both came up positive. Setting aside the details, both of these are abnormal reactions that indicate very serious damage to the medulla oblongata. The brain-stem," she added, as an afterthought, translating for the benefit of her audience.
This did not appear to get much of a reaction from the assembly, but eventually, Shane glanced around at his companions before speaking out.
"You mean the virus is affectin' the brain?" he asked, seeming slightly embarrassed. "Dr. Jenner told us that. Ain't no news. Sorry, ma'am," he finished, and then wound down as Sidney laid a firm, patient stare upon him for a second.
"I have a great deal of respect for the CDC's efforts," she told him, "but I suspect they were looking in the wrong place all along, and also failed to try anything so basic as a reflex test. The answer's not in the virus, but in the walkers. To answer your question, Deputy: not quite. The virus is attacking the only part of the brain that still remains functional, and what's more," she went on, pausing for a preparatory breath, "if I'm right, the damage is degenerative."
This time, the response was little short of incendiary, and Sidney held up a hand to quell the sudden outburst of conversation in front of her. In the interim, Andrea watched her cast a low, sidelong glance at Hoffman, who seemed to have turned inward, and might as well have been carved from marble.
"People," said Sidney, calmly, speaking over the hubbub until it died away beneath her soothing tone, "I'm going to speculate for you, and I want you to remember that that's all it is. The cerebral cortex is rendered inoperable. Nonetheless, there are certain of its functions that the walkers still possess, such as sensory processing and motor control, which are presumably now being routed through the medulla instead and putting it under the kind of stresses it was never designed to take. In short, I believe they're burning out."
"You mean they're dyin'?"
Everyone looked around; including Hoffman, Andrea noted. Sophia had spoken up from her perch on her mother's knee, and Carol looked understandably pained at this worryingly adult observation, but said nothing to quell the girl. Sidney offered the child a bright, warm smile from across the floor and nodded a little. She followed this with a slight cough, and then her expression grew serious once more.
"There are so many variables here I won't even attempt to list them," she said. "The lesions could be pre-mortem, although it would be highly unusual for a young girl to display even one, let alone both responses. The damage may not be progressive after all. Even if it is, I have no way of predicting a time scale. Weeks, months, maybe even years." She shrugged helplessly. "All I can offer you with this is a little hope."
"So, supposin' you're right," said Rick, after a lot of quiet thought; he had not, in fact, spoken for a long time, "what can we expect to happen?"
"Well, brain-stem damage can show up in a lot of ways," said Sidney, pausing to look up at the ceiling, as if for inspiration, "but typically, I'd expect first loss of fine motor function, then dizziness and loss of balance, unconsciousness, cardiopulmonary shutdown, and death." She sighed shortly. "Whether it'll work that way on a reanimated corpse, who can say?"
"There's only one problem with that," said a quiet voice, from off to the side. Diana bore up under the heat of sudden scrutiny, pushed herself out of the corner in which she'd been lurking and swiped her hair out of her eyes before continuing. "There's no loss of motor skills. If anything, they're learning. I was almost killed because one of them dodged when I took a swing at it."
"I'm gonna swear there was something wrong with that thing before we brought it in," said Hoffman, his brow furrowed. "It looked pretty spaced out."
"Did I ask you?" said Diana, acid dripping from every word; though she was not surprised, Andrea was nonetheless shocked at the teenager's sudden attack of bare-faced hostility, particularly in front of so many witnesses. If Diana was bothered by this public display, however, she merely shrugged it off and looked back at Sidney, her eyebrow raised.
"I'm going to say it again," replied Sidney, with what sounded like the tiniest strain upon her patience, "I have no clear answers for you or anybody else. Perhaps the child was infected before the others, or perhaps it has something to do with a higher metabolic rate. And now," she said, her tone becoming distinctly edged, "you're going to apologise to Detective Hoffman."
She might as well have slapped the girl for the reaction this caused. Diana's dark eyes widened in disbelief, and she raised a trembling hand to her throat for a moment before it sagged back to her side once more. The entire gathering had fallen silent; so silent, in fact, that even from across the room, Andrea heard Diana draw in a deep, shivering breath.
"What?" she asked, her incredulity sliding a little way towards outright anger.
"You heard me well enough," said Sidney. "I won't have you speaking to people that way."
Hoffman looked like a man undecided between shock and puzzlement; his expression registered a difficult amalgam of both as he glanced between the pair, but otherwise held his peace. Diana, for her part, had whitened to the point that the only colour in her face were twin pink patches of high flush on her cheeks. Her lower lip was shaking slightly, and Andrea braced herself for an outburst, but Diana – against all expectation – finally subsided an inch at a time, though she did so as if making progress in the teeth of a hurricane. It seemed to take her an even greater effort of will, however, to meet the detective's gaze. Given the depth of that fixed stare, Andrea sympathised.
"I'm sorry," she said, very quietly, and then looked sidelong at Sidney for a second; what she saw there evidently told her that this was not enough. "I'm sorry I was rude to you," she added, raising her voice, though it cracked as she did so. "It won't happen again."
Hoffman accepted this with a brief nod, but otherwise remained both silent and still and continued to watch the girl.
Sidney settled down now, seeming to have run out of steam, and Andrea noticed that, all of a sudden, the light had faded from her eyes and she looked very small and fragile and quite tired. She reached out to her side without looking, found the handle of her cane and slipped down from the table, approaching Andrea and apparently ignoring everyone else in the room in spite of their curious stares.
"Can I talk to you?" she asked.
"Sure," said Andrea, after what she hoped was a respectably short pause.
"In private, please," added Sidney, nodding at a side door.
Battling a small, instinctive urge to refuse, and not seeing that she had any other option, Andrea followed the other woman into the small room beyond, the one that contained nothing but a bare gurney and a set of steel trays. She waited, uncomfortable and apprehensive in what suddenly felt like a dimly-lit sepulchre, until Sidney had closed the door and turned around. In the low light, her expression was hard to read, and was carried only by a pair of bright sparks, one in the centre of each wide eye.
"You have to understand that Diana's very protective of me," she said, presently, and Andrea frowned in momentary bewilderment; this was not what she'd expected to hear. She pounced upon it, though.
"No," she said, emphatically, shaking her head slowly. "There's more to it than that."
"There really isn't, you know," Sidney insisted, gently. "She lost her mother, and, just about a week ago, her father as well. She's terrified of losing everything, and besides that the last thing she wants is to appear weak in front of other people, so you can appreciate I hated to do what I did just now," she sighed heavily, "but I have to put her on a better path than this."
"Is this really why you wanted to talk to me?" asked Andrea, out of the blue; the words had spilled from her lips before she'd run them by even a first thought, let alone a second.
"It's one of the reasons," said Sidney, regarding her closely now, "and I just thought I'd answer you before you asked. There is something else, though," she added, and then looked down for a moment, readjusting her grip on the handle of the cane, somewhat distractedly. "I tried to warn you," she said, presently, raising her head once more, "but you didn't listen, did you?"
"How'd you know?" asked Andrea, dropping her shoulders.
"I didn't until now, but I'll take that as an admission," Sidney told her, with a small smile that bore no humour whatsoever. "Now you feel betrayed, yes?"
"Betrayed ain't quite the right word," said Andrea, avoiding Sidney's gaze for a second to give herself time to think, which was proving extremely difficult under that gleaming gaze.
The trouble was, she realised, that it was the right word, and it was hard to substitute another. Whether or not it was a rational feeling was not what concerned her now. She had submitted to Hoffman's advances with brazen haste, had surrendered body and soul to the jaws of the animal beneath his skin, and had ultimately placed her trust in his ability to keep it in check.
(sometimes...animals just don't watch who they bite)
And yet...something was still deeply and profoundly wrong. Andrea still could not decide where the most crucial lie of all resided: with Sidney, or Hoffman, or somewhere in the silent, unfathomable gulf between the two. She could think of many questions, but none that she dared ask.
"You'll understand I don't feel I've gotta explain myself to you," she said, eventually.
Sidney nodded politely. "Of course not," she said, "but you may want to consider explaining things to yourself at some point. You had reasons for your choices and only you know what they are," she went on, "so you're the only person who can decide if a line's been crossed."
Andrea held a hand to her forehead for a moment, paused to pinch the bridge of her nose and then looked back up at Sidney with a quiet, weary little laugh.
"Y'all talk in riddles the whole damn time," she said, shaking her head.
"So I've been told," said Sidney, so soberly that Andrea half suspected she was being mocked somewhere in there, "but everything will make sense to you eventually."
"When?" asked Andrea.
"Soon."
(A/N: Yes, really, Hoffmann's reflex. I found it far too charming a coincidence to ignore...)