The next three weeks seemed to stretch into an eternity of unrelenting humidity, short spurts of activity, and long evenings that ended up more often than not seated with Spencer, as Her father and brother spoke in hushed tones in their own corner of the discoveries of the day.

Spencer had been coy about the project itself, but the company they were building was very much at the center of his focus. Several pharmaceutical companies had sprung up in the heady days of the Truman era and well into the reconstruction of Europe, certainly. Massive investment into academia has catapulted research in genetics and virology beyond what any of them could have imagined prior to the outbreak of the last great war.

Marigold had nodded along. "I remember when polio came through the village back home when we were quite young. I'm not sure Alexander was old enough to remember. How frightened everyone was." A lot of children had disappeared from the village. Neither of them had been allowed outside for several months, not until the Salk vaccine was introduced. "Now it's like it was never there." She paused. "Some of the major solutions are overused though. Everyone's mother took thalidomide for a while; I heard they were going to ban DDT soon in America, though they used to blanket every street with the stuff." She glanced over at Marcus at the far end of the table, who was studiously ignoring the conversation in favor of compiling the day's notes. She glanced down at her hands, then back up at Spencer. "There's rather a lot of uncertainty in a lot of markets these days, is there not?"

Spencer smiled. Good students were something to savor.


There were some people, of course, who curdled into the worst version of themselves, given too much time to their own devices. Spencer's little throwaway line about Geneva had lodged itself like a splinter into Marcus' mind. He had been thoroughly disgraced in that data mismanagement affair, even though it had been the error of a senior advisor. No, they had all seemed to surge together as one unit to select their sacrificial lamb for expulsion from the academic community. Spencer had been putting him in his place, and doing so while introducing him to the extended branch of the team.

(The thought that he would be disposed of in turn once again was nowhere near his mind at that point. That thought was still years away. Yet pride and paranoia were still foundational pillars of his character.)

The fascinating virus which the flower Sonnetreppe, or Stairway of the Sun, as the unfortunate local people had called it, was concentrated in the ovule and anthers- core, and pollen of very young anthers - pollen extracted at a very specific stage of growth would have the capacity to infect an adult human. The local warriors had demonstrated as such In a rather spectacular fashion, if to no avail.

Their time gathering samples and planning the nascent stages of Umbrella was coming to a close. The boy and his father were too engrossed in their own affairs to hardly even notice, of course, although Spencer had quietly taken Marcus aside to assure him that he would still be leading research in Arklay, absolutely.

The collaboration of the three parties would elevate the project as a whole, both in the breadth of knowledge and projection of old-world power. They would be busy and distracted for the next few days before heading back to America and Europe, respectively. Back to pumping up their competing narrative of what this virus would be meant to do. Ashford had seemed rather skeptical about bringing in the military, and while he wasn't wrong, that approach would lend a muscularity to the project that the elder man seemed incapable of seeing.

That little girl Spencer was grooming for a public relations campaign would splinter the damned project before it began.

A moment of calm, rational thought might have set this spiral of paranoia on a cleaner path. Yet the heat of the sun and the fragile state of mind of a man who had recently lost his entire career bore down to crystallize into a darker idea.

Really, it was child's play to ensure a dose of the malaria pills, delivered each evening before bed, was altered to contain the crushed ovule of one of the flowers.