Jongdae shriveled into his coat, pulling his furry hood further down over his ears, hunching his shoulders as he stuffed his hands tightly into his pockets to keep out the worst of the unseasonable cold. The cheerful ticker sign for the airport lot across the street proclaimed “Welcome to Canada!” in four different languages, then scrolled “Current Temp: -6C.” Jongdae’s face was numb with welcome by the time an SUV pulled up to the curb in front of him. The front window rolled down to reveal Director Choi.

“Get in,” he called, and Jongdae gladly complied. The car sped away as soon as he climbed inside, rocking him back against the seat as the woman at the wheel maneuvered deftly through the sluggish airport traffic. “How was your flight?” the director asked. “Did you sleep?”

“Not really,” Jongdae said as he shrugged out of his heavy coat, now stifling in the car’s heat. He’d spent the entire flight poring over Choi’s database of reports of vivus infections from around the world. He’d tried to analyze them like he would any other case, and they were all dishearteningly similar. An office worker inexplicably started biting his coworkers before dropping dead of a heart attack. A mother pulled herself from a sinking car, then watched the rest of her family drown without lifting a finger. Robbed of basic human decency, average people the ones closest to them, and the betrayed never knew that their loved ones were slaves to a single-celled tyrant. Jongdae wished he could feel pity for the infected, but he had already lost too much. He couldn’t forgive and he wouldn’t forget, but he could try to save Kyungsoo from the same fate.

“We should be helping the police with the manhunt in Korea.” he said, leaning into the front seat. “Every day those two together, Kyungsoo is in more danger.”

“I’ve already got four of my best teams chasing down the leads you gave us.” Choi told him. “They’ll find them long before the police ever come close.” Jongdae prickled at the slight on his former colleagues, but didn’t argue as Choi held up his phone. “I get updates every six hours. When they find your friend, you’ll be the first to know. Until then, quarantining the patients we can actually find takes priority.”

Jongdae turned to the window as the civilization of the city gave way to mountainous wilderness. “There’s a case all the way out here?”

“Our Guardian network reported an incident last night,” the driver spoke up. “A mountain lift carrying 20 members of a wedding party crashed on its way up to one of the area resorts.”

“This is Sarai, the analyst and medic for Team A.” Choi introduced the woman, and Jongdae bobbed his head in acknowledgment.

“Mountain Rescue was mobilized,” Sarai continued, returning his nod. “But they had to recall their teams after nightfall, and one of the rescuers didn’t report back.”

“Do you think he was attacked?” Jongdae thought about the vivus case studies he’d read. Several had involved emergency workers that were infected while attempting to save someone. “Maybe a person injured in the crash was trying to find a new host for the parasite?”

Sarai and Choi exchanged glances. “It would fit the pattern,” she said slowly.

Jongdae caught a note of hesitation in her voice. “What pattern?”

“You’ve probably already realized it,” Choi explained. “We find all of our cases the same way. The vivus host encounters danger and acts to protect itself. Survive or infect. Behavior that fits that pattern is what the Guardian network looks for, but we didn’t come here because of the lift. The person we’re here to quarantine is the missing rescuer.”

The wheels of the SUV crunched over gravel as Sarai turned off of the main highway onto a narrow trail. The trail led to the base of a mountain, dead-ending at a warehouse with a giant mural of a stylized snowboarder across its front. The warehouse backed up to a snow-packed slope, the cables of a small ski lift stringing up into the distance. From the outside, the place seemed deserted except for three rugged trucks parked near the entrance emblazoned with the Parks Canada logo. Sarai parked alongside them, and Choi pressed a small earpiece into Jongdae’s hand as they climbed out of the car.

The moment they entered the warehouse’s battered double doors, a wave of noise and activity washed over them.

“Excuse me,” Choi snagged a frazzled-looking man hurrying by and flashed an ID in front of his face. “Where is the team from the CDC?”

The man brushed aside the ID and waved his arm toward the small crowd gathered in the center of the room. “Everybody is waiting for an update from the search teams,” he told them, already walking away.

“There’s James,” Sarai said, pointing to a man in all black standing head and shoulders above the rest of the crowd. “James!” The man looked around as she called out his name, waving her arms to catch his attention. He spotted them and gestured towards a relatively empty corner of the room, and Choi led their way through the bustle. As they reached the meeting spot, James re-emerged from the crowd, trailed closely by a willowy kid in ripped jeans and guyliner. As he sauntered past Jongdae, the kid looked him up and down with a tiny sneer. Jongdae’s fingers twitched with the urge to wipe that smirk off his face, but Director Choi’s voice distracted him.

“What’s the situation?” the director asked as they huddled together to hear above the background noise.

James pointed with his chin towards the knot of activity. The crowd of red-clad rescue workers were clustered around a set of laptops, closely attended by two scruffy men with dark shadows under their eyes and on their chins. As Jongdae watched, a small group of exhausted men and women trooped in from the warehouse’s mountain-facing entrance, their clothes caked with ice and faces red with the beginnings of frostbite.

“They’re still looking for the ski lift,” James explained. “The windstorm that brought it down also made most of the trails impassable, and visibility is low because of all the flying snow. It just starting clearing up an hour ago.”

Choi harrumphed his understanding. “Spread out,” he ordered, making a splitting motion with his fingers. “We need to know what happened to the missing rescuer. Report everything you hear via comm.” Sarai and James drifted away into the bustle, but the director snagged the kid by the arm before he could do the same. “Not you, Baekhyun. Stay next to me.” Baekhyun rolled his eyes and leaned against the wall with a sigh, hands in his pockets in a classic teenage sulk.

With a little thrill of satisfaction, Jongdae pulled out the small rubber nodule the director had given him and wedged it into his ear. The sound of Baekhyun humming filtered in, overlaying the sounds around him like a surreal soundtrack. He was humming something upbeat, energetic, and extremely distracting, and, given that no-one was telling him to shut it, this auditory entertainment was a regular and unavoidable occurrence.

“He takes requests,” Choi said, straightfaced.

Jongdae shot Baekhyun an annoyed glance. “Can we mute him?”

In response, the humming paused, then changed to a rendition of The Magician’s Apprentice. Jongdae ground his teeth in defeat as the rest of the team chuckled over the comms and headed for the group by the computers. He approached one of the new arrivals, a woman with hair still dripping from snowmelt.

“I’m Jongdae Kim, from the CDC,” he told her, using the director’s earlier cover.

The woman’s eyebrows rose in surprise. “Why is the Center for Disease Control here?”

Jongdae smiled stiffly. “We’re conducting an investigation,” he said, and breathed an inward sigh of relief when she didn’t question his vague answer. “Why is the search taking so long?”

The woman’s face drew tight. “We think they were halfway up the mountain when the lift derailed, but the high winds are making it impossible for us to look for them with our choppers. We’ve been sending out ground teams to try and reach the lift’s location, but between the freak freeze last night and the wind, we’re not making any progress.” She bit her lip and looked down. “Even falling from that height, there might have been survivors if we’d been able to get to them. But it’s been nearly twenty-four hours, now,” she sighed. “We’re probably just looking for bodies now.”

“I heard that someone from yesterday’s rescue team is missing, too?” Jongdae prompted.

The woman huffed, tossing her hair in apparent exasperation, but her fingers squeezed together, betraying her anxiety. “Minseok. His GPS tracker is down, and we’ve been trying to raise him on radio but he stopped responding during the night.” She turned away, but not before Jongdae caught the glistening in her eyes. “He shouldn’t have wandered off,” she whispered softly.

“I got a signal!” A man’s voice rose excitedly over the general clamor, and the crowd surged even closer to the computers. Caught in the press, Jongdae stood on his tiptoes, trying to see the screens over the heads of the people in front of him.

“They picked up a GPS signal, and it’s not moving.” James’ voice filtered through Jongdae’s earpiece as he narrated the events, his height giving him a nearly unobstructed view. “ They’re redirecting the closest team to intercept it.”

“Is it Minseok’s signal or the lift car?” Jongdae asked.

“See for yourself,” James said, unhelpfully. “They’re showing the feeds from the helmet cams.”

“I can’t,” Jongdae started to retort, when someone started up a projector on the far side of the room, displaying the rescue team’s camera feeds against the wall for all to see. He began inching closer to that wall so he could follow the action, leaving James behind to monitor the GPS tracking system. Sarai also appeared out of the crowd on a different side of the room.

“I found something weird,” she began.

“Go ahead,” Director Choi said.

“Overnight, one of weather stations recorded a sudden cold spot. The temperature dropped forty degrees on the mountain, but none of the surrounding stations recorded similar drops,” Sarai reported. “I’ve been looking up the weather maps, and the cold spot stayed in the same place all night. It didn’t blow in with the storm, and it’s not dissipating either.”

“How is that weird?” James sounded decidedly underwhelmed by Sarai’s findings, but Jongdae thought of the ‘freak freeze’ the female rescuer had mentioned.

“Cold air doesn’t just appear,” Sarai retorted. “And the center of the spot is less than a mile from where that GPS signal is transmitting. I’d say that’s mighty weird.”

Before Jongdae could add what he’d heard, an exclamation of shock rose up through the crowd. He whirled back to the helmet camera feed, staring open-mouthed with the rest of the observers at the grainy images. The rescue team leader’s camera showed his labored progress, step by step, through a nightmare landscape. His team’s cries of dismay were static-laden but unmistakable as the camera panned past the scattered, twisted bodies of the people they’d set out to save. Dark blood splattered liberally and stark against the snowy landscape, and the bodies were rimed in a clear coat of ice. The wreckage of the lift car they’d been ejected from loomed several feet away at the end of a trail of mangled corpses. The team leader’s breath puffed in the air as he struggled up the slope towards it.

“God, it’s cold,” he muttered as the camera followed his glance downward to his watch, showing the temperature dropping with each step he took. The other camera feeds showed his team of volunteers straggled across the mountainside behind him, two still doggedly climbing in his footsteps while the other three stopped by the bodies. The team leader pushed on, his grunts of exertion growing increasingly strained as he drew closer to the ruined lift car. Glass from its smashed windows glittered dangerously underfoot while his breath turned to ice on the camera lens. When he finally reached the car, he dropped to his knees with a gasp of relief, echoed by the sympathetic observers. Picking himself up after a brief break, he walked around the car lying sideways in the snow, half buried, ducking under the thick cables still attached to its torn top. He paused beneath the cable stalk, looking at the snow that had piled under it during the car’s slide down the mountain. Hunkering down on his hands and knees, he brushed awkwardly at the ice-hardened snow with his gloves, startling backward when a whole shelf of it collapsed inward. His camera abruptly fogged up in the gush of warm air from the tiny cavern formed by the car’s upended structure, but everyone caught a glimpse of eyes blinking rapidly in its depths, and a pale hand held up against the bright sunlight.

“Holy smokes,” a portly volunteer spoke into the stunned silence in the warehouse. “That boy’s got more lives than a cat.”

Jongdae found himself jostled backwards as more of the observers pressed closely to the projector, trying to make out the details of the camera’s foggy picture. He fought the crush with his elbows and managed to maintain his place near the front. The camera view gradually cleared, showing the team leader still on his knees, now joined by the two other rescuers who had toiled up the slope with him. Together they were scraping away the snow and ice from the opening in Minseok’s makeshift shelter, widening it so he could squeeze through. It didn’t take them very long; Minseok climbed out of the hole when it seemed barely large enough for a child to fit through. As soon as his feet cleared the threshold, he twisted back around and dived headfirst back into the cave. The camera lurched crazily as the team leader and one of his companions knocked heads in their haste to throw themselves on top of Minseok’s legs before he fell. They pulled backwards, and Minseok reemerged from the cave clutching a large, bright red bundle tight to his chest.

Jongdae held his breath along with everyone else, and staggered sideways as the crowd erupted in wild, jumping, triumphant cheers when the bundle Minseok was holding squirmed and turned its little face to the world. This time, Jongdae didn’t resist the buffeting motion, and he washed up against the wall like flotsam, reeling.

“That’s the center of the cold spot,” a voice said into his ear. It took Jongdae a moment to realize that Sarai was continuing her argument from earlier. “Cold air can’t come from nowhere, and children don’t survive minus-40 nights .”

“Weird.” James’ one-syllable response was all that was needed.

The crowd chattered excitedly as they watched the team on the mountain exclaim over the rescued toddler. Their journey back down the mountain was full of smiles, even as they collected their teammates from their work in the icy graveyard. At some point, Jongdae realized that Minseok wasn’t wearing his coat— it was wrapped around the child, leaving him with only a thin fleece pullover. He should have been freezing on that long hike, blue and crippled with hypothermia. Instead, Minseok was practically running down the mountain, all of his attention fixed on the bundle he carried, his properly-clad teammates hard pressed to keep up.

Survive or infect. Director Choi’s words ran circles in Jongdae’s head as he tried to make sense of what he was seeing.

As the rescue team drew within sight of their snowmobiles, the camera feed went dead, its work complete. The observing crowd dispersed, energetically preparing for the incoming team and survivor. A small crew, noticeably less excited, began gathering supplies and litters to return to the mountain and recover the bodies of the fallen.

“Baekhyun!” Director Choi’s voice boomed through the comm after the long silence, and Jongdae winced, grabbing his ear. “Does anyone see him?”

“Did he disappear again?” Sarai’s voice was high-pitched with worry. Jongdae forgot about the rescue and scrambled to remember when he’d last heard Baekhyun humming. He came up empty, and the other team members echoed his uncertainty. No-one had noticed when Baekyun literally dropped off their radar.

“Mierda!” James swore. “He’s outside.”

Jongdae turned towards the exit as Sarai blasted past him and through the door. Caught up in her panic, he chased after her, James far in the lead, all of them running flat out towards Baekhyun’s tiny silhouette in the distance, toiling slowly up the foot of the mountain.

When they caught up with him, he was nearly to the top of the first rise, his hands and knees iced and bloody from clawing his way up the slippery slope. James planted himself in front of Baek, blocking his path with one hand on his chest. Sarai drew out a thin cable from her pocket and gingerly clipped the end to one of the silver rings hanging from Baekhyun’s belt. Jongdae watched in bewildered fascination as the two, working in tandem, slowly guided Baek back down the slope, James herding from above, Sarai towing him gently from below. As they neared the bottom where Director Choi waited, the first snowmobiles of the rescue team slid into view from the other side of the mountain. Baek turned, taking a step towards them, his eyes strangely unfocused. Jongdae reached out to stop him, only for Baekhyun to go suddenly limp, dragging them both off-balance and tumbling them the rest of the way down the slope.

Jongdae groaned as Sarai slid to a stop beside them, tucking something into her pocket. She crouched over Baekhyun, lifting his eyelids and checking his pulse. “Seizure,” she said in response to Jongdae’s wide-eyed, unspoken question. She straightened as James arrived in a puff of ice. “He’ll be fine.”

That didn’t look like any seizure I’ve ever seen, Jongdae thought to himself, but he said nothing. Instead, he helped Sarai carefully drape Baekhyun over James’ back, and tried not to limp as they carried Baekhyun back to their car. Director Choi joined them as they arranged the unconscious boy in the backseat, and tapped James on the arm.

“Stay here and rendezvous with Team B when they arrive tonight. Quarantine the patient and have him transported to the Utah facility. We’ll meet you there.”

James stared at the director.“Tonight?” he repeated, and something in Director’s Choi’s expression made his snap to attention. “Tonight,” he said firmly. “ What about the child? He could be infected by now.”

Sarai looked up from tucking a blanket around Baekhyun’s shoulders. “Everything about this accident is going to make the news. We can cover up Minseok disappearing, but not the little one, too.”

Choi tapped a finger on his cane thoughtfully. “Have the Team B medic take a blood sample from the child, and assign a Guardian to watch over him until we get the results.”

“Understood.” James saluted before jogging back toward the warehouse.

For the return trip, the director took the wheel as Jongdae climbed into the passenger seat. Jongdae turned to the back, where Baekhyun showed no sign of reviving, his head in Sarai’s lap. The kid looked awfully pale.

“He’ll be fine,” Choi said coolly, noticing his concern. “He’ll wake up in an hour.” The SUV jostled back and forth as they retraced their path back to the main highway.

Jongdae pushed away the worry about Baekhyun with a little shake of his head, refocusing on the mountaintop rescue. Before learning about vivus, he would have written the whole thing off as exceptional good fortune. Now, he couldn’t shake the little details, like the puff of warm air from the cave, the healthy flush of the child’s cheeks, the stationary cold spot. It didn’t make sense. “Minseok wasn’t wearing a coat,” he remembered, that detail standing out above everything else. “It was forty below at night, but he didn’t even seem cold.”

“He used that child like personal heater,” Choi said, his mouth twisting in distaste. “Do you see how ruthless vivus makes a person?”

Survive or infect. Jongdae tried to match what he’d seen that day with all he’d learned from the vivus cases he’d studied, but there was a piece that didn’t fit. Maybe Minseok didn’t mean to save the little boy, maybe he had been keeping him for his body heat just like the Director said. But a vivus host would never have knowingly put themselves in danger, yet that’s exactly what Minseok had done. He had risked his own life first by volunteering for a risky rescue, by purposefully leaving his team after nightfall, and once more by taking off his coat. Director Choi seemed convinced that this was just another case like all the others, but Jongdae wasn’t so sure. Minseok didn’t fit the pattern.