In the camp, Maria watched as some of the younger folks worked on unlocking their professions. Students who had been studying A&P days before were now figuring out how to sew hides into armor. A young woman who’d been paying for school by working as a line cook was experimenting with herbs they’d found and a spit-roasted leg of dinosaur meat.

  The dinosaur meat, Maria thought Aster would have appreciated, tasted like gamey turkey. She thought she remembered something about dinosaurs becoming birds or something… I don’t know. That’s some Aster-level nerd shit I don’t need to worry about right now.

  What Maria was worried about was making sure their island didn’t have the fewest gained levels by the end of the next day. Something had happened two days ago, when one of the islands’ rate of growth almost doubled over the course of the day. Maria had been the one to notice it, but Murph was the one who discovered what was going on.

  Professions. Professions were safer to level up than classes were, and for those who were able to level up both, their growth would expand even faster. Murph had discovered this after a meeting she’d held with the camp had triggered a notification of an available profession. The Fledgling Leader of the People profession gave a bunch of stat points and was surprisingly easy to level up. Nearly every time people in the camp accomplished a goal she’d set out for them, she’d receive levels.

  They’d organized another camp meeting to figure out how to get other people their professions, too, which had unlocked Maria’s profession: Novice Party Leader. The fact that she’d been taking lead of hunting parties and acted as the tank for almost all of them was what had led to the change. She didn’t know how rare it was to have a profession directly related to combat or overseeing combat, but nobody else had unlocked anything like it yet. Then again, very few of the students actively sought out action in the canyons.

  After that, it was the cook who’d unlocked her profession next, and since then there had been nearly a dozen more professions unlocked. From builders to tailors and even an armorer, the camp was coming along nicely. Maria had to admit that Murph was a surprisingly good leader. She was reminded of a seasoned ER charge nurse she’d known, able to juggle many, many things at once all while performing triage and calming down combative patients. For a bunch of early twenty-somethings, this group was surprisingly organized and capable.

  Castle was the first to undergo the race evolution at level 10, followed quickly and quietly by Murph. Castle’s own evolution seemed to have accomplished something Murph’s leadership profession had really liked, since the moment she’d come back from blipping away into that weird evolution space Murph had gotten the levels she’d needed to undergo her own evolution.

  The evolution had been mostly unimpressive for her, though Castle could swear she was a little bit taller now. Murph had suggested the same thing, and the vitiligo on Murphy’s face had cleared up extremely well. A person with a tailoring profession who had lost several toes during a scrap in the canyons had found them grown back after undergoing their own evolution to F-grade.

  So, all-in-all, things were going well for the group. Everything except Aster’s lack of presence.

  Castle watched Murphy approach, striding through the camp as though this was something she’d done for years and not just a hectic five days. She carried herself with a confidence Castle was almost starting to believe she actually felt.

  When Murph got close she asked, “Can I sit?”

  Castle motioned to the spot next to her on the rock. "It’s a free country.”

  They both tilted their heads at the common response, but neither addressed it.

  “How are things going with your fighters?” Murph asked.

  Castle gave a shrug. “They’ve been leveling consistently, though I think we’re still in contention for the losing spot at this point.”

  It was a hard truth at this point of the Tutorial. One of the islands was going to fall to the sea below— and Dr. Asnani’s influence over the initial three days was something they were fighting to overcome. After all, the vast majority of their island’s population had been under the influence of someone who’d thought this existence was just some sort of mass hallucination.

  Nothing could have been further from the truth.

  The question came out of nowhere. “Where did you meet Aster?”

  Murphy looked at Castle, surprise on her face. “Where did that come from?”

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  Castle shrugged, trying to right herself mentally. Aster had… kind of been her responsibility, at least for a bit. “Sorry,” she offered. “It’s none of my business. I—“

  “I was a TA.” Murph responded, still looking at Castle with that perceptive gaze. “My professor had me run some stuff to a private lab on campus.” She paused and looked away.

  They watched someone in the camp show another how to accomplish something they’d been working on in their tailoring profession. Castle was almost lost in it by the time Murph continued.

  “I’d forgotten all about it, to be honest,” Murph rubbed her face at the memory. “It was nearly two in the morning when I woke up, freaking out about how much shit I was going to be in in the morning when he realized I’d forgotten.

  “When I got there, however, Aster was there.” Murphy looked toward Castle, but not at her. Her eyes were far away. “It turned out that the lab was reserved for her.”

  “Is that unusual?”

  “It was for a freshman, yes.”

  “How’d that happen?” Castle was honestly curious, but she also wanted more information on the personal history of the girl she’d been hired to provide end-of-life care for.

  “She, well…” Murphy sighed. “Her dad is a big name in the pharmaceutical industry.”

  “But I thought they don’t get along?” Castle asked.

  Murphy gave a dark laugh. “No. No, they do not. But Aster is… a force of nature. She’d drop a name if it meant she got what she wanted, and so she did. It helped that she was genuinely a genius, though.”

  “Was?”

  Murph was silent, then let out a breath Castle hadn’t noticed she was holding. She continued. “Her work was unconventional. Aster didn’t have any good feelings toward her father, but again, if there was something she wanted…

  “She wanted him to start investing in the research of new antibiotics. This all stemmed from the rise of some new resistant strains of bacteria. Did you hear about the new syphilis cases in Europe a few years back? That was just one example she had. There’s MRSA and a dozen other resistant strains of common bacteria in hospitals and nursing homes and school all over the world. However, there’s little money in the research of new antibiotics.” Murphy laughed, this time with genuine mirth. “Aster figured out a plan to scare enough people into wanting to fund more research.”

  “But she was a freshman, right?”

  Murphy nodded. “Right. And the night that I met her was right in the middle of some of her work.” She sighed, “It’s a little technical—“

  “I don’t mind at all,” Castle said.

  Shrugging, Murph said, “Aster was in a negative pressure tent constructed in what was essentially a warehouse. Apparently she’d paid for most of it out of pocket, with only a little financial backing from some of the university’s higher ups. She had several tables set up inside with a few glove box isolators— those things that are airtight, with gloves built into the front of them that let you interact with the stuff inside?

  “She’d used a nutrient-enriched gel, like what you grow cultures in, mixed different batches with different-strength antibiotics, and layered them side-by-side in descending order of strength, with an unaltered strip of gel at the end. She then introduced common bacteria to the basic growth media.”

  Castle narrowed her brows. “What was she trying to do? Manufacture new super bugs?”

  “Essentially, yes.” Murphy shook her head. “Only Aster… Anyways, she did this with samples of half a dozen of the most common bacterial infections.

  “She documented how, at room temperature, she was able to brute force the evolution of bacteria. They’d outgrow the culture media they’d started in and run up against the next strip that had an antibiotic in it. Eventually, a new strain would manage to break through and grow into the new medium.”

  “Did she manage anything?”

  “She did. Honestly, what she’d discovered was terrifying. Within two months, with common materials nobody needs a license to acquire, she managed to create strains of strep, staph, E. Coli, Bacillus and… I can’t remember the others. But they were universally novel and resistant to vancomycin and even tetracyclines.”

  “Holy fucking shit,” Castle said, the words coming from deep within.

  “Yeah,” Murph said. She rubbed at her face, “Aster was about to publish a report with the intention of using it to scare congress into funding research into new antibiotics when the FBI got involved.”

  “When I was nineteen I think the most impressive thing I’d done was manage to get into a community college.” Castle shook her head. “That bitch is crazy.”

  Murphy laughed loudly at that. “You don’t know the half of it! She was unique in so many ways…”

  There was that was again. Castle understood it, but she hoped Murphy would find some peace about their whole situation.

  Murphy continued. “So the FBI got involved and quietly got rid of everything while opening investigations into Aster and half of the university’s medical staff. The whole thing was a clusterfuck.”

  “Aster must’ve been heartbroken,” Castle said.

  “Actually, she was thrilled.” Murphy smiled over at Castle. “It created enough of a stir that it eventually made it up to the governor. Once the investigations and stuff were wrapped up, her research got studied and got quoted in some new bills that funded research on a state level, and then eventually at the federal level.

  “She told me she’d expected law enforcement to get involved at some point, since she was literally creating biological weapons.”

  “How did this ever get approved?” Castle raised an eyebrow.

  Murphy shrugged again. “Nobody took her seriously at school before that. Why would they? So far as anyone knew, she was just some entitled rich kid who was throwing her dad’s name around to run a private science project. Nobody expected her to succeed.” She sighed and muttered, “Absolute idiots. Anyone who managed to spend more than a few hours with Aster knew she was the real deal.”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean.”

  They sat together like this for a while as the sun set, sharing food and telling stories. Murph was interested in how Castle had gotten involved with Aster’s life at the end, and Castle wanted to hear about their relationship. The stories where Aster wasn’t a complete asshole were news to her.

  Eventually they called it quits and went to bed. Neither slept well that night.