Elliot drove to the diner.

He felt a lot better with a heroic dose of cold medicine in his system, reducing his temperature and banishing the sniffles and occasional coughs. He left a brief note to Ruby, explaining that she might have to wait until the end of his shift if she wanted the car.

He felt better, but not so much better that he could endure the significant physical strain of a bike across town.

Driving through Aurora felt... different, somehow. A strange dread followed him, like knowing he had left something at home while already on the plane for his vacation. Or that awful knowledge that he hadn't studied for an upcoming test, and was doomed to fail it no matter how hard he tried.

Maybe it was his imagination, maybe it was the cold. He spent the drive wondering exactly what he was missing. Was there some easy way to discover the journal he had missed? Could there be a tracking device somehow concealed in the pages, small enough that he hadn't noticed?

He had more cold medicine in the glovebox, enough to get him through the rest of the shift. He would ask for fewer hours next week, maybe even some overtime at the end of the week, to give him time to recover from this little cold.

It wasn't just Elliot that wasn't in top form today. His car spluttered a little going up the hill, and the overhead lights switched on at least twice during the drive. Maybe Sam had rustled some of the wiring around when they pulled off a piece of body panels.

"I don't have time for this right now..." Elliot ran his free hand through his hair as he pulled into the parking lot, feeling his heart beating faster in his chest. It was a busy night, even for this early into the shift. But before he could get to that, he would need to survive whatever waited in the black Suburban parked near the edge of the lot, with tinted windows and exempt plates.

"I can do this. They just need to think everything is normal. Because it is. I just have a cold, that's all. I don't know anything, I'm not a threat. I just want to work my stupid job and make my crappy paycheck."

He drove through the lot as usual, all the way around to the back with the other employees. He pulled into the spot, and the light came on again. "Stop!" He reached up for it, and a little bolt of static connected him to the fabric ceiling, sharp enough to briefly turn his fingers numb, sending little tendrils of pain into his scalp.

"I thought you were a mechanic, Sam. What wires did you cross?" He switched off the car, tucked the keys into a pocket, and made his way into work.

As expected, there was someone waiting for him in the diner. Mr. Moon waved him into the back, where the banquet room was still decorated with pink streamers and balloons from a child's birthday party. Must've been a few days back, judging by the sad state of some of those balloons.

That only made the scene more absurd: a woman a little older than he was sat at one end of the long table, with a plain white notebook in front of her and a plastic recorder. Her partner shut the door behind him as he walked in, also not the same person as Elliot saw the day before.

This man was bigger, broader of shoulder, with a military haircut and muscles that his black suit could barely contain.

The woman waved him into the seat beside her. "Elliot, I think. You were the waiter on duty when that fugitive was here, correct? I'm Agent Butler. My partner is Agent Lance. We won't take too much of your time."

He obeyed, settling into the offered seat without objection. "Already told the last guy everything. Not that there was very much to tell."

He sat as still as he could, making polite eye contact without staring. Just have to make it through the same story as last time. Then they leave, and I can go to my stupid shift.

She nodded. "I've been over the audio recording several times, along with the account of the other staff at the time. This is... something else."

She clicked the plastic button on her audio recorder, turning it towards him.

But it was Agent Lance who spoke, walking slowly back and forth by the door. "Officer Prahlow is dead, along with the rest of his containment team."

His voice was everything Elliot expected, deep and confident. His words, though--

Shock overwhelmed him, washing away whatever he'd been planning to say. Elliot had barely even known the man's name, and probably wouldn't have remembered it at all if it wasn't on the card. How could he be dead?

"We need to know if you saw anything strange from Prahlow, or any of the people in his cleanup detail," Agent Butler continued, too fast for him to recover.

She nudged the recorder a little closer to him then, apparently ready for him to answer.

That didn't mean he actually knew what to say. "Officer Prahlow... asked me some questions. About the guy in the jacket. I told him what I saw, and his guys cleaned up the place he sat. Everything about that night was strange. Was there something specific?"

She tilted her head to one side. As she did, the suit jacket slipped off a short distance, exposing the handgun tucked against her chest. So long as it stayed in there. "Unusual behavior, lights or sounds you couldn't explain, nausea or lack of coordination. Anything you saw might help us isolate what happened here. No detail is too small to be potentially significant."

Dead. That didn't fit into what he'd read of the notebook, though in other ways it made perfect sense. If someone wanted to reduce his mass by that much, they'd have to slice his head off and just keep that. I have no idea what's really happening here. Find one stupid notebook and suddenly I understand this?

"You saw something," Lance brushed the glitter off another chair, then slid it next to him and sat down, facing Elliot instead of the table. "We need to know what it was."

Not the notebook. He knew without even looking at Lance what would happen if he shared that piece of information. They'll lock me up for a few months, or maybe drive out into the desert and shoot me.

"Not about... Prahlow, you said his name was? Nothing about him. I could tell that the guy in the jacket didn't want me to see him. Had this way oversized jacket--all his clothes were kinda big, actually. Sounded weird when he talked. And I think maybe he had colored contacts on? But I didn't see any of the soldiers in those suits, and Prahlow... nothing. You said you heard the interview already."

Lance folded both arms across his chest. Butler scribbled several notes down on her pad, more than anything he'd said. "Don't remember you mentioning contacts in the recording."

He shrugged, using the gesture to wipe a little slime away from his nose. Good thing he'd taken all those medications--but they weren't enough to keep him feeling totally normal. The longer he sat here, the more unpleasant he felt. "Lights in this place aren't the best, especially in that corner. But thinking about it... I'm pretty sure there were."

Lance smacked the table next to him, loud enough to startle him into sitting up. "No aggression? No signs of illness? They should've barely been able to walk. Whoever--" he stopped, silencing whatever he'd been about to say. "The fugitive couldn't have done it. Someone else..."

"Someone else was spreading a potentially deadly contaminant," Agent Butler continued helpfully. "It can kill rapidly, Elliot. Worse than radiation, worse than any poison you can imagine."

She leaned closer to him, then tapped the single button atop the recorder. "Clearly you're still standing, but there was at least one other case from that night. There are four fatalities at this moment. If this thing gets loose in Denver, it could be a million in a month."

Elliot gaped. "You're just... telling me?" They're gonna shot me in the desert. "No NDA, no security clearance, or..."

"You've been watching too much TV," Agent Lance said, rising from his chair. He stalked across the room to the other side, kicking aside a few of the balloons as he went. "You live here, Elliot. Your family are in Colorado, your girlfriend. If what was in here gets out there, they're fucked. We all are."

"Did you see the fugitive do anything to any of the men? Any unexplainable flashes of light, sounds, senses of sudden disorientation or nausea?" Agent Butler spun her pen around between her fingers, never looking away from his face. "Anything you saw, please. We need to know."

Elliot thought back, straining his memory for anything that would satisfy these agents. But unless he wanted to try and lie...

"Nothing like that. Dude fought, tried to get away, but they got him pretty quick. Didn't see any... flashes of light, you said? Didn't feel anything, other than terrified I was about to get shot." Kinda like I feel right now.

They didn't shoot him, or drag him into the back of a van. They didn't even take his temperature. Instead, Agent Butler gave him a little white plastic rectangle, about the size of a phone.

"You're going to keep this with you at all times," Agent Lance said, glowering down at him from the door. "All times. It's next to you when you take a shit, when you go out for a jog, when you're getting groceries. You keep it charged. If you don't, some people show up who make things far more unpleasant for you than it already is."

He took the rectangle, running his fingers over it. There was a USB-C port on the bottom, a single pinhole near the top, and not a lot else, besides a black barcode printed onto the plastic. "Okay. What is it?"

"Contact tracing," Agent Butler explained, far calmer. "We're giving them to anyone who had any contact with the fugitive. Hopefully, we'll be in touch in a few weeks' time to get this back. Then you'll never need to see us again."

Evidently he was the last one for an interview, because they left shortly after, sending him back in to finally begin his shift. Elliot spent that time with the addition of a new plastic rectangle in his pocket, wondering how much it was doing.

His cold medicine started fading about halfway through the shift. He topped it up as best he could, but the second dose just didn't have the same effect as the first time. He could keep the customers from noticing, if only by taking frequent trips to the restroom to clear his nose and wash his hands again.

If there was one mercy, it was that Mr. Moon was still upset with him, and his schedule for the next week contained few hours. Normally that was a punishment, holding back the part-time hours of someone who had screwed up. But when Elliot saw the schedule, he almost cheered.

Even so, there was nothing magic in suppressing symptoms. As morning approached, the weight on Elliot grew so heavy he barely made it to his car. Just a little further. It's almost over.

Elliot settled into his seat, then eased it back. He would just take a few moments to get his bearings, that was it. Just a few minutes...

The next thing Elliot knew was the ring of his phone, loud enough to jostle him awake. Bright light blinded him, bright enough that he had to shield his eyes with his arm, searching blindly for the phone with the other. He nearly ran out of rings before he finally got it in front of him, and tapped the button to answer.

"H-hello?" He sounded worse than last time, with slime dripping freely down his face and his sinuses filled with goop. His muscles had started aching too, stealing his coordination. Judging by the sun, it must be at least noon--how had he slept that long?

"Elliot? Are you alive?" Ruby asked. "And... not locked up."

"Yeah." He shifted uncomfortably in his seat, forcing it into an upright position. Now that he was awake, he couldn't possibly get comfortable here anymore--the car was baking hot in the sun, and the sun blinded through every opening. He twisted the keys, and found it started without an issue. "Technically. Sam got me sick."

"I can hear," she answered. "Why didn't you come back? Ignored all my texts..."

"Fell asleep after the shift," he muttered. Every word hurt, like he'd swallowed a piece of glass and got it stuck somewhere down his throat. "I'll head over."

"You should. I was gonna tell you when you got there, but... I'm staying with a friend until finals are over on Friday. She's staying on campus, but I'd rather use an air mattress than get sick and miss an exam."

Those words were somehow both painful and a relief--he would never ask Ruby to give up her bed so he could recover without making her sick. But if she was going to do it on her own...

"But I can't wait any longer. There's another study group meeting soon, and my ride is heading back. I want to be on campus if they lock it down again."

I might know why they did that now. Or at least, he knew something connected to the reason. The "toxin" that had apparently killed every member of the team who showed up at the diner. Either they were lying to me, or we understand this so much worse than we thought.

But even sleep-deprived and ill, he knew better than to share that information over the phone. "Okay, Ruby. Love you."

"Love you too. And call me if you or Sam need anything. We both know she'll never ask." The line clicked.

He drove himself back to the apartment about twenty minutes later, after taking what was left of the cold medicine. It sort of helped--helped him enough not to go off the road. He was still a zombie when he shuffled up the steps and shut the apartment door behind him.

He made it as far as the couch before he collapsed into merciful unconsciousness again. He wasn't even awake to notice the rest of his brown hair falling out.

Author's Note

I'm loathe to do this, but I have to post a chapter without a vote this week. I hate to do this in a vote-driven story. I did think about making the chapter much shorter, with choices about how to deal with the investigators and what to say. But wrong choices on those options would take the story in a direction that wouldn't be very fun to read, so I took this route instead. I promise to do as few chapters without votes as possible!
But I'm really trying to get the show in the road in terms of getting the pony into this pony story. Just bear with me a tiny bit longer!