"It's a pathogen." That much, she knows for sure. "I know people who went to the CDC--the Center for Disease Control."

Byerly, after all, has no reason to know what that means. She tries to remember what she heard, second- and thirdhand. "There was only one scientist left. Everybody who could have figured out how to stop it ended up dying."

She falls quiet, because all she has left after that is what her father had said about Jesus raising the dead--how nobody had wanted it to mean this.