What happened in Contagion by Teri Terry - Recaptains

The basics

Title: Contagion

Author: Teri Terry

Series: Dark Matter #1

- Contagion (2017)
- Deception (2018)
- Evolution (2018)

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Goodreads Summary:

Callie is missing.

Her brother Kai is losing hope of ever seeing her again. Then he meets Shay, a girl who saw Callie the day she disappeared, and his hope is reignited.

Their search leads them to the heart of a terrifying epidemic that is raging through the country.

Can Kai and Shay escape death and find Callie?

Read a full summary of Contagion by Teri Terry below. If you can’t remember what happened in Contagion and you need a refresher, then you’re in the right place.

What happened in Contagion?

• Shay starts off in Killin, in Scotland. She’s not having a great time at school and a boy called Duncan is bullying her. She heads home and comes across a missing poster for a girl called Callie, and she recalls seeing her a year earlier.
• Callie is in some sort of facility on the Shetlands. She’s being experimented on.
• Shay calls the number on the poster and gets through to Callie’s brother, Kai. He says he’ll be right over and cycles up from Newcastle to meet her.
• People at the facility start to get sick and die. Callie isn’t sure what’s going on. She learns that she’s on an island and plans to escape. She realises the scientists there have been trying to find a cure for cancer, and it seems to have gone wrong.
• Shay shows Kai where the abduction happened and tells him she has photographic memory. Kai shows Shay a photo of a man and asks if he was the one to take his sister. Shay doesn’t recognise him. Kai says he was his stepdad and he thought he was behind the whole thing.
• Shay and Kai speak to a policeman, who tests Shay’s memory before taking her seriously.
• Kai defends Shay from Duncan.
• Callie escapes the island quite easily because she’s now invisible (or dead??). She heads through Aberdeen, determined to get the train home to Newcastle.
• Outbreaks start to happen in Aberdeen. Coincidence? I think NOT!
• Callie reaches Newcastle and finds her family. None of them can see her so she watches them.
• Kai, Shay, and Callie go to Edinburgh university. They see Kai’s stepdad (Callie’s real father), who doesn’t know where his daughter is.
• Kai’s mother’s partner dies. Kai and his mother are taken away by the government because Kai’s mother is an important doctor and might be able to help. Kai heads off to find Shay.
• Shay and her mother catch the thing, and Shay’s mother dies. They were able to hear each other at the end.
• It comes out that the outbreaks have been along the eastern trainline, exactly where Callie has been traveling.
• Kai reaches Shay and she survives the illness. She can now see Callie, though, who may or may not be in another dimension.
• Kai and Shay go to Killin to help the sick as they’re now immune. Duncan is there and he protects Shay as the government agents try to kill her for being immune. Shay runs away.
• Shay wonders if Kai can now hear her thoughts. It’s likely that he can.
• Callie tells the team that she knows that the infection started in Shetland, so they all head up there to investigate. With the help of Iona, one of Shay’s friends, they find someone to stay with.
• The group gets to Shetland via a boat headed for Norway that is smuggling people out of the UK.
• They head into the facility and don’t find many useful things. Shay blames herself for the infection, because she figures that the places that she has been have had outbreaks. Callie, however, realises that it’s her.
• Shay and the others discuss antimatter. They think that the people on the island were experimenting with antimatter and particle collision/acceleration and it went horribly wrong.
• Shay turns herself in at the end of the book because she thinks that she is the culprit.

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