A needle in the skin, a slanted shaft of light, not like a hospital but close. Pariston sat against the wall, draped in protective gear, and watched Cheadle collect her blood samples, her saliva swabs, throwing away one syringe after another, one pair of gloves after another. The process was meticulous, obsessive, and she did it while asking a long series of questions, slowly growing her pile of medical profiles. Pariston spent most of the last three days with a pen and paper in hand, writing down all that information.

Markov was helping, mostly with convincing the children to sit still and take the invasive tests. Right now, he sat with one of them in front of the window, and was amusing the listless boy with a primitive show of shadow theater. Markov's hands joined together to form a decapitated bird that soared on the column of light adorning the clinic floor. The headless bird glided out of the frame and back into it, out and back, its long, heavy, split tail dragging behind it.

And then Pariston realized it. The bird cut flight and Pariston figured out finally what had distinctly estranged him since their arrival, since they set foot on shore and since the dead insect in Cheadle's palm.

He hasn't seen a single animal in this place. There were no animals anywhere, no wildlife, none of the innumerable critters he saw during his last time spent here; the small ones that scurried behind bushes, the big ones that could eat a man whole, the horned and venomous and clawed, not even birds, no other living creatures beside the bug Cheadle had accidently killed.

The place was devoid of any non-human inhabitants.

"Markov, do people here eat meat?" Pariston asked nonchalantly, noticing the shrinking column of light under the other man's feet.

The question seemed to light up something in Markov's head, like he had just remembered something he had completely forgotten. His eyes widened for a moment, his mouth slightly open, as if he was trying to recall every dish he'd ever eaten. "No, we don't. No," he finally said, then he chuckled. "I mean, people here barely eat anything other than potatoes."

Without prodding, the boy walked towards the chair when Cheadle beckoned for him. He took off his clothes then sat in front of her, staring straight ahead, extending his arm when she asked him, opening his mouth, letting her check his teeth and gums, shine light into his eyes, take blood from him, mark the inside of his arm with a number, but he answered none of her questions.

"Still can't get them to talk?" She shot the question to Markov, quietly aggravated, adding the kid's samples to those of the others, all labeled with numbers but no names. "Still can't even know what they're called ?"

Markov shook his head, helping the small kid stand up on his feet. "The majority won't say anything. We really don't know what happened to them; they're very reluctant and stubborn." He said. "But few did speak, though. They did say their names, at least."

"Which ones?"

"A couple kids in the isolation ward."

Cheadle threw the waste in a bag and wrapped it tightly.

"What are you thinking, doctor?"

"I'm thinking of dividing the three groups of refugees into separate categories, for comparison." She said. "Can you help with that? Do you remember which child came in which wave?"

Markov hesitated, noting the antagonism in her question, the silent indictment. "I… I remember the number of children in each wave. We can also, I think, start with the ill kids, we can ask them; despite their illness, they seem to be older and more… intelligible."

Like the one Cheadle had spoken with, like the one who had stared back at Pariston.

"What would comparison between them help you determine, doctor?"

"Who's normal and who isn't." She said, opening the door for him. "Bring me the next patient, please."

III

The flash light made Nina's big brown eyes appear like two pools of muddy water, like the little tunnels Cheadle made with her index and middle fingers in her mother's soaked flowerbed.

"Are you feeling well today?"

"Yes, I love the summer." Nina said, her round face swelling with a soft smile. "I used to get the flu every season, but I suppose one of the good things here is how rare it is. Influenza, I mean." Her eyes flitted to Pariston when the flash light left them. "Have you ever heard of any flu cases here in the continent?"

Cheadle shook her head, gesturing for Nina to open her mouth. "It might very well exist in the continent, but with very little opportunity for circulation. Humans are few and far between, here. Although it's possible that we have passed a few common mainland viruses to animals."

"A virus strand could evolve to infect animals, too. It's such a fascinating field." Nina added, then chuckled softly. "Maybe I should have studied it."

Nina's arms were long at her sides, her whole body tinged with a peachy hue, and the fuzzy hair on her cheeks was long so that in sunlight it created a halo around her face. A deep scar blemished her back, a knife between her shoulder blades. She flinched when Cheadle inserted the needle.

"Why did you study virology, doctor?"

"Because I believed it would be challenging."

"Not to find cures, save people?"

She pulled the needle out. "Noble intentions usually come later." She said, pulling the needle out of Nina's arm. "Why did you study agronomy?"

Nina shrugged. "In high school, I looked at onion cells under a microscope, and thought they were pretty. The way they were stacked together, like a melting beehive. The order of it." Then she smiled. "I believe things exist because they are good, because their very existence is good. Viruses might challenge that notion to some, to those who believe that humans are the center of the universe. Anything that harms us must be bad, and therefore must be eliminated, but sometimes I envision a world where we just let things be."

"You envision a world where you, your colleagues and others die preventable deaths, needlessly?" Cheadle asked, giving the agronomist a piece of cotton to place on the puncture point. "Where suffering takes its course?" She looked Nina in her bright, dreamy eyes, in the haze of them. "Do you believe suffering is good?"

"I believe it's part of the lawful order of the world." Nina said. "The world I envision is not one where we die needlessly, but one where we simply accept unfortunate deaths not as needless but normal and natural. We lose, but sometimes, without doing anything, without fighting back, things can return to us."

Cheadle took the agronomist's samples and placed them next to the others. "I don't agree with you."

"I don't expect you to, it is very morbid." Nina laughed, and it made her look too young and too carefree. "But it's the world we live in now, isn't it? This land, it's full of mass graves. So many people have come here in search of eternal life, but no ways have been spared in killing them. If eternal life, for example, is good, there would have been ways to achieve it. I have accepted that, and that we are no exception as well. Nobody is special. Suffering surrounds us, and I let it be."

"Where were you, when all that was happening?"

"In prison." Nina answered. "But you already know that."

Cheadle's eyes wandered over the other woman, over her long torso and short legs, over the valley collapsing her stomach. "Have you ever been pregnant, Nina?"

Nina nodded, her finger tilling that valley from top to bottom. "It died shortly after birth."

"Here?"

"Yes, here."

Cheadle nodded. "The father lives in the settlement as well, I assume."

"He does, yes." Nina replied, drawing her shoulders closer to herself. "We're married. We married here. Not officially, by any means; no papers or rings to prove it, nothing. But we did." She chuckled. Then, when nobody said anything, she added, looking up at Cheadle with worry in her eyes. "Will this affect our prison sentences?"

Cheadle smiled and shook her head. "No, it won't."

"What's the scar on your back, if you don't mind me asking?" Pariston asked, speaking for the first time since Nina entered the room. Cheadle herself had contemplated the question, but thought it inappropriate to ask. Scars like that rarely told good stories, but Pariston didn't care about good stories. He spotted damage with hunger in his eyes, with predatory curiosity.

Nina looked up at him, not hesitant to speak but taking a moment to assess him personally. "An ex-boyfriend flew into a rage and stabbed me."

Pariston smiled. "You stabbed him back?"

"I did."

"Is that why you were in prison?"

"The first time, yes." She said, her eyes unwavering. "Manslaughter."

"Why didn't you plead self-defense?" Cheadle asked her.

"You don't get to plead self-defense when you stab back a few too many times and then hide the body."

If any of them felt guilt for their ensuing amusement, none expressed it.

"What do you think of the children here, Nina?" Cheadle asked once again this question that she had ventured to every scientist and ex-fighter that came for the checkup. She had asked it so many times now that the very premise of it felt a little unreal.

Nina finally stood up, smiling thankfully to Pariston who began handing her back her clothes. "What I think of their presence here or what I think of them?"

"Any thoughts you have."

"I think they're experiment subjects that have either escaped or have been released." Nina said with a resolution mixed with a kind of quiet indifference, like she had reached this conclusion and didn't care for any further theories. Her eyes, too, weren't searching Cheadle's for any corroborations or validations.

Cheadle wasn't convinced. "Maliciously?"

"Maybe, maybe not." Nina said, zipping up her trousers. "Many experiments have been done in the continent, and maybe some are still ongoing. We're not the only ones living here, or experimenting. It's an unimaginably vast land, and we know that many people have come here."

"If they are experiment subjects as you say, then what were those experiments?"

"I don't know."

"If you were to guess."

"Gerontology."

Cheadle stood and watched Nina bend down nonchalantly to tie her shoes, waiting for her to straighten up again. "Why gerontology?"

"Because it's behind what everybody deep down came to search for here." Nina answered. "People all over the world heard about nitro rice, they heard about the closest thing to immortality humanity had come to know. How to control aging, how to live forever. One group of 'amateur radical gerontologists', as they called themselves, entered the continent through our shore, had stayed with us in the settlement for a short period of time, and they claimed their purpose was to 'farm' nitro rice. They were very friendly."

"You didn't warn them of the futility of their mission?"

"We did," Nina smiled wistfully. "But when someone has a dream in their eyes, can you really take it away?"

Cheadle was becoming impatient with the elusiveness and tone of every answer she received. There was no apparent reluctance to answer or engage, and Nina specifically was one of the more talkative residents here, but she could not help but feel the pressing air of conspicuous silence around some details. With every new checkup, with every new interviewee, this sense of deliberate obfuscation pervaded her mind. There were things Cheadle didn't ask about because she wanted them offered voluntarily, was waiting to hear them without prompt, for someone to point them out and speak of them.

"So you think that group might be responsible?"

"Groups like them."

"But isn't the fact that the subjects are children challenge this theory?"

"Maybe. Maybe the subjects were their parents." Nina replied. "Is it known how regular consumption of nitro rice affects children?"

Cheadle shook her head. "No, but we do know how it affects those who had consumed it once. Experiments had been done, and some of the subjects were children between the ages of twelve and seventeen."

"And?"

"Diarrhea. For months. Same physical reactions across different demographics." Cheadle shared Nina's irreverent chuckle. "But that's the problem with 'life-extending' substances; only time can really prove how effective they are."

Nina nodded. "I see."

"During our first meeting, you suggested the refugees might not be the source of the infection, and you said it might be one of you." Cheadle said. "Do you have any more to say about that?"

Nina, fully clothed again and solemn, ready to open the door and leave, shook her head. "You might want to speak with Gregory Buress on this. She was the first to become sick."

III

"Why were you reluctant to believe her theory?"

Cheadle stopped in the middle of the stairway, and took a minute too late to turn around. The building was quiet in the afternoon, warmer, clammier, the eco-friendly materials of which its constructed malleable, almost softening with the oncoming nightly heatwave, willing to be reshaped anew. Descending or climbing, she lost her sense of orientation for a moment.

"What does a fatalist have to say about life."

Pariston walked a step down, but it didn't make the directions any clearer. She felt a little feverish as he stood over her, one step higher. His coloring made him blend strangely well with the surrounding brown walls and floors, with the sickly yellow of creeping sunlight.

"Are you sick, Cheadle?" His voice trickled from far away. "You look sick."

Her ears rang. That gurgling sound again. "I'm not sick."

Pariston took her hand and pulled her down so they could sit on the steps. She resisted, but his grip on her fingers was strong. She let him guide her down, came at face level with him, took a deep breath when his fingers slid under her bangs to check her temperature.

"We shouldn't be sitting here, like this." She whispered, her knees brushing his, his cold hand on her temples.

"There's no one here."

Her skin was hot, and her eyes were unfocused, that undecided look swimming in them. Pariston moved his hand to her neck, his other hand still holding hers. She opened her mouth for an objection but nothing came out. Her chest moved up and down, slowly, a leaf in a breeze. The shackles around his ankle burned.

"It's like we're the only ones in the building."

She snorted weakly. "What a nightmare."

"You have a fever, Cheadle." Her skin and the walls were the same. Tender he could dent them if he squeezed hard enough. "Did you get infected?"

"No, it's just a drop in blood pressure. I just need to rest a bit." She said, tilting her head back, resting it against the wall. "Besides, if I got infected, the symptoms won't appear so quickly, anyway."

Pariston watched her eyes wander the ceilings, staring at the invisible line from the tip of her upturned nose to her dimpled chin, down to her neck, exposed to him, his hand still there so that he couldn't tell apart her temperature from his anymore. His thumb rested over her throat, pressed over it, a little darker than the skin under it, felt her swallowing.

"Do you fear that you might get infected?"

"I'm prepared for it as a very real possibility. Doctors get infected all the time."

"But do you fear it?"

He wanted to kiss it, the neck held in his hand. His thumb caressed it, up and down, felt it tense against his touch. It was interesting, that she was yet to snap at him, that she let his hand wander to the back of her neck, to the soft hairs, the little bones.

"She asked me if it will affect their prison sentence," Cheadle murmured, more to the ceiling than to him, a somber smile adorning her face. "marriage." A half-hearted laugh escaped her. A marriage here bigger and smaller than everything else.

Pariston pressed harder. "It makes you feel bad?"

"Yeah."

"Then you should help them."

"They don't trust me."

"They will," he said. "you're a trustworthy person." Cheadle looked down again, seeking his eyes and not the misshapen clay protrusions of the ceiling. "They don't have a choice."

Her hair fell on his hand, tickling his wrist. "Do you know how to speak with children?"

Pariston smiled, finally slipping his hand away from her neck, from the slightly red fingerprint he left on it. "I can try if you want me to."

She nodded and he helped her up, then felt her hand leave his as she continued down the stairs, down towards the isolation ward. Pariston followed her, the hallways darkening, her white button-up shirt the clearest thing ahead.

He didn't tell her about the headaches. They were becoming more painful, more frequent and lasted longer. It seemed that his body had joyously recalled its worst affliction from the deepest recesses the moment his nen was suppressed, happier now that nothing stood in the way of pain. Back then, a controlled dose of aura to his head was enough to stop the worst migraine, but then he was no longer able to do that; no aura would flow in his body, and the "lawful order of the world" resumed unabated. Something about the place here aggravated his pain such that he felt his brain swelling inside his skull, threatening to burst out of it. It was at once better and worse at his home-prison, or so he remembered.

Is it the constant proximity to her? Is it some physiological reaction to his nen, so close to him but not his, entrapped and entangled with hers?

After the loss of his nen, the best solution to mollify the pain was an old one, a simple, primitive method from the earliest days of this scourge, brought back from childhood when he still didn't know anything about nen. Total, complete darkness. Pariston would go to the room farthest away from any natural light, pull the drapes shut, and sit in a sheltered corner for as long as he needed to; sometimes for a couple hours, sometimes so debilitating it was he'd spend half a day nested in a closet where darkness was so encompassing it swallowed all light, all reflections, all glints and gleams, swallowed his very being.

There were no dark places here like the closet at his home, not any he discovered yet. Glassless, drapeless windows worked to always let even the slightest light in, and the neon tubes that lined some ceilings in the building were lit all night.

It was dim, in the building, but never dark. A hazy, grainy dimness that made everything seem like an old movie reel.

What would happen, Pariston wondered, if he asked Cheadle to alleviate the pain of his migraines with her own nen? She had let him touch her, but it wasn't trust. His nen will not be given back without at least a bit of trust, the kind established here, in his work. Cheadle has to feel that he'll stand by her if she needed him, that he'll help with this, that he'll learn to help, only then will his nen be brought on for negotiation. Asking for it too early would risk losing it for good.

The isolation ward hallway again. The white suits again. Something putrid hung in the air, a bowl of rotting fruit. They weren't alone.

Sulei stood inside the ward, fully clad in her suit. "I didn't expect to see you here today, doctor."

"Where do you expect to see me, Sulei?" Cheadle asked dryly.

"In the little clinic you have set up for yourself, of course."

"In which you're yet to show up for your medical checkup."

"Tomorrow." Sulei said. "Thought it would be better for you to finish with the refugees and soldiers first."

Cheadle looked up at the taller woman, her wry smile murky behind the protective screen of her headgear. "I would've finished much sooner if you were a little more competent at collecting data and information about the people you have allowed into a research facility, but I digress. Any new developments?"

"Slight worsening, but an hour ago, this happened," Sulei answered, leading them towards one of the farthest beds where one of the children lay, catatonic. "He's breathing, his heart is beating, but otherwise he's completely unresponsive. His eyes aren't moving."

Two dark wells stared, unblinking, at the three figures towering over the face they had sunk into. The boy lay, frozen in a night terror, his arms wooden at his sides. If the smell outside was coming from this small body, nobody could tell. Air only left their suits but didn't enter it.

Pariston looked away, seeking the other boy, the older one, the more interesting one, and to his delight found him looking back. He nodded, the boy acknowledged it by not looking away. The ill teen looked worse but no less aware.

Cheadle was already making to examine the unresponsive boy, and she had noticed the looks Pariston exchanged with the other one. With a silent gesture she agreed to let him go there. Sulei's gaze followed him as he retreated away from one death bed to another. She didn't like it, and even though he turned his back to her he could still feel her, disapproving and apprehensive.

Now that he was closer to the boy, Pariston guessed the kid was about fourteen years old. His full height was now also more apparent as he sat hunched in bed instead of lying down in it. The plate of food next to it was left untouched.

"You with that new doctor?"

"Yes, I am." Pariston replied, pulling a chair to sit next to the bed. "My name's—"

"Pariston. I know. I heard it."

Dismissive, but mostly bored. His eyes indicated an unwelcoming curiosity. Pariston smiled. "And what's yours?"

"Sam."

"How are you feeling, Sam?"

"Like I'm dying."

Sam chuckled and Pariston did, too. He pulled his chair closer. The kid sat a little straighter.

"Anything more specific?"

"No."

"You're not feeling any pain?"

"I'm not feeling anything." Sam said with little emotion. "I can't feel anything. I've lost all sensation in my body."

Pariston tilted his head, seeing the tail end of a rash that was eating up the skin around the kid's neck. "That's terrible."

"You don't look too concerned."

"I'm not," Pariston admitted. "I don't know you."

Sam smirked and leaned closer. "I know you're not a doctor." He said. "I knew the moment you came in here, the first time around."

"Then you must know that none here before us are doctors, either."

"Only she," Sam jabbed his chin towards Cheadle. "I know because of how she spoke to me."

Pariston nodded. "She wasn't very satisfied with your answers."

"I wasn't very satisfied with her questions."

"Cheeky," Pariston smiled. "I like you."

"How old are you?" Sam asked in a demanding tone that was shy of sincerity.

"Twenty-five."

"You look fifty."

"Cheeky and rude," Pariston frowned in mock disappointment. "you ought to be nicer."

Sam rolled his eyes. "I'm a dying child. I get to be mean."

"How do you know you are dying?"

That seemed to give the kid a pause. His smug little expression melted away quietly, and he shrugged and lapsed into a silent moment of contemplation. Pariston glanced at Sulei and back to Sam.

"Did they tell you you're dying?"

"No, but I've seen others die here."

"How far is the damage of your body?"

"I don't know, I don't look."

The head bowed down, a small patch of lost hair above the nape, nailbeds a yellowing green, the skin over the knuckles and between fingers discolored, more calloused than elsewhere, the pebbly rash sneaking treacherously outside the short sleeves.

"When did you arrive here, Sam?"

The boy shrugged. "Months ago. I don't even remember anymore."

"Were you sick when you arrived?" Pariston asked. "Were you able to feel pain then?"

Sam raised his head again to look at Pariston, appearing puzzled by something he was seeing inside his head. "I was sick, yeah."

"Did you already have the rash then?"

"I saw it when I was here, and then I didn't want to look anymore."

"Does it scare you?"

Sam finally focused on him, trying to make out his features behind the screen separating them. He didn't succeed, and looked away again. "It does, a little, I guess. It's gross."

"Do you feel safe in the settlement?"

The boy smirked, retaining some of that mischievous glint to his eyes. "Do you?"

"Safer than if I were outside it, for sure."

"Why are you here, anyway?" Sam asked.

"To help you. Why are you here?"

"I was born here," Sam's smirk grew bigger and more devious. "My mother is the jungle, my father the mountains. I'm a demigod, if you think about it."

Pariston chuckled. "Well then, I must thank you for entertaining a mortal such as myself."

"My pleasure, Pariston."

"You should eat your food." And with that he stood up, exchanging a courteous nod with the kid, and turned around to rejoin Cheadle and Sulei, could see the tension between them in the way they stood, in the reluctance in which they interacted with each other. Cheadle didn't like the animosity and obfuscation, Sulei didn't like the sudden transfer of power, and apparently, she neither liked their attempts at striking conversation with the patients.

"Gregory is a strange case," Sulei said when Cheadle mentioned the ill scientist. "the first to become sick, but she's still alive even though those who fell ill after her had died."

"What are you trying to get at?" Cheadle asked.

Sulei stepped closer, huddling the three of them in a tight circle. "She's a liar. She's always been." The biologist's eyes moved pointedly from Cheadle to Pariston. "Never was a team player, has spent months here but still refuses to speak."

"Maybe she'll respond to us."

"What makes you think that, doctor?"

"You call her a liar, you say she's not a team player, which suggests tensions with you," Cheadle said. "If someone not from within the team approaches her, she might cooperate."

Sulei's suit crinkled with the shifting of her weight. "She's dying."

"She's the person who can help the most, right now." Cheadle insisted. "Through her, we might be able to learn what kind of contact happened, originally. She's the index patient, and therefore possesses valuable information."

The biologist said nothing, arms folded, overviewing something in her head.

"Is there a reason you don't want us to speak with her?"

"I didn't say that," Sulei's voice rose a notch. "I implied that I don't trust her to speak any truths about whatever happened. I don't think she might even be able to speak."

Cheadle nodded. "I appreciate your concern, but I'd like to determine the validity of whatever she says myself."

"Alright, she's there," Sulei said, taking a step back and pointing towards a bed surrounded by long drapes separating it from others. "You've already seen her, but I bet she's nothing like the photos on the profile from which you had picked her for this team." She sounded dry but not entirely unsympathetic. "Whatever she brought in with her has been eating her face."

"Noted," Cheadle said. "I'd like you to leave us alone with her, please."

They watched Sulei leave, shooting Sam a quick glance and continuing towards other patients. She agreed to leave them alone with Gregory but she wasn't going to leave the ward, opting to circle the place like a hungry cat.

"I may have overestimated your ability to maintain peace." Pariston said, walking beside Cheadle towards the isolated bed.

Cheadle scoffed. "I am maintaining peace, unless by peace you mean personally appeasing the ego of a power hungry criminal."

"But what if maintaining this peace involves appeasing egos?"

"I'd rather have my face eaten then."

Pariston hummed. "But you do appease others. Maybe the nature of lawlessness here makes you act differently?"

"I'm sure you'll have plenty of time at night to think over that smarmy question." She retorted, stopping just short of pulling the drapes to enter this isolated quarter. She stood still, hesitant, processing something, then without further stalling she lifted the drape and entered.

Pariston took a breath and buried it in his chest. Even inside the suit, he felt invaded, felt that the very air within his protection gear was contaminated. The little square was busy with two bodies hampered by heavy, large suits and a bed in its midst, the body lying on it literally disintegrating.

"Gregory?" Cheadle asked gently, taking careful steps closer to the bed.

It was easy to imagine that every corpse lining this continent had had a name once, but Pariston couldn't imagine that any name applied to this ruin of a human, that it was still sentient enough to respond to one. It was closer to a rotting tree bark than flesh.

A dark, open wound for a mouth moved, and then closed again because the sounds didn't come out right, didn't come out as words. Cheadle didn't interrupt the second attempt, or the third. She didn't interrupt because Gregory was intent on speaking intelligibly.

Two eyeballs rolled from one of them to the other. Something was growing in the whites of the scientist's eyes, brown protruding needle points. If he looked any closer, he might see the little dots moving. Yet, the irises were lucid, saw them and took them and regarded them knowingly.

"Hello…" the mouth moved, and a rustic, broken voice came out of it. "…new faces."

Cheadle smiled and leaned closer, lost for a moment because the limp hand she wanted to take in consolation threatened to fall apart at the slightest touch. Gregory's eyes rolled down, unhinged, and appeared, despite the decaying skin around them, to be apologetic, like it was too sad that Cheadle couldn't hold her hand, like she was the one consoling the doctor.

"I'm sorry," Cheadle whispered, finding little comfort in touching the loose, falling strands of hair strewn on the pillow.

Gregory stared, unable to emote anything comprehensible, unable to move anything but eyes that belonged to everything but the peeling, devoured face they were clinging to. Pariston didn't know what to do. Cheadle was hunched over, silent, her expression obscured.

"Can you talk to us?" She asked, implored, almost. "What happened, first?"

Gregory managed a weak shake of the head. "Don't matter…" the two of them stared at her as she continued to sway her frail, misshapen head. "This place, it's bad."

"What do you mean?"

"It's all over…" Gregory murmured, her words wheezing breaths. "It's everywhere."

"The illness?"

Gregory nodded.

"Tell me what you know, please ," Cheadle said, a quiet, desperate frustration in her voice. "What kind of contact happened, with another person, animal, plant, anything. Did you breathe in something, eat or drink something?"

"Water," the scientist said. "I drank water, from the well."

Cheadle's eyes widened. "The industrial well outside?"

"The well, in my room."

Cheadle took a long breath, her white suit crinkling, the color of it too bright beside the decomposing, sickly green skin next to it. She was growing impatient. "A water well, in your room?"

"He said…" Gregory began, ignoring the incredulous question, struggling to manage the words out. "… you'll come."

Cheadle leaned even closer, hunched over the other's face. There was no proof, nothing, but Pariston knew both of them were thinking it, only Cheadle didn't venture the name out, prudence or skepticism stopping her, so he did.

"Ging?"

The eyes rolled up to him, a weak nod. Pariston met Cheadle's fervent gaze, and she looked at him as if he had any answers to offer or explanations, as if he could speak on behalf of the human wreck on the bed. He had nothing.

"You know who we are?" He asked again.

Another nod, and something, he imagined, close to a smile. "I'm sorry…" her eyes turned to Cheadle. "I ask a favor."

"What is it?" Cheadle asked, somehow her voice weaker than that of the bedridden scientist.

"Kill me."

"No," Cheadle said, sounding confident, perhaps already knowing that this would be the favor. "You still have to tell us what you know."

"You agree, with me."

Cheadle frowned. "About what?"

"Better, if I die."

The doctor and the scientist stared long at each other, saying nothing. Gregory let Cheadle be silent, let her consider the favor, the infection peeling her to nothing, to rotting flesh, to pain. The little sealed quarter grew smaller with every breath taken, and Pariston was curious, because he didn't know what Cheadle was going to do.

How many people have she pulled off life-support? Was she thinking of this as a similar situation? Did she believe in mercy killing? In putting an injured animal down?

He looked at Gregory, at the remains of her hair, at the shriveling nails, at the sinkholes in her arms and legs. Only her eyes spoke of personhood. There was still a will in her, something old and luminous and intelligent and terrified, a sliver of everything she still held onto and of which she was willing to let go, and in his head, there was a song that started with a beat like a ticking clock.

"Can you give us a moment, Pariston?" Cheadle finally spoke, her voice resolute and even.

"Of course," he said. "I'll be outside."

"Thank you."

He left them, parting the drapes, stepping out of that coffin, any sense of fresh air he pulled into his lungs a simulacrum of the real thing. The headache announced itself again, and he had a desire to just sink under a blanket until the pain of it went away. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw decaying skin and muscle. He stood still and wandered the ward with his gaze, to the corner where Sulei still loitered, to the bed where Sam had fallen asleep, to the windows up high that made him feel like he was standing in a crumbling church.

In the silence, he could hear the rustling of leaves outside; but that, too, was only in his head.

And then Cheadle called for him and asked that he bring Sulei in, to let her join them in the closed off space that separated Gregory from the rest of the world. And then a long, patient discussion happened between the three women with surprising amiability as everybody sat around the bed, a jury in a lawless court.

The dying biologist had to hear everything, from how her life would end to how her body will be treated afterwards, chiming in with a few nods and fewer words, even a couple jokes at her own expense. Sulei, too, listened, and seemed to have spent a long time without looking directly, or perhaps at all, at the face of her colleague.

The sight of Gregory on the bed moved something in her, made her quieter, more willing to bend, but there was no reading the thin line of her lips or the creases on her forehead, and she exchanged very little with Gregory, purposefully, he thought, yet she talked with Cheadle at length about everything there was to talk about regarding the situation, and the two appeared to finally share a common space where personal grievances didn't matter as much. A decision was finally made, and after a moment Pariston was left alone with the patient while the other two left to make preparations.

He smiled, and imagined her smiling back.

"Is Ging here, by any chance?" He asked, looking at the pulsing black stains in her eyes.

She nodded.

"He visited you today, to say goodbye?"

Another nod, and then nothing was said as the two of them waited. Time was nothing here, and if Pariston looked up like she did he could see the long white drapes extending all the way to the ceiling, where they grew solid like walls, walls that shot up beyond the ward and beyond the settlement and all the way to the outside world. Everywhere he looked here he saw prisoners.

Then they were back, with more people in tow waiting outside, most likely to cart the corpse away to one of the labs. Cheadle and Sulei re-entered the room.

"Are you ready, Gregory?" Cheadle asked, a needle in one hand, the other still fumbling with how to console.

"I'm ready." Gregory said, taking her eyes off the ceiling to look at the person who was going to euthanize her. "Thank you, Cheadle."

Pariston sat and watched the whole thing quietly, disappearing into the room, listening to things he knew and things he didn't, and as Cheadle inserted the needle, it appeared that Gregory chose to die staring at him, that glassy sheen in her eyes steadier but filled with what no longer belonged to her.

How did she see him? What did she know about him? What has been spilled to her, what has she seen? He was part of her world before she was a part of his, that's what usually happens when you know of others even when you don't ever see them. Pariston's world was populated by enemies and pawns and tools and entertainment, but she was none of that, couldn't be any of that, and there was no chance of making her one, or seeing her become one. She was a passing figure, in so many ways and like so many others, but he was already feeling her lodging inside him, carving a place under his skin, long tunnels and ridges, festering. Then he thought—not her , but the idea of her.

To die here was to die like this.

He straightened up with everyone else, helped clothe what's left of this corpse inside a protective suit, stood to the side when it was hauled to another bed to be pushed outside the ward, and was the last one at the enclosed space, now empty but of its walls, and a bed.

Pariston glanced back at the stained mattress, and found a peculiar, shiny leaf. He took it.

In the disinfection antechamber, everyone was silent, and then he finally got to step outside and take off the suit, yet still felt as if his body was nestled inside a second layer of skin, unable to step outside of it.

Cheadle was in her own corner too, in her own thoughts, taking a little too long in cleaning her goggles, then her glasses, and Sulei had stepped away as well, and was leaning with her shoulder against the wall, her back to them. She was crying.

The quiet, unexpected weeping was perhaps the reason it took Cheadle a moment to just turn around and address the world around her. Perhaps grief wasn't part of whatever little strategy she concocted in Gregory's cell. It wasn't just him who didn't want to be confronted with this, and yet she left the side of the wall and walked towards the other woman, placing that same hesitant hand on her shoulder. It made Sulei sob harder, but Cheadle didn't retreat on the small comforting gesture.

He was a pair of legs and a headache as he walked towards them, and without glancing at Sulei he tapped Cheadle's shoulder. She looked up at him.

"Do you need me here? I want to rest a bit, if possible."

She nodded. "You can go. I'll work in the lab for tonight."

Pariston gave her a little wave and left, his body disappearing in the shadows before he turned a corner. Her attention turned back to Sulei, long, thin fingers pressing on eyes, to hide the tears, to stop them, the sound of her sniffing herself back to composure the only certainty in this little moment they shared.

"Your presence there was important." Cheadle told her, withdrawing her hand when Sulei finally lifted her head and loosened her shoulders.

Sulei scoffed, looking at her with a face encrusted in tears. "Once again, you do something I couldn't do." She said, passing her hand roughly over her face. "Gregory was my friend. We had our disagreements, but she was, and I failed her."

"Why do you think that?" Cheadle asked.

"Didn't you see her?" Sulei hissed and then shook her head, refusing to allow herself any more crying. "I couldn't look at that."

"But you did look, at the end, and it's not going to be for nothing." Cheadle said. "We'll work together so that nobody here suffers like that. I will do my best to find a cure, I promise. But you have to help me, Sulei."

The biologist nodded frantically, mindlessly, numb and distraught. "I feel severed."

And severed she walked with Cheadle to the lab where Gregory's body was waiting, bagged and contained and concealed. There were two other scientists there, Hima one of them. As she prepared an examination table, the other approached at their sight to hand Cheadle the deceased's medical profile.

They hadn't kept up with her. The updates stopped at a certain point, and what happened after 'severe deterioration of skin' and 'spine deformation' was left for Cheadle to imagine. Curiously, no pictures were taken, unlike with the children.

The truth of the matter was that Gregory Buress was left to rot alone for months, with seemingly no intervention of any kind. Sulei had an excuse, one Cheadle could understand and sympathize with, but what of the others? Were they not able to look at their ill colleague, too? There were things that she still needed to know, the relationships that had formed between these people over the past eight years, the dynamics that had brought them together or pushed them apart. She noticed that almost all of them spoke a great deal about themselves but rarely about the others.

"What was she like, Sulei?" She asked as they moved Gregory to the examination table and slowly unzipped the bag in which she was encased.

"Brilliant, erratic," Sulei gently took the decayed arm out of the bag. "a jokester but emotionally reserved." She continued, pulling out the frail, deboned leg. "She was eager to go on any and all tracking missions. I think that's why she was at such a high risk of contracting something, sooner or later."

The two stood over the decomposing human pile between them, eyes unclosed because there was no skin to slide over them. The dark impurities dotting the whites of them larger than a mere hour ago. This close and with only a face mask, without the dusty hindrance of the suit's screen, she could see what appeared like long, green veins coursing through the remnants of Gregory's skin.

"So you think this infection came from outside the settlement?" Cheadle asked, reaching for a pair of scissors to cut open the gown still covering Gregory's body. "It seemed only Nina Funlime subscribed to that theory, when we spoke."

"It's not only Nina, we're all split on the matter." Sulei answered, glancing away immediately when the gown split open, revealing a sunken, dark ravine for a chest and a bloated, moldy stomach.

Cheadle gave her a moment, taking the time to inspect this strange body before her and the strange series of traumas that had befell it. She had seen similar cases, scrunched up, dried, scaly skins; atrophied, shrinking muscles; osteoporosis where the bones were rendered to hollow twigs, but nothing of this sort, and nothing with this combination of apparent symptoms.

On closer inspection, Cheadle could trace small but numerous skin erosions and gyrated depressions that littered the small patches of discolored skin, the marks of what she guessed were severe nodules and ulcers. They had no specific localization, found almost everywhere she looked, but mostly on the arms, legs and neck.

"It's not just Nina," Sulei repeated with a strained voice, gathering up her courage to look steadily at the body laid out before them. "When the children arrived, Gregory was the first to suggest taking them in; I dare say she was downright enthusiastic about it, and they took a liking to her afterwards. She was in their company for long stretches of time, but she was sick before that."

"Sick how?"

"There was a rash on her body. We never knew because she hid it so well." The biologist said. "It's only after she fell completely ill that she told me."

Cheadle sought a circular blade from the tray beside them. "You were the only one she told?"

"As far as I know, yes."

"Did you see the rash?"

She placed the blade over a patch of skin with the least amount of damage, and started rotating it down, waiting for Sulei to answer.

"I didn't," Sulei said. "I didn't because she wouldn't allow me to see it until it was too hard to tell it apart from all other disfigurements."

"Rashes are symptoms, not diseases," Cheadle said. "You didn't notice any other symptoms?"

"What every person in the isolation ward is displaying: fatigue, nausea, loss of appetite, reduced immunity."

Cheadle nodded, feeling that the circular blade was reaching an oddly hollow layer where the hypodermis should be, like she was twirling a straw in an empty glass. Slowly she pulled the blade out with the incomplete cylinder of tissue within it.

Frail tendrils of what appeared to be connective tissue hung loose from the bottom of the extracted skin. She handed it to one of the assisting scientists in the lab with them. "Keep it preserved, please." Then she turned to Sulei, clearing her throat. "I'm going to dissect her."

It took Sulei a moment to nod. "I understand."

But then something moved.

Four pairs of eyes turned towards one another, and then instantly towards the corpse, towards the hardened, rotten stomach.

"What was that?" Hima asked, sample still in hand, fridge open beside her head.

The stomach moved again.

"I'm going to open it." Cheadle declared, reaching for a large incision knife.

But her blade was met with resistance. Tough and leathery, the arch of skin trembled and moiled under her hand. She persisted, finally puncturing the skin and driving the knife down, then cutting downward to open the stomach. "Get me a couple more trays."

The ringing sound of clinking metal filled the lab as she and Sulei stared down the dark insides of this pouch. Whatever was inside had ceased movement upon meeting light, apprehensive at having its burrow dug out, and was breathing.

Cheadle heard Hima murmur a curse, heard the smallest sound in the room, the tense way Sulei breathed and the nervous shutting of the fridge door and the careful, uneasy placement of a new tray beside her. She could make out a pair of unformed eyes, a lipless mouth, fingers that weren't growing out of a hand or a hand growing out of an arm, only little tendrils of flesh growing out of a shapeless body, latching onto the viscera around it.

She poked it with a swab stick. It twitched.

"What is this?" The other two scientists had joined them around the examination table, pale and wide eyed, the overhead lights casting shadows over their faces.

"Is this a fetus? Was she pregnant?"

"No," Cheadle answered. "It's been growing in the stomach cavity."

"What do we do?" Hima asked again, chuckling nervously, out of fear or morbid bemusement. "Do we just, 'scoop' it out?"

Cheadle looked at her. "Actually, yes. We'll separate it and pull it out. Get me another knife, please."

Blade in hand, Cheadle started slicing up the sturdy tentacles that clutched for dear life around everything that surrounded them, even the blade itself. They grabbed at it and coiled around it firmly, their desperate gripping and grasping relentless and bizarrely strong. Sulei assisted, completely silent, helping her severe this parasitic creature out of its host.

"Have you seen something similar to this before, Sulei?" Cheadle asked, snatching up her hand out of Gregory's stomach when one of the tendrils tried to seize her fingers.

"No, I haven't." Sulei answered. "This, whatever it is, wasn't there, at the beginning. This is recent."

"How would you know it's a recent development if you didn't visit her?"

Sulei stabbed the creature violently with her knife. It sunk, coiling on itself.

"Why do you treat us with contempt and suspicion?" She asked, glaring at Cheadle. "You think just because I didn't see to her personally then nobody did? You believe that we had left her to die, but she was continuously being cared for. Others tried to feed her but she wouldn't eat, treat her wounds but she wouldn't cooperate, wash her but she chose to lie in her filth. She refused help. Actively and sometimes violently."

Cheadle's eyes shifted from Sulei's indignant stare to the stabbed creature. "Remove your knife out of it, please." She said. "It's valuable."

The biologist complied, pulling the blade out with a tight grip, then lowering it down beside her. Cheadle thought that Sulei could stab her now, if she was brave enough, or angry enough, but the woman was neither. After a moment she loosened her grip on the blade when she noticed the other two scientists observing their interaction closely.

"You have to forgive any mistrust on my part; you weren't particularly honest with me in the past." Cheadle said, turning back to their original work. "Since I was not informed of the refugees' presence nor were any other of your team's donors, I think it's absolutely within my right to suspect that you might be hiding some facts from me."

Sulei snickered, returning her knife to the flailing flesh tendrils. "Then you have to forgive our mistrust and suspicion, seeing as you are the primary authority responsible for all this." She said, managing with a single, deft roll of the knife to separate the entire creature from the pouch. She picked it up with one hand, surprisingly small now in the open, and slabbed it down on the tray. "Our research here is your side pet project. We don't really matter. We can cultivate pink potatoes here for the rest of our lives for all you care. It's the money you want. Money off of us to keep running your organization of monsters."

"My 'organization of monsters' bailed you out of prison," Cheadle said, offering the other a mean smile. "it gave you back your life when you were on death row, months away from a hanging."

"So I can die here, only slower."

"Yet here you are, alive and well, unsurprisingly good with a knife." She said, sidestepping Sulei to take a closer look at the creature, glad to find it entirely unaffected. "You signed a contract. You came here, voluntarily. Don't forget that." She picked up the tray and looked back at the biologist. "I will take this to the other lab for further study. Thank you for your help, everyone. You can go to bed if you want, it's your call. I will handle the rest of the autopsy."

Sulei watched her as she turned her back, and in spite of not being able to see her, Cheadle knew there were many more things she wanted to say, and she did say one of them.

"I'm trying to see the good in you," Sulei said. "I'm trying to like you."

"You don't have to like me," Cheadle said. "you only have to trust me."

III

The settlement draped in long, desolate shadows, all the hallways stretched endlessly before Cheadle. She walked alone, gazing out of passing windows at thick dark clouds, like chimney smoke that had interspersed in the air and stuck stubbornly to the sky. It was a moonless night, and her little gnarly parasite was secure in a container all its own, so was its host.

Her room was so far away, felt even farther the closer she walked towards it. Slogging through the hallways, she thought of Gregory, of what she said, and pondered making a small visit to the dead woman's quarters, to ' the well in my room' . Did she say that because she feared somebody could be overhearing them? Did Gregory trust her colleagues? Cheadle sensed that sentence was a wordplay, a puzzle more than a description of something real, yet she resolved to look into the water settlement resources anyway.

Then again there was Ging, who apparently knew Gregory well enough to assure her of their visit. Was he really that certain that they would respond and come? Was Gregory his eyes here? It's impossible for her to have helped him physically send the message to mainland, and if he visited her recently then he visited her in the ward and nowhere else. Markov mentioned that Ging had not appeared in the settlement for a while, which meant he most likely sneaked in without anybody's knowledge. Ging didn't need help breaking and entering, and she knew he could go unnoticed for as long as he wanted.

If Gregory was a friend then it was possible they'd met outside the settlement, on one of her tracking missions, along with others.

Ging could help in this. He might know what had happened at the very beginning. He might be sick, too.

The room was close. Was Pariston still awake? What did he do after leaving the isolation ward? He seemed so small to her now, amid everything else. She has been keeping a close eye on him, but they were no longer on a seaplane alone and he was hardly her only company anymore. She wasn't his, either, and like a rat that gnaws at everything in its path, he would be exceptionally good at wheedling his way into all sorts of subgroups here. He had a talent for it, and she could benefit from that, if not use it entirely to her advantage. He could supplement what she lacked: effortless charisma, a way with people. Being attached to her would make his job difficult, since he was simply guilty by association. It didn't matter if the two of them were true allies, people here nonetheless viewed him as an extension of her, and he was no doubt aware of that.

Whenever he left her side, he didn't stray far. And he was in the room when she opened the door—the actual door; she always turned to the wrong one first—only he wasn't asleep, or alone.

Cheadle stood in the doorframe, struck, watching Pariston's tongue slow down over the cock he was sucking to gaze at her slyly from the corner of his eye. He didn't stop, seemed to revel in observing her watching them silently, her eyes wandering over his unbuttoned shirt, his reddened lips; on Ging, lying on her bed, tank top halfway up his chest, his breath dragging with an arm over his eyes.

And then as if he had to acknowledge her presence somehow, Ging straightened up, and both were now staring at her. None uttered a word for what felt like an eternity.

Pariston turned his full face to her, at complete leisure, and seemed to challenge her to enter the room. She didn't move. Instead, she burst out laughing, uncontrollably, glimpsing their expressions change into confusion.

"I'm really sorry to interrupt this health hazard," she said, taking a step back, laughing some more. "Continue, please."

Then she slammed the door shut behind her and ran back down the stairs, skipped three steps and slammed her feet on the ground and took a different hallway from the one she passed to here, the remnants of laughter dying in her throat the farther away from the room she ran, gripped instead by an abhorrent sadness and an incessant, hot pulsing that coursed through her entire body. She ran to kill it.

Cheadle sprinted without destination, could no longer hear her feet pounding on the floor, and only slowed down once she reached a floor she's never been on, a labyrinthine stretch of stone lined with windows. She imagined passing a blue, rustic metal door that was closed, but she couldn't see it anymore.

Heart drumming in her ears, she finally came to a stop beside a window, finally let the one following her catch up.

"You're fast." Ging's voice reached her before the man himself did, still stepping through the shadows on her trail.

"And you're an asshole." She retorted, still catching her breath.

"You could've just come into the room, you know."

She scoffed and glared at him. "To suck your dick? Fuck you."

Ging arrived to her side, standing before her where the dim light finally reached his face. He stood there in front of her saying nothing, studying her face and body like she studied his, the way she searched for changes in his features, in his posture, searched for time.

He was himself, unmistakably, but the longer she looked the more she saw him; new scars on his face and hands, stood differently with a different glint to his eyes, a gladness in there that she hated to see. He was 34 years old when she last saw him and now he was ten years older and looked it, if only in the way he stood there, content to just take her in without awkwardness or discomfort. They were so close. She wanted to throw him out of the window.

He smiled, but she hated it.

"You look nice." He said, but she ignored it.

"Is that why you told me to bring Pariston along?" She asked. "For free blowjobs?"

Ging leaned with his shoulder against the wall. "You know nothing's for free in Pariston's world."

"Then what the hell were you doing?"

He shrugged. "It just happened."

"I don't trust him."

"Then why did you go through the trouble of bringing him with you?"

Cheadle's eyes widened. "Because you asked me."

"Since when do you do anything I ask you to do?" He asked, bemused.

Cheadle leaned her head back, taking in a long breath. "People are dying a couple floors away from us, and I think you know that." She said. "I didn't have to come here personally, and I sure as hell didn't have to bring Pariston with me, so how about you own up to the fact that you want us here? And maybe it is for the best that I'm here, because whatever we're facing in this place should have fallen into S-rank mission category, but I'm surrounded by shit weasels who lie and tell half-truths, so don't you dare be one of them. Not you."

She stared at him, hearing her heartbeat in her ears, feeling it in the tips of her fingers. He was listening but looking elsewhere.

"Pariston won't be satisfied playing nurse for long, and I'm preparing for when his mask of cordiality falls for good." She continued, calmer, slower. "As always, he wants to make me feel left out and unimportant, wants to make me angry and put me on edge, but I didn't come here to participate in his nonsensical mind games. I don't really like it here, but I did come to help. I have a responsibility in this place, so I don't care if you have to run into the mountains with an erection, if you want your dick sucked do it in your own goddamn home."

He had that old sulky pout of acceptance on his face. "Fair."

"And what a touching reunion, really." Cheadle went on, drawling sarcastically, crossing her arms to look outside the window, hiding this measure of hurt with childish dejection. "I don't see you in almost a decade only to find you enjoying a hearty blowjob. I'm moved. Deeply."

Ging frowned, annoyed. "Let it go, will you."

"No, I won't let it go." She hissed at him. "I won't let it go because while you were enjoying your blowjob, I was dissecting a scientist who before dying cared enough to mention you."

His face underwent a subtle change, that little perpetual frown of irritation giving way to something somber, and Cheadle knew he was aware of whom she was talking about. When he spoke, his voice was serious. "Were you with her when she died?"

"Yes."

"Good."

"Good?" Cheadle spat out. "Someone you know died a horrible, slow, agonizing death. For months. And you were there to witness it, I believe."

"I know," he said, pushing himself off the wall, seemed ready to book it out of there. "We'll talk about her later."

Cheadle stood unmoving, watching him give the floor a quick survey.

"Are you sick, too?" She asked, surveying him too as if she'll find some ailment clear on his body, in his stance, in the way his feet shuffled under him.

"You don't have to worry about me," he said, smiling at her. "it's good to see you again."

She turned around, leaving him before he left her. "Whatever."

III