Sobbing, chest heaving in the cold night, Vanessa huddled in her little tent, shivering, not daring to make a fire lest the smoke leave a trail. She couldn't get the image of Langston out of her mind. He was important. He was special. And now, he hated her.

She cried out of self-pity, that much she could tell. But not for injury or flight; she was deeply affected by the knowledge that she could never see Langston again. Never again would she feel the ease and comfort and warmth she had when around him.

She was longing to be with him in ways they'd never actually touched. This was in the books, the ones she'd found boring. To define it by texts, Vanessa came to accept that she'd been in love with Langston.

Without Langston in her life, knowing that he was out there hating her...Her chest hurt terribly and she wondered if she would die.

OXO

In those days, the generation who remembered the aftermath of the Great Fall were elderly or dead. The term 'lost technology' came to mean anything that Gunsmoke citizens could not reverse-engineer from the wreckage, and everything that they could no longer understand. Among such things were the plants, around which every town and settlement grew. The largest concentrations of plants yielded the largest cities, and at the time these were really not terribly big cities at all. But they were growing steadily, as nutrition and shelter (thanks to the plants) allowed them to have many children, children who did not die in their early years. The population growth rate was steadily increasing, as were the towns.

But, at that point, there were still few towns and cities. The population primarily settled in the big cities, with very few smaller towns.

Thus, Vanessa had few places to go, in her early days. The places where people might remember what she was (whatever she was, she wondered) were places she could not risk to journey to again. Not until she'd aged some, so that people wouldn't recognize her.

She wandered for a few years, taking odd jobs and hiding herself and generally trying to blend in. But people always found out. Her ears would show or she'd say something that would put people off, and she'd be run out of whatever town she was in. Growing somewhat used to the insults and rock throwing and roughing up and occasional unwanted advances, she went to the place where she'd first been called names. Vanessa returned to Haven.

But it wasn't to reminisce. On the contrary, she avoided the side of town where Greta lived. She only came to that town because she'd gotten wind of a need for a nurse at the little clinic that Dr. Chang's successor was setting up. Haven had grown by a third of its previous size (it'd been only seven years since she'd left!). Dr. Garret did, in fact, need a nurse. And Vanessa got the job, under an assumed name of Ness, of course.

She learned that Greta had died of disease, and that her husband and boys had left the town before she arrived. The children who'd teased her at school and the few other people she'd met there sometimes came to the clinic for this or that, but to Vanessa's great relief, none seemed to recognize her at all. She wasn't the hunchbacked, awkward, naïve girl they once knew.

In the clinic in Haven, Vanessa studied workings of the body she'd only had theories about previously. She managed to fill most of the pages in her book with diagrams and equations. She'd gouged the former title of the book out of the cover and spine long ago, to avoid any more…problems. It was the most important thing she owned and was at all times at her hip, secure within the leather straps of a converted gun holster, should she need it.

And need it she often did.

The pages did things to people. She was sure of it. After wondering about it as a midwife's assistant, and seeing it to be true once she'd gotten the book back, Vanessa proved to herself, secretly, time and time again that the pages did things to people's physiology. It wasn't easy; each page took forever to draw up and when she used them on people it made her quite tired. When Dr. Garrett left for the night and she was alone with the patients too sick to go home, she used the book on them. At first, she made mistakes, and some people got worse. A few died. But she gradually improved, and so did the patients.

Dr. Garrett was praised as a miracle worker those who'd passed through his clinic. He was humble, and insisted that people thank modern medicine. People also thanked their Lord, whom they credited for answering their prayers and healing the sick. And they insisted that Dr. Garrett and his nurse were doing 'God's work.'

Vanessa wondered about the implications of that. She wondered what place a god had in the world. It wasn't anyone altering those people's bodies but her. She was alone with the patients, alone with the book.

She was very, very alone.

Patients told her she was beautiful. She doubted they'd say that if she undid the braids and pins in her hair veiling her ears. They warned her she'd become an 'old maid,' that she should date. Young and old men alike made propositions, offered dates. She even went on a few, but sometimes things didn't go well. Once in a while she'd find herself in a bad situation.

There was something about men, she came to understand, that if they could overpower a woman, get her alone, grab at her, they thought it was fun. They didn't offer money and there was no security around, like at Madame's. They just wanted to touch and take and have, and they didn't care that she said, 'no.' Out of a total eleven dates she went on, four ended like that (the remaining eight were boring and awkward but otherwise harmless). The book and her struggling got her out of it thrice. She'd make them fall asleep or lose their balance or something simple like that. The remaining instance was something she tried not to think of, or only in medical terms. Will had forced her to do the thing to him, and then he let her go.

Vanessa wrote up a special page, just for Will.

Will came down with testicular cancer months after. He would've died, had Dr. Garrett not removed both of his testicles. In truth, Vanessa knew the cure, with or without her book, but she said nothing. When he recovered, she found herself disappointed, and considered making another page for Will.

Needless to say, she accepted no more dates after Will's.