Emma had walked on by anyone and everyone. If someone wanted to stop her, they were going to have to do it by force. She barely even knocked before entering Whale's office.

"Sheriff," he said sternly.

"I need to see Regina."

"That isn't possible."

"You let Tink see her yesterday."

"Things have changed since then."

"I don't care. Take me to her."

Whale didn't even try to hide his annoyance as he stood. "Follow me," he said. They walked to the elevator.

"How is she?"

Whale didn't answer, which made Emma even more angry than she already was.

"How is she?"

"She's dying and at this point there isn't anything I can do to stop it," he said as if he was telling her the weather forecast. Emma had never liked the man – found him to be creepy – but now he seemed downright cold.

"What about Marian's blood? I thought you were going to try to and get the antibodies from it or something."

The elevator came and they boarded it.

"There were none in her blood. She may be a carrier, but there is no evidence the disease has ever tried to take hold in her, therefore her body had no reason to produce antibodies to combat it. It's a dead end."

Emma felt like she had been slapped again – only this time it hurt and the sting wasn't going away.

"What are you going to do then?"

"You mean after you are done bothering me with your ridiculous demands as if I don't have patients who are sick and suffering? I still have some options to try, but it's not like we have a full high-tech virology lab here. We aren't the CDC."

"Then maybe we should call them in."

Whale laughed in an emotionless way that made her skin crawl. Thankfully the elevator doors opened and she was no longer in a confined space with him.

"You would expose Storybrooke to the world by doing that."
"Yes, but if saved lives."

"It could doom just as many lives," Whale said. "Are you familiar with the history of this country at all? When the Europeans came here they brought with them diseases that the natives had no immunity to. Disease wiped out hundreds of thousands of people. Some estimates go as high as millions of people. Entire tribes and cultures were wiped from the planet all because the Europeans settled here. This is no different. You introduced a disease into a land that has no natural immunity to it. Do you want thousands or millions of people's deaths on your conscious?"

"But there has to be something we can do."

"There is nothing you can do sheriff beyond wasting my time, but if you are truly determined to see what your actions have wrought, follow me."

She paused a moment before following. She had to see.

They made her put on a mask, although Whale said it was doubtful she would catch any thing from the kids. He said it was only a precaution that he was isolating them, but was prepared to lift that isolation for the parents downstairs. Seeing their kids may go a long way to helping ease the tensions in the waiting areas.

They stopped at the first room. "Alex, age 8," Whale said. "He was one of the last cases to come in but as you can see he has already advanced to the stage where he has the chills."

Emma saw the poor boy trying to huddle in his blankets for warmth, although Emma could tell the temp in the room was higher than out in the hall. A nurse was sitting beside him trying to coax him into eating.

"The next stage for him will be the aches," Whale said. "At which point we will need to start him on pain medicine. And the aches while painful, are nothing compared to what these kids will experience when the real pain starts after the hallucinations."

They went to the next room, and the next. At each room Whale would tell her the kid's name, age and which phase they were in. Each kid looked pale, small, weak and miserable. Only one kid had entered the phase of having aches and Emma stood in his room watching has he kept moving around as each movement was designed to try and find comfort but brought only pain. He was crying as a nurse tried to soothe his mind if nothing else. He was 7.

"Seen enough?" Whale asked.

"Regina. I need to see Regina."

"Suit yourself."

She was surprised when they went up another floor. It was empty except for some nurses. "We have no isolation wing here so we cleaned out an old lab room and put a bed in it for her. This way we can observe her from this room here," he explained as he held the door open for her. She entered and immediately saw the glass partition – a window about three feet square. She walked up to it and turned to Whale.

"Why do you have her restrained?"

"It's merely a precaution."

"A precaution for what?"

"Sheriff I don't tell you how to do your job, and I don't need you to tell me how to do mine."

Emma looked back into the room. There were straps on each of Regina's arms that held her down to the bed. She looked about 10 times worse than any of the kids she had seen. Regina's hair was plastered down from being damp, her skin had a sheen of sweat on it and Emma had seen more color in some corpses than Regina was exhibiting right now. Like the boy who had the aches, she was moving around a lot, but instead of crying she was making clear sounds of being in pain.

"Can't you give her something more for the pain?"

"I could," Whale said, knowing full well the IV that was now attached to her contained only a saline solution, no pain medication. "The nurses tell me the pain will get worse so it's best not to rush to a high dosage."

When she wasn't making sounds of pain, Regina seemed to be mumbling but none of the words were clear enough for Emma to make out. She wasn't even sure if Regina was awake. She didn't care what Whale said, she saw no reason for Regina to be strapped down like that. If anything it would probably cause her more discomfort as it restricted any attempts at becoming more comfortable.

Before she could say anything, Regina tugged against the restraints and white light came out of her right hand for a matter of seconds. Then her body started to shake.

"She's having a seizure," Whale said rushing from the room.

Emma watched as Whale and two nurses went into Regina's room. Another burst of white light came out of her hand and she could see one of the nurses preparing a syringe while the other nurse tried to hold Regina down. In the grips of the seizure she was thrashing about. The first nurse handed the syringe to Whale who plunged it into her IV. It took several moments but Regina's body finally started to relax from the sedative that was now spreading through her system.

Emma backed away from the window. She brought her right hand up, studying it. She could have sworn she felt something – almost like the tingling sensation you get when feeling returns to a limb that has fallen asleep. She had only felt it for a few seconds, but something about it felt familiar.