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“I did not mean to make it sound like it was only to sate your curiosity. Your heartspace is troubled by what all this means for a reason. We raskarrans would call that Lina’s guiding hand, and wise males listen to such guidance.”
She sighs heavily, looking exhausted, despite the fact that we are asleep.
“I also kind of hope it is just because I’m a nosey cow. I’m afraid of what I might find if I keep pulling at all these threads. Nothing good, I think.”
“Better to be armed with knowledge than protected by ignorance.”
She shuffles round to my side, resting her head on my shoulder as she tucks herself against me. It makes my heartspace glow with pride to know she seeks comfort from me now. That my closeness eases her spirit.
“I hate asking you this, but could you tell me everything you know about the sickness? Everything you can think of. I know you were very young when it happened.”
“Most of us were,” I say. “Younglings survived the sickness better than those full grown. Elders, also. You will see of our tribe that most of us have less than thirty seasons or over sixty. It is a small number of us that exists in the middle. Anghar is the only one in our tribe who was raised by his father and not his grandfather.”
My Angie immediately frowns. “That usually goes the other way.”
“Sicknesses take the very old and very young.”
“The most vulnerable.”
“That is the way it always was for us before, though we are rarely so badly sick that the forest cannot provide something to aid us. That made the sickness strange, also. Nothing our healers did helped.”
“Forgive me for saying this, but you can’t have the most advanced medicine.”
“Compared to the things humans can do - we cannot freeze each other in pods for endless seasons, no.” A hint of a smile graces her lips. “But we are blessed to have djenti berries to speed our healing. Grace and Rachel have said that humans have nothing like that. We use them to help with all manner of injuries and ailments. But the sickness - they did not touch it.”
“So nothing about it behaved like any sickness you had ever encountered before?”
Her expression is grim as she says it.
“No, it did not.”
She is silent for a long moment.
“I don’t like it.” Her voice is heavy. “A new sickness unlike anything you’ve ever experienced before feels so much like it ought to have been brought here by Mercenia. Especially with the really high mortality rate.”
“But Mercenia was running from it also.”
“Yeah,” she says, her voice empty of the confidence it held only a sunset ago.
“You no longer believe this to be true?”
“I believe it’s either true or they wanted anyone looking to think it was true.”
She sits back so she can look at me properly. “It’s the emails. The messages on Farrow’s computer. The guy saves every document he has on his desktop, like a complete idiot, but his emails are immaculate?”
“You questioned before what he might have got rid of to cover up his incompetence.”
“Or his corruption.”
“Which would be the simplest?” I ask, thinking of how we made my problem as simple as possible and, in doing so, found the answers.
She makes a frustrated sound, then collapses back onto the ground, staring up above her at the sky before covering her face with her hands, massaging at her temples.
“You have an ache in your headspace from all this thinking and fretting,” I say, moving to sit at her head.
“I’ve had a headache since I woke up, pretty much,” she says.
“I think that is normal when the headspace has so much to process. Speak with Lorna in the morning. She will help Shemza get you the right treatment.”
