~ TEMA ~
The ward grew quieter with each passing death. When the lockdown began, Lily Day had tied ribbons of silk around the base of every patient’s cot. One by one, the ribbons had been cut free and gathered into a box, as the sick lost their fights. Poor Lily Day had died in the end, and it had come quick when it came. She’d complained of a headache at the end of one shift, and by the next she was unconscious on a bed beside the patients she’d attended hours earlier. She was the third one to die, the second of the hospital’s staff, and her death had been met with an outpouring of grief. Tears had been shed when they wheeled her away to the morgue.
By the time Doctor Ballard died, the staff had only silence to give. They were the sort of conditions that almost seemed to encourage mental breakdowns. It felt like they’d been stuck here for years. The hospital was a prison, a place for them to stay forever without sunlight or respite, watching on as nearly a dozen of their friends grew steadily weaker and eventually passed away. The occasional bright patches gave rise to false optimism, optimism soon crushed. Oscar Paisley, who’d been unconscious and waiting for a ventilator to be prepared, woke up one morning well enough to eat solid food and chat to young Lucy Jaine, attending him. An hour later he was dead. Callie Huston’s recovery—to the point where the red welts had gone, and the fever had broken—was hotly followed by Martha Salcombe falling ill.
The shifts were longer now out of necessity. There just weren’t the numbers for eight hours on and sixteen off. Masks, thankfully, were still plentiful, but the numbers were dwindling. Tema had put Viola Watling to an inventory the other day, to give her a break from the front line pressure. It had needed Grant Radge to relay the instructions to Viola, who’d not dared face Tema since outing her to Staniforth and the rest. Grant had relayed the results, too, and they made for grim reading indeed. The masks were running out. At a noticeable rate. If they carried on using them without thought to rationing, within a month they’d be short.
And there was no indication of how long the lockdown might last. Tema had made the call to ration the masks now, limiting them to two in each shift, in the hopes that at least they’d have something, even if they were forced to stay here far into the future.
Of course, when Ruth Fletcher caught the illness, and keeled over beside the bedpan she was in the middle of emptying, Tema got the blame. “She’s sick because her mask failed,” somebody had said, pointing an accusing finger. The truth was that they didn’t know if that was true. How could they know?
Tema had come to tune out most of what the others said. It was better if she just got on with her work.
When Caroline stopped breathing, Janna Davis called her over. “She won’t wake up, Miss Tema. I think she’s gone.”
Janna went with Caroline’s gurney, and Fran Dunn stepped out of the room to grieve. And all of a sudden Tema was on her own, nothing to disturb her thoughts but the constant caterwauling of Caroline’s lifesign monitor. No longer plugged into anybody, it was pitching a fit at the fact it hadn’t been immediately switched off. If it was covered in feathers rather than aluminium, she’d have thought it to be a bird in heat rather than a medical instrument.
She turned it off at the mains and it thankfully fell silent. In its place, she could hear the monitor attached to Doctor Maynard. That one was beeping quietly, periodically, not enough to become a nuisance. The sound of its activity was heavenly. Never stop, she willed it. To stop would be to fail.
In the peace, a wafting scent came. It was a bitter smell, acrid, like rotten meat left too long to swelter. Emmeline’s flesh had greyed. She could see the waxy pallor from across the room. Poor Emmeline’s breathing was constant, the rise and fall of her chest still natural in its rhythm. How long would that last? Others had gone the same way. The fighters. Their bodies had curdled, and in the end their melted lives had drained through Tema’s fingers. Every name was burned in Tema’s mind. It was her roll call of failure, far too long.
Doctor Maynard would not be adding to that list. She refused to allow it.
Each death heralded a sombre ritual. The body was carried to the morgue, carefully labelled and consigned to the ice. The empty bed was wheeled away and the bedding doused in disinfectant. Tema removed the ribbons which had been tied to the end of each bed, a reverent continuation of Lily Day’s habit. She washed each by hand, and placed them folded in a strongbox. When at last the lockdown was over, she’d take the box to some breezy headland, somewhere where wildflowers grew in the sunlight and wheeling birds sang, and bury it in remembrance. For now, she kept it under the desk in her office.
To stay the spread of infection, Tema had mandated that every patient’s principal attendants clean themselves thoroughly in the showers, twice over. An unused ward had been converted into an isolation room. There was a two-day quarantine in place for those who had been closest to the deceased. If they showed signs of infection, even so much as a runny nose, they wouldn’t be allowed to return to the hospital floor. It had been hard to keep resolute in this policy when the deaths started to ramp up, and the numbers dropped. She’d pulled a few shifts of twenty-four hours or more to smooth things over. But the spread had declined. She liked to think her efforts had helped.
At Doctor Staniforth’s insistence, Tema had loosened the seal to permit visitors. The sick had friends and relatives who they’d want to see again, Staniforth pointed out, and it would be a defeat for morale if that wasn’t allowed to happen. As a condition of this, any visitors were to spend two days in the quarantine ward before they were permitted to leave the hospital, and a further week in their homes. Tema had slipped a message to one of the guards outside the door, to inform the Governor of this development. If anybody showed a peep of infection, out in the valley, they were to be returned post-haste, and the lockdown would return to its firm seal until there was no trace of sickness anywhere within.
It wasn’t often that a visitor braved the lockdown. The first had been the Governor’s deputy, Ian Fitzhenry, a day or so before Caro passed away. He—and the few that came after him—was sent to the same empty ward before they were allowed to leave, whether they’d been in for an hour or a few minutes. Some complained, tried to leave anyway, but the guards on the outer door had clear instructions. Only a letter of clearance signed by the head doctor would enable someone to leave the hospital, and Tema refused to sign too soon. Maybe they weren’t sick. It was too dangerous to take the chance. She would have no more blood on her hands.
They all reacted to the quarantine in different ways. Tommy Morton had sat on a metal bedframe for the full forty-eight, staring with clenched jaw at the windowscreen through which Tema watched him. Ian Fitzhenry had spent his isolation on the brink of tears, begging for forgiveness over and over until he collapsed into sleep. The reeve Goulden Aster, who had come to sit by the bedside of his sick daughter Bedegrayne, talked in hush tones to no-one in particular.
Nobody had come to visit in the past two weeks.
An unspoken rule had developed over time, that the dead weren’t mentioned by those who remained. Once they were tagged and in the mortuary, their names went unsaid. “We should let their spectres pass unseen,” Betsy Clanackan had pronounced, during one of their informal evening round-tables. “After all, that is the proscription found in the Four Fiefs: ‘let the ague of their ghosts fade away’.” A prayer should be read each morning, reciting in full the list of the fallen, and thereafter the Gods should not be tempted.
Betsy Clanackan was ill herself. Her prayers had lasted for three days, before she was found convulsing beside a trolley of supplies. Nobody had taken up the prayer in her stead, and nobody had seen fit to test the Gods anymore.
So after each death, the remainder of the hospital staff rallied around the dwindling patient population. They were down to ten now, ten people in sickbeds. All stank of fever. Without a cure presenting itself, half would die. More, if luck wasn’t on their side.
Tema squeezed close her fist, around a green ribbon. This one is Caroline Ballard. She turned it over in her hands as she walked towards the box. It was almost overflowing. Lily had never said where she’d been getting the ribbons from, but she’d had a healthy supply. Dozens of them, in all the major colours. Every one was a human being, not so long ago living and healthy and happy. Tema couldn’t say who any of the ribbons had belonged to. They had no name, no identifying features. They were anonymous, one among a hundred. Indistinct.
Caroline Ballard was far from indistinct.
I will not do it, she thought. I will not add Caro to the pit. It would be no justice. She reached around and pulled on a tuft of hair, tied the ribbon tight around it, tapped it until she was certain it wouldn’t fall. I will wear Caroline, and keep her close beside me until her kindness has been earned. I will wear her in my hair forever.
She started for the admin block with trepidation in her step. Much as she didn’t want to face him, Doctor Staniforth should be informed. They were the only two qualified, certified doctors this side of the lockdown—it wouldn’t be right to keep things from him.
Her feet led the way. They eschewed the lifts in favour of taking the main staircase. As the lockdown went on, it had become a far busier place. Fake and gaudy as the waterfall was, when put against the boredom of everywhere else in the hospital it was practically paradise. And it also meant she’d take longer to get to Staniforth’s office. Passing through, she found Callie Huston taking lunch with Maponane Lombard. Callie had finally returned to health, and gone through the quarantine period without ill effect. She was the first, and so far only, full recovery. Hopefully she wouldn’t be the last. Tema had put her on easy duties for this first shift back, mentoring Maponane and running errands for the tyro nurse. Tema passed the two with a wave, not reciprocated, and headed up the stairs with the rush of cascading water filling her ears, leaving them to their frumenty.
The admin block, by contrast, was silent. Of course it would be. Nobody else had any reason to visit. The air here felt heavy, almost morose. It was hard not to be drawn to Doctor Ballard’s office. All the others had been positioned surrounding it; Caroline, as chief doctor, was the heart of the hospital, and everybody else was a body in her joyful orbit. She’d gone supernova now. The orbit was off kilter, the joy gone. The frosted glass didn’t hide the darkness inside. Caroline’s office had fallen silent as she did.
Across from it, Doctor Staniforth’s showed the only signs of life. The glow coming from it was like a tonic. As Tema approached, so she tuned in on the echoing of her footsteps. The soft rubber soles were muted, compared to the clacking heels she’d have worn in easier times, but they weren’t silent. They beat out a countdown to her coming face to face with Staniforth. If only there was somebody else who could relay the message.
She’d reached his office. There was nowhere further to walk, no reason for delay. Nothing to do but knock on Staniforth’s door. She breathed in deep, and she knocked.
It wasn’t any surprise that he chose to ignore her. Loathe as she was to admit it, she’d probably have done the same were the roles reversed. And with the offices all fully soundproofed, the chances were he hadn’t heard the knock anyway. There were intercoms on all the doors in case the doctors needed to be contacted while they were inside their offices, but Staniforth’s lacked the telltale green light. He’d disconnected it. Tema could only contact him at his own liberty. So there she stood, like a lemon.
If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
She couldn’t just stay there all day. That would be wasting time she couldn’t afford to waste, when her time was most precious. She knocked once more, on the off chance, but still Staniforth ignored her. She could see him through the window, if she squinted; he was reading a battered book and chowing down on an oat bar, hand down the front of his trousers. Research, he’d said. The semi-naked girl on the cover of his book was in a position that suggested lots of things, but research wasn’t one of them.
Tema turned away, an idea forming, and headed for her own office. She grabbed the metal chair behind her desk and took it to Staniforth’s office. Then, lifting it high above her head, she swung with great force at the glass. The noise was great, but not enough for Staniforth to hear. So again she swung, and a third time. By now she was sweating from the exertion. A chip had formed in the glass. That was her target. She focused her aim on that chip, swung the chair at it, and suddenly the chip had doubled in size, and a slim crack was shooting from it.
This had drawn Staniforth’s attention. He emerged through his door apoplectic. “Have you gone completely insane? What are you doing?”
“Getting your attention, Doctor Staniforth,” said Tema, setting the chair down gently beside her.
“By smashing through the walls? You’re loopy. Little mad cunt.”
“There’s no need to be rude,” said Tema, keeping her voice calm. “I’m only here as a courtesy to you. And if you’d not insisted on ignoring my knocks, I wouldn’t have had to act.”
Staniforth glared at her. “What do you want?”
Tema sighed. “Doctor Ballard’s passed away,” she said. “I came to fill you in.”
A flicker of a smirk crossed Staniforth’s lips, before he replaced it with a stoic expression of indifference. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said, his tone conveying utter disinterest. “She will be missed.”
“There will be a mourning in the chapel, as usual. Perhaps you’ll be there?”
“I said she will be missed,” Staniforth snapped. “Is that not mourning enough? She was no friend of mine. You can leave now, and I’d be very grateful if you could refrain from attacking my walls again. Take your anger out on Ballard’s office—she doesn’t need her walls anymore.”
Tema stood there as Staniforth turned to return to his office. “You’re a dick. You know that?”
He turned back with a grin. “I’ve been told,” he said. The door slid shut, cutting the two off from one another, and Tema didn’t stay there any longer. She carried her chair back to its rightful place and sat on it, crying, for five minutes. Only five minutes. She allowed her anger at Staniforth and at the Gods for taking Caroline to pour in and drown her for those five minutes, and then she turned off her emotions. She needed to be robotic now.
Stopping only briefly to push her hair back behind her ears, she headed for the wards. Caroline might have lost her battle, but Emmeline Maynard still lived.
Tema stood alone in the ward, surrounded by the constant beat of Emmeline Maynard’s vitals, until Viola Watling found her. Viola had come running, judging by the sweat on her cheeks. She didn’t meet Tema’s eye. “Visitors,” she said. “There’s three of them, scientists. Fran’s with them in the reception.”
“Did they say what they want?”
Viola shook her head. “They asked for Doctor Ballard. I told them that Doctor Ballard wasn’t available, but that I would find Doctor Caerlin instead.”
The three scientists were sat on chairs, masked and gloved, unattended. Fran had left them at some point before Tema was able to reach them. Upon seeing her, one rose. He was short and round, with podgy arms, and a trimmed black moustache poking out of his mask. “Doctor Caerlin,” he said. “Dougray Stockton.”
“And what brings you here, Master Stockton? I’m told you’re looking for Doctor Ballard.”
“I am indeed,” he said. “Might she be available at any time soon?”
She shook her head. “I’m sorry,” she said, and then paused. Why was it so hard to say? She touched the ribbon now fastened around her hair. It was as if at once she could hear Caro’s voice in her ear, telling her to breathe and keep calm. Everything would turn out fine. “Doctor Ballard has passed away,” she said.
The sandy-haired woman stood to Stockton’s left gasped audibly.
“That is a pity,” said Stockton. “I can’t say I knew her intimately, but she never gave me cause to doubt that she was a wonderful woman.”
“She was the best,” Tema agreed.
“Can I take it you’re in charge now?”
She nodded. “I suppose I am.” It was one thing to be in charge in the interim, while Caro was incapacitated. But she’d figured Caro would get better eventually, and soon enough she’d be back to being just another doctor among many. That wouldn’t be the case. She was the senior doctor, and that was that.
The woman by Stockton picked up a metal case that had been tucked between her feet, and set it down on the empty chair next to her. She unclasped it and opened it to reveal two glass jars, nested in an excess of soft charcoal foam. Stockton gestured towards the case. “Doctor Ballard contacted us some time ago to perform some tests on a blood sample. I suspect the results will be of interest to you. I only wish we’d been able to bring this sooner.”
Tema walked over to the case and picked up one of the jars. This one contained what looked like the blood sample Stockton was referring to. Not that it resembled any blood sample she’d come across. It looked almost alive, moving about like a jelly. Flecks of black dotted it, like the seeds of a watermelon.
The other jar, next to it, was half-filled with a black crumb. “You see this powder?” said Stockton. “The same substance is in that blood sample. It’s the black spots you can see.”
“What is it?” Nothing that belonged in blood looked like that.
“The very question we’ve been working to answer for the last several months. In truth we don’t have a full answer, but we have made some progress. It behoves us to bring the information to Doctor Ballard’s attention. Or yours, I suppose.”
“There’s silicon in there, and carbon, and a few others,” said the woman. “Only we’re not sure exactly what. It plays havoc with our microscopes.”
“At a push, I’d say it’s likely to be elements as yet unknown to us.” The other scientist, the gangly man with a freckled face, spoke for the first time.
The woman interjected, talking forcefully as though she thought her cohort a fool. “The issue is that it all appears to be stable. An element that heavy would decay before our eyes. This does not.”
The science was beyond Tema. She’d known from very young that medicine was her path; none of the lectors had ever managed to instil more than a passing understanding of chemistry in her.
“The short of it is that the sample Doctor Ballard sent my way is possibly the greatest mystery I’ve ever had to work on,” Stockton said.
Tema had questions. Many questions. “You say this came from here?” She indicated the blood sample, and Stockton nodded. “Jem?”
“Doctor Ballard never told us anything about the source of the blood, and to be honest it wasn’t our business to know. She just wanted us to conduct some tests to try and explain the anomalies.”
It had to be Jem. He was the only patient to die before Caro fell sick herself. Perhaps he wasn’t human. Boy, that would be a story to reminisce over. She made a point to tell Macel Donea when this was all over. He wouldn’t believe her, but she’d tell him all the same. “This powder must be something endemic then,” she said.
“It would follow. Some weeks back, we received another sample of the powder, from the Constabulary. Captain Clifford seemed surprised we’d not already tested it—apparently it was discovered alongside the body of the soldier.” Tema didn’t recall hearing anything about a dead soldier, but she let Stockton continue. “And then a woman was found not more than a few days ago,” said Stockton. “Badly wounded, a long way from the valley.”
“Another stranger?”
“No. One of our own. A missing soldier, I believe—I’m not in on all the details.”
It couldn’t be Eilidh, surely? After all this time?
Stockton continued. “There was more of this powder on the ground around her. No samples, unfortunately, but reports from the officers who found her. We’re operating under the assumption that it’s the same. And whatever it is, it has a very unusual effect on blood. It thins it and batters it until it’s too molecularly unsound to clot, or to even really function as blood.” Explaining why no amount of stitches could stop Jem’s bleeding. “Frankly, we’re still at a loss as to what’s happening here. But Ella here did a few tests herself.”
The woman—Ella—raised a hand, revealing a plastered thumb. “I used samples of my own blood. Added a fractional quantity of powder and left it overnight. It had the same effect as Doctor Ballard’s sample.”
“Which proves that the powder is the culprit here, and not just another side effect,” said Stockton. “But Ella’s results were curious indeed.”
“When I removed the powder, the blood cells reconstituted themselves,” she said. “It took a few days, mind, but eventually there was no way to tell it apart from a fresh sample of blood that had never been exposed to the powder.”
Tema frowned. “How does this help us here? We’re not in the business of adding strange powders to people’s blood, you know.”
It hadn’t been meant as a joke, but Ella laughed. She had the same squeal of a laugh that Tasha used to have.
“Antibodies,” said Stockton. “You expose a body to a virus via a vaccine, and the next time the same virus is introduced, the immune system is prepared. The antibodies stop it dead. This powder seems to work in a similar way.”
“When I added more powder to the reconstituted cells, nothing happened at all,” said Ella. “A slight increase in haemoglobin, but that could have been statistical noise. Certainly it didn’t suffer from any of the effects of the first test.”
“Are you saying this powder is a virus?”
Stockton shook his head. “The powder’s a powder. That much I’m certain of. There is no criteria by which you can call it life, not if you stretch definitions as far as they’ll go, not if you hold it at a funny angle and squint. It is not alive.”
“But it can still immunise,” said Ella. “My theory is that it can be used as a vaccine against something. They’re saying the soldier lady was found in some ancient holy site. Perhaps whoever lived here before us found a solution.”
“You think it’s medicine?”
“It’s worth considering,” Ella nodded.
True, Tema thought. It didn’t hurt to consider the possibility. “But we can’t just give it to people and hope for the best,” she said.
“I completely agree,” said Stockton. “And since one hundred percent of the people the powder’s been found on had serious, possibly fatal, wounds, I would completely understand if you wanted to steer clear of it completely. But Ella’s convinced.”
Ella was nodding enthusiastically. “It might save lives.”
“She’s my best student,” said Stockton. “Absolutely devoted to her work, even if she’s slightly idealistic.”
Tema put on a smile. “Thanks for bringing this all to my attention,” she said, “but you shouldn’t have broken the lockdown. You’ll have to stay in quarantine for two days before I can let you leave.”
“Yes,” Stockton nodded, “the guard did say something about that.”
“Might we be able to look through the hospital library?” Ella asked. “I might find a disease that the powder could cure.”
Tema couldn’t help but laugh. Had she ever been that keen, when she was young? She was more occupied with hating herself, and dreaming unachievable dreams of the body she wanted to have. In her younger days she’d have despised somebody as chirpy as Ella, wanted to throttle them. Ella made that enthusiasm endearing. “You’re welcome to try,” she said. “But even if you do find something, what then? I don’t have the time or the people to spare to help your project, and I’m not injecting anybody with something that might not even work.” That was a quick way to a malpractice suit, and no jury would give her any leeway when the truth of her gender history came out.
“That’s okay,” said Ella, with a grim-set look of determination on her face. “I’ll be the guinea pig.”
Tema waved over the nurse on the reception desk, who today was Delphine Janley. “Phina, find a room for these three to use as a base of operations. Somewhere near the library.”
Delphine frowned. “The library?”
“On the other side of the chapel. The big room with all the books.”
Delphine nodded. “I know it.” She led Master Stockton and the scientists through reception and out of sight, and left Tema stood alone.
This isn’t going to work, she thought. I need not get my hopes up. I must not get my hopes up. But she couldn’t help it. Perhaps Master Stockton would be the saviour. Perhaps the nightmare was nearing its end.