Unbeknownst to me, while I had been talking with Drs. Nowston and Skorbinka, a traffic accident occurred several miles from the city center, near the county line, in a little suburb called Rebel’s Spark. Like most traffic accidents, this one happened at an intersection, one where the old road met the new. The new road was straight and narrow; the old, wide and winding. A hundred years ago, give or take, lots of places like Rebel’s Spark had been little more than cozy, cranky, suburban barnacles encrusted on asphalt highways the First Republic and, later, the Prelatory had built to cut through the pine-pelted foothills at the fringe of the Elpeck metropolitan area. Over the years, places like these had grown like weeds. Roads millennia old hid under asphalt highways that had since fallen beneath the shadows of glass-roofed Expressways and monorails with their red tracks and trestles. All that remained of the ancient right of way that linked the highlands to the bay was the land’s gentle slope, and the old road’s cypress-spangled curb.
The new new constructions had stuffed Rebel’s Spark with commuters and cash, enough to stretch the community into enclaves of buildings, though none of them were lived-in enough to grow to more than a couple of stories tall. Fortunately—particularly for the development’s advertisement campaign—Rebel’s Spark made up for it by having a storied history, or, at least, a claim to one. The place was proud of its name; the developers settled on the name to commemorate nearby events four-hundred years prior—the Sparking—when Trenton freedom-fighters made their first-ever use of darkpox as a biological weapon against the forces of colonial Mu. Their coördinated efforts secured the deaths of a regional colonial governor, several minor nobles, and most of the colonial settlements and outposts for several miles. The lands were repatriated, and the success of the campaign would prove to be a key turning point in our so-called “Third Crusade”, that great, bloody struggle which finally brought to an end nearly two-hundred years of Munine colonial rule.
In truth, the ruins of most of the nobles’ estates were a couple miles from the community’s center, though, perhaps, with more time, Rebel’s Spark might have grown to include them.
The lights at the intersection had only just changed, and traffic was heavy. A sleek, bright yellow sedan turned onto the old highway. Its tires screeched on the asphalt road. The sedan was but the first in a long line of vehicles lined up by the Expressway, desperate to merge onto it and head for the hills. Well, further into the hills, at any rate.
The new new constructions in Rebel’s Spark had stuffed the community full of commuters and cash, enough to stretch the community into enclaves of buildings, though none of them were lived-in enough to grow to more than a couple of stories tall.
Perhaps, with more time, they might have matured.
The yellow sedan was halfway through its sharp, sudden turn when the accident happened.
There was quite literally no way to have seen it coming. In the blink of an eye, a horse-drawn carriage appeared in the middle of the intersection. Wherever it had come from, it had been in a hurry, and however it had gotten to Rebel’s Spark, it had gotten there with its momentum fully intact. The wooden carriage had two big wheels, each as tall as a man. Their many spokes cast shadows that crisscrossed the asphalt in the late afternoon light. The carriage had an arched roof adorned in stripes of black and pale yellow. Curtains trailed down in tassels made of fine fabrics, bearing a crest of foreign design. The curtains’ red tips were encrusted with mud, still fresh and wet. Colorful, rectangular shingles covered the carriage’s sides, forming protective armor that clicked and clacked as the frightened horses galloped along the asphalt.
The yellow sedan’s drive had no time to react. By the time he processed the reflections in the panicked horses’ eyes or the sunlight streaming through their wild manes, it was already over. The carriage toppled forward. Horse blood sprayed steaming hot across the windshield as the car’s arrowhead hood ornament sliced the animal’s neck open. The horses whinnied and floundered. They careened forward, collapsing into the road, their legs snapping on impact. One of the carriage’s wheels buckled. The wood snapped; spokes broke as the carriage fell to its side. The carriage-driver’s whip lashed through the air in the half-second before the carriage-driver’s face smacked into the windshield, crunching bone and cracking glass.
The sedan’s wheels screamed like the horses as its driver hit the breaks, but he hadn’t been wearing his seatbelt, and his head crashed through his windshield, slitting his neck open. The cars behind him swerved out of the way, crashing into the carriage and the other horse, splitting both of them in two, slicking the road in blood. Wheels slipped on the wet road, streaking red across the asphalt as vehicles crashed into one another. Sleek chassises crunched. Glass shattered. Airbags blew.
And people screamed.
— — —
Suture Station was the secret to West Elpeck Medical’s Success, along with the benefits that came from being an institution over a millennium in the making. It meant that WeElMed was the most easily accessed hospital in the entire world. Special ambulance trains ran on a specially designed monorail route, transporting emergency patients directly to the heart of the hospital, in addition to the regular transportation services offered by WeElMed’s location on the Elpeck Metro line.
The Suture was what everyone called the new new atrium built at the back of the Administration building. The sleek module of chrome and glass was the point where the old and new parts of West Elpeck Medical Center came together and held hands. In all honesty, the Suture had always looked to me like it had been stitched onto the old stone where the architects had blasted a big opening in the back of the Administration Building.
As I walked to the Suture, I ran into a familiar face.
Jonan.
Well, it would be more accurate to say that he ran into me. I was busy typing up a text message to Brand on my console, to explain to him that, no, he wasn’t crazy—and then I got myself a face full of Jonan.
We staggered back. I put my console to sleep and stuffed it back in the new PPE I’d donned on my way up from the basement.
Jonan responded by snapping at me. “Watch where—”
—Only to stop once he realized who he was talking to. “Oh, Dr. Howle.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, bowing in apology, “I was busy with something. I should have been watching where I was going.”
“Are you headed to the Suture?” he asked.
I nodded. “I’ve been put on Darkpox duty.”
It never ceased to amaze me that nobody with the necessary power, influence, or cold hard cash had yet thought, “Hey, maybe we should make a new profession consisting of doctors whose speciality is to be on call to respond to accidents, emergency trauma, and the like.” I suspected the answer, like most things, was ultimately a matter of money. While the government could easily—and had easily—cut funding to paramedics and ambulance drivers, I think it might have been harder for them to do the same to full-fledged resident physicians with a specialty in, mmm… call it emergency medicine. And that meant that, should that profession be established, there was a strong possibility that the people who practiced it would get the appreciation they so rightfully deserved. But, of course, the last thing the status quo wanted was for money to go to someone who did not, themselves, come from money. So it goes.
Jonan nodded. “There’s been an accident out by Rebel’s Spark,” he said, pointing up to the Suture’s entryway further down the hall. “And it’s a big one. The one saving grace is that it happened near a monorail station. They loaded the victims onto the train in no time, and should be here in a matter of minutes.”
Both of our consoles played the same emergency jingle. A message marched across their screens.
Warning to all staff: trauma-bound patients arriving at Suture Station are confirmed positive for darkpox. Staff members assigned to the inbound patients are reminded to maintain appropriate containment protocols. Information regarding vaccine administration will follow shortly.
Jonan turned to me once more. “Well, at least you’re dressed properly for darkpox containment protocol.” He briefly cocked his head to the side. “Well, we all are, so… I don’t think it counts.”
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
“Let’s just get going,” I said.
Jonan and I entered the Suture through the opening in the back of the Administration Building. Stepping into the Suture was like entering an airport, what with the high ceilings crisscrossed by escalators and support beams. Sunlight streamed in through the glass panes in the polyhedral ceiling. In front of us was a glass bridge. Escalators straddled the bridge on either side, leading downward to the train platforms below, to be used by the general public. The ambulance monorail line, on the other hand, would be arriving at the upper tracks located on the platform across the glass bridge. Even ordinary monorail trains could be diverted to the upper level, if necessary, allowing for patients to be rolled on and off the hospital floor without the slightest trouble.
Jonan and I weren’t the only ones there. A whole flock of nurses and other doctors stood at the ready, Ani among them.
Jonan went white as a sheet the instant he saw his girlfriend—and he was already white as a sheet.
“Ani! You’re half-Munine. You shouldn’t be here! There’s—”
Ani turned to face him. “I know, I know.” She nodded in acknowledgement, trying to calm his fears with an expression of hope. “You don’t need to worry,” she smiled, “I’ve been taking the darkpox vaccine on a regular basis ever since I left for college. Better safe than sorry, you know?”
Jonan sighed with relief—as did I.
Stepping in front of her, Jonan gently grabbed Ani by the shoulders and locked eyes with her.
“You know,” he said, “sometimes I just want to kiss you.”
Ani rolled her eyes and politely shoved him off. “Later, champ. Later.”
Jonan was absolutely right to be concerned. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t go asking people about their personal medical decisions, but when it came to people of Munine or Tchwangan ancestry and the darkpox vaccine, I couldn’t help but make an exception.
The darkpox vaccine was one of the miracles of modern medicine: expeditious, efficacious, and dirt cheap to make—and it was in the public domain, to boot! If administered anywhere between six months before and two or three days after exposure to the virus, the vaccine would prevent nearly all effects of the illness. After that, without any treatment, most people had a nine-out-of-ten chance of surviving, except if they had Munine or Tchwangan blood by matrilineal descent, in which case—as absolutely every medical student in the world had to learn—there was a minor mutation in their mitochondrial RNA which acted like catnip for the virus, and caused the mortality rate to skyrocket to three out of every four cases. Because the vaccine only conferred about six months’ worth of protection from the darkpox virus, swift, coordinated responses to outbreaks were paramount if the virus was to be kept from ravaging the population.
I glared in concern at both Jonan and Ani. “Remember to keep your distance, people,” I said, though I directed it to everyone in earshot. “It’s not just NFP-20 anymore; we’ve got darkpox to deal with, too.”
As was writ in every history textbook the whole world over, the Munine colonization efforts in the Costranaks and Trenton six-hundred or so years ago marked the first time the Old World—Mu, Tchwang, Araka, and the rest—had come in contact with the New World—Trenton, Polovia, Benun, and the like—since the land bridge over the Strait of Uniyagu-Maiko had sunken beneath the sea at the end of the last Ice Age. And of all the plants, animals, and ideas that the New World shared with the Old, none of them, save for our religion, had anywhere near the impact that darkpox had.
Though the Great Colonizer Kenji Uminokami had secured his eternity in the annals of history, he would never again behold his native shores. The intrepid journey that culminated in his “discovery” of Trenton and the New World was his first and his last. Some said it was out of greed, others, pride, or regret, or even shame; whatever the reason, the Daimyo of All Seas chose to stay behind in the Trenton colony, while half of his men embarked on the long voyage home, born across the sea by the wind’s whip. The rugged, storm-beaten ships with their crimped sails shaped like paper fans carried cargo that defied the imagination, and which would change the course of history.
The Munine word for darkpox was shinokaze. The wind of death.
“How much longer?” someone asked.
Jonan glanced at his console screen. “Get ready people. They’re inbound. They’ll be here in sixty seconds.”
I’d first learned about darkpox in my first grade science class. For years, I’d have nightmares about it, dreaming of dark pustules and sub-dermal hemorrhages crawling under my skin like weeds, and I’d wake up screaming. At least my sister had been there to comfort me.
If only the peoples of the Old World could have afforded such comforts. The returning flotilla never made it to the docks of the Great Harbor of Hyokumina. They were found adrift about a mile off shore, haunted by an awful stillness. The ships were dragged into the harbor with the help of rope and nimble barges. Unfortunately, by the time the local magistrates finally put the cargo inspectors into quarantine, it was too late.
When it started, dock workers fell sick. When it ended, empires burned.
An evil spirit took to the air, reducing its victims to blood and sloughed flesh.
The Great Dark.
For two nightmarish years, from 1422 to 1424, the Great Dark swept across the Old World, the first and greatest darkpox outbreak it would ever see. Tchwang was decimated. The mightiest empire the world had ever known was snuffed out like a candle. The repercussions continued to be felt to the present day. The only reason Mu survived at all was because Mu’s Emperor Shonu deployed gunpowder to wipe the Isthmus of Umihashi off the map, separating the northern half of the country from its southern half. All who attempted to cross were killed. Every town and city within two miles of the sunken isthmus was bordered up and burned to the ground, with their inhabitants trapped inside.
It still boggled my mind to think that all of that actually happened. It seemed unreal.
The translucent doors across the glass bridge rattled, pulling my attention back to the present. Reverberations from the tunnels below rumbled up the stairwells.
“Here it comes…” Ani said.
The noise reached a climax, then fell silent as the doors slid open and the train came to a stop. The emergency exit in the side of the train in view split down the middle, opening up like a jaw. Paramedics rushed out of the opening, wheeling five patients, each sealed in a darkpox bed.
Everyone on our side of the glass bridge stared in astonishment.
The medics were as heavily armored in PPE as the rest of us. The paramedics came in five pairs, one for each bed. The way the patients lay beneath the darkpox bed’s plastic cases made them seem like they were held in stasis tubes, like something out of science fiction.
But that wasn’t what was making mouths gape.
Ani pointed to the enclosed beds. “Are you seeing this?”
“You think they’re Third Crusade re-enactors?” Jonan suggested.
“Maybe actors from a period drama?” someone said.
As for me, I didn’t know what to say. I just stared. The sight before me reminded me of an old folktale: a plucky young thief dared to plunder one of the ancient barrow-mounds overlooking the bay, only to be enslaved for eternity by the demon that dwelled within it.
Of the five patients, there were two adult males, one adult female, and two children—one male, one female, with the boy appearing the older of the two, on the cusp of adolescence. At a glance, I would say one of the two men was a bodyguard—he was certainly dressed like one—while the other four individuals were a family: father, mother; son and daughter. All five were of Munine ethnicity, though the father was clearly biracial. The light brown skin beneath his dark brown hair indicated he was probably half Costranak, like Ani. His beard and mustache made curly hedge-rows on his face, complementing his strong brow. The son’s hair was black, like his mother’s; the daughter’s, brown like her father’s. The other adult male was pure Munine, like the wife—tall and long-faced, with night-black hair tied in a bristling horsetail.
All five of them displayed signs of darkpox in varying stages of progression: flushed cheeks, bodies pock-marked all over by hematomas; dried, blackened blood encrusted around the eyes, nose, and mouth. The woman—the mother—was in the worst shape. Fissures ran down her exposed arms in between the hematomas like cracks in pavement, marking where her skin was beginning to slough off. Even so, her features were still graceful, even as she lay in a frightful fever dream, her face pained and sweat-streaked. Her long, dark, silken hair covered her like a veil half-drawn.
But even that wasn’t what took my breath away. No: it was their clothes.
Their clothes were extraordinary. I could imagine them in a HTP colonial-era period drama, or—better yet—behind glass at the Museum of the Third Crusade. The woman wore a thick yukata, decorated with flower motifs—indigo and crimson—that stood out against the luminous white fabric.
“That dress…” someone said, “is it silk?”
The father wore an austere, deep blue kimono, with a matching thigh length jacket. Thin, vertical monochrome stripes covered his long trousers and matching belt, their white strips shone in the bright light of his darkpox bed’s interior. The other, younger man was decked out in banded leather armor with metal highlights that blossomed, skirt-like around his waist. The whole suit of armor was sheathed by a red vest, dull and sleeveless. The children were more or less miniatures of their parents. And they all wore polished wooden sandals, with thick socks as white as snow.
It was too perfect for a re-creation, and yet… too ominous for a miracle.
As the patients were brought closer, I shuddered at the sight of the woman’s mouth. For a moment, I thought she’d stuffed it full of mud. A second look, however, revealed something… unexpected.
I pointed at her. “Look at the woman’s teeth,” I said, “they’ve been blackened!”
Many old-world cultures once practiced teeth-blackening, as body beautification, and to symbolize coming-of-age, and the serene purity of the Night. In the modern era, Isolated tribes or developing backwaters still did it, but, otherwise, the practice had ceased centuries ago, in large part because of the extraordinary stigma Lasseditic cultures had against it. To this day, the stereotype of an abusive, womanizing Munine nobleman was a fixture of the Trenton imagination’s image of evil. My ancestors had believed the practice was a sign Munine women were molested by demons, to fill them with the Night’s darkness to bring about Hell on earth, as if Athelmarch supposedly doing so wasn’t enough of a punishment for my people’s sins.
But then Ani spoke up. “We can gawk at them later,” she said, reminding us of our duties. “C’mon, people, let’s move!”
“Alright,” I said, “tell me what to do.”