Life was a tragedy. A tragic play, only there was no going home after the show. I knew Dr. Arbond was finished when the sound of cursing stopped echoing in the distance.

I’d watched over Mr. and Mrs. Plotsky until Cassius had stepped back into the room.

Mrs. Plotsky finally spoke up. “I… Ileene? What…” she wheezed, “is there news?”

The residual hair gel left in her bouffant ‘do seemed to be the only thing still holding her together—that, and the fragile, deluded hope in her wide, searching eyes.

A couple of feet away, Jed lay on his back in his separate bed, breathing like a dying animal: slowly, raggedly; the effort of the simple task shook his frame. His bulging, bloodshot eyes winced at the fluorescent lights overhead, and I wondered just how much of him was still… there.

My gaze drifted back to his wife. How much had she forgotten? Perhaps, in her concern for Jed, Babra simply hadn’t noticed anything amiss within her own mind.

As scared as I was at the thought of becoming a wyrm—and, almost as bad, of not knowing what that even meant—the idea of forgetting everything that made you who you were, and without even noticing it? That made me shiver. My tail wriggled in my pants-leg.

I was almost too afraid to ask her about it.

“Is Ileene here?” Babra asked. “Did they find her? Is she okay?”

Oh no. Please, no…

Sniffling, I bit my lip and clenched a fist, though I held my arm behind my back so that Mrs. Plotsky wouldn’t notice. I breathed in deeply, letting the air out so slowly that my chest quivered.

“Yes, she is,” I said, perhaps a bit too quickly.

Babra looked up and covered her mouth with the back of her hand. Her weak, raspy voice muttered a prayer, likely one of the Orisons. The ceiling lights shone down on her, making her tears glisten the subtle crows’ feet at the edges of her face.

Babra patted her blanket and gown for a moment, flattening them and pressing them smooth. Nervous, she smiled fretfully and nodded with a shiver. “W-When did she arrive? Is she okay?”

The agitation in her words was as fresh as hail. Her desperation pushed tacks into my ears.

They say that comedy is an outgrowth of an awareness of our own mortality. If that was the case, I think it would be fair to say that tragedy was an outgrowth of an awareness of our own mentality. That, or—perhaps—the infirmities of old age. There was something romantic about a vibrant soul getting cut down in its prime in a single, unanticipated blow. It spared the victim and the world of the tragedy of a protracted decline. As the ancient Odensky proverb went, there is no greater honor than to die in action. That was what made cognitive disorders so insidious. If death taught man to be humble, fading minds taught man true fear. Mental illness had the audacity to show us just how fragile we really were.

To us, memory was magic. Our memories were a trove of miracles. They built up our identities one brick at a time. But, as far as chemistry cared, memories were aggregates of calcium, neuronal cytoskeletal elements, and association pathways in our brains, but we didn’t see it that way, because subjectivity is the ultimate high. Culture was a hypnotist; it wanted us to believe the world was simple. Problems with strokes (or plague, or infertility)? Why, it was because there were heretics among us, perhaps even sorcerers. Suss them out, and all would be right again. But the world didn’t work that way.

Concerned, Cassius glared at her. “Ma’am, your daughter is—”

—Reaching out, I looked my colleague in the eyes. “Please, Dr. Arbond, let me handle this.”

He scowled, obviously miffed, but then his expression softened. He closed his eyes briefly, gave a begrudging nod, and then opened his eyes and looked away. “I understand.” Taking a step closer, he leaned toward me and whispered. “After what happened out in the hallway,” he muttered, “you can fly this case to the Moon as far as I care. This is fucking terrifying.”

I could barely hear him through his mask and PPE.

I sighed. Then, clearing my throat, I began to improvise.

“Babra, your daughter arrived in an ambulance. I haven’t heard any details about where she was found or what condition she was in. That information will probably determine what my colleagues and I will need to do to best help Ileene, so… would you mind telling Dr. Arbond and I what you know?” I gestured at Cassius. “I want to make it clear: you are not under no pressure to do anything one way or another. There are no legal obligations one way or another.”

At the moment, my priority was to keep Babra as calm as possible. This was already a matter of life and death. Any unnecessary stress ought to be avoided, simply for her own well-being. I wanted to avoid, if at all possible, having to outright ask her if she thought she was still right-minded enough to make the decision regarding Ileene and her baby. Letting Mrs. Plotsky recount an experience from memory would help me ascertain her current state of cognitive function, and if that didn’t clarify her soundness of mind to my satisfaction, at least it would help me devise a less destructive means of posing the question to her. Afterward, though, the sooner we could get Mrs. Plotsky into an MRI, the better. If we could get her into an MRI quickly enough, I would be able to use her narrative as a psychiatric base-line by which I could correlate her cognitive impairments with whatever physiological problems ended up appearing on the MRI.

Mrs. Plotsky was heartbroken as she looked at me, and it nearly broke my own heart to see her—or any parent like her—so distraught over their child.

“I imagine this is a difficult subject,” I said, “so… I don’t want you to feel like you are being—”

“—No, no.” She dabbed at the tears on her cheeks with her blanket. “Ileene’s doctors should know. It’s for your own safety.”

From what I’d seen of Jed’s condition, and from the way his wife was acting—their ataxia and motor difficulties notwithstanding—the particular pathophysiology underlying the impairments of their memories had to be something extraordinarily subtle. Whatever the Green Death was doing to make people lose their memories, it most likely wasn’t a result of macroscopic trauma, like large-scale brain damage, blood clots in the brain, cerebral hemorrhaging, or proliferating endarteritis’ destructive enlargement of cerebral blood vessels. Some mental phenomena were controlled by specific areas of the brain, while other functions had a much more complex basis. Laser-accurate memory loss like this had to have a much more subtle explanation.

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Assuming there was an explanation…

It may have been hubris on my part to assume that modern medical science could understand NFP-20, but these were the only tools I had, and, gosh darn it, I had to do something—even if it was ultimately futile.

Babra winced as she coughed. Then, with a deep, raggedy breath, she began to tell her tale.

“Ileene disappeared weeks ago. All she left us was a note: I’ve finally found my calling. I know who I am now, and who I was meant to be. You don’t need to trouble yourselves any longer. That was it. She’d left the note in her room, along with most of her belongings. We got in touch with a detective that very same day. My older sister’s husband works for Elpeck PD, where he’s second only to Commissioner Holbrook himself, so it wasn’t too difficult to get a detective on the case.”

Coughing again, she cleared her throat, growling like a rabid dog. Mrs. Plotsky shuddered in pain.

“I couldn’t have prepared myself for the answer. It came so quickly.” She shook her head. “I still can’t wrap my head around it, Doctor. Did she really believe it? I don’t know. Maybe it was just her latest ploy to hurt me. Maybe it was that boyfriend of hers.” She shook her head and wheezed, “But I just don’t know. Whatever it was, she just… drifted. One moment she’s going out on dates with her boyfriend all hours of the Night, even when Ileene well knew that, as long as she was living with us, she was to be back before midnight on weekdays. The next… she joins up with the Innocents of the Mountain. My whole family balked at the news.” She grimaced bitterly. “All of their attention and concern went out the window once they realized it was just another case of Babs being a mess.” She scoffed, only to fall into a coughing fit.

She wept.

“To think,” she bit her spit-slicked lip, “the daughter I raised went off and joined those white-robed cultists in the Riscolts.” Mrs. Plotsky pointed her thumb at her chest, and for a moment, anger flared in her bloodshot eyes, but then it fractured and she whimpered. “Night after night, I’m up wondering what had become of her, half afraid, half outraged.” She brought her hand to her mouth, sobbing and coughing all at once. “Yet… I still want to see her again. I want to see her so, so badly.”

Cassius cleared his throat, scoffing. He bristled. “Talk about Innocents, they’re the guiltiest motherfuckers this side of eternity. Ma’am, they’re not cultists, they’re fucking terrorists.” Dr. Arbond stabbed his purple-gloved finger at the poor mother. “If your daughter was a member of their organization, we need to alert the National Guard. She might have played a role in the bombings at Elpeck Polytechnic.” He threw up his hands. “And now, in the middle of a pandemic?” he roared, “there’s no telling what she might do! She—”

“—Dr. Arbond, please,” I said, loud and stern, pleading with my eyes.

Mrs. Plotsky pursed her lips, as if maybe she could hold back sobs and roars if she only squeezed hard enough.

But, of course, she couldn’t.

“You—you think I don’t know that!?” she bellowed, only to dead-end into a coughing fit. “My mind’s been wrapped around it ever since it happened,” Babra continued, softly and weakly. “I’ve barely slept these past few days. Not even prayer helps.”

Not wanting to take any risks, I whipped out my console and sent Cassius a text message.

Don’t react to this. Don’t shout. Don’t scowl or yell. It’s news to me Ileene was involved with the Innocents, but there’s not much more damage she can do. You’ve been busy, so you must not have heard: at some point, she was lobotomized——most likely by the terrorists. She’s not a threat any longer. Please, Cassius, for once, hold your tongue. These poor folks have suffered enough.

I pressed send and glared at him. “Check your messages,” I said.

He fumbled for his console, pulling it out from his PPE pocket. I watched his expression quiver in realization. Anger bubbled up in him, this time toward himself. Dr. Arbond bit his lip and then muttered under his breath and looked away.

Despite Cassius’ outburst, Mrs. Plotsky appeared to remain mentally stable. Though her memories weren’t all there, the most important parts seemed to be intact.

I decided to pop the question. I didn’t know how much time she had left.

I didn’t know how much time any of us had left.

“Mrs. Plotsky,” I said, meekly, “the reason we came here is because…” I took a deep breath, “your daughter is pregnant…”

The woman stammered in disbelief. She was a quaking teapot, heated to boiling.

I bit my lip, knowing the worst was yet to come.

“Both Ileene and the baby are infected.”

“What…?” Mrs. Plotsky’s mouth gaped. It was like the air had been sucked out of her lungs.

“It’s a fungal infection, and—”

“—I’m sorry, Genneth,” Dr. Arbond said, stepping forward, “this is taking too long. You’re wastin’ time we already don’t have!” He turned to Mrs. Plotsky. “Listen: your daughter has gone septic. If we don’t get that under control, her organs are gonna to start shuttin’ down, and then it’ll all be over.” He crossed his arms. “But the fetus complicates things, especially since it’s infected.” Cassius tapped his console screen and skimmed over the ultrasound footage Jonan had sent us.

The horrid, horrid ultrasound footage.

“Our tests indicate the fetus has been much more severely affected by the fungus than Ileene has.”

Babs coughed. “I don’t understand, what do you—”

“—I’ll cut to the bones of it, Ma’am. Given her age, and the fuzziness of the law for medical decisions whenever pregnancies are involved, we can’t proceed without consultin’ her parents and gettin’ consent. Even if your daughter wasn’t lobotomized and insensate, we’d still need to get your word in.”

Mrs. Plotsky’s fingers clawed into the bedsheets, squeezing them tight.

I shuddered. Darn it, Cassius!

I nearly bit my tongue.

“Lob… Lobotomized?” Mrs. Plosky cried, “What… how…—”

—Her precarious condition went over the edge. Her whole body convulsed. Her eyes bulged. Her lips sputtered.

Croaking, Mrs. Plotsky was wracked with a sob, only to get sucker-punched by a cough.

“How… how could I forget?” She shook her head, clasping it in her hands. “My baby girl. My baby girl… Why couldn’t you listen? Why!?”

Babra Plotsky looked over to her unsoundly sleeping husband. Terror and foreboding were written all over her face. Then, with grave decorum, she turned back to Dr. Arbond and myself.

“Please… whatever you can do… save the baby.”

“One of my colleagues—Dr. Derric—is working directly with your daughter’s case,” I said, readying to relay what Jonan had told me. “Dr. Derric believes we need to remove the infected fetus ASAP. There’s a good chance the fetus is no longer viable, and its presence inside your daughter’s body is going to make her condition worse. There’s a good chance it might be the cause of Ileene’s sepsis.”

I took a deep breath, bracing myself for what came next. “He suggested it should be removed immediately, although… I don’t think he had a premature birth in mind.”

“That blonde braggadocio can think whatever he wants,” Cassius said. “Push come to shove, I’ll be the surgeon who ends up openin’ your daughter, and—let me tell you, Ma’am—given her current condition, any kind of surgery is nothin’ more than a death sentence. You don’t go drivin’ no sixteen-wheeler truck over a rickety bridge. We gotta stabilize Ileene before we go in and remove the fetus.”

“Doctor: how do you know she’ll live long enough to be stabilized?” Babs said.

Dr. Arbond tried to respond, but the grieving mother cut him off before he got a word in edgewise.

“—I know what I want,” she said. “I’m making up my mind, now, before I forget.” She stared at the surgeon in the eyes. “Save my grandchild, doctor. I don’t want Ileene to disappear. I don’t want us to disappear. Please. I… I need another chance. I need to make it right.” She swallowed hard. “The failed mothers drown in the Night,” she added, in a whisper, quoting scripture.

Closing his eyes, Cassius huffed a breath out his nose.

“So be it, then,” he said. “So be it.”