Into the chasm of death, again, went I, and with far less practice time under my belt than I would have preferred. But, as the messages Heggy had left on my console while I’d been out in the garden playing wizard had been pretty clear: this was no time to dawdle, especially now that I knew Nurse Kaylin had had some kind of nervous breakdown last night. Jess was on a mandatory rest period, to give her time to relax. So, of course, everything was falling apart. Never underestimate the power of a short person to get things done.

My rounds were waiting for me.

As I waited for the elevator to descend from the floors above, Andalon materialized beside me, looking up at me, her face scrunched up in befuddlement.

“Mr. Genneth, what’s a zombie?”

Wh… why are you asking about zombies?

The blue-haired waif pointed at the reception desk against the wall opposite the elevators—or, rather, at the man who sat behind the desk. As my gaze wandered across the nervous current of people traveling down the hallway, I locked eyes with him. He returned my gaze with a pale, tired gaze. There was fear in his eyes.

If only he’d seen what I’d seen, and knew what I knew.

As I’d learned yesterday, dialing back my wyrmsight helped keep me from getting overwhelmed. Instead of having it active everywhere and making a razzmatazz scene out of every inch of my field of vision, I turned off my wyrmsight everywhere except for a narrow strip in the middle of the left half of my field of vision. It was through that strip that I saw the violet and aquamarine lacework of the telltale plexuses that signified the man was bound for wyrmhood, just like me.

“This guy, right here? I hear him. He’s sayin’, ‘I’ve turned into a zombie. I even want to eat people. What is going on? I just ate! Why am I hungry again?’ That’s what I hear.” Andalon bugged out, eyes going wide as she looked around. “Wowwww! I hear lots of stuff…”

Andalon… that man isn’t talking.

“He’s thinking, though, and I can hear it!” She hopped happily. “Andalon can hear it!”

She could read minds now?

“I’m a read-minder?” She looked at her hands; they trembled with excitement. “Is that a good thing?” She looked up at me.

Behind me, the bell dinged as the elevator slid open. I turned around and slipped in. I went to the back of the elevator, where I could lean against the wall while grabbing onto a handlebar to brace myself—anything to take some of the pressure off my legs and the pins and needles sensations that frolicked all over them.

Andalon followed me into the elevator, phasing through other people. She looked up at me with a troubled expression, though half of it was lost in the thigh of the person standing next to me.

“It’s… it’s not a good thing?”

Apparently, silence meant “no”, and that silent no made Andalon absolutely devastated.

I sighed.

Just—just follow me. I have a job to do, Andalon.

Andalon did just that. She was like a shaken bottle of seltzer as she followed beside me. Her steps and body language were positively bubbly.

“It is a good thing!” she chirped. “It is!”

Well, it makes one thing clear: the more I change, the more capabilities you develop.

“Capybarities?” Andalon asked.

I sighed again, though this time with a smile.

“Sure, Andalon. Sure.”

I was of half a mind that Andalon was some kind of divine algorithm that had gone wrong. Unfortunately, it wasn’t like I could just walk up to the Angel and ask Him for clarification.

If only.

We rode down the elevator. As we stepped out into Ward E, I bid my new stomping grounds a good morning.

Good morning not-quite-modern equipment. Good morning vinyl floors and plastic flowers. Good morning framed artworks—paper sculptures, pastel paintings, and watercolors.

Not that there was really anything good about this morning.

Good morning staff, you brave souls. Good morning patients, doomed to die.

Shaking my head, I pulled my console out from the pocket of my PPE gown, tapped the screen awake, and then booted up the WeElMed app, logging in for my shift. I scrolled through the usual morning messages—the daily affirmation quote, yadda yadda yadda. After checking to see if there were any notifications from Heggy or Dr. Horosha—and there weren’t—I started to deal with our patients, following the order recommended by the app.

Unsurprisingly, the details of that mandatory training video sent overnight became relevant as soon as I entered Ward E.

Like any healthcare establishment built and/or operated by DAISHU, when it came to the latest technology and infrastructure for combating outbreaks, no expense had been spared for providing West Elpeck Medical with the state of the art equipment. Of course, by “outbreaks”, they really meant “darkpox outbreaks.” Individual rooms could be hermetically sealed. Airlocks for facilitating healthcare workers’ safe passage in and out of hot zones were always at the ready. To that end, every door in the hospital—every single door—was actually two doors in one, one on either side. The two sides were connected by wireframe tunnel covered in a durable translucent polymer. When not in use, the tunnel was compressed into the thickness of a single door, and by pressing the door handles’ hinges in just the right way, you could separate the two doors apart, stretching the plastic into a tunnel or compress it back in place, like an accordion.

The tunnels were everywhere; the big plastic caterpillar-looking things jutted out from virtually every door.

The training video had made it clear that, overnight, any hopes DAISHU and the government had had that NFP-20 would prove to be a manageable disturbance had gone straight out the window. This was not going to be like the bird flu scare from a decade back; this was going to be a watershed moment in human history, no doubt about it. The stops would be pulled out, one by one. The quarantine tunnels were just the beginning of civilization’s war against the Green Death.

Yesterday, there had been some hesitation about mustering the full force of West Elpeck Medical’s darkpox-containment capacities against the Green Death; as usual, maintaining a good public image trumped sensible policy decisions. Thankfully management had been lightning-quick in turning about-face. I imagined yesterday’s arrival of our five mystery darkpox patients had given them a spinnable pretext for deploying the tunnels. At first, the tunnels were used just for those five; we’d sealed their rooms behind tunnels as soon as we’d gotten the patients situated. Other parts of Ward E quickly followed suit, as did the rest of the hospital. Official sanction came down some time in the middle of the night.

Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.

Still, those five patients…

Could Jonan be right? Might they really be time travelers? I mean, they certainly looked like they’d come straight out of a period drama set during the Munine Colonial era. Ordinarily, I would have dismissed time travel as pure fantasy, but now that my life was pretty much a fantasy made real, I guess that put time travel back on the table of possibilities. It turned out plausibility really was relative, as was denial.

I bid Andalon farewell for the time being, letting her return to the not-here-place as I plunged knee-deep into the battle against the fungus. I had to insist on it, in fact, explaining that it would be easier to focus if she was in the not-here-place.

Of course, I had an ulterior motive.

I didn’t want Andalon to be scarred by the horrors of suffering and death wrought by the Green Death.

As of yesterday afternoon, Andalon could now see what I saw, which was just another sign that my transformation was affecting her almost as much as it was affecting me. She was developing new abilities, and—I hope—recalling more of her memories as well. I suppose I had the blue flames to thank for that. Whatever the blue flames were, they were related to—if not part of—the transformation at work in my body and mind. They appeared whenever I ate, and—as I’d seen in last night’s experiment with the protein bars in the stairwell or this morning’s experience with the stool in the aerial garden—the flames stopped appearing once I stopped eating. It seemed safe to assume that more of her psyche would return to her as her memories returned, and I wanted to minimize as much as possible any potential mental or emotional trauma which would interfere with her progress—with our progress.

As the minutes ticked by, I only grew more and more certain that my decision had been the right one.

People were dropping like flies. Through the strip of wyrmsight I’d left on the left side of my field of vision, the hallways were a hellscape of auras and souls. It was like neon lights shining through fog, and nothing shone brighter than the fungus and its baleful energies. I would have called it beautiful, especially if I hadn’t known what those lights meant. But I did know, and the bodies of the plague-dead ensured that I would never, ever forget. The fungus left them almost unrecognizable. You could hazard a guess as to overall age and stature, but not much else. One of the carcasses I had to wheel away—a child’s corpse, no less—looked a bunch of fruit peels that had been left to rot, somewhere dark and musty. The poor thing was twisted and corroded, blackened and sloughed away.

I felt the teensiest bit of lightheadedness whenever one of the ghosts’ mist-like forms passed through me. I was pretty sure that that meant they were being uploaded into me, though, as of yet, I had no proof for that.

I was in the middle of moving from one room to another, thinking about when and how the ghosts would appear to me now that my neurophysiology could handle them properly when Andalon called out to me.

“Mr. Genneth!”

Speak of the Norms…

A gut instinct told me I might just get my answer.

Stepping off to the side of the hallway as I turned around, I found myself greeted by something new. Yes, Andalon was back—and of her own volition, too—standing barefoot on the hallway’s vinyl floor, but that wasn’t what startled me.

No: what startled me was that, for the first time ever, Andalon wasn’t alone.

She’d brought someone with her: a young boy.

They walked side by side, hand in hand. Despite being the shorter of the two, Andalon was the one taking the lead. Much to his befuddlement, she was tugging on the boy’s arm, beckoning him forward like he was a confused puppy. He looked to be about Rayph’s age, and with a similar, pasty complexion. The most noticeable thing about him was his hospital gown. It had to be at least one size too large for him. It sagged, its hem nearly brushing the vinyl floor. He seemed curious enough, staring inquisitively—mostly at Andalon, but also at me—though his curiosity was clearly restrained by a sense of apprehension. His red-brown eyes darted about, as if something raptorial might reach out at any moment and grab him—well, something other than just Andalon, anyhow.

Her face scrunched up with exertion. Her feet should have squeaked on the floor as she dragged him forward, but they didn’t.

At the risk of overanalyzing, as far as I knew, Andalon was incorporeal. She could not touch, nor be touched—though anything I’d created with my hyperphantasia was exempt from those rules, and also, for some reason, she didn’t phase through the floor, though she could phase through walls.

I widened and thickened my wyrmsight as I stared at the boy, checking for any sign of consciousness aura or NFP infection. I didn’t see either, and that meant only one thing: he was dead.

Andalon had brought me a ghost.

As I said, this was new. This was the first time Andalon had ever brought a ghost to me. All the ghosts I’d seen until now had appeared to me on their own, and—except at the end, with Frank’s ghost—it was only by sheer luck that Andalon arrived to keep things from going catastrophically wrong. Also—and probably even more significantly—until now, all but one of the ghosts that had appeared to me were violent and dangerous. If our understanding of the situation was correct, this was because the fungus had been in the process of turning them into demons.

Then again, Aicken Wognivitch had been nuts even when he was alive.

Anyhow, it seemed my gut was right. This was a new development in my transition from man to wyrm, no doubt due to all the blue flame Andalon had absorbed as a result of having eaten half of a metal stool.

Perhaps eating metal specifically had something to do with this?

I could ask her later.

The boy started to speak: “Who are—“

—Down the hall, around the corner, a voice cried out in alarm.

“Angel’s mercy!”

I heard retching and gurgling. A whole group of people screamed as something hit the floor with a hard crack.

“He fell!”

“Somebody, help!”

“Oh my God! Oh my God!”

I ran toward the commotion.

Oh God…

It was another young man, this time Jules’ age. He’d cracked his skull on and was bleeding out on the floor—but that was the least of his worries. He flopped around on the floor like an electrocuted fish, frothing at the mouth. His limbs bashed against the vinyl.

Darn it! He’s already in the clonic phase!

“He’s having a seizure!” I yelled.

Grand mal, by the looks of it.

Fortunately, I was no stranger to working with patients who suffered from seizures.

I waved my arms. “Back away! Back away!”

The crowd dispersed.

I got down on my knees—only for Andalon and the ghost to run around the corner.

“Mr. Genneth! Mr. Genneth! This is imporptant! It’s wyrmeh stuff!” She pointed at the boy. “Kres-Kres needs you! He—”

“A—”

I started to speak to her, but I bit my lips, stopping myself.

Andalon, please, I—

—The seizure boy’s neck convulsed, lifting his head off the floor, and then bringing it down again just as swiftly.

“Mr. Genneth!”Andalon stomped her feet, making the ghost stare.

“No!” I yelled, and though I yelled out of fear, it sounded like I was yelling out of anger.

Andalon flinched, eyes going wide as she began to cry.

No no no no no no!

Time seemed to slow down—though Andalon the ghost did not slow down with it. Lightheadedness swept through me, but I wasn’t going to let that stop me. I kept moving through the slowed time, lunging forward with my arms, to cushion where the boy’s head would likely impact the floor. In between the milliseconds, I wove a little cushion of a plexus there, too, to soften the blow more as remembered statistics flashed through my head.

The average human head weighs between 5 and 11 kilograms, and last time I checked, I weighed just about 100 kilograms.

What I wouldn’t have given to have an extra head, right then and there.

So that meant I needed to do how much of what I’d done to levitate myself to counteract the weight of the kid’s head?

“Mr. Genneth!” Andalon cried.

Fudge! Fudge! Why does it have to be math!? Wh—

—And then, for an instant, the lightheadedness in me—

—Spiked

—Spiked

I managed to get my arms underneath the boy’s head in time.

Thank the Angel!

But—fudge!—the clonic phase wasn’t stopping.

“What the heck is going on?”

I heard myself speak, even though I hadn’t.

No, I definitely did speak.

Huh?

I looked up.

I looked up.

My position had suddenly changed. One moment, I was on my knees, beside the boy. The next, I was standing next to Andalon and the—

—Holy moly…

I was looking at another me.

I was looking at another me.