Heggy Marteneiss was as dog tired as a woman could be, but she wasn’t going to let that drag her down. Nor could she. Sleep brought nightmares instead of rest. She dreamed of human carnage piling up all around her as a monument to her failures, one wet thud after another. Shadows loomed over her dreamscapes, cast by jungle trees and abandoned apartments, brimming with the ghosts she’d left in her wake.

When you served, death followed you, even if—as a combat medic—it was your job to chase it.

Despite all the death the plague had brought, it was the losses of her past that lingered in Heggy’s mind. Lost friends; dead child soldiers; drug mules looking up at her with their frightened, dying eyes, their lips frothing, their bodies convulsing in her arms because of a leak in the bags of narcotics stuffed into their unmentionables.

Like me, Heggy hated being helpless. But while I had no problem confessing to my weakness, for Heggy, such an acknowledgement would have been anathema, as it would be for any Marteneiss. It was their heritage.

The Marteneisses were haunted by their own sense of loyalty. Their loyalty was more than just a sense of faithfulness. It was the expectation that a Marteneiss had to be dependable. Weakness was not an option, because weakness meant your people couldn’t depend on you, because you might not pull through for them.

Heggy’s lineage was one of soldiers and service: captains, admirals, generals, and more. The Marteneisses were nobler than the actual nobles. It started with Commodore Horace Marteneiss, back in the Second Empire. The Commodore was one of the Empire’s finest privateers, and for his service, he won himself a peerage, only to catapult himself into the pages of history by humbly declining the honor, for fear of vanity. That was nearly a quarter of a millennium ago, and Horatio’s descendants made sure no one would ever forget it.

To be a Marteneiss was to serve. They served the nation, no matter the cost. The sprawling family prided itself for being a part of the great chain of tradition that carried Trenton even in the darkest of times. For them, it was about patriotism, and honor.

“Lesser men have the luxury of weakness, Heggy,” her grandfather had liked to say. “But not a Marteneiss. The people look to us for strength. We can never let ourselves falter.”

Weakness was the enemy. Weakness was the drug lords making human shields out of innocent civilians. Weakness was standing by the wayside while bad guys thwarted the law with impunity. Weakness was losing touch with your inner light and giving in to the dark of the night.

Weakness was leaving the field of battle for the field of medicine. On paper, Heggy’s discharge was honorable. Even the best warriors could be laid low by post-traumatic stress. But, for her, there was no greater dishonor. She hadn’t been fit for duty.

In the rare moments where Heggy talked about these things, I tried to tell her that leaving the military for a civilian job wasn’t an act of weakness. It was one of strength. Not many people had the strength to make a second life for themselves, least of all as a doctor of internal medicine, but Heggy had always had trouble swallowing that view. By the time I’d come to know her, she’d been out of service for over a decade, and though I’d never seen her demonstrate any symptoms of PTSD, I didn’t doubt her diagnosis for a moment. Heggy bore suffering without complaint. And, in trying times, she did what most of us did: bury ourselves in our duties.

Heggy had spent the morning processing the recent influx of patients, and it was in service of that duty that she stepped into the room, ready to deal with the latest batch: the Broliguez family.

Both father and son had been intubated, with the tubes in their tracheas hooked up to ventilators beside their beds, to breathe when they couldn’t. Both men were unconscious. A more honest diagnosis would have been comatose, but Heggy didn’t like gilding the lily if she could avoid it. Of the four Broliguezes, their teenage daughter was the least affected. The girl lay quietly in her bed, staring up at the ceiling, occasionally running her fingers through the turquoise beads of her Maikokan-styled hair.

Heggy nodded at the young woman and then walked over to Mrs. Broliguez’s bed and pulled up a chair from the corner of the room. The woman was on the heavy side; heavier, even, than Dr. Marteneiss herself. Heggy figured her skin should have been a warm bronze, but, instead, it was the color of mud. Dark, thread-edged stains splattered across Mrs. Broliguez’s neck and forearms like rivulets of ash. Wheezes marred her sputtering breaths. Even so, she sat upright in bed, with one arm clutched around her chest.

Miyali Broliguez smiled a little as she caught sight of Dr. Marteneiss. She tilted her head at Heggy in a little bow, wincing as she coughed. Heggy scanned her PortaCon over the woman’s hand, bringing up her profile on the WeElMed app. She was on a morphine prescription, to be delivered via intravenous drip—the IV bag up on the stand at her bedside.

“Hello, Mrs. Broliguez,” Heggy said, looking up from her console. She set it down at the foot of the bed. “I’m Dr. Heggy Marteneiss. Do you know why I’m here?” she asked.

Miyali nodded. “Yes, ma’am.” There was a notable Maikokan accent to the woman’s terribly hoarse voice. “I heard there is some kind of new treatment that you will be testing soon?”

Heggy nodded. “Yes, and it just so happens that you filled out the paperwork to volunteer to receive it. But, before we can approve you, I need to do a check up.”

The daughter—Nina—spoke up. “Can’t you just give it to us?”

Heggy turned to face the girl. She was on the bed at Heggy’s back, off to the left. “I can’t,” she explained. “It’s not ready yet. Should be soon, though.”

“Then why are you here?” Nina asked.

“Rules are rules,” Heggy said. She nodded at Miyali. “Your mother filed an MT-3. MT-3s require check-ups before final confirmation, to ensure the patient is suitable for the trial.”

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Nina coughed. “We’re dying from the disease that’s killing people like flies and turning them into monsters. Is this really a time for bureaucratic bullshit?”

Heggy frowned. “It’s not ‘bullshit’, young lady. It’s law and order. We gotta to set a good example. Speakin’ of which,” she turned to face Mrs. Broliguez, “Let’s get this over with,” she said.

Miyali nodded.

The check-up was straightforward: pulse, vitals, blood-work—the latter done by the assay machines by the patients’ bedsides. Heggy also performed a physical examination to the best of her ability—and not just on the woman, but the men, too. The worst part was when she helped Mrs. Broliguez take off her shirt.

Heggy was familiar with people who had been struck by lightning. Elpeck was a big place, big enough that people could—and did—get struck, and when that happened, the unlucky son-of-a-bitch could look forward to the characteristic furcating Brightmountain figures disfiguring their skin. The patterns were the footprints left by the electricity as it flowed through the victim’s body.

Looking at Miyali’s back, Heggy’s thoughts flashed back to a memory of treating burns on Corporal Stevens’ back. They’d been in the middle of raiding a drug lord’s compound in the outskirts of Vaneppo at the height of Costranak monsoon season, and Stevens had gotten as on the wrong end of a wayward thunderbolt. Even so, Stevens’ burns didn’t hold a candle to the shit on Mrs. Broliguez’s back. You’d have to pump Brightmountain figures full of blood and wine until they bulged up from the skin like a foaming sealant before you got halfway to the fungal growths sprawling across Miyali’s back.

The sight made Nina gasp. The girl covered her mouth, unable to stop herself from crying.

Miyali, of course, couldn’t see the awful state of her back, and Nina’s horrified reaction ruined any chance Heggy might have had of softening the blow when she told the woman what she saw.

Heggy made a mental note to pray for the Broliguezes at the hospital chapel as soon as she could, though that would have to wait until later in the afternoon. It was midday during the Green Death pandemic, so there was no hope of finding any spare room in the chapel at the moment, though it was a coin toss as to whether the people stuffed into the chapel would be there for Mass, or because they’d died and their bodies hadn’t been carted away .

Heggy’s heart sank as she sat back in the chair beside Miyali’s bed. She’d done what protocol required of her, but, still, there was one extra thing she had to do, for the hospital’s sake.

Also, she had a gut feeling that I was somehow involved. You had to be very much in-the-know to know about both the mycophage and MT-3 forms, and, seeing as the Broliguezes were in E Ward, Heggy couldn’t shake the feeling that I had been meddling—and she was absolutely right.

“If I might ask, Mrs. Broliguez,” Heggy said, “how did you hear about the mycophage treatment?”

“One of the doctors explained it to me.”

“Could I have a name?” Heggy asked.

Fear creeped onto Miyali’s face as she tried to remember, but couldn’t. “I… I…” She shook her head. “Why don’t I remember?”

Shit, Heggy thought.

Mrs. Broliguez was already starting to lose her memories. Short-term memory was the first to go.

“It was Dr. Howle,” Nina said.

Heggy scoffed at that. “Yep, that checks out.” She chuckled softly.

Dr. Marteneiss had scooped up the trial volunteer case as soon as she’d caught wind of it. “It’s a good thing I’m nipping this in the bud here and now,” she said.

“What do you mean?” Miyali asked.

“Let me guess,” Heggy said, “Dr. Howle helped you fill out the paperwork?”

Miyali nodded.

Heggy rolled her eyes, shook her head, and sighed. “I don’t mean to sound rude,” she explained, “but… he really shouldn’t have done that. When you file a request like that, it goes into the queue, and anyone—and I do mean anyone—who looks at the database will see it, in all its glory. It’s like if the Polovian mafia sent a severed head through the mail; it’s bound to attract unwanted attention. Obviously,” she continued, “the longer the request stood unfilled, the higher the chance that some motor-mouth would see it and start blabbin’ about the mycophage to everyone in earshot, and, before you’d know it, WeElMed would have a riot on its hands with people of all sorts clamorin’ to get the miracle cure.” Heggy shook her head. “I don’t know which is scarier: the treatment working, or it being dead on arrival.”

“Why would it be a bad thing if it works?” Nina asked.

Heggy looked over her shoulder at Nina. “If it works, the demand is gonna outstrip our ability to make the damn stuff faster than ice on a hot griddle. We won’t be able to make the stuff fast enough, and Angel help us if people start fightin’ over who controls it. If I had to choose, I’d rather die from a plague than that level of human stupidity. ‘We found the cure, but we couldn’t share, so everyone died,’ is not the epitaph I want on my grave.”

Heggy pursed her lips.

Dr. Marteiness knew I wouldn’t have gone out of my way like this for just anybody. She also—and correctly, I might add—gave me the benefit of the doubt and assumed that I was fully aware of the risk of letting the cat out of the bag re: the mycophage.

“Do you mind if I ask why Dr. Howle shared this with you?” Heggy asked.

Miyali shook her head, but then Nina spoke up: “Uh… it was me.”

“Say what, now?” Heggy asked.

“I came here a couple days ago with my little brother Lopé,” Nina said. “Dr. Howle helped us. He…” The girl lowered her gaze. “He explained that Lopé had a Type Two infection,” she added, softly.

Behind the rebreather unit beneath her PPE’s visor, Heggy’s lips made an O. “Shit,” she muttered.

Mrs. Broliguez furrowed her brow. “You know something, don’t you?”

“What, ma’am?” Heggy asked.

“Nina said this before, that Lopé had a Type Two case,” Miyali explained. She coughed. “She keeps saying it’s different from the usual type, but she doesn’t explain why. A little while ago, Dr. Howle took her off somewhere—I don’t know where—but,” she looked at her daughter, “when Nina came back, she looked like she’d seen a ghost, and she’s not talking about it. Not to me.”

“If I remember right, Mrs. Broliguez,” Heggy said, “your husband attacked some nurses, demandin’ to see his son. Would that son be Lopé?”

“Yes, Dr. Marteneiss,” Miyali replied. There were tears in her eyes. “First Lopé goes crazy with the Angel stuff, and then, one morning, he says to me he is dead, and while I worry and worry, he starts flopping on the floor all chabita. Something is terribly wrong with him, I can feel it, but no one is telling me the truth. I’m his madre, Dr. Marteneiss. I have a right to know!”

Heggy’s heart sank. What she’d hoped would be a simple pre-trial check-up was turning into something much bigger than she could have ever anticipated.

Mrs. Broliguez’s words were hitting far too close to home.

Heggy remembered having to harangue the folks at the Veterans’ Administration to get an explanation for Sarah’s death, and they’d hemmed and hawed like nobody’s business.

“I’m her mother,” she’d told them, “I have a right to know!” But she didn’t get the answer until she’d gone and asked Vernon to pull some levers for her.

The whole fiasco left a bad taste in Heggy’s mouth, one that continued to the present.

“Dr. Marteneiss,” Miyali said, interrupting Heggy’s train of thought, “I don’t know which I hate more: not knowing what is happening to my son, or not knowing what I can do to help him. Especially if I’m…” But her words cut off; she brought her hand to her mouth and hunched over as another wave of coughs wracked her body.

She stared Dr. Marteneiss in the eyes, searching for a miracle-worker.

“Mrs. Broliguez,” Heggy said, “you don’t need to say another word.” Heggy’s shoulders tensed. “Normally, I’d tell you to sit down for this, but you’re already in bed.”

Miyali’s jaw went slack. “No… no…” She shook her head. “Don’t say it! Don’t tell me I’m going to lose my Lopé! I can’t lose him! Not again!”

“Again?” Heggy said.