The Chant of the Sibyl
Nov. 8th, 2007 10:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crowsThe scent of blood and crushed flowers lingered in my hair, mixed with the smoke from Adrian's favorite incense, which was burned to excess in the camp that he and 'his people' had had retreated to. I could catch a hint of those mingled odors every time I turned my head too quickly, faint enough to be unidentifiable should one know know where I had just come from. It was cold; the air was damp and electric but it hadn't started to rain yet... I hoped it would hold off until I got home, that would be a stroke of luck.
Despite myself, I had to admit it, as I was there sitting in the dark of the transit station courtyard, waiting for the last transfer of the night, that I was beginning to doubt him. I'd been seeing Adrian for four years... almost four and a half, and never loved any man or friend or family member with such unbridled ferocity and terror.
He was the kind of person that compelled instantaneously, who was not burdened by zeitgeist of conventional distraction. Adrian embodied clarity of vision, of progress and momentum. Moreover, ever since I had met him, I'd wanted to be a part of that... it was like he bent the heavens merely walking beneath them.
A month ago, though, things had started to change. The initial shift had been so abrupt, so stark, that I had even for the first time broken one of Adrian and I's oldest covenants. I had began writing about him in my book of days. He had ceased speaking to me for a week, saying only – when I did try to press him – that he was working on something and I had to wait until it was finished. When he'd come out of this bizarre recession, it was with the most disconcerting object I had seen in my life. His project was a crude sort of weapon; a blackened scrap of metal with a quarter-twist halfway down. He'd lashed it to a carefully carved piece of goat bone – this was the beautiful part, Adrian's art. The knot-work binding the steel to the handmade hilt was intricate and perfect, every lash tooled with iconography that only he fully understood. What didn't follow was Adrian's fascination with beautiful things... the metal was burned and brutalized, a scrap of something that look like it had been pilfered from a car wreck. He was entirely taken with this thing though, this bit of derelict metal. There would have been no other reason for him to have taken such care in setting it.
The instant I set eyes on it, my skin began to crawl. I'm not sure what it was, not even now, but it shook my faith the way he gazed at the blade turning in his hands.
Adrian believed things differently than most people. Differently, and profoundly, in such a way that had been drawing people toward him inexorably since long before we met. The man that introduced us was a bit of a zealot, in general, always looking for the next dogma to chase and lauded Adrian as some kind of near-prophet. I'd already learned better than to look for every burning meteor that this particular friend pointed at, but Adrian was the exception. We met at a club he was working at as a bartender, just before his shift ended. That morning, I called my boyfriend and told him to move out and leave the keys under the mat... I never looked back to that life.
Two years later, Adrian quit the last in a string of similar work, having come into enough money to buy an abandoned plot of land a little ways outside the city. He'd picked up a lot of strays like my friend, gradually speaking in greater and greater arcs of metaphor, storytelling, and parable. I had always taken his particular brand of mysticism more symbolically than a lot of people... but I was sympathetic to their need for hope, especially after the war had wiped out all of the support structures that people of faith had used to get through the day to day before. All of the old religions were disdained, tarnished as outdated relics that had driven mankind to the brink of self-destruction. They were right, but that didn't mean that there wasn't a higher power, still speaking through enlightened individuals on the earth. Adrian never claimed such a thing – that was part of what drew people to him – but the way he related to the world around him was unequivocally unique.
His explanation, however, for the knife that he had made was so far into this personal mythos that he had developed that I felt shaken in my prior belief that his airs were simply ways of communicating with the many and varied people that had come under his influence and care. He told me over and over that this had been given to him by the heaven and the earth as a sign, the sign that he'd been waiting for. That it had been given to him so that he would have the power to lead 'his people', and that it was going to show us all where to go. That final destination he didn't know yet, and when I questioned him he smiled at me, kissed my brow and advised my patience. Then, he sent me home.
Despite having promised never to write about him in the book of days – though it was by his behest, after the first week we'd been together, that I begin keeping one – I went straight home and opened an entry under his name. The spine of this year's journal has started to wear in the spot where these pages are, late in the written portion, for how many times I've gone back and read over and over that entry and the entries that follow it... Today, as I read, more than ever, I feel like it is the beginning of the end of my life... rather than the beginning of rebirth, as I have been promised. That was a month ago... another week later I started to feel sick. The pain started behind my eyes.... crippling migraines that I'd never experienced in the past. They came on suddenly, as I learned with the very first one... I remember only being on my knees as suddenly as if I'd been struck to the head, vomiting on the floor of my kitchen and without most of the vision in my right eye. That day, I thought I was going to die. I dragged myself to the living room of my flat, prostrated by the pain before I could get at the telephone to call for help, and I lay like that for almost an hour, paralyzed. What was even stranger than the unwarned assault was how swiftly it abated: the affliction vanished so quickly I thought that perhaps it had been some kind of awful dream, but that didn't follow as I normally didn't sleep stretched between my living room and kitchen. Discovering the pool of half-dried, reeking fluid on the tile didn't do much to dismiss the attack, either.
I went in for a physical. I didn't have a regular doctor, and the nurse at the urgent-care clinic wasn't very interested in my story. She conducted a reasonably cursory examination before determining that there was nothing she could see wrong with me. They boxed my head into a scanner for a 'quick peak' as the technician had called it, and assured me that I did not have a brain tumor before sending me home. The only other offer they could make me was an expensive trip down to Australia, where the research company run by the man who had invented the curiosity algorithm for advanced computers apparently had one of his electronic prodigies trained to diagnose medical patients with complicated disorders. They didn't think I needed it, and I didn't think I could afford it, so I went home and hoped that it wouldn't happen again. Three days later, it did, and I called the still-aloof Adrian as soon as I could get off the floor (once again, it came and went with equal haste). When I told him about what was happening, I could hear him crumbling on the other end of the phone; the soft quickening of his breath, the swiftness of his steps as he told me not to go anywhere or call any body else. Twenty minutes later, he let himself into my flat and collected me into a warm embrace where I sat on the bench below the window. One look into his eyes told me that I had my Adrian back, and he was beside himself with worry for me.
He tucked me into bed without letting my say another word about what had happened, and through a dizzying haze of troubled half-sleep (for, I had been interminably exhausted since the first attack, and now it felt worse, as if my body just couldn't recover even a mote of energy spent) I could hear him moving things around in my kitchen. Some period of time later he came back for me with a mug of a viscous, pungent sort of tea. There was a heady mix of smells and flavors that I couldn't identify, and Adrian made me drink every drop, which was not easy. I fell asleep soon after, a true sleep that was heavy and dreamless.
When I awoke the next morning, I felt better – granted – but I was still disturbed by the sensation that something was profoundly wrong within my body. Adrian had left in the night while I was unconscious – not uncommon – and left me a note about the vat of the mixture that he'd left in my refrigerator. Doses were sketched out – amounts, times of day, hot or cold... typical Adrian modus operandi. I was hesitant to subscribe to his course of medication but it was the best I had, and drinking it hot – which I did right before bed, after the first course in the early evening, over ice – did put me into that deep sleep that seemed to be the only rest I was able to get.
Aside from that nagging sensation of not being myself, increasingly, under my skin, I didn't have another one of those blinding attacks but I knew something was still wrong. Adrian was distracted but didn't neglect me too much so long as I came out every few days to visit the camp. That was when I began to learn that I was not the only one who was ill...
The transfer arrived in a susurrus of of electrical humming and air cut by the bulk of the vehicle sweeping up to bear me into the city. I climbed aboard, stirring the ache in my legs that had settled there, unwelcome and unrelenting. With a wince, I settled myself into an empty seat, feeling more like a heap than a woman in the half-light. My transfer took off in a rush, blurring the streets outside just as the first thunder came to crack the clouds. Watching the windows and streets slicken with silvery water took me back to the camp that I'd just left, watching Adrian treat the people that were in his care. A lot of them were worse off than I was, but Adrian's nursing kept them something like comfortable, a feat that did a lot to restore my faith in his vision, however incomplete it remained. My arm stung where he'd given me the small injection... after his tonic tea had stopped seeming to have any effect, he demanded that I come out there so that he could try the next step in the treatment he was refining. A tiny bruise was forming in the crook of my arm as a reminder of a fact that stung more...
Adrian refused to bring me into the camp. Total strangers lodged beneath the roofs he had built out there, and yet, when I told him I wanted to come and be a part of what he was building – forever, because I knew I could never leave him – he only shook his head. If I pressed the issue he told me to go home and get some rest, promised I would understand in time. He tried to be sweet about it... his normal excuse was that I was too important, that this was not a place for someone like me, that what he had given people was a halfway house for their souls as they started to learn about the things that he had come to know. But it had been years, now, and it wore on me steadily that he had to spend so much time alone there, when I was willing to offer him every second of my breathing life.
***
Isolde and I walked on rain-sparkled streets, she wrapped neatly in a wool jacket to ward of the chill and me slinking along like a shadow at her shoulder in a long-coat that looked entirely too businesslike for what we were conducting. I felt uncomfortable conspicuous, but she said it would give us some credibility when we went around snooping for information regarding people's medical care. Sweet-faced as Isolde was, she was a sly cat, and had already arranged the paperwork – without pulling too much attention with her strings, she promised me – to get us access to things that were normally protected, at least to some degree, by privacy laws. That was the nice thing about outranking almost everybody in any given medical community in both experience and reputation (except, of course, the Mater Dei Research Association but I was doing my best not to think very much about them at the moment). People didn't often question you when you wanted things... it was just accepted that you were more important than they were, and they coughed up the loot.
The first stop for the day – after, of course, hot coffee and muffin sandwiches at a cafe that had absolutely enslaved me near her apartment – was an urgent care center a short walk away. The receptionist was kind if slightly vapid, probably a medical student in her second or third year with no other experience in the field, trying to gain some life experience sitting behind an intake counter at a clinic that rarely saw worse than a broken toe or second-degree burn. Having referred us to the doctor in charge, she shuffled us back into a tiny office cluttered with paperwork that was disappointingly disorganized, considering that – relevant or not – it was a medical facility. We waited for ten minutes, a quarter hour, and then a little longer before the door opened and the woman came in. She was shorter than Isolde, and older, but not unattractive in her smart white coat and tidy hairdo.
“What can I do for you two?” She said somewhat brusquely, tacitly making it very clear that she did not have a lot of time to waste on us. Isolde stepped forward to do that talking.
“We were wondering if your clinic has treated any patients complaining of intermittent blindness, severe headaches, chronic exhaustion...” Letting her voice trail somewhat musically off the list of the first, most salient symptoms of our phantom disease, Isolde passed her the crisply typed paper on which I'd listed some of the other common factors that we were using to identify infected parties. Frowning slightly, the good doctor shook her head and then paused.
“Well, there was one girl, a couple of weeks ago who came in claiming she'd had some kind of blackout or something. I remember we scanned her, at least... we don't scan very many people. Most folks that have cause to believe they have something neurological going on go straight to a proper hospital.”
“Did you treat her yourself?” Isolde pressed.
“No. But I looked over the scan before we checked her out – it was fine. We couldn't find anything wrong with her, she struck me as the type to exaggerate a bit, you know?” She locked eyes with Isolde and shrugged.
“We'd like to pull her file.” My friend refused to be dismissed so easily, and with an irritated sigh the doctor turned and lead us out of the office.
“Fine, but you won't find anything in it.”
Information in hand, we quit the clinic and resumed our trek. Isolde hadn't looked at anything, which was her process as I had witnessed it. She'd explained to me a few days prior that there was no way not to be remembered, coming around making these kinds of requests with the credentials we had between us, but it was best not to tip your hand as to why you were sniffing around after patients. MDRA's careful withholding of information from the public or any of the varietal sovereign governments that would probably have liked to have known what was killing their civilians was working for us at this point. I doubted anyone at that clinic had any idea of the disease that loomed above them.
There existed a silent awareness between Isolde and I that this fortune wouldn't last, however... eventually, panic would seed itself whether we found what we were looking for or not. Family members would start talking, the infection would spread, and the repercussions were going to be cataclysmic.
We were nearly alone, however, on the early morning streets, and once we'd gotten around the corner from the clinic she stopped to pull open the heavy stock envelope that had been handed over to us by the smiling receptionist of the urgent care center, blithely unaware of the gravity of our situation.
“Jadany Arkenstone.” Isolde murmured under her breath, tracing her fingertips over the glossy cover sheet. “Age 24. No history of a chronic condition, at least nothing she claimed to the office there... though I doubt their medical history questionnaire is very thorough. Hmm...”
I circled around to her shoulder to look over it myself. “Is there an address for her, or contact information?” I could feel my heart beginning to beat faster, this was the first lead we had on a real person – other than the still-elusive Adrian James – who might have had an active infection. That was as frightening a prospect as it was promising... Isolde and I both needed to be able to see the sickness itself, get face to face with it so we knew what kind of a demon we were fighting. She and I agreed... statistics dehumanized, and especially from my vantage point it was almost all I ever saw.
She shuffled through the papers. “Fortunately, yes.” We stood looking at one another for a long time then, the brisk, bright air silent but for the muffled noises that drifted from other parts of the city. Finally, I cleared my throat and broke her gaze, kicking at the concrete.
“Maybe we could leave her a letter.” Isolde apparently wasn't feeling any more savory about actually invading this woman's life than I did. It was one thing to commandeer records and scrutinize someone's personal information down to their most private issues when they weren't around, but it was another entirely to confront them with the information once you had. I'm not sure what we were planning to do once we found somebody who was not already quarantined in a hospital... we just knew that we had to.
She let my silence stretch on for some time before clearing her throat and nodding me down the street. “We also need to add everyone at that clinic to our charts, keep an eye on them if we can.”
I grumbled, falling in step behind her. “The dragon that we are intent on chasing needs a small army, not two scientific vigilantes.”
She refrained from answering me.
Wordcount as of November 8: 11,352.
I'm a little behind.
Despite myself, I had to admit it, as I was there sitting in the dark of the transit station courtyard, waiting for the last transfer of the night, that I was beginning to doubt him. I'd been seeing Adrian for four years... almost four and a half, and never loved any man or friend or family member with such unbridled ferocity and terror.
He was the kind of person that compelled instantaneously, who was not burdened by zeitgeist of conventional distraction. Adrian embodied clarity of vision, of progress and momentum. Moreover, ever since I had met him, I'd wanted to be a part of that... it was like he bent the heavens merely walking beneath them.
A month ago, though, things had started to change. The initial shift had been so abrupt, so stark, that I had even for the first time broken one of Adrian and I's oldest covenants. I had began writing about him in my book of days. He had ceased speaking to me for a week, saying only – when I did try to press him – that he was working on something and I had to wait until it was finished. When he'd come out of this bizarre recession, it was with the most disconcerting object I had seen in my life. His project was a crude sort of weapon; a blackened scrap of metal with a quarter-twist halfway down. He'd lashed it to a carefully carved piece of goat bone – this was the beautiful part, Adrian's art. The knot-work binding the steel to the handmade hilt was intricate and perfect, every lash tooled with iconography that only he fully understood. What didn't follow was Adrian's fascination with beautiful things... the metal was burned and brutalized, a scrap of something that look like it had been pilfered from a car wreck. He was entirely taken with this thing though, this bit of derelict metal. There would have been no other reason for him to have taken such care in setting it.
The instant I set eyes on it, my skin began to crawl. I'm not sure what it was, not even now, but it shook my faith the way he gazed at the blade turning in his hands.
Adrian believed things differently than most people. Differently, and profoundly, in such a way that had been drawing people toward him inexorably since long before we met. The man that introduced us was a bit of a zealot, in general, always looking for the next dogma to chase and lauded Adrian as some kind of near-prophet. I'd already learned better than to look for every burning meteor that this particular friend pointed at, but Adrian was the exception. We met at a club he was working at as a bartender, just before his shift ended. That morning, I called my boyfriend and told him to move out and leave the keys under the mat... I never looked back to that life.
Two years later, Adrian quit the last in a string of similar work, having come into enough money to buy an abandoned plot of land a little ways outside the city. He'd picked up a lot of strays like my friend, gradually speaking in greater and greater arcs of metaphor, storytelling, and parable. I had always taken his particular brand of mysticism more symbolically than a lot of people... but I was sympathetic to their need for hope, especially after the war had wiped out all of the support structures that people of faith had used to get through the day to day before. All of the old religions were disdained, tarnished as outdated relics that had driven mankind to the brink of self-destruction. They were right, but that didn't mean that there wasn't a higher power, still speaking through enlightened individuals on the earth. Adrian never claimed such a thing – that was part of what drew people to him – but the way he related to the world around him was unequivocally unique.
His explanation, however, for the knife that he had made was so far into this personal mythos that he had developed that I felt shaken in my prior belief that his airs were simply ways of communicating with the many and varied people that had come under his influence and care. He told me over and over that this had been given to him by the heaven and the earth as a sign, the sign that he'd been waiting for. That it had been given to him so that he would have the power to lead 'his people', and that it was going to show us all where to go. That final destination he didn't know yet, and when I questioned him he smiled at me, kissed my brow and advised my patience. Then, he sent me home.
Despite having promised never to write about him in the book of days – though it was by his behest, after the first week we'd been together, that I begin keeping one – I went straight home and opened an entry under his name. The spine of this year's journal has started to wear in the spot where these pages are, late in the written portion, for how many times I've gone back and read over and over that entry and the entries that follow it... Today, as I read, more than ever, I feel like it is the beginning of the end of my life... rather than the beginning of rebirth, as I have been promised. That was a month ago... another week later I started to feel sick. The pain started behind my eyes.... crippling migraines that I'd never experienced in the past. They came on suddenly, as I learned with the very first one... I remember only being on my knees as suddenly as if I'd been struck to the head, vomiting on the floor of my kitchen and without most of the vision in my right eye. That day, I thought I was going to die. I dragged myself to the living room of my flat, prostrated by the pain before I could get at the telephone to call for help, and I lay like that for almost an hour, paralyzed. What was even stranger than the unwarned assault was how swiftly it abated: the affliction vanished so quickly I thought that perhaps it had been some kind of awful dream, but that didn't follow as I normally didn't sleep stretched between my living room and kitchen. Discovering the pool of half-dried, reeking fluid on the tile didn't do much to dismiss the attack, either.
I went in for a physical. I didn't have a regular doctor, and the nurse at the urgent-care clinic wasn't very interested in my story. She conducted a reasonably cursory examination before determining that there was nothing she could see wrong with me. They boxed my head into a scanner for a 'quick peak' as the technician had called it, and assured me that I did not have a brain tumor before sending me home. The only other offer they could make me was an expensive trip down to Australia, where the research company run by the man who had invented the curiosity algorithm for advanced computers apparently had one of his electronic prodigies trained to diagnose medical patients with complicated disorders. They didn't think I needed it, and I didn't think I could afford it, so I went home and hoped that it wouldn't happen again. Three days later, it did, and I called the still-aloof Adrian as soon as I could get off the floor (once again, it came and went with equal haste). When I told him about what was happening, I could hear him crumbling on the other end of the phone; the soft quickening of his breath, the swiftness of his steps as he told me not to go anywhere or call any body else. Twenty minutes later, he let himself into my flat and collected me into a warm embrace where I sat on the bench below the window. One look into his eyes told me that I had my Adrian back, and he was beside himself with worry for me.
He tucked me into bed without letting my say another word about what had happened, and through a dizzying haze of troubled half-sleep (for, I had been interminably exhausted since the first attack, and now it felt worse, as if my body just couldn't recover even a mote of energy spent) I could hear him moving things around in my kitchen. Some period of time later he came back for me with a mug of a viscous, pungent sort of tea. There was a heady mix of smells and flavors that I couldn't identify, and Adrian made me drink every drop, which was not easy. I fell asleep soon after, a true sleep that was heavy and dreamless.
When I awoke the next morning, I felt better – granted – but I was still disturbed by the sensation that something was profoundly wrong within my body. Adrian had left in the night while I was unconscious – not uncommon – and left me a note about the vat of the mixture that he'd left in my refrigerator. Doses were sketched out – amounts, times of day, hot or cold... typical Adrian modus operandi. I was hesitant to subscribe to his course of medication but it was the best I had, and drinking it hot – which I did right before bed, after the first course in the early evening, over ice – did put me into that deep sleep that seemed to be the only rest I was able to get.
Aside from that nagging sensation of not being myself, increasingly, under my skin, I didn't have another one of those blinding attacks but I knew something was still wrong. Adrian was distracted but didn't neglect me too much so long as I came out every few days to visit the camp. That was when I began to learn that I was not the only one who was ill...
The transfer arrived in a susurrus of of electrical humming and air cut by the bulk of the vehicle sweeping up to bear me into the city. I climbed aboard, stirring the ache in my legs that had settled there, unwelcome and unrelenting. With a wince, I settled myself into an empty seat, feeling more like a heap than a woman in the half-light. My transfer took off in a rush, blurring the streets outside just as the first thunder came to crack the clouds. Watching the windows and streets slicken with silvery water took me back to the camp that I'd just left, watching Adrian treat the people that were in his care. A lot of them were worse off than I was, but Adrian's nursing kept them something like comfortable, a feat that did a lot to restore my faith in his vision, however incomplete it remained. My arm stung where he'd given me the small injection... after his tonic tea had stopped seeming to have any effect, he demanded that I come out there so that he could try the next step in the treatment he was refining. A tiny bruise was forming in the crook of my arm as a reminder of a fact that stung more...
Adrian refused to bring me into the camp. Total strangers lodged beneath the roofs he had built out there, and yet, when I told him I wanted to come and be a part of what he was building – forever, because I knew I could never leave him – he only shook his head. If I pressed the issue he told me to go home and get some rest, promised I would understand in time. He tried to be sweet about it... his normal excuse was that I was too important, that this was not a place for someone like me, that what he had given people was a halfway house for their souls as they started to learn about the things that he had come to know. But it had been years, now, and it wore on me steadily that he had to spend so much time alone there, when I was willing to offer him every second of my breathing life.
***
Isolde and I walked on rain-sparkled streets, she wrapped neatly in a wool jacket to ward of the chill and me slinking along like a shadow at her shoulder in a long-coat that looked entirely too businesslike for what we were conducting. I felt uncomfortable conspicuous, but she said it would give us some credibility when we went around snooping for information regarding people's medical care. Sweet-faced as Isolde was, she was a sly cat, and had already arranged the paperwork – without pulling too much attention with her strings, she promised me – to get us access to things that were normally protected, at least to some degree, by privacy laws. That was the nice thing about outranking almost everybody in any given medical community in both experience and reputation (except, of course, the Mater Dei Research Association but I was doing my best not to think very much about them at the moment). People didn't often question you when you wanted things... it was just accepted that you were more important than they were, and they coughed up the loot.
The first stop for the day – after, of course, hot coffee and muffin sandwiches at a cafe that had absolutely enslaved me near her apartment – was an urgent care center a short walk away. The receptionist was kind if slightly vapid, probably a medical student in her second or third year with no other experience in the field, trying to gain some life experience sitting behind an intake counter at a clinic that rarely saw worse than a broken toe or second-degree burn. Having referred us to the doctor in charge, she shuffled us back into a tiny office cluttered with paperwork that was disappointingly disorganized, considering that – relevant or not – it was a medical facility. We waited for ten minutes, a quarter hour, and then a little longer before the door opened and the woman came in. She was shorter than Isolde, and older, but not unattractive in her smart white coat and tidy hairdo.
“What can I do for you two?” She said somewhat brusquely, tacitly making it very clear that she did not have a lot of time to waste on us. Isolde stepped forward to do that talking.
“We were wondering if your clinic has treated any patients complaining of intermittent blindness, severe headaches, chronic exhaustion...” Letting her voice trail somewhat musically off the list of the first, most salient symptoms of our phantom disease, Isolde passed her the crisply typed paper on which I'd listed some of the other common factors that we were using to identify infected parties. Frowning slightly, the good doctor shook her head and then paused.
“Well, there was one girl, a couple of weeks ago who came in claiming she'd had some kind of blackout or something. I remember we scanned her, at least... we don't scan very many people. Most folks that have cause to believe they have something neurological going on go straight to a proper hospital.”
“Did you treat her yourself?” Isolde pressed.
“No. But I looked over the scan before we checked her out – it was fine. We couldn't find anything wrong with her, she struck me as the type to exaggerate a bit, you know?” She locked eyes with Isolde and shrugged.
“We'd like to pull her file.” My friend refused to be dismissed so easily, and with an irritated sigh the doctor turned and lead us out of the office.
“Fine, but you won't find anything in it.”
Information in hand, we quit the clinic and resumed our trek. Isolde hadn't looked at anything, which was her process as I had witnessed it. She'd explained to me a few days prior that there was no way not to be remembered, coming around making these kinds of requests with the credentials we had between us, but it was best not to tip your hand as to why you were sniffing around after patients. MDRA's careful withholding of information from the public or any of the varietal sovereign governments that would probably have liked to have known what was killing their civilians was working for us at this point. I doubted anyone at that clinic had any idea of the disease that loomed above them.
There existed a silent awareness between Isolde and I that this fortune wouldn't last, however... eventually, panic would seed itself whether we found what we were looking for or not. Family members would start talking, the infection would spread, and the repercussions were going to be cataclysmic.
We were nearly alone, however, on the early morning streets, and once we'd gotten around the corner from the clinic she stopped to pull open the heavy stock envelope that had been handed over to us by the smiling receptionist of the urgent care center, blithely unaware of the gravity of our situation.
“Jadany Arkenstone.” Isolde murmured under her breath, tracing her fingertips over the glossy cover sheet. “Age 24. No history of a chronic condition, at least nothing she claimed to the office there... though I doubt their medical history questionnaire is very thorough. Hmm...”
I circled around to her shoulder to look over it myself. “Is there an address for her, or contact information?” I could feel my heart beginning to beat faster, this was the first lead we had on a real person – other than the still-elusive Adrian James – who might have had an active infection. That was as frightening a prospect as it was promising... Isolde and I both needed to be able to see the sickness itself, get face to face with it so we knew what kind of a demon we were fighting. She and I agreed... statistics dehumanized, and especially from my vantage point it was almost all I ever saw.
She shuffled through the papers. “Fortunately, yes.” We stood looking at one another for a long time then, the brisk, bright air silent but for the muffled noises that drifted from other parts of the city. Finally, I cleared my throat and broke her gaze, kicking at the concrete.
“Maybe we could leave her a letter.” Isolde apparently wasn't feeling any more savory about actually invading this woman's life than I did. It was one thing to commandeer records and scrutinize someone's personal information down to their most private issues when they weren't around, but it was another entirely to confront them with the information once you had. I'm not sure what we were planning to do once we found somebody who was not already quarantined in a hospital... we just knew that we had to.
She let my silence stretch on for some time before clearing her throat and nodding me down the street. “We also need to add everyone at that clinic to our charts, keep an eye on them if we can.”
I grumbled, falling in step behind her. “The dragon that we are intent on chasing needs a small army, not two scientific vigilantes.”
She refrained from answering me.
Wordcount as of November 8: 11,352.
I'm a little behind.