#30ff

Day 198 of Plague Research

18:15

It has been 5 days since I lost Rosie to the plague. I am redoubling my efforts to find a cure. We all are. But it’s hard. We’re overworked. Tired. Not fed enough. Paranoid about catching the very disease we’re studying.

Yesterday, Amelia passed out at her station. The quarantine people came and carried her out, then we all had to get out of the lab. They disinfected the whole place before we were allowed to get back in again. I’d left my journal in the rush, so I wasn’t able to write down yesterday’s events. I guess at least now my journal has been disinfected.

I’ve been trying to find out what happened to Amelia. Passing out could’ve meant anything. We were all exhausted and sleep deprived. Maybe that was it. But no one would tell me anything.

I fear Amelia is dead  infected. Maybe we’ll never see her again. The people who go to quarantine never come back.

Obviously, Amelia was my friend. But as much as I miss her friendship, I miss her expertise more. She died disappeared right when we needed her. Now we’ll need to find another molecular biology scientist to fill her station.

I’m looking over to her station now. Looks wrong without her standing there, holding her mug of coffee. (It’s unhygienic and just plain unhealthy to drink or eat in a research lab full of plague virus, but that’s that was Amelia for you.)

I wonder what’d happened to that mug. I remember it said something like DON’T TALK TO ME BEFORE MY FIFTH CUP OF COFFEE.

Wasn’t hard to follow its instructions. Amelia was always drinking coffee somehow.

There’s something on her table. A piece of chalk, I think. It’s a nice, blue-ish green. Viridian, I think the color’s called.

Something weird about that. Amelia didn’t like the color green.

I’m gonna go look at her station now. There must be something there. Amelia looked like she wanted to say something to me before she collapsed.

Alright. So I went looking at her station. The viridian (yes, it was viridian. I looked it up.) chalk was used to write something. I just needed to find the surface.

But wait.

There was chalk powder all over her station. Some residue in the test tubes. Maybe she was testing them for something. Too bad she didn’t write notes.

I think I’ll try to recreate her experiment. Something to honor her legacy. She is was a brilliant scientist.

23:45

Oh, my god.

OH MY GOD.

Amelia was onto something.

I think this viridian chalk could cure the plague.

It’s just a hypothesis. I did some basic tests. Nothing conclusive yet.

Lab database says it’s a common mineral found buried in grounds near the equator. A new mineral. Discovered  Happened into existence around the time the plague killed its first victims.

Viridian, they call it.

I think it could save the world.

She fixed her eyes on the far side of the room as she moved smoothly into a pirouette, touching back down and continuing with her routine. Her body went through the motions, but her mind was elsewhere, at some place far away that she couldn’t even be sure she still remembered accurately.

She remembered the heavy weight of the gun in her hand. She remembered the wind on that rooftop, the cold bite of the chill. She remembered the exact feel of her heavy coat, her thick-soled boots. She remembered a girl begging for mercy.

She remembered how she showed her none.

She remembered how she didn’t regret it right after she did it.

She leapt in tune to the music, landing on one foot and spinning fluidly. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see her coach leaning on the railing watching her form with a critical eye. She tried to keep her mind on the routine. The audition was coming up fast, and she needed to be more than perfect if she wanted to land the lead role again.

But she couldn’t stop thinking about that night. All the blood on the frost, all the rage she’d felt.  She was young then, reckless and foolish, thinking that she could get away with anything.

While it was true that she’d gotten away with it until now, she hadn’t been able to forget how the light left Aline’s eyes when the bullet entered her forehead.

All over what? A petty feud over who landed the lead role in the company’s latest feature.

Once she had thought she was prepared to do anything to be successful, to be remembered. Now she knew she wasn’t prepared to murder somebody. The guilt haunted her then, and it will haunt her for the rest of her life.

She’d gone to Aline’s funeral, seen the weeping mother and the grief stricken brother. She’d put the flowers on Aline’s grave with the very hand that had murdered her.

She came to at the end of the song, to the sound of applause.

“Fantastic,” her coach seemed to be saying. “That was fantastic, Eleanor. Again!”

As the music started up again, her body moved automatically as if on cue.

She carefully stepped over the creaky board and dropped to her knees in front of the door, lining herself up with the small crack under the door. Sounds floated out from the toasty room, carried out along with the hot air. She closed her eyes and strained her hearing.

A few weeks ago, she would’ve said that eavesdropping was below her. And yet, here she was. Eavesdropping had become a habit that winter.

It all started when she woke up shivering because the fire had nearly gone out from the hearth and she was forced to go fetch more wood. As she groggily made her way to the shack where they kept all their firewood, she had heard voices. Her sister and someone else she didn’t know. It sounded urgent, conspiratorial, and she was suddenly compelled to know what they were saying. She had tugged her fur cloak closer over her body and crouched down just around the corner, out of sight but within hearing range.

It was a plan, of some sort. Who knew her sister was a part of some secret society?

Back then, she wasn’t entirely clear on what this secret society was. She thought it was just something transient, another one of her sister’s seemingly endless whims. Of course Maya would go off and join a secret society. There was something so Maya in a secret society. Maybe it was the secret rushing thrill of it.

She was just the uncool sister Maya left behind in the dust.

“-we should strike now!” The unknown voice stressed.

“No!” Maya’s familiar voice drifted through the door, soft and a little vacant. “We can’t do that, too much risk-“

From what she had gathered, Maya was a part of some rebel alliance who wanted to overthrow the government. All this secret society business was not a part of Maya’s whimsy anymore. Maya was a traitor.

She was sick of Maya leaving her behind. She was done with being the sister nobody wanted to deal with.

She sold Maya’s secrets to the government.

Maya never suspected her.

Maya will regret never suspecting her.

“There’s a spy!” The voice snapped. “We should strike now, before our plans get fed to the state again!”

On her notepad, she carefully jotted down notes in neat columns. Coordinates in the other column.

As the conversation in the room seemed to come to an end, she tucked her notepad back inside her dress, her pen behind her ear. She neatly stepped over the creaky board, crept up the stairs, and was back inside her room before Maya and her friend even emerged from the room.

Someone was waiting in her bedroom.

She handed him her notepad.

“Why are you doing this?” He asked. “They never told me.”

He lay back in the snow. Looked up at the sky. The shimmering air seemed so unbearably bright despite the apparent gloominess of the day.

He wanted to move his arms and legs, recreate the snow angels of his past, but he couldn’t. His arms were as heavy as lead, and his legs may as well have been chopped off for all the good it did him at the moment. He was trapped here, in the snow. Sooner or later, the cold would seep through the heavy furs he wore, and he would freeze.

He would die eventually. It was only a matter of when. He hoped it’d be before the wolves came hunting.

He thought back on his life, not fondly but with a resigned sort of nostalgia. There were so many things he could’ve done better. He could’ve been less cruel, he could’ve listened to his mother more, he could’ve been kinder to Nyhemia.

So many could haves. So little hads.

Upon the moment of his death, all he could think of was his own failures in life.

He was a little ashamed of himself. He’s been denying it for so long, shoved it so far in the back of his mind that he actually forgot about it. But there was no denying it now. His life wasn’t a stretch of glory that he’d hoped it would be. It was little more than a long roll of mediocre experiences and deeds, occasionally interspersed with a brief moment of extraordinary that was hardly enough to make up for the overall dullness.

And he had made up for his own deficiencies with unkindness towards other people, with arrogance and ego.

He regretted that now. He wished he’d been a better person.

Because there was nothing to be done about that now, he closed his eyes.

And he heard footsteps.

Irene was a dreamer.

Everyone she came across in her short little life said so. She stared off into the far distance, engrossed by things other people cannot see. She often looked as if she floated through the realm of men, ethereal and unbothered by worldly concerns.

They failed to see that she was also an observer.

She liked to watch people, sort their behavior into neat boxes that helped her understand them better. People were less confusing when they were in neat boxes.

And when she was done assembling those boxes, she brought out the people and slowly fit them into her world.

She liked to do that. Call it a hobby, if you will, or a habit. She liked to fit people into the world like puzzle pieces.

The world was such a big place, one she couldn’t possibly understand unless she broke down all of its small parts and built it back up in her own mind.

It doesn’t matter that the other children call her strange. She understood the world more than they did. She knew Keith was a bully because his older brother bullied him. She knew Sandra was mean because she felt better about herself when she was mean to other people.

Keith went into the Bully box and Sandra went into the Low Self-Esteem box.

Her mother is always pulling out tufts of her own hair. Her father is always angry.

She went into the Anxious box, he went into the Insecure and Dissatisfied box.

Then she built her own world with those boxes like building a lego house.

She didn’t like the world she built very much. Though one could hardly blame the child who built a lego house using crooked legos.

Even at ten years old, the world disappointed Irene.

And that was why she dreamed. To see a better world, if only in her dreams, made her less sad and drawn.

Some day, she vowed, she would fix the world. It would be as good as the one in her dream, if not better.

I was fuming by the time I stepped through the threshold of the flat. William walked casually ahead of me; either he is oblivious to my simmering anger or he doesn’t care. The latter is just as likely as the former, and who knew anything with William anyway. He was as capricious as a drop of mercury on a good day.

And maybe this was a good day for him. He was whistling, his hands tucked inside his heavy trench coat. Any minute now, he’d untie his blue scarf from his throat and hang it up on the coat hook. This was a routine I knew intimately from years of sharing a flat with him, but right now the whole ordinariness of it just frustrated me.

I was spoiling for a fight, adrenaline still in my veins from running through the streets behind his back, chasing after whatever truth he sought in the city’s back alleys.

True to my prediction, he removed his scarf and coat, hung them up on the coat hook, and moved towards the sofa that by now I’d come to recognize as his the way the armchair next to it was mine.

“Some tea would be great, John.” He flopped dramatically onto the sofa.

I gritted my teeth, but complied, shuffling into the kitchen to tend to the comforting routine of making tea. Putting the kettle on, rooting through the messy cabinets for two sachets of tea. Pouring water, letting the tea steep. The familiarity of the motions calmed me somewhat, and I handed William his cup of tea.

He took it without a thanks, sipping from it and closing his eyes in appreciation of the flavor.

“What, not a thank you?” I blurted out before I could stop. Some gratitude right now would be appropriate, especially after the trying day we’ve had. Which was, again, his fault alone.

“Come on, John.” He sighed, exasperated. “Not now.”

I wanted to fight, and he just wanted to finish his tea. The absurdity of the situation made me laugh for a moment, a sharp, scathing laugh that made William wince.

I felt a little grain of petty satisfaction at making him wince.

“If not now, when’s a good time, hm?” I sat down heavily in my armchair. “It’s never a good time with you, is it? You’re always off chasing one mystery after another and you just expect me to follow you and not complain!”

“I never asked you to follow me,” William’s face was stormy. “You chose to, so don’t you complain now.”

“Oh, now it’s my fault.” That’s it. I was done with this conversation suddenly. Why did I think it was a good idea to pick a fight with him? I knew I’d never win it.

The futility was amusing in some way, I suppose.

William remained frustratingly silent.

“Alright, fine. I’m going out to get some air.”

He looked up at me, and there was something there in his eyes that might’ve been an apology if I tried to convince myself it was. The truth was, I didn’t know whatever it was he was thinking. I never did, and that was probably part of the reason we’re friends.

Because he was right. I did choose to follow him, even if I didn’t like to admit it to myself. Life was just more interesting when he was around.

I took my coat off the hook and put it on, kept my lips shut. After going to all that pain to pick a fight with him, I was certainly not going to apologize first.

I opened the door. The cold wind blasted my face, but I went out anyways.

Maybe William would apologize when I come back. Probably not, though.

He reached upwards, searching for another sturdy handhold and tugging to make sure it was secure before he put all his weight on it and reached up with his other arm and repeated the process. Fighting not to look down, he wondered how exactly it was that he had gotten roped into this foolish, dangerous quest.

He had just been looking for some quick money doing odd jobs for strangers in the market square. Usually the things he did were mundane: steal this from that Lord, put this secret love message in that Lady’s private chambers. Never in his wildest dreams did he imagine that he would be scaling the Cliffs at dawn, looking for some mythical lily nobody’s seen in centuries.

He risked a glance down, and found that he couldn’t even see the ground anymore. One misstep now would be fatal. He swallowed into his dry throat and continued climbing.

Three hours, the cloaked lady had said. He had three hours to scale the Cliffs, collect the lily, and bring it back down to her at the town square. Any longer and the lily would wilt away into a useless husk.

He gritted his teeth and reached for the next handhold, heart dropping out of his body when it broke off in his hand and he was left dangling over the abyss with one hand holding him to the rock face.

He’d never considered himself to be particularly religious, but now he prayed to anybody out there who would listen to let him survive. He didn’t want to die. Besides, if he made it out of this successfully there’s a hefty bag of gold waiting for him according to the cloaked lady that had asked him for his help.

His hand reached the top of the cliff, and he clawed his way onto it and collapsed, shaking and gasping. He looked up at the lightening sky and was immensely grateful to make it alive.

And he spotted it, the beautiful white lily, growing impossibly out of a crack of a rock. After all the trouble he went to, climbing up the cliffs, he wanted to rip it out root and all. But he held back the impulse, delicately picking the flower out of the stems.

The sun rose even higher. He was running out of time.

He carefully tucked the flower into his waistband, careful not to crush it, and began the painstaking climb down the Cliff. He rushed through it, considerably less careful than he had been on the way up, his feet finding niches quickly and his hands following right after. Before long, he was safely back on solid ground holding a single white lily.

He started on the trek back towards town. He’d collect his gold and go, and do no more business with strange ladies in market squares. One near-death experience had been enough. He didn’t care what she wanted with the lily, but he wasn’t going to ask. If you asked him, he suspected witchcraft.

“Say your vows, Alina.” The old crone gestured with her walking stick. “It is time.”

Alina glanced around warily at the crowd of Silent Sisters and dropped to her knees.

“I am the Sister of the Vale, the Sister of the Night, the Sister of the Flames.” She mumbled, sneaking a glance at the altar. “I will lay with no man, I will bear no children. I devote myself to protecting the Vale, to guarding the realm against the Endless Night, to tending the Eternal Flames.”

“Rise then, Sister Alina.” The crone rested her hand on Alina’s forehead. Her head felt cool and wrinkled, and it reminded Alina of her grandmother. She seemed so far away now. The Vale had always seemed secluded from the rest of the world, and that had never been more apparent than this moment. Her grandmother seemed like a distant dream, her old life an echo from the mouth of an infinitely long cave.

She rose up, wobbling a little. The coarse black cotton of her robes chafed against the back of her legs uncomfortably. One by one, the Sisters came forward to touch her forehead. Alina wanted to shrink away from them all; she had never been good with people. She liked them well enough, but she didn’t know how to approach them, how to talk to them, how to act around. It was far easier to avoid them, in her experience.

“Sister Alina,” they murmured as they blessed her.

She felt uncomfortable and unsettled around so many people. Her skin itched, and she was hit with an urge to crawl out of her skin and take shelter somewhere else with less people.

And finally, it was over. She was free to roam the Vale as she wished, on the condition that she came back to the Citadel before nightfall. She wandered outside, squinting up at the cloudy sky. She eyed the river cutting behind the Citadel and decided to follow it.

Alina drifted alongside the current almost dreamily, letting the chill seep into her clothes and cool her down from the stressful morning. She picked flowers and tucked them behind her ear, skipped stones across the river, and twirled barefeet in the lush grass.

Perhaps being a Silent Sister would not be so terrible after all.

Just as she finished the thought, the sky opened and rain poured down in thick sheets. She cursed softly and ran for the nearest cave in the surface of the steep valley that she spotted. She ducked inside the cave, dripping wet, and sat down in relief near the fire without sparing a thought for the person who had built the fire.

“Hello?”

Alina barely bit in her shriek, and recoiled away from the voice.

“I-I-I’m sorry,” and here it was again, her social ineptitude come out to play. “I didn’t m-mean to. I’ll leave right away.”

“Nonsense, it’s pouring out there.”  The voice moved closer to the light, and was revealed to be a girl with long blonde hair, wearing a richly colored dress. “My name is Illiya. You don’ t have to be afraid of me.”

“I-I-” Alina was angry at herself. She couldn’t even talk to people who were willing to talk to her, goddammit, what was wrong with her?

“I’m Alina,” she managed finally. “What are you doing in this cave alone?”

She winced inside. Her grandmother would be appalled to know that she treated her host this way.

“I’m a weaver,” Illiya gestured at the dark shadow of a loom in the back of the cave. “I weave for the Silent Sisters and anyone willing to pay.”

She scrutinized Alina closely.

“You’re a Silent Sister, aren’t you?” She smiled. “I wove that cloak a few weeks back with special measurements. You’re so small, it seems the Sisters’ normal sizes wouldn’t fit you.”

“I’m not small!” Alina seethed, her shyness forgotten in the face of her indignation. “I’m just-”

“The Lord just wasn’t that generous with me, that’s all.” She finished lamely, peeking at Illiya to see her reaction.

“Oh, aren’t you a precious little thing.” Illiya laughed, a delightful sound that reminded Alina of running streams and rustling leaves. “Stay for a while, won’t you? Until this rain ends, of course.”

“Maybe I’ll come back,” Alina said shyly. “Even when it isn’t raining.”