Authors: Finder
Ms. Wu leaned out of the window above me and called, "Come on up." So I abandoned all the speculation that I'd already decided three times was pointless, anyway.
By the time I reached the second floor, Ms. Wu's bag was packed, and she was towelling her hands at the kitchen sink. She seemed a bit pale and pinched. Tick-Tick looked no better, but no worse. There was a lingering smell of some light, sharp-smelling incense, and red votive candles still burned in holders on each windowsill.
"I would have told Tick-Tick my diagnosis and let her pass it on to you, but this will save her the wear and tear," said Ms. Wu. "Not to mention the annoying questions that she won't be able to answer." Her face was calm, but not smiling; I was nervous enough to think that she might have steeled herself to this.
I sat down next to the couch, where I could watch her and the Ticker both.
"Did she treat you bad?" I asked the Ticker.
"Heavens, no," she answered, in the pale version of her usual manner that seemed to be all she had the strength for. "Not even one of her wretched fortune cookies, though if she'd offered me a nice ginger jelly for being a good girl and not crying over the needle, I assure you I wouldn't have minded."
"Oh, hell! I should have remembered to bring you some when I went to fetch her."
"I suppose you were distracted," the Ticker said, pretending to be wounded. I could have enlarged on the pantomime, if she hadn't been folded up just then with a cough that made her clutch at her chest. "My, that hurts," she croaked when she'd finished.
"I felt as if someone had taken a pair of tongs out of the freezer and used them on my heart. But all I said was, 'Then shut up, for God's sake, and you won't cough so much."
Ms. Wu, who had been pretending not to listen to us, sat down on the other side of the couch. "I've treated fourteen cases of this so far this week," she said. "At least, the symptoms and the onset of them has been the same. After the first six or so, I was driven to do a little research. The early symptoms
painf
ul joints, headache, and fever. All of my patients have been Truebloods."
The Ticker snorted.
"I beg your pardon?" Ms. Wu asked.
"I have no objection to being called an elf. I don't believe it has any derogatory connotations."
"Others among your people do."
"My people," Tick-Tick said, with fine dignity and a shot of a glance at me, "are widely assorted genetically, and are by no means limited to those who have their origin across the Border."
I remembered my recent objection to her use of "my people" and "your people," and grinned.
"Shut up, round ears," she said, without looking at me.
Ms. Wu's lips twitched, but she only said, "May I go on?"
"Please do," I replied.
"I don't know how familiar you are with the nature of viruses. They're one of the most easily mutated organisms in nature, which is one of the things that makes them so hard to fight, in the World. By the time you've found something that will kill one, it's likely to have turned into something else.
"True—elves living in the Borderlands have had very little to fear from viral infection, for the same reason. The Wall between the Elflands and the Borderlands seems to have a disruptive influence on any virus that passes through it, killing it or mutating it into something harmless. In particular, airborne viruses from the Elflands are unknown in Bordertown."
I thought I recognized a prologue when I heard one. "Until now?"
"Until now. This seems to be a version of a disease known only in the Elflands, and not known well there. There, it's not only rare, but slow to spread. No one I've talked to has figured out yet how it crossed the Border and became viable here. There may be a specific vector, which we can eliminate to slow down the spread of the disease."
"Vector?" I asked.
"I'm sorry. Carrier, more or less. Rats were a vector for the Black Plague, in the Middle Ages."
"Huh. Do rats cross the Border?"
"Only," Tick-Tick supplied, "If they're Trueblood rats."
"So how do you cure it?" I asked, hoping to keep Tick-Tick from making any more outrageous comments.
Ms. Wu pressed the fingertips of her two hands together. "I don't know," she said.
A B B YY.c
The Ticker and I bot
h stared at her.
"You weren't listening properly," she said in answer to our eyes. "This is, essentially, a new disease. It's related to an old one, but given the difference in contexts, who's to say if the old treatment will be effective? Viruses tend to weaken over time, but that's no help to the population infected with this generation. Besides, when I ask the few people I know who're really well-versed in the medicine of Faerie what the usual treatment is, they get wonderfully vague."
"There are prohibitions," Tick-Tick said.
"On saving lives?"
"I suppose, if it came to that, they might inhibit the saving of lives. But there are many things in the Elflands that can't be spoken of outside them. The prohibitions seem laid almost at random; it's not until you are about to say something that you find yourself unable to do so."
Ms. Wu looked outraged. "Was this a spell? Can it be lifted—or at least an exception made, just once?"
"I was not placed under any enchantment, so far as I know. I think, perhaps, it is in all elves, that we are born with it." Then she gave Ms. Wu a wry little smile. "But if this disease is rare, as you say it is, they may only hesitate to admit that they don't
know
the treatment."
"Well, I admit it in a flash. I've given you something that will reduce the pain and swelling in the joints, and tincture of echinacea for your immune system. Let the candles bum themselves out if you can. If you have to snuff them, do it with your fingers—don't blow them out. I've left willow bark tea; take that in the evening when your fever starts to climb and you'll sleep a little easier. There's a cough syrup for your throat, too. Right now, that's all I can do."
"What… what are we expecting?" I asked her.
"I was getting to that. This has the potential to be a very dangerous illness. It is in the Elflands, anyway.
I want you to lie there and do absolutely nothing except take medication when you're supposed to. Some of my other thirteen, the earliest, are so sick I had them moved to The Lilacs, where they can be observed around the clock."
"Blessed Mab," Tick-Tick said, on a startled cough. "How many town council members do you know, to have managed such a thing?"
Ms. Wu shrugged elegantly.
"Resources to make a princess blush," the Ticker muttered, and added to me, "Even you would fancy it, my duckling. It's more like a resort hotel than a hospital, and high up on the Hill, far above the fetid airs and cares of town."
"Beggar's snobbery," I told her. "Ms. Wu, what is this virus when it's at home? If that's all we know about it, I'd like to know that much."
"Dangerous. I told you."
"How?"
A B B YY.c
"Pos
sible impairment of brain function from high fever; damage to the heart, similar to that
caused by
rheumatic fever; and thi
nning and breaking down of cell walls in certain kinds of tissue. Do
you know
more than you did before?"
"My mother was a nurse. Yeah, I do." Something about that description bothered me—besides the obvious fart that whatever the virus did might happen to Tick-Tick. "Are you treating Sunny Rico's partner, Linn?"
"No." Ms. Wu raised her eyebrows. "I've met him, of course, but I don't know either of them very well.
Does he have this, too?"
"Yeah. So raise the tally of sick people to fifteen."
"If I've treated fourteen cases personally, there must be a good many more than fifteen," Ms. Wu said softly. "This may be an epidemic. If so, the town faces something of a challenge, since in the past our epidemics have run more to things like mononucleosis."
We were interrupted by a banging at the door in the street below, and a voice shouting up, "Ms. Wu!
Ms. Wu!"
"How do they know you're here?"
"I left a note at the shop," she answered on her way to the window. "Yes?" she called down.
"Ms. Wu," I heard the unidentified shouter say, "can you come? Eglantine is awfully sick."
"I'll be right there." She pulled her head back in the window and turned to us. Something flashed across her face that reminded me of the way she'd been in the shop when I'd gone to fetch her, and I realized that at least some of her brisk, confident style at the Ticker's couch-side was an effect achieved with a little effort. "Take your medicine, and send your partner to fetch me if things take a turn for the worse,"
Ms. Wu said to Tick-Tick. "I'll come back to check on you as soon as I can."
I went to the door to show her out, but she said, "I can find my way." Up close, I could see how tired she was.
When she was gone, the Ticker stretched and groaned. "I suppose I'd best explain all my drugs and doses to you, so you can help me mind 'em," she said, her voice coarse with the irritation of the cough.
"By leaf and root, this is a tedious business for you, my dear, nursing the invalid. I'm damnably sorry for it."
"Silly. I don't mind." I took the cap off one of the bottles and sniffed. "Bleah. What does this do?"
"It's meant to soothe my throat."
"Well, it's sure not going to soothe your nose. You know, if you wanted an excuse to find out how the other half lives, we could probably trade on Ms. Wu's connections and get you into The Lilacs."
"I have a reasonably clear notion of how the other half lives, thank you." She gave me a rueful look.
"Besides, it is a bastion of Truebloodedness, and they might be rude to you during visiting hours."
The Ticker shook her head and gave another little snort. "Truebloods. What, then, are humans? False?
Artificial bloods? All blood is true." Her voice was deteriorating into a whisper, which must have been more comfortable. She turned her gaze from me to the shaded windows. "By its nature, all blood is true."
"Except…"
Tick-Tick watched me and waited, her eyebrows up.
"I don't know. I was thinking of this drug of Rico's, and the way it changes people."
"Are you saying that people like the girl, Tiamat, are false-begotten, untrue creatures?"
"No, but they're not quite… one thing or the other."
"Some say the same of half-elves."
"But that's not true. They're a whole new thing that happens to be part elf, part human."
"What of Wolfboy?"
"He's himself."
"And before he was himself, there was nothing like him. When the Elflands returned, they changed everything. But the Borderlands have never ceased to change, since then. They have produced, and will go on producing, objects and people that are not one thing or another. They have already produced a human with a fey gift, and an elf with a human talent."