Chapter Twenty-Eight Fenlia
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Fenlia
Of all the lessons Zinnitzia has tried to impart on her, Fen thinks this the most important: that Kreuzfurt was meant to contain Givers and Reapers, not help them work together.
All of Zinnitzia’s yelling during every argument, and every time Fen failed to heal someone from their suffering and pain – none of it was ever intended to help Fen succeed.
And for all her vague warnings and attempts at imparting an idea of greater meaning, she is not truly helping now either.
So, if it’s all bullshit, Fen thinks, barking orders at one Giver and Reaper pair and then to the next, I’m going to ignore it.
‘You’re going to eat together,’ she tells the teams. ‘You’re going to room together.
You’re going to get to know each other.‘ She hisses that last part when she starts hearing grumbling amongst the ranks. ‘You’re going to learn how to communicate. You’re going to stop spending time only in your own groups.
You must learn how to work together, and you’re not going to do that if you hate each other. ’
Fen is relatively certain that every Reaper and Giver in Soleb loathes the ground she walks on.
She cannot bring herself to care. Adalei’s decision not to close the gates, to at least attempt to slow the spread of whatever is truly causing this plague, has left them overwhelmed with the sick beyond the point of reckoning.
It is exactly as she has feared, and people are dying.
They don’t know how to treat them without their powers.
Elena’s new recruits fumble this way and that, trying to help anyone that the Exalted aren’t attending to, but they are squeamish around the bodies and Fen catches a few of them crying from the sheer futility of it all.
They don’t know how to save the people they’re trying to help; they’ve never needed to tend to anyone before and no one has ever explained it.
They have only ever hoped, and waited for a Giver to save them.
None bothering to learn more. And for them, now, what good is offering comfort if it only ends in death?
Isn’t it better to just stay away from the damaged and weak and pretend it will never come for them too?
‘The good is kindness, and respect,’ Elena says when Fen asks her just that. ‘A modicum of dignity to those still living, with the time they have left. And it is a dignity we all deserve.’
‘Even if it doesn’t matter?’
‘It matters very much to the people we’re being kind to.
Sometimes the most valuable thing you can do for someone is to remind them they are not suffering alone.
’ Elena stands stalwart even as her volunteers balk, offering palliative care and running tests whenever she can on the organic material of sick and healthy individuals alike.
Her protégés are terrified of the way she lances wounds and forces food and drink into the mouths of those unable to swallow on their own.
But those under her care last longer, and, Fen hopes…
they will continue lasting just long enough to be healed.
Fen and Cieli are still the only consistent team available, and where before they hoped to heal only the most grievous of illnesses first, they now need to try an alternative option.
If there is less to heal, it takes less time to heal.
Two of their Giver and Reaper pairs help all those who are first showing signs of symptoms, and they are mitigating the influx of the new while harsh decisions are made around who may be too far gone.
If they can heal ten people an hour instead of only one…then is that not better in the end?
Families cry. They curse. They scream. Fen crumbles under the face of their wrath.
She tries to steel herself against their hate and their rage.
Their despair. Why could you save my father but not my son?
Can’t you just look at my mother? And she tries.
She tries to help everyone she can, but there are simply too many people falling ill. And they can only do so much.
The wind carries the disease up over their barricades.
Their too-basic quarantine fails, and the whole of the city is overcome.
Reports arrive from other provinces: it is the same everywhere.
The death toll is rising. If smacking the Exalted around would help them learn the very basic principle of teamwork, she would do it, but Zinnitzia smacked her more than a few times in Kreuzfurt and it never once brought fresh knowledge or possibility.
The only thing it did was make Fen hate Zinnitzia and everything she stood for.
She isn’t going to smack these Reapers or Givers.
But she is going to make them miserable.
‘You will sit at each other’s sides. You will learn each other’s names, histories, families. You will talk about the things you like and the things you don’t. You will memorize each other’s favourite fucking flowers, and you will get along.’
‘You’re ordering us to be friends?’ Gerai asks her hatefully.
‘Yes. You’re going to be best friends and you’re going to figure out what it is that you need to do to make this work.’
Since Kreuzfurt was designed to isolate them, she will make them integrate. Since Kreuzfurt has kept Givers focused only on healing and Reapers only on killing, she will force them to do otherwise.
‘I don’t have a favourite flower,’ Cieli informs Fen when they pause for a roll of bread for dinner.
Despite Adalei’s attempts at forestalling a famine, the supply chain has weakened dramatically.
Fen has already assigned one Exalted team to ensure anyone responsible for making, producing or transporting food in and out of the city is healthy.
Another group of freshly healed volunteers is working to mitigate distribution issues, including rationing and price fluctuation.
(She has seen one of the guards whipping a merchant who dared to sell flour for ten times the common asking price already, and heard it happened three other times as well.) Things she did not think needed monitoring or regulation suddenly required an overseer to make sure someone else did not feel the need to profit on others’ misfortune or desperation.
They eat bread for lunch, bread for dinner, and if they are lucky, they have bread for breakfast too.
Right now, anything more filling goes to the baseline humans who are dying daily and desperate for sustenance.
Fen is starting to hate bread, but it is what they need to do to help their patients.
This will not last for ever. She needs to believe that. It is not going to be for ever.
Fen slowly chews her loaf. Her mouth feels dry and uncomfortable. Her stomach clenches painfully tight. ‘Jasmines are mine,’ she tells Cieli. ‘I like the purple.’
‘Purple is nice,’ Cieli agrees. She sounds a little wistful.
‘When I was younger, I wanted to wear nothing but purple. I hated wearing Giver white.’ She looks down at the uniform she was given to identify her to their endless stream of patients.
‘It’s bland and useless and it gets stained so easily.
It feels like being wrapped in rules. No running, no playing, no excess movement, because anything you did got the white dirty and then everyone would know you broke the rules. Everyone could see.’
‘I like white,’ Cieli says. Fen’s nose scrunches; she rubs at the grime staining her knees from where she has knelt repeatedly at the bedsides of the ill.
‘In the cells, everything is dark. The only light comes from the torches carried by the guards and a few pillars along the way that have vents going up to keep us from suffocating. But…the light never travelled far, and you can’t see colours in the dark.
Not really. Everything is muted and bland.
Sometimes, in the years it took for me to be summoned again… I’d forget the colour white.’
She smiles a little, like she’s just told a joke. ‘So, every time I saw it again…I would think: it’s beautiful. There’s no darkness here. It’s only light.’ Cieli’s fingers go to her black trousers. She too rubs at the stains on her knees, hers almost seeming to meld into the fabric.
‘Do you hate black?’ Fen asks. Right now, with everything going on, she isn’t sure she can arrange for a change of uniform for the Reapers.
‘No,’ Cieli says. ‘It’s familiar. Comforting, in its own way. Sometimes, in the cells, if you hid far enough in the shadows, the guards never noticed you. So, the dark is nice, sometimes.’
‘Cat likes the dark.’ Fen knows. He lights fires for others, but if left on his own he would curl into the dark corner of his room and sleep peacefully without concern.
‘And he seems to like silver too. Or maybe he just likes his crown.’ She meant it to be a bit light-hearted, but Cieli frowns at the observation.
Cieli hunches a bit. She lowers her voice, like she is telling a secret. ‘When he was younger, they used to keep a torch over Stello Alest’s cell. Everyone could always see him. Everyone always knew where he was. Who he was.’
Fen is not sure what to say. She puts another piece of bread in her mouth, chews even though she doesn’t have the saliva to make it easy.
Swallows dry. Cieli flicks some invisible dirt off her knee.
She folds her hands in her lap. ‘He used to look at us every time they brought him in and out of the cells. He’d look at us like he was memorizing our faces.