Chapter Thirty-One Fenlia
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Fenlia
Elena’s inoculation works. There are a few days of illness: coughing, sweating, a rush of energy, then stabilization.
Nothing worse. She tests it on fifteen healthy individuals, volunteers desperate for some kind of sign.
Then she tests it on twenty. Then, the whole of Crowen begins receiving the treatment, and as it shows continued efficacy – so too do her lessons on patient management.
On offering food and water to those struggling to swallow, on giving palliative care, and dignity, to those suffering while waiting for a Reaper and Giver to work together and provide a proper cure.
Lio arrives in the city only a few weeks later with a handful of Alelunen Reapers willing to help their cause, as well as a large group of soldiers from the army willing to submit to the inoculation and enter into whichever tasks public service demands of them.
Rodans comes with him. He offers Fen a fond smile over Lio’s shoulder, and she nods in his direction before addressing her brother’s closest friend.
He smiles when he sees her. Like he used to, before things became bitter and tense between them.
‘Finally,’ he says, spreading his arms for a hug she would have gone to at any other moment without hesitation.
‘Some good news.’ She swallows hard and steps into his embrace, stomach churning from guilt.
‘All ready to get your dose?’ Fen asks, voice trembling.
‘All ready to figure out exactly what needs to be done so we can get the recipe out to every city in the country,’ he replies. ‘The death toll is getting high in the Crownlands. They need more help.’
‘How are things in Altas?’ she asks.
‘Safe, secure. There haven’t been any resurgences.
If we can just get ahead of this thing…we could do this.
’ If only Cat and Elician hadn’t left. They could have healed all of Soleb and stopped the plague entirely.
Instead…they went to Alelune. She hopes it was worth it.
She hopes they will not regret their choices in the end.
‘Have you heard anything from Elician or Cat?’
‘No. There’s been nothing from Alelune, no movement, no refugees, no sign of life. It’ll be all right,’ he tells her. ‘Just believe in them.’
Belief. It’s a hard thing to feel right now. Especially right now. ‘I don’t think Adalei’s plan is working.’
‘The farms have stayed active. Transportation too. The food is not good, it’s not quality, but we haven’t completely slipped into famine and there have been no major shortages.
People are dying, but it isn’t from starvation at the very least. This situation was always going to be shit no matter what she did. ’
‘Then these deaths are inevitable?’
‘It’s the best we can do, Fen. It’s the best any of us can do, given the situation at hand.’ She swallows. Nods. ‘Show me what’s been happening here.’
She does. She leads him through the quarantine zone.
Shows him their organization system, the sick, the terrified families.
The streets of misery and the butcher shop where the worst off are strewn across the floor aching for relief.
She shows him the pain and the agony. She says: ‘We can’t revive them.
’ And he looks at them all. He, who has been brought back so many times by someone whose love for him was greater than his concern for the consequences that would follow.
He who lives when he should not. None of this would have happened if he had died a long, long time ago.
Tears prick at her eyes. She forces them back.
‘Would you have stopped him?’ Fen asks as quietly as she can. ‘If you had known what it would cost?’
‘You know I would have,’ Lio replies.
‘Would you bring someone back?’ she asks him then. ‘If you had the power to do it. If you knew what it could mean for everyone else? Or would you let someone die, even if you could have saved them?’
Lio doesn’t meet her eyes. Perhaps it is too difficult a question to answer.
But she dared to ask it anyway. And when he responds, she knows it is an answer he does not want to give.
‘I’d let them die,’ he says. ‘We can’t save everybody.
All life is sacred…but all things die. And sometimes…
people die for a reason. And it’s better if they do. ’
Elena calls her name.
Fen swallows. She says, ‘Wash your hands and face,’ as she straightens her spine. Tilts her chin up. Prepares herself for her fate.
‘Would it even help?’ he asks.
‘It’ll help clean the dirt off your skin,’ she replies. They are trying to fistfight the gods, and they are losing, but at least he will be clean.
Fen weaves her way through packs of patients and their care-givers. Sick civilians who never asked for this, and who lie without any kind of care or assistance because theirs is a country that has relied on magic and miracles instead of science and themselves.
She steps over bodies and mutters an apology as she knocks into Gerai and Angelo on her way past. They have finally come to some form of agreement between themselves – they’ve been successfully healing twelve patients a day for the past three days.
They’ll be leaving soon, to the Crownlands most likely, to help alleviate the suffering there and give room for the new recruits to take their place.
Fen wonders if it matters that more people in Crowen will die in their absence.
She wonders how any of them are going to live with themselves after this, when they think back to everyone they could have saved but didn’t.
Elena waves her arm in the air as Fen draws near, flagging her down as quickly as she can. Kassandra lies on the ground at Elena’s side.
She is sick.
Terribly sick. Pustules and black patches mar her fair skin.
When she breathes, her throat squeezes painfully on air trying to reach her lungs.
Her hands shake. Her face is blotchy, and blood dribbles from her nostrils, bursts free from veins and vesicles.
Too much blood, Fen thinks wearily as Elena tries to drain some of the excess from a cut on Kassandra’s arm.
It will not be enough. Fen knows what she needs to do next.
Knows, too, that none of this is going to be easy.
‘She said she knows you?’ Elena says as Fen settles in at Kassandra’s side and takes her patient’s hand.
‘Yes…Elena…can I talk to her alone, please?’ Fen murmurs.
‘Shall I get Cieli?’ Elena asks her, easily and freely.
‘No,’ Fen replies. ‘We’ll be fine…but…you should see Lio first. He just arrived. There are things he needs to tell you.’ Elena looks between them, uncertain but accepting. She stands and leaves, and when she goes, Fen feels the heavy burden of fate on her shoulders.
Fen wonders how Hamad got her this sick this fast. If he had done a bastardization of what Elena had been trying to do with the inoculations – injecting some ill person’s matter directly into her skin but offering no form of immunity or relief in turn, ensuring that the plague dug deep into Kassandra’s body and would never again let her go.
‘Hurts,’ Kassandra whispers. Her voice warbles brokenly from her swollen throat.
‘I know,’ Fen says. She has no idea what it must feel like to be as sick as Kassandra is, but she can sense the pain receptors that are working at maximum capacity.
She can identify the triggers in Kassandra’s brain that are panicking with an overextended influx of warning, warning, warning. Danger. Illness. Wrong.
‘An – Aniya—’
Her daughter. She wants her daughter. Fen doesn’t know where she is, but she is certain: wherever it is, Aniya is safe. Fen squeezes Kassandra’s hand. ‘Do you still trust me?’ she asks. She made a promise. She made so many promises. But this one, this one is more important than all the others.
Kassandra cannot speak the words. Her head jerks in a pained nod.
‘You need to die,’ Fen says. ‘You need to die for this to work.’ She doesn’t have time to explain.
Doesn’t even fully know if she can do what needs to be done.
‘I’ll take care of your daughter. I’ll make sure that she gets to where she needs to be. But you can’t be there when I do.’
Kassandra’s lips tremble; her whole body shudders. Limbs jerk as nerves misfire and blood pulses too strongly through veins too small for the excess. ‘Trust me. Trust me that I will do right…for both of you.’ Kassandra gasps. Her spine arches.
Fen stays at Kassandra’s side; she watches as black blood bruises beneath her skin, forcing its way free from the corners of her eyes and her nose.
Kassandra chokes on it, gags. Fen feels everything.
Kassandra’s body failing. Her soul, nestled in the pit of her chest, clinging to all of the excess life that floods through her body – desperate not to go.
She imagines, for a moment, a vision of the goddess Death.
A vision where Death kisses Kassandra on the lips and pulls back with her breath filled with Kassandra’s soul.
Elena resurrected someone once. Not with magic, not with any gift of the gods.
Just with her hands at their breast, pumping her arms into the patient’s chest and breathing her own life into the patient’s body until they coughed and sputtered and once more came alive.
It was the most astonishing thing Fen had ever seen.
And as she imagines Death, stealing the very breath that keeps Kassandra alive, she thinks too of something else: Is it truly a resurrection if the soul never leaves?
Can you truly die if your soul never wanders far?
‘Trust me,’ Fen whispers once again. She continues to squeeze Kassandra’s hand. She breathes in long and steady, and she thinks: Enough. She has suffered more than enough.
And she wants, so very badly, for everything to stop.