Chapter 15
Jordan
Everyone was well again and, thanks to the CDC, vaccinated against smallpox and a myriad of other diseases.
The common house had been sterilized and everything we couldn't disinfect had been burned.
I'd stood in the cold morning air, arms crossed against the chill, watching with the rest of the clan as the last of the contaminated items went up in flames.
The acrid smoke rose into the gray sky in thick, oily plumes, carrying with it the remnants of a nightmare that had nearly destroyed this community.
But something gnawed at me, persistent as a splinter working its way deeper under skin.
Where the hell did the Orcs get smallpox in the first place?
The CDC had been working on it for weeks and were no closer to finding patient zero. There were some crazies in Franklin pitching a fit, saying the Orcs brought it up from the bowels of the earth, that it was some ancient plague from whatever hell-dimension they crawled out of.
Complete garbage.
Smallpox belonged to humanity—our disease, our curse, as distinctly human as the ability to lie or wage war over imaginary lines on a map.
Viruses didn't materialize from thin air, didn't ooze through cracks in reality or bubble up from subterranean lairs like something out of a bad fantasy novel.
This particular monster had been hunted to extinction decades ago, its last specimens imprisoned in exactly two places on earth.
High-security laboratories where even the air was filtered, monitored, and probably given a stern talking-to before being allowed to leave.
So how the hell did it end up here? How did a dead disease find its way to an isolated Orc settlement in the ass-end of nowhere?
The question wouldn't leave me alone. It paced circles in my skull while I helped Zuhra haul cleaning supplies into the common house.
The CDC techs in their moon suits had moved through the building meticulously, disinfected, collected samples and murmured into their recorders.
They'd confirmed it was variola major—the genuine article, the killer strain, not some watered-down cousin or look-alike.
But when it came to explaining how it got here?
Radio silence.
Either they didn't know, or someone had decided I didn't need to know.
The scrub brush bit into the floorboards as I attacked another stain, channeling my frustration into the repetitive motion. Scrub, rinse, repeat. As if elbow grease and determination could somehow scour away the memories of those horrible few weeks.
Beside me, Ryhain moved with surprising delicacy for someone who could probably bench-press a small car.
Her massive hands wielded the antiseptic-soaked rag like a surgical instrument, treating each wooden bench with the reverence of a sacred ritual.
The hospital-grade disinfectant Kelsey sent stung my eyes and seared my nostrils, but I welcomed the burn.
It smelled like safety. Like death being driven back, one molecule at a time.
"Your friends are good people," Ryhain murmured, wringing amber-tinted liquid into the bucket between us. "To help us like this."
The understatement of the century, but she wasn't wrong. My friends had been absolute warriors.
Kelsey had transformed into a force of nature, bulldozing through bureaucracy and calling in every favor she'd accumulated over her career.
The antivirals, the vaccines, the mountains of supplies—she'd made it all materialize through sheer willpower and strategic arm-twisting.
People had lived because she'd refused to take no for an answer.
Sarah had been our shield against the outside world, navigating the legal and political nightmare.
The CDC, the media, the local authorities who wanted to seal the settlement in concrete and throw away the key—she'd handled them all.
Without her, this place would've been locked down tighter than Fort Knox, everyone inside treated like biological weapons instead of victims.
And Tori. God bless Tori and her enormous heart.
Every day like clockwork, deliveries from her winery's restaurant kept us fed.
Roasted chicken that fell off the bone, vegetables that still held freshness, bread that steamed when you broke it open, fruit that tasted like something other than tin.
Real food for people who desperately needed to remember what normal felt like. It had been medicine in its own right.
Zuhra shouldered through the back room doorway, arms piled high with linens that threatened to topple with each step.
Dark circles shadowed her eyes, but her jaw was set with that stubborn determination I'd come to recognize in the settlement's residents.
"Last batch," she announced, dropping the stack onto a nearby table with a grunt.
"Everything else went into the burn pile. "
I pushed myself up from the floor, my knees cracking in protest. An hour of scrubbing had left me feeling like I'd aged a decade. "We're almost done here. Give it a few more hours and this place will be sterile enough to perform surgery in."
"Thank the ancestors." Zuhra planted her hands on her hips and swept her gaze across the common house, taking inventory with the eye of someone who knew and loved every inch of this space.
"People keep asking when we can open the doors again.
They're going stir-crazy in their own homes.
This place—" she gestured around us, "—it's where we come together as clan. Not just exist."
The ache in her voice hit me square in the chest. The common house wasn't just a building.
It was the settlement's beating heart—where meals turned into celebrations, where arguments became decisions, where isolated families became a community.
The outbreak had ripped that away, transforming their sanctuary into a quarantine ward, then a contamination site that no one dared enter.
But we were taking it back. Inch by scrubbed inch, we were reclaiming it. Soon it would pulse with life again—clean, safe, and ready to welcome them home.
Zuhra patted the top of the stack of blankets, her expression smug. "These have been through hell and back—boiled twice, bleached until the water ran clear. Think they're safe enough to use again?"
"Absolutely. Nothing could survive that treatment."
She hefted the pile again in her arms and turned toward the storage area, and that's when I saw them.
Really saw them. The blue-and-white stripes running through the fabric like veins.
That particular institutional heft that came from industrial looms. The edges bound with that specific reinforced stitching that only manufacturers used.
The world tilted sideways.
"Wait." The word came out sharper than I intended. I crossed the distance between us in three strides, my hand reaching for the top blanket. "Zuhra. Where did you get these?"
She glanced down at the stack, then back at me, confusion flickering across her face.
"Care packages. We get them all the time—churches, community groups, do-gooders who think we need saving.
" A wry smile tugged at her lips. "The irony is most of the Orcs here could buy and sell half the humans who donate to us.
But we live in huts and grow our own food, so obviously we must be destitute.
" She shook her head. "Blankets, canned soup, secondhand clothes. The charity never stops."
But I wasn't listening anymore. My fingers had found the fabric, tracing that blue stripe like it might burn me.
Because I knew these blankets. I'd walked past hundreds of them in the supply closets at Franklin Memorial.
Standard hospital surplus. Mass-produced, mass-distributed, utterly unremarkable.
Except when they showed up here.
Ice crystallized in my veins, spreading outward from my chest until my whole body felt brittle enough to shatter. The blanket slipped through my suddenly nerveless fingers.
"When?" The word scraped out of my throat. "When did these arrive?"
Zuhra's expression shifted from confusion to concern.
She hugged the blankets closer, her brow furrowing as she thought back.
"The same day Chieftain Ruka left to claim his mate.
" Her face creased as she winked at me. "I remember because half the village was in an uproar—everyone placing bets on whether he'd actually convince you to come back with him.
" A fond smile ghosted across her lips. "Kael was running a whole betting pool.
The delivery truck showed up right in the middle of it all.
Everyone was so excited about you and Ruka, I just had a couple of warriors carry all the boxes to storage to deal with later. "
"Which warriors?" My voice sounded sharp and choked.
Zohra blinked at my tone but answered readily enough. "Akkak and Turvost. They were on perimeter duty that day, so they were closest when the truck arrived."
Akkak. I remembered Ruka mentioning he was one of the first to fall ill. One of the warriors who'd been strong and healthy one moment, then burning with fever the next.
"When did Akkak get sick?" My voice sounded distant to my own ears, like it was coming from underwater.
Zohra's face went still, her eyes unfocused as she reached back through her memory.
"That same day, actually. Later that evening.
" Her hand drifted to her throat. "I remember because it seemed so sudden.
He said at dinner that he felt bad—headache, chills.
" Her voice dropped to barely a whisper.
"By morning, he couldn't get out of bed. "
The same day.
The exact same day Ruka had driven to Franklin to claim me. Five days before we'd returned to find children covered in pustules, elders burning with fever, the village transformed into a plague ward.
My stomach lurched. Not a coincidence. It couldn't be.