Finally, Res was able to speak. “You're Changing.”
“Yes.” Praeis stroked her ears. “My second-mother Changed early, but my mother did not, so I hoped it had not carried through.”
Theia lifted her head. The streaks of tears down her face glistened in the moonlight. “I can't take any more, Mother. I can't. I want to go home.”
Guilt surged through her, and Praeis clamped brutally down on it. “Home or here, this would still be happening.”
“But not like this!”
“Yes, like this. And right now.” She tightened her hold on both of them. “The only difference is what's happening around us.”
Res's ears drooped so far the tips almost dragged her shoulders. “If we asked you to take us home now, would you?”
Praeis's heart froze. “Are you going to ask me, my own?”
Resaime combed her sister's ears. “No,” she said softly. “We're not. Are we, Theia?”
Theia lifted her trembling head. “What are we going to do?”
Praeis sighed and rocked them all back and forth a little. “Tomorrow, I'm going to the hospital where Lynn's David works. Alone.” They both instantly opened their mouths to protest, but she shushed them gently. “It's a plague hospital, and you two will be no good to me or to each other if you become infected. I'll have him make sure I'm healthy otherwise, and work out how long I have left before my soul drops.” She leaned her cheek against the top of Resaime's head. “After that, we'll see.”
Neither one of them said anything.
“Are you cold, my loves?” asked Praeis. “Shall we go back inside?”
“I want to stay here for a while,” said Theia in a voice small enough to make Praeis's whole loosened soul ache.
“Then that's what we'll do.” Praeis shifted herself so her back was against a tree and she could pull both of them into her lap.
They stayed like that until her daughters fell asleep and Praeis was able to lead them, drowsy and unprotesting, back to the house.
Praeis walked through the doors of the hospital. The scent of disinfectant assailed her nostrils, and they pinched shut automatically.
The place was a warehouse. The single, long room had been hung with sterile sheets to make clear, temporary walls. Sisters and mothers wearing filter masks moved around the sheets, swabbing them down with whatever added the incredible stench to the air.
More sheets had been hung around individual beds, turning them into miniature tents. But that wasn't doing much good. The families of the patients worked their way under the sheets, lifting them up and breaking the sterile field.
The beds were surrounded by metal racks holding bags of saline solutions, blood, or other fluids Praeis didn't want to think about. Care-takers moved between the beds in teams. They worked with the fluids. They injected the patients. They gave the families pills and drink, or clean sheets and other supplies so they could tend their sick family members. The patients in their narrow beds coughed and retched and trembled, held down by straps as well as by family members. Some of them lay rigid as blocks of wood, dying of the paralysis that was the last stage of the plague.
Praeis knew calling the disaster that brought its victims to this place “the” plague was incorrect. That made it sound like there was just one virus to be tracked down and dealt with. In the wards of Crater Town, David had explained to her what the Humans had discovered. The plague wasn't one virus, or even one set of viruses. By now, it might very well be every virus on All-Cradle.
“As near as we can tell,” he'd said, leaning close to her and Jos, speaking in his low, steady voice. “Whatever the Octrel let loose was designed to attack the cell pores. Pores in cells are like pores in skin. They open and close as needed to transfer chemicals, waste materials, and so on.
“The original virus blocked the signals that tell the cell pores to close. If the cell pores don't close, one of the major keys to neurochemical regulation within the body is removed. That sets off a host of problems, the most dramatic of which is paralysis of the voluntary and involuntary muscles.”
“It freezes your heart.” She remembered how hard she'd squeezed down on Jos's hand as she spoke.
David had nodded. “Heart, respiratory system … You die because your body can't control itself anymore.” He paused. “That's only the beginning of the problem, however.
“We're sure the virus was supposed to die out when the infected population did. That's generally how these things are planned.” The look of distaste on his face was so intense, Praeis reached out instinctively to touch his knee. “But in this case, it didn't die out fast enough.