10

 

The Genoese fell to the pestilence like wheat to the harvest.

From infrared observation, Habidah confirmed a sixty percent mortality rate so far, and that was even taking the flight to the countryside into account. Whole neighborhoods became mass graves.

The plague’s grip on the city was diminishing, but it was far from gone. Habidah spent all of her waking hours walking among the survivors, rapt by what she saw. Collectively, among every social class, they’d gone from fear and flight to acceptance, even as the plague took its daily toll of hundreds. Now, even people who had the opportunity to leave Genoa chose not to. It was astounding what people, collectively, could put up with when they saw their neighbors doing the same.

Nobody had moved into the abandoned houses on Habidah’s street, of course. They knew better. Nor were businesses and marketplaces reopening. But people were venturing outside of their homes to find out which of their family and neighbors had survived thus far. Habidah heard men and women ask each other on the street, in disbelief, “You are still alive?”

Courts were in session. Habidah listened in on one case, a nephew and a stepbrother disputing the inheritance of a small house. The previous owner had left a will, but all five other beneficiaries had died. When the court reconvened the next day, neither claimant arrived. Habidah tracked them down. They’d perished overnight.

The city restructured around the plague. Civil servants were replaced as soon as they died. For once, they didn’t come exclusively from the Genoese elite, who no longer had so many sons and nephews to spare. The city hired hundreds of new corpse carriers and gravediggers.

The only men willing to take such obviously risky jobs came from the lower strata of society, rural Italians who couldn’t survive as mercenaries or brigands. They plied the streets at all times of day. They kept the corpses from piling on the streets or rotting under too-shallow graves. But they also ran rampant through the taverns and whorehouses, or robbed whoever they pleased.

On her nightly walks, Habidah observed gangs of gravediggers breaking into homes. She’d nearly run to help when she’d seen three gravediggers pull knives on a lone father with three children. The gravediggers wouldn’t have stood a chance against her. Only the thought of Feliks held her back. The last thing she needed was for him to report her.

The worst thing was that he wouldn’t do it out of spite. He’d do it because he was concerned. He’d already decided she wasn’t suited for this.

Maybe he was right.

Genoa’s response to the plague made a marked contrast to her own. She buried what she could under a flood of antidepressants and electrocortical stimulation. She could only go so far with those before arousing Feliks’ concern.

She was accustomed to working alone. She’d forgotten how much pressure came from just the fact of being watched. She was always on edge, always thinking about how she would be seen.

She trudged back in the hours before dawn, taking care to keep clear of the carousing gravediggers. She hardly went to their house except to sleep. She’d been out for thirty-six hours.

When she entered, Feliks was sitting up on his bed, staring at a map of the city projected on the opposite wall. The onierophage was making using his demiorganics uncomfortable. Several hot yellow blips stood out on each street. He said, “I think we’ve got enough eavesdropper coverage that you don’t need to be out there.”

“We don’t rely on eavesdroppers. That’s why I go out.”

“The first wave of plague deaths are just about over here. I know we don’t have the manpower to visit every Italian city, but I think it would be appropriate to spend some manpower surveying the rest of the peninsula.”

“The plague’s cooling down, sure. But not the people. The state of the city is changing every day.”

“I think I’ll be able to observe that from here, through the eavesdroppers.”

Habidah sat heavily on her bed. “You?”

“I know I’m not doing well, but I’m not dead yet.”

“You really think you’re up to it?”

“I’m trying to be diplomatic, Habidah. You need to get out of this city before you lose your mind. Get in the shuttle, go up there, clear your head.”

“Medical leave, you mean.”

“We all need breaks. You’ve been out there for ninety-five percent of your waking hours for a month. Frankly, I’m amazed you haven’t had a breakdown already.”

“The last time we were on assignment together, I managed three months like this.”

“That assignment was a biosurvey. People didn’t die every day. You weren’t getting to know families just in time for them to get annihilated. This is harder than anybody should have to watch. It’s been getting to you. I know.”

Habidah shrugged. Her impulse to deny it was a foolish one, she knew. She couldn’t deny what her brain chemistry made plain as day. “I didn’t come here to be happy.”

“You’re not going to be much good to anyone if you fall apart. Come back after you’ve taken a trip, gotten some new air in you.”

“Sounds too fair,” Habidah said, only just keeping back what she really wanted to say.

Feliks said, “I also know you’re chafing living with me.”

“I am not,” Habidah said. She didn’t know why she was denying it.

“You’re not going to offend me if you say it. I don’t want this assignment to end with us not on speaking terms. I know it’s not your fault, or my fault, if we can’t live together. So I’m asking you to please take a break. I’ll let you know if anything interesting happens here. Sound fair, too?”

Habidah hated the way her voice sounded when she said, “Sure.”

That evening, she stood in a clearing outside the city, waiting for the shuttle. A gust of freezing wind ruffled her wimple. She’d had to wait; the shuttle’s camouflage fields weren’t up to protecting it during the day. A shadow waved across the sky. Then the shuttle dropped the camouflage fields. It was right there, hovering and huge.

This time, the shuttle waited until she was snug in her acceleration couch before gaining altitude. She soared along the Italian coast, putting distance between her and Genoa. She watched the map, and then turned to the cameras. It was too dark to see past the reflection of the cabin lights.

She leaned into her cushions and let the engines’ vibration throb against her ears. All of the exhaustion she should have felt over the past few weeks was catching up with her all at once. It wasn’t just Feliks that she was running from. It was the whole damned plane. The plague here and the plague back home.

But she still had too much work to treat this like a vacation, no matter what Feliks thought. She dimmed the lights in the cabin. Details emerged on the monitors. She was cruising above a churning, tumultuous sea of starlit black-and-grey clouds. The western sky was still twilight-blue. She wasn’t even sure she was still over land until she pinged one of the survey team’s positioning satellites. The shuttle was taking her south, not too far from Naples.

When she was nearly upon Naples, she told the shuttle to descend under the overcast. Visual scanning showed a few firelights, tiny stars. Infrared unveiled a far richer tableau. Bright red blotches delineated sleeping bodies, hazy old smoke from fires burning to embers.

None of her team had been to Naples, and none were scheduled to go, but she didn’t need to pull up satellite records to see that the plague had struck here, too. Infrared showed empty houses, whole abandoned streets, even the cooling bodies of the recently dead.

There was worse yet. A pulse scan found neighborhoods reduced to burnt husks, littered with fresh dead. All had died at once. They’d been massacred. She knew immediately what had happened. Joao had watched and reported on many similar events. All over Europe, people blamed the plague on a conspiracy of Jews, and torched their neighborhoods.

The Neapolitans had washed streets in a slurry of Jewish blood and ashes.

She couldn’t tear her eyes away. She nearly directed the shuttle to land, though she didn’t know what she’d do. She couldn’t stay long. Maybe she could help a person or two. But Feliks would immediately know what she was doing.

He had his principles. They felt like shackles around her hands.

She ordered the shuttle to turn hard north.

She wondered, not for the first time, what had become of the fisherman in Messina. He might have gotten out of the city in time, he might not. It had been worth taking a chance for. She never could have done even that much with Feliks looking over her.

She closed her eyes and breathed into her hands. How long it had been since she’d cried? Her eyes were so dry they hurt. When she tried, she couldn’t make one tear.

She thought she’d been prepared for this assignment. All of the others seemed to be doing better, at least when she saw them. Maybe it would be best if she went home. But the moment the thought occurred to her, she knew it wouldn’t help. She’d be going from one plague to another. Here, she might still send something useful back to the Unity.

She carefully charted a path away from any cities. The world below was a dark, gray canvas. Tiny towns and farms and country houses and even brigand camps lay scattered across the countryside. Their inhabitants’ bodies glowed tinily. Radar landscaping found several buildings empty and abandoned. Chemical analysis handily told the difference between those abandoned long ago and those that held the recently dead. Habidah’s mind’s eye conjured images of children lying still in their parents’ arms, livestock fallen in piles.

Several wealthy country refuges seemed untouched, with dozens of active or sleeping inhabitants. These manors might be worth a look. They were perfect case studies of healthy, isolated citizens coping with the loss and despair seizing the Unity. They’d left their friends and families, and often their fortunes, just to improve their odds of survival. Many in the Unity were trying the same. Joao and Kacienta had left families to come here.

She soared past the constellation of refugees without stopping. She didn’t know what she was looking for. She wasn’t fit for this assignment, not in this state. She’d come here to accomplish, but all she’d done so far was bear witness. It would drive her mad if she couldn’t do more. So many survivors of this plague drove themselves frenetic. They spent their hours working to collect for their churches, caring for orphans, praying for help and for the souls of the departed.

Radar landscaping showed broad, rocky hills. Very few infrared sources dotted the horizon. A distant town – more of a cluster of houses – stood to the east, a few farmhouses around it, without any infrared sources at all, even livestock.

The infrared specks grew farther between. She’d entered a heavily forested region. This far from the towns and cities, the wildlife stood out. She pulled up an infrared survey of the region taken months before the plague. Even accounting for the seasonal change, there were far fewer animals than there should have been. The plague had come in through the trade road, but it penetrated the forest rapidly.

She spotted a skulk of foxes out much later than they should have been. They had quite a hunt ahead of them, judging from the paucity of infrared fuzz to indicate hares and other prey animals.

One heat signature caught her attention. She reduced speed. There – one human shape caught in the midst of several red blurs. They were dog-shaped. Habidah’s eyes widened. They were wolves, attacking the person.

She’d seen wolves and wolf-analogues on many other planes, but never attacking a human. Like the foxes, the pack must have been desperate. As she watched, the person toppled to the ground with one of the wolves latched on his neck.

She forced herself to look away, and commanded the shuttle to accelerate. She didn’t want to see what would happen. Everything in that person’s story had already been written. It was only a matter of flipping the last page.

There was no reason in the multiverse why the amalgamates couldn’t have given them a cure for this plague. If not now, then when they had learned all they could and were about to leave. Even Feliks wouldn’t object to that. There was a difference between detachment and callousness.

Before she’d applied for this assignment, she’d seen detachment as a mark of professionalism – of craft. She couldn’t take charge of the natives’ destinies. It would have been vanity. Even the amalgamates, powerful and control-hungry as they were, didn’t force planes to mirror their values. She was far less impartial than they.

Now, all those excuses sounded hollow. There was no principle in keeping her hands off even when there was nothing useful to observe.

Feliks was probably watching. The amalgamates always were – if not directly, then by proxy. A hard lump burned in her throat. It stopped her from swallowing. The weight of it kept her from thinking of anything else as the shuttle pulled away.