I found the village chief’s house without any trouble: it was the only one with its door open.
It stood at the end of the main street, where the stream made a lazy bend before disappearing under a stone bridge. It was bigger than the others, two stories, with a round window high up, but it had the same thatched roof and the same gray stone walls. The difference was out front: instead of a garden, a long table covered in open books, and an old man sitting at it with a quill in his hand.
“Is he w-writing?” Sun whispered. “In the middle of the street?”
“Looks like it,” Rafael said.
I kept quiet. Ever since we had set foot in the village, something had been bothering me, and only now did I understand where it came from: the place made no noise at all. No dogs barking, no pots, no children except the girl with the basin. A whole village of closed doors, and from behind some of them came a low, steady sound I preferred not to identify.
I identified it anyway. Coughing. A lot of coughing.
When we got close, the old man didn’t look up. His fingers were stained with ink up to the second knuckle, and his hunched back seemed to have molded itself to that position years ago. His white beard came down to his chest, tied in a knot of string so it wouldn’t smudge the pages.
“Names,” he said, without stopping his writing.
“Sorry?” Rafael asked.
“Your names. One at a time, and slowly. My hand isn’t what it used to be.”
We exchanged looks. Sun opened his mouth, closed it again and nudged me with his elbow: you go.
“Kai Sehun,” I said.
The old man dipped the quill in the inkwell and wrote letter by letter, with the patience of someone praying. Then he waited.
“Rafael Jeon Oliveira.”
“Sun Hwei.”
Lili was still behind Rafael’s leg, her staff squeezed in both hands.
“And the little one?” the old man asked.
“Lili.” It came out so quietly it almost got lost in the sound of the stream. Then she added, testing the sound: “Lili Ferrer.”
It was the name she had mouthed without a voice, looking at the screen at the foot of the tower. Now she was saying it out loud, to a stranger, and on her own.
The old man wrote. When he finished, he blew lightly on the ink, as if putting out a candle, and only then raised his face. His eyes were a washed-out blue, almost white at the edges.
“Thank you. Now, if you disappear, someone will know you were here.” He pointed the quill at a bench on the other side of the table. “Sit. I’m Bertil. I was the elder of this place, back when there were still people for me to be the elder of.”
[New character identified: Elder Bertil]
[Relationship: Neutral]
“Was?” Sun sat on the very edge of the bench. “Sorry. I mean, you’re not anymore, sir?”
“I’m what’s left. You came from outside. I can tell by your clothes, and because you still look people in the eye. So you must have crossed the field.”
“The one with the flowers,” Rafael said. “Pretty, that.”
Bertil’s mouth stretched, but the rest of his face didn’t follow.
“It is, isn’t it? I plant one a day.”
I did the math before I understood I was doing it. Among the roses and sunflowers, the white flowers grew in rows too orderly to be wild, each one on its own little mound of earth, all the same distance apart.
No.
“That’s a cemetery.”
Sun turned to me so fast his neck cracked.
“A what?”
“Each white flower is a grave,” Bertil confirmed, in the same tone he had used to ask for our names. “They grow on their own, overnight, on top of whoever dies of the White Fever. We don’t need headstones anymore. The fever marks the spot for us.”
“B-but there were hundreds,” Sun murmured. “I stepped on… we walked right over…”
He didn’t finish. He brought his fingers to his mouth, and for a moment I thought he was going to throw up. Rafael put his huge hand on Sun’s shoulder and left it there until the color came back.
“Sorry,” the painter said. “I’m okay. Go on. Please.”
Bertil watched the scene with a kind of tired tenderness.
“You’re a good boy. You still feel things. Here, we stopped feeling about three weeks ago.”
“What is the White Fever?” I asked.
The old man turned the book toward us. The pages were full of names, hundreds of them, in columns, each with a date beside it. Some had small notes: liked honey cake; sang off-key at the festival; was afraid of thunder.
“It starts small. You forget where you left the knife. Then the way to the well. Then your neighbor’s name. Up to there, it’s like getting old. But then the fever rises, and you start forgetting the names of the people you love. Your husband, your wife, your children. Last of all, you forget your own. And when no one remembers your name anymore, not even you, your skin turns white as a petal, and you stop.”
“Stop?” Rafael repeated.
“Stop breathing. Wanting. Being.” Bertil closed the book with a soft thump. “The fever doesn’t kill the body first, son. It kills the name. The body only goes along because it no longer knows why it should keep going.”
After that, you could hear the stream down under the bridge.
A disease that erases names.
I had a book in my pocket that gave memories back to me one line at a time, and I had just walked onto a floor where people lost them at the same pace. If that was a coincidence, it was the kind I didn’t want to put money on.
The floor’s screen kept blinking in the corner of my vision, stubborn.
[The Plague]
[Objective: ?]
[Story: ?]
[Reward: ?]
[Difficulty: Nightmare]
“That’s why you write the names down, sir,” Lili said suddenly.
We all looked at her. She had come out from behind Rafael and was looking at the book with a strange attention, almost hungry.
“That’s why,” Bertil agreed, gently. “If it’s written down, someone can read it. And if someone reads it, the person still exists a little.”
He opened the book again, at the first pages this time, and turned them toward us. I leaned forward. The ink in the first columns was pale, almost gray. In some lines, only the ghost of the letters remained, as if someone had wiped a wet cloth over them.
“The oldest ones are fading too. From the page.” He ran his finger over a line you could barely see. “I rewrite them every morning. Every day, a little fainter. One day I won’t be able to read what I have to rewrite.” He shrugged. “Then I’ll stop too, I suppose.”
Sun looked away. Rafael clenched his jaw, and Lili stayed caught on the page.
“And the doctors?” I asked, to get back to what could be solved. “The girl with the basin asked if any of us was a doctor.”
“Pia.” Something softened in the old man’s face. “She asks everyone that. We had a doctor, Doctor Ilsa. Good woman, stubborn as a mule. When the fever started, she turned the old chapel on the hill into a hospital and took the sick up there.” He pointed the quill north, where a low hill rose behind the village, with a stone building on top. “It’s been eight days since she went up. From up there, only the bell comes down.”
“The bell?” Sun asked.
“It rings at midnight. Every night.”
Bertil explained nothing more, and no one had the courage to ask.
Before I could ask the next question, quick footsteps echoed on the stone street.
TAP TAP TAP TAP
“Grandpa Bertil! Grandpa Bertil!”
It was the girl with the basin. Pia. Up close, she was smaller than she had looked from a distance: eight, nine years old, straw-colored hair in two crooked braids, an apron too big for her. Her face was red from running and her eyes were wet, but her mouth was firm, in the visible effort of not letting anything out.
“Mommy!” She stopped to catch her breath. “Mommy forgot again.”
Bertil closed his eyes.
“Forgot what, dear?”
“Me.”
The word came out so small I almost didn’t hear it. But Lili heard. I saw her shoulders rise up to her ears and stay there.
Only then did Pia notice us. She looked at my spear, at Rafael’s shield, at Sun’s palette and, last of all, at Lili, who was about her size. The girl’s eyes went wide.
“You’re still here. You really did come from outside.” She took a step, her hands clenched in her apron. “Can any of you heal?”
Rafael looked at me. Sun looked at the ground.
Then Lili stepped forward.
“Lili can.” Her fingers were white around the staff. “A little bit.”
*
Pia’s house was two streets away, near the stream. It was small, a single room, and it smelled of boiled herbs and washed sheets. A table, two chairs, a stone stove and, against the back wall, a narrow bed.
In the bed was Hanne.
I had seen plenty of sick people in Erebus, at least according to the index, but none like this. The woman must have been about thirty, with a face that, at another time, would have been pretty. Now her skin was the wrong kind of white, one that leaned neither toward yellow nor toward gray: smooth, a little translucent, like a petal held up to the light. The marks started at her neck and climbed her cheeks in the shape of leaves.
She was propped up on a pillow and received us with a hostess’s courtesy.
“Oh, visitors. How nice. Sorry about the mess. I was going to tidy up.” She looked around, confused. “I don’t remember where I keep things.”
Pia ran to the bed and knelt beside her mother. You could tell she had done it many times. The way she took the woman’s hand, the way she straightened the sheet with the other hand without looking. It was a ritual.
“Mommy, it’s me.”
Hanne looked at her with an empty kindness, the same she had shown the strangers at the door.
“Hi, sweetheart. You’re very pretty. Who are you?”
Rafael made a short sound in his throat, like someone who takes a punch to the stomach and doesn’t want the others to notice.
The worst part was that Pia kept smiling. She squeezed her mother’s hand and spoke in a firm, practiced voice, like a times table learned by heart:
“I’m Pia. Your daughter. You named me after Grandma, who was called Pia too and made honey cake. I’m eight and a half. I’m afraid of thunder, and you sing to me when it rains.”
Hanne blinked. For a second, something moved behind her eyes, a shadow, a reflection. Then it went out.
“What a pretty name. Pia.”
Sun turned his back and pretended to look out the window. His shoulders were shaking.
Lili took a hesitant step toward the bed. Then another. She stopped beside Pia. The two of them were almost the same height.
“She…” Lili started, and stopped. She looked at Hanne, then at Pia, and I saw something on her face that took me a while to name: recognition. “Did she remember you before?”
“Yesterday she did.” Pia wiped her nose on her sleeve. “In the morning she remembered. Then in the afternoon she forgot. Then I told her and she remembered again. And now…” Her voice broke there. She sniffled, and the mask went back in place. “Now I told her three times and it didn’t come back.”
Lili looked at me. It was the first time since the forest that she had asked me for something with her eyes.
I didn’t know what the fever was, or whether Lili’s blessing would do anything against a sickness that erased names instead of tearing flesh, or whether that floor even had a way out. But that look I knew. It was the same one from the restaurant, in front of a dish of ice cream: someone asking permission to do something that was hers.
“Try. But if it hurts, you stop. Understand? Stop right away.”
“Mm-hm.”
Pia got up to make room, without letting go of her mother’s hand. When she passed me, she stopped, raised her face and stared at me with those red, steady eyes.
“You’re the one in charge of them, right?”
“More or less.”
She grabbed the sleeve of my coat with her free hand, with a strength that didn’t match her size.
“Okay then, boss. You’re gonna stay, right? You won’t go away like the others?”
Boss.
The stone house vanished. There was the sound of canvas flapping in the wind, the smell of a campfire and of wet leather, and a thin, excited girl’s voice shouting from somewhere behind me: “Boss! Boss, look! I hit it!”
I wanted to turn around. There was nowhere to turn.
Then it was just the house again, and Pia tugging at my sleeve.
“Boss?”
I realized I had my hand on my chest, the fabric bunched over my heart. I counted two breaths. The voice was gone, but the tightness stayed, like the mark a finger leaves after a pinch.
What was that? It wasn’t in the index. There’s nothing like that in the index.
The index gave me lines, dry encyclopedia sentences. That had sound and smell: someone calling me happily, someone I couldn’t see.
“Boss, are you okay?” Pia asked, worried now.
Rafael was looking at me too. I let go of my coat and put on my usual expression, the one I used when I didn’t want any questions.
“Yeah. Just tired.” I looked at her. “Yes. We’re staying.”
Pia let go of the sleeve one finger at a time, to see whether the promise would stand up on its own. Then she went back to her mother and knelt on the other side of the bed.
Lili had already put her hands together. A shy golden glow began to bloom between her fingers.
And somewhere to the north, high on the hill, the bell rang once, long before midnight.
DONG
[Story updated]
[The Plague → The White Fever]
[Objective: ?]
If Lili heard the bell, she gave no sign. She didn’t take her eyes off Hanne.