Two days later, I started having bad days for no reason. There wasn't anything specific that went wrong. I wasn't tormented by the last mission. In fact I felt like I should be happy about it. For once, everything had gone right. The man who killed the Enforcers would be executed for certain, and maybe his comrade, too, but at least right then, no one had even been badly hurt. I didn't have the terrible dreams that sometimes ruin my days. It wasn't the right time of month for my body's cycle to wane, and it didn't feel like that, anyway. I didn't feel a cold coming. I wasn't in pain.
I was just quietly miserable, the way bad days are. Nothing felt quite certain. Everything just seemed a little bit unreal. A little bit hostile. A little bit untrue. It came and went, but it always came back.
I thought I might be sick. I wasn't the only one with the symptoms. They tested the food and water and air. They sent a group of us on a long run out into the farmland. All of us that had the symptoms felt better until we got back.
That seemed to settle it. Something in or near the convent was making us sick. We would evacuate for now, leaving only a rotating guard in full armor on purified air, and sleep at night in a grammar-school nearby.
But the tests found nothing, and moving to the school didn't help. Eventually we decided it was just in our minds. It wasn't terrible. It didn't impede function. Getting outside seemed to help.
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Weeks passed. It didn't get much worse. I don't think it got better, either, but I got used to it. Tara, Verity, and Gwen had it too. C-shift didn't get any combat missions, although there were a few times where we were called out to just visibly stand guard and remind unruly gatherings by our presence that the Church was willing to defend its own.
Even in our shifts at Saint Margaret's, we didn't interact with many people outside the order, but I got the feeling that it was going around the city, too. There were fewer smiles, but that didn't explain my feeling. The sense of things was wrong. That may seem meaningless, since everything seemed wrong. I can't describe the difference in words that make sense. To me it felt like a wet wrongness, but the other wrongness felt dry. Perhaps others can make more sense of that than I.
I wondered if it was related to the Fear. But that felt false and wrong. I chided myself for obsessing over the sect and exceeding my place. I put the thought aside.
I wonder, now, if those feelings, those thoughts about being wrong, were themselves the Fear, or at least influenced by it. I have done many foolish things in my life. But I do not think I was ever foolish enough to have perceived an attack against my soul and all I love, and yet to have spoken of it to no one, on no better grounds than my own self-judgment.