[Medbay — Day 58, 0320]
The smell hit before the light did.
Not the clean disinfectant smell that Clarke had been running through the medbay since Day 11 — this was underneath that, organic and wrong, the specific warmth of a fever breaking badly. Ethan had been in the dropship archive when Abby's runner found him, and the runner had said biological outbreak, wing three in the flat voice of someone who had already processed the worst of it.
The wing had fourteen beds. Eleven of them were occupied.
Abby met him at the entrance with a mask and the face she used when she was managing her own fear by staying clinical. "Contamination vector is unclear. The particulate samples from the south shelter match what we logged off Murphy's satchel in Ch — in the perimeter incident." Her voice compressed the timeline to a single phrase. "We think it settled on personnel returning from the shelter evacuation. Incubation was twelve days."
Twelve days from the night of Ch.38.
Three dead in the first hour. Four more failing. The CPE had been running the population mortality update in his peripheral vision since he'd entered the compound. He stopped reading it because the numbers were moving too fast for the reading to be useful.
[CPE: Biological Agent — Confirmed contamination. Vector: Camp Jaha south-shelter returnees.] [Mortality projection (72hr): 8–14. Intervention window: Negligible.] [Voice queue update: Hala — Mountain signal DARK. Timestamp: 0318.]
Hala.
He had known the Mountain's extraction window was non-linear. He had known that the 30-day estimate was a projection, not a guarantee, and that Cage ran timelines on his own math. The signal going dark at 0318 while the medbay was filling with fever-dead was the specific cruelty of coincidence — the kind that the CPE logged without comment and he had to process without any vocabulary for it.
He filed it the same way he filed things that had to wait.
Wells's note was on the quarantine board — folded, his name on the outside, the handwriting a little looser than usual, which was how Wells wrote when he was managing a fever himself.
The child in bed seven. Her father is Davin Reyes. Her mother is Suki Chen. You'll know why I'm telling you this.
He knew.
He went to bed seven.
---
Mira was eight years old and unconscious. Her breathing had the specific rhythm of a respiratory system that was losing the argument it had been having for the last six hours. He had been looking at her for ninety seconds when Abby came to stand beside him.
"The older patients may recover," Abby said. "She won't. The fever-cascade in children this age — it's moving too fast."
He looked at Mira.
The CPE pulsed once at the edge of his perception.
[Quest Available: Authorize Mercy Kill] [Objective: Administer final sedative dose. Dignity for the dying.] [Reward: +200 EXP. Voice catalogued with full biographical register.]
He dismissed it.
Not because the act was wrong. Because he was not doing this as a system transaction, and the system knowing it offered one was the system doing something he was going to have to think about later.
"I need five minutes," he said.
Abby's voice was careful. "Ethan—"
"I know what you're asking me not to do." He looked at her. "I need you in the outer ward. If you're in this room, you carry the act. We need your hands for the people who are going to survive."
Her jaw moved.
He had said it wrong — too clean, too clinical, the resource-allocation register when what she had needed was something else. He tried again.
"I can't ask you to do this," he said. "It's not your weight."
A long pause. Abby looked at Mira.
She left.
Sinclair was in the corridor. He had been there since before Ethan arrived — he had been there since the runner had come, because Ortega had been his junior and Ortega's absence from the fog shelter had written this room months earlier, and Sinclair understood exactly what the weight was because he was carrying the same weight from the same source.
He handed Ethan a syringe without comment.
Ethan went back to the bed.
The act took thirty seconds. Mira did not wake for it. Her breathing changed once and then did not change again, and the room was very quiet, and the CPE did not offer the Quest a second time.
[Voice Catalogued: Mira Reyes-Chen. Age 8. Camp Jaha resident.] [EXP Penalty: −100. Queued. Delivery: 36 hours.]
He said her name once. Aloud. In the empty part of the medbay where the only person who could hear it was him.
"Mira Reyes-Chen."
The name settled into the silence the way names settled into silence when they were the last thing said.
---
Sinclair walked him out through the south entrance — the one that bypassed the ward and the other eleven beds and the people Abby was still fighting for. The pre-dawn camp was cool and quiet, the kind of quiet that happened when the perimeter guard had been told to stay tight and was staying tight.
"She would have lived," Sinclair said. "If we'd built the fog shelters in time."
Ethan stopped walking.
Sinclair had stopped too, two paces ahead, facing away. His broken arm was out of the sling now — six weeks since the Alpha crash, Clarke had cleared light use. He had his hands at his sides.
"The shelters would have kept her parents out of the fog," Sinclair said. "Parents alive, she doesn't arrive at this camp as an orphan. Doesn't spend her recovery in the sector that was closest to the south-shelter contamination path." He turned. His face was not the face of a man looking for absolution. It was the face of a man who had worked through the logic and was presenting it as a shared fact. "Some of this belongs to me too."
Ethan did not answer.
He filed it in the category of things that were true and did not help.
Then he went to the archive.
He wrote Mira's name at the bottom of the fourth sheet, below Hala's, below Ortega's, below the first eleven names that started with Atom. He closed the journal. He replaced the false panel.
He sat in the archive cavity for twelve minutes.
Then he went to find Clarke.
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