“Really?”
Tarc nodded.
“How would I practice that?”
“Um…” Tarc got a perplexed look on his face.
“What is it?”
He put up a hand, “Wait. I’m trying to figure out how you might practice precognition.”
They walked side-by-side for a while, saying nothing, though Lizeth really wanted to ask him what he was thinking.
“Okay,” he said, bending over and picking up a rock. He held it up, then put his other hand fifteen centimeters (6”) beneath it. “I’m going to drop this stone. You try to catch it before it hits my fist.”
He dropped it.
Lizeth snatched it without difficulty. “Anyone could do that,” she said.
“I don’t think so. It’s like that nail trick of Sam’s. People’s reactions aren’t fast enough to catch it once they see it start dropping. You can do it, but only because you know it’s going to drop before it even starts.”
“You really can’t do it?”
Tarc tilted his head, “I don’t think so. You want me to try?”
She held the stone up, then dropped it.
Tarc caught it, but only by chasing his hand down after it to catch it some distance below the hand she dropped it from.
“That’s cheating!” she said with a frown. “You’re supposed to catch it up just beneath the hand that drops it.”
“Yeah, that’s why I had my hand in the way when I dropped it for you. To keep you from reaching down to grab it.”
“Oh. I wondered why you held a hand there.”
“Anyway, there’s no way I could grab it without it being an accident, or chasing my hand down to catch it after it’d fallen some distance.”
“Huh. And you really don’t think anyone else could catch it either?”
“Not unless they were a precog.”
“And you’re thinking I can practice this? How?”
Tarc held up the stone. Lizeth put her hand up near his again, but he said, “No, put your hand about a third of a meter (13”) away. Then you’ll have to see farther into the future to be able to start reaching for it before I even let go.”
“Oh,” she said drawing her hand back. Before she’d pulled it back the full third of a meter, she lunged forward and grabbed the stone—just beneath his hand. “You tried to trick me!”
“We’re trying to see if you can be tricked, right? Give me the stone and put your hand a half-meter away.”
Lizeth did, then walked along focusing on his hand for several seconds before her hand lashed out to grab the stone. “It almost feels like my hand grabs for the stone by itself,” she said.
“I’m not surprised. When someone throws me a ball, I don’t have to think about it, my hand just seems to reach out and grab it… Um, did you notice you weren’t able to catch it right under my hand? That time it fell several centimeters before you got it.”
“Really?”
Tarc nodded and took the stone from her. Holding it up, he said, “Try it again. This time try harder to catch it as soon as I let go of it. When you catch it, pay attention to how far it fell before you caught it.”
In fact, despite a number of tries, from a half-meter away Lizeth couldn’t catch it before it’d fallen a couple of centimeters. She found this frustrating.
But when Tarc offered to help her practice in hopes she’d get better, she got a warm feeling.
***
Hareh felt exhausted as he walked back to the tavern in the evening. He hadn’t been able to get his head shaved until late morning. When he’d finally gotten down to the ghetto he’d been teamed with Jadyn, assigned to killing rats and mice. Jadyn would telepathically force them to come out of their hidey holes, then Hareh’d use his teleportation to cut their brainstems. As he understood it, Kazy and Daussie, and Eva and the grumpy old Ms. Rainey had formed similar pairs and were doing the same thing.
Seri and Vyrda worked independently because they could each use their telekinetic talent to both rip the rats’ brainstems and drag them out of their holes.
Doing so was difficult for Vyrda because her talent was barely strong enough to pull them out. She’d worked slowly the entire day, staying on the edge of a headache the whole time.
In her role as the group’s epidemiologist, Rrica’d spent the day charting the plague on her map. It showed where people had died, where they were sick, and where they weren’t sick. Hareh’d heard that—encouragingly—there were only a few places where the disease had skipped to houses away from the area of the main epidemic. These were likely places where fleas on people had transmitted the disease to people elsewhere. The encouraging part was that Rrica thought most of the transmission was coming from rodents leaving one house and passing their fleas to the rodents in the next house—rather than from people carrying it over greater distances.
They’d all been handing out antibiotics to those who were merely sick. Knowing the antibiotic would run out otherwise, they’d given placebo packets to those deemed so sick that they’d die with or without actually getting medicine. If they hadn’t been giving out the placebo packs, there would’ve been fights as people begged medicine for loved ones standing at the threshold of death.
Those decisions had been the hardest of Hareh’s life. Now he was overwhelmed with doubts. Could that boy have been saved? By wasting medicine on those two girls, have I doomed others to die when we run out? As a mere student of healing, should I be making these kinds of life and death decisions?
If the Gellers were able to make more drugs soon—and it turned out that he could’ve been giving everyone medicine—he was going to hate himself for each placebo pack he’d handed out. If they couldn’t make more, he’d hate himself for the moderately sick people he’d given antibiotic to.
To everyone’s astonishment, Baron Vail had shown up in the ghetto with his head shaved. He’d brought the guardia—their heads shaved as well—and gotten marching orders from Eva. He’d passed the orders on to his men. They’d started burning the piles of garbage and trash. They’d removed the rat and mouse carcasses and put them on the fires.
The dead people were collected and cremated, by men whose entire bodies had been shaved and who wore only loincloths. Their inducement for such dangerous labor were packets of antibiotics. Packets they had to consume then and there for fear they’d otherwise try to take them home to their families—when they themselves were the ones at risk, having been exposed to the fleas jumping off the dead.
Criers had been going from neighborhood to neighborhood, telling people about the plague and what to do. Barbers, paid from the baron’s coffers, were shaving peoples’ heads. Emergency crews were collecting garbage from neighborhoods, even areas not affected as yet. The dump outside town—where garbage was normally taken—was being burned as well. Traps for rodents were being built by those who could and bought by those who didn’t have the skills to build their own. Everyone was trying to get rid of their own rats and mice, and keeping a close eye on their pets for signs of illness. They were all wearing as little clothing as possible. They were marching down to the river to wash themselves and their clothes and had been told to do so at least daily. The water there was uncomfortably cold, but it carried the fleas away so they couldn’t jump back on you when you got back out of the water. Bedclothes were hung in the sun all day to kill flea larvae. Rugs, carpets, extra clothes—anything fleas might live in—were taken outside and left in the sun. They were only to be brought inside in the event of rain.
When he thought about it, Hareh was astonished by the level of organization Eva and Rrica had wrought.
Well, Eva and Kazy and Jadyn, using their telepathy to convince the movers and shakers of Clancy Vail to go along with Rrica’s ideas.
He thought, If only we had a way to directly kill fleas the way we do rats.
Of course, he could use his teleportation to cut a flea in half, but finding each flea to do so would take far too much time…
***
Kazy was calling a rat out of the wall of a shack in Grissom. The house was on the periphery of the area where most of the dead had lived, but this home hadn’t been struck by the plague yet. She looked up when she heard a man’s voice calling her name.
Daussie leaned out the door of the shack to look, then turned back to Kazy, “It’s one of the guardia.”
Kazy had bent again to her task. Now she pointed to the rat she’d just persuaded to come out into the room.
Daussie glanced at the rodent and sent out her ghirit. The animal twitched and died.
Kazy stepped to the door and looked out at the guardsman, saying, “I’m Kazy.”
The guardsman waved vaguely behind himself. “There’s a kid here looking for you. Says it’s important.”
Kazy stepped out far enough so she could see past the guardsman, then turned back to Daussie. “It’s Morgan Geller. Come with me.”
Suddenly shy at the thought of meeting the boy Kazy thought was a match for her, Daussie stayed behind the door. She thought, I can’t meet him looking like this. She said, “You don’t need me!”
“No,” Kazy said with a grin, “but you’ve got to meet him. Come on.”
Daussie followed Kazy out. She saw a tall teenage boy about her age standing a couple of meters behind the guardsman. He had the Geller family features, more pleasantly arranged than usual. His head was shaved, which certainly met her approval.
It also made her feel better about her own appearance.
She liked the way his eyes shot to, then stayed focused on her. Why do I feel a tingle when his eyes are on me, she wondered, when I don’t like the way so many other men look at me?
~~~
Morgan saw Kazy come out of one of the ghetto shacks and realized she’d certainly been exposed to plague. He hoped he wouldn’t have to get too close to her. Trying to avoid exposure so far, he’d stayed in the middle of the street and several paces behind the guardsman who’d conducted him to this location—which as best he could tell was in the middle of the plague-stricken area.
Another girl came out behind Kazy. Taller, but also slender with a shaved head. He blinked and looked closer. She might’ve lost the crowning glory of her hair, however that hair had looked, but—bald or not—she was beautiful.
Kazy approached, but Morgan couldn’t seem to take his eyes off the other girl.
“Morgan, what’s up?”
Morgan tore his eyes off the other girl. It was Kazy who’d spoken. “Huh?” he asked brilliantly.
Kazy grinned at him, then over her shoulder at the other girl. “This is my cousin Daussie. What’re you doing down here?”
“Um, hi Daussie,” Morgan said self-consciously.
The girl reservedly said “Hi” in return.
Morgan tried desperately to think of something intelligent to say in return but the silence dragged on.
Suddenly the guardsman snorted disgustedly. “I thought I was bringing you down here with some kind of important message about the plague? I’ve got more important things to do than watch you make a lame attempt to pick up girls!”
Horrified, Morgan got a grip on himself, “Um, sorry, Kazy. We need benzene.” Though his eyes’d been on Kazy when he’d started talking, they were back on Daussie when he finished.
Kazy said, “What’s benzene?”
“Um,” Morgan looked at Kazy again. “It’s an aromatic hydrocarbon. A ring, C6H6. We use it as a precursor for the sulfa drugs.”
“And where do you get it?”
Morgan found his eyes were on Daussie again. He turned back to Kazy. “Wellers. They have an oil well a couple of kilometers out of town. They crack benzene out of their crude. Um, we have to purify it further before we can use it.”
“Crack?”
He tilted his head, “They distill the crude oil. Benzene’s one of the fractions.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” Kazy said dryly. They won’t sell it to you?”
“They say their current production’s promised to someone else. I suspect they have a deal to hold it for one of our competitors in dye chemistry.”
“You told them it was so you could make medicine for the plague?”
“Yeah, but I don’t think they believe there’s any such medicine.”
“Okay,” she said, turning to her cousin. “Daussie, I’d better go with him.”
Daussie nodded. “I’ll keep working.” Cryptically, she said, “These houses are going to stink for a while, but that’s better than the alternative.” She studied Morgan for a moment, then turned back into the house she’d come out of.
Morgan watched her go.
Kazy said, “You ready to go?”
Morgan shook his head to clear it. “Yeah, this way. Um, I probably shouldn’t get too close to you right? Since you’ve been…”
“Right,” Kazy said. She winked, “You keep your distance buddy.”
Morgan blinked and looked at her. He thought she was teasing him, but, if so, he didn’t really understand the joke. He turned to Kazy, “So, how’re you going to convince the Wellers? We’re regular customers but we haven’t been able to get them to budge.”
“I’m going to convince them they’re going to die if they don’t.”
“We already told them that.”
“Yeah,” she grinned, “but I’m far more persuasive than you are.”
~~~
To Morgan’s astonishment, Kazy did convince the Wellers to turn over three five-liter jugs of benzene fraction. Quickly too.
As he couldn’t carry all three jugs, she offered to carry one to save him a trip. As they walked she made him feel good by telling him that the Geller’s antibiotics had already made a huge difference with the epidemic. “Because we’ve been worried about running out, we’ve been careful about how much we’re handing out. But, people who were pretty sick yesterday are either better or at least not worse today.”
“You’ve been seeing people with full-on plague?”
“Yeah,” she sighed dispiritedly, “yesterday there were already a lot of dead people. The people who were nearly dead yesterday” she shook her head, “they didn’t make it through the night.” She brightened, “But the ones who only had mild fevers, they’re already well. The ones who were pretty sick, but not on their deathbeds, most of them are better too.”
“So,” he said tentatively, not knowing how to say it without implying his own reluctance, “you’ve actually been going into the houses of people who have plague?”
“Yeah, it’s pretty creepy. Of course, we’re staying away from any of their fluids and doing our best to stay out of flea-jumping distance.” She shrugged, “and wearing light clothing, then taking baths and changing our clothes twice a day. We’ll shave our heads again tomorrow or the next day.” She glanced at him, “And we’ve been taking sulfa of course. Thanks for that.”
“Fluids?” Morgan asked out of morbid curiosity.
She nodded, “Blood, urine, stool, pus. Plague’s almost always transferred by fleas, but it’s known that you can get it by eating animals that’re sick with it.”
Revolted, Morgan said, “You wouldn’t actually eat…” he trailed off trying to imagine what part of a dead person the Hyllises might consume.
She darted him a startled look, then started laughing so hard it took her a few seconds to get herself in control. Finally, she said, “No, no,” she giggled, “but you don’t actually have to eat someone to catch their disease, though people have caught it by eating animals. The problem is that people just naturally tend to touch their mouths and noses and eyes. Once you touch a fluid, like pus, thus getting the Yersinia germs that cause plague on your fingers, it’s really easy to transfer the germ to your mouth—which is kind of like eating it.” She gave him a curious look as if wondering whether he was following. Apparently, she decided he was, because she said, “So we try to remember not to touch their fluids or ourselves, especially our mouths. Then each time we leave a house, we wipe down our hands and arm
s with an alcohol-soaked rag. We’d rather wash with soap, but we can’t carry enough with us.”
“So you’re just going house to house checking on people and giving them antibiotics?”
She shrugged, “We’re also killing the rats and mice. The Guardia comes in later to scoop up the carcasses and take them out along with any trash. They’ve been bringing in big pottery jars so people can use them to store their food. Rodents prefer houses where they can get into the food supply.”
“How’re you… killing…?” Morgan asked slowly, then halted, unable to picture the two girls killing rats.
Kazy shrugged, “We have this ultra-high-pitched whistle that drives them out of the walls and makes them hold still. I blow the whistle till they come out. Then Daussie clubs them.”
Morgan had a hard time believing the beautiful girl he’d seen in the ghetto could—or would—club a rat. Rather than thinking about it, he pushed on with a different kind of question. “High-pitched whistle?”
Kazy nodded, “You know how there’re whistles pitched so high only dogs can hear them?”
Morgan nodded.
“There’re whistles that’re even higher than that. Mice and rats are really annoyed by them so you can drive them out of their hiding places.” She shrugged, “At least that’s what we assume it is since we can’t hear them. But, however they work, if we blow through them just right, the rats come right out of the walls.”
Morgan was about to express his doubt about the whistles, but they’d arrived back at Geller’s chemistry. Seeing the five-liter jugs of benzene fraction, his aunt Rachel stared at Kazy. Doubtfully, she asked, “You talked Wellers into selling those to us?”
Kazy shook her head. “I convinced them they should contribute them to the effort to keep the plague from killing all their customers.”
Rachel laughed. “You not only talked them out of some benzene, you talked them into giving it to you for free?”
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