The Prison Healer (The Prison Healer #1)(48)

On top of that, and perhaps more disturbing, they weren’t getting any better. No matter how many remedies she tried, how many sedatives she gave them for rest, how many antivirals and antibacterials she shoved down their throats, nothing helped. She even tried bleeding a few of the sicker patients, and still, none showed any signs of improving.

They were, however, beginning to die.

One by one they were falling into the everworld, with the earliest patients already having been sent to the morgue, and many of the later patients swiftly joining them. The incubation period was different for each person; some died within days, some died within hours.

Kiva couldn’t make any sense of it, each new victim only adding to her frustration—and her helplessness.

“Don’t w-worry,” Tipp told her one night, ten days after the Trial by Air. “You’ll g-g-g-g-g—figure it out.”

It was late, and the young boy had been running around helping Kiva all day. He was so tired that he was swaying on his feet, even though she had repeatedly told him to sit down and rest. She wanted to avoid him falling over, but she also wanted to keep him from getting angry with himself, since he always grew distressed when exhaustion made his stutter more pronounced.

“I just don’t understand it,” Kiva said, scrubbing her hands clean and wiping them with silverseed oil as an added precaution. She handed the flask to Tipp and eyed him until he did the same. “Their symptoms are identical: high fever, dilated pupils, headache, vomiting, diarrhea—”

“Don’t f-f-forget the rash,” Tipp interrupted, handing the sterilizing oil back and wrinkling his nose at the bitter smell.

“—and a stomach rash,” Kiva added, ticking off her fingers. “They all have the same thing, I’m certain of it.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

Kiva spun around, not having heard Jaren’s arrival in the infirmary. Perhaps Tipp wasn’t the only tired one.

“The problem,” Kiva said, not wasting energy asking why he was there, “is that Rayla is from administration.”

Jaren cocked his head to the side, making the tunnel dust smeared up one half of his face even more noticeable. “Am I supposed to know what that means?”

“She’s f-f-favored,” Tipp answered for Kiva, before yawning widely and swaying again.

Alarmed, Jaren reached for him, and with a look that brooked no argument, led him over to one of the metal benches and waited pointedly until he sat. While Kiva was relieved to see the young boy now off his feet, she still grumbled internally that it was Jaren’s intervention that had convinced him to move, when she’d been begging him to rest for over an hour.

“What do you mean, favored??” Jaren asked.

Naari, on duty at the entrance to the infirmary, made a coughing sound. Kiva felt like doing the same. But instead, she answered the question, as delicately as she could.

“It means she’s given extra comforts from the guards—warmer clothes, better rations, safer work allocations, that kind of thing—in return for . . . services.”

“I don’t g-get it,” Tipp said, yawning again. “I mean, what k-k-kind of services can she g-give that others aren’t giving them? They already have p-prisoners doing their laundry, making their meals, and c-cleaning their quarters. There’s n-nothing else they need.”

Naari coughed again, and neither Kiva nor Jaren answered.

“I see,” Jaren said tightly. “But I still don’t get how Rayla-from-administration is a problem.”

“The favored prisoners are kept separate from the rest of us,” Kiva shared. “Rayla would have had little to no interaction with anyone other than the guards that she . . .” She cleared her throat, and rallied on. “Even her sleeping quarters are away from the rest of the cell block dormitories, closer to the guards’ quarters.”

Or inside those quarters on any given night, Kiva didn’t need to add.

“She shouldn’t be sick,” Jaren said, realization lighting his features.

“She shouldn’t be sick,” Kiva confirmed. “I mean, it’s not impossible that she’s been in contact with an infected person, but if that were true, why are none of the guards that she’s been—” Kiva broke off with a quick look at Tipp before turning back to Jaren. “Uh, been near, getting sick?”

“Are you saying that none of the guards have fallen ill?”

Kiva swiveled to find that Naari had moved closer on silent feet, joining their conversation.

“None,” Kiva stated, still slightly uneasy talking to the amber-eyed guard, even if the feeling had been slowly dissolving.

“How many prisoners are sick?” Naari asked.

Kiva did a mental calculation. “Including those who have already died, close to seventy, with ten more on average every day.” And at least that many dying daily, too. The quarantine room was nearly at capacity, and would have passed it if not for the rapid increase in deaths. Kiva had even been allocated extra workers to help temporarily care for the sick, as had Mot and Grendel in the morgue and crematorium.

“Statistically, shouldn’t at least a few guards have caught it by now?” Jaren asked. He didn’t seem at all afraid of Naari, though he hadn’t witnessed a decade of guard brutality like Kiva had.

“If it’s a stomach virus as I had originally assumed, then yes,” Kiva said. “But while all the symptoms point that way . . .”