Chapter 181: Infected (2)

The sixteen residents claimed the building had sheltered them for six days, and that created the first problem.

According to Senna, a middle-aged woman with graying hair braided tightly down her back, there had originally been twenty-two people inside the building. Six were dead now, and nobody could agree on how.

"The first three died in their sleep," Senna insisted. Her arms remained folded so tightly across her chest that her fingers had disappeared beneath her sleeves. "We woke up, and they were just... dead."

A younger man beside her frowned. "No. Two died sleeping. The third was Maro. He got stabbed after the food argument."

Senna turned toward him. "That happened later."

"No, it didn’t."

"Yes it did."

A man with a crooked nose shifted near the staircase. "One disappeared."

The argument stopped.

Dorian turned his attention to him. "Disappeared?"

The man’s jaw tightened. "Gone. There was blood on the ground, but no body."

Misha listened from the edge of the group while pretending to examine her food.

People lied for many reasons. Fear, shame, self-preservation, or habit. The existence of parasites made every ordinary human inconsistency look sinister.

That was probably the point of the quest.

By noon, Dorian had organized temporary groups. Food was inventoried, sleeping rooms were assigned, and Blackthorn members took positions near corridors and stairs under the harmless label of keeping order, while the strangers were given central rooms where they could be observed.

At first, several of them refused the arrangement.

"You expect us to sleep in the middle of your people while yours stand at every exit?" one man demanded.

He was broad through the shoulders, perhaps a former laborer, with a dark patch of sweat spreading beneath his collar despite the cool hall. His companions called him Brad.

"That sounds less like hospitality and more like imprisonment! We came here first!"

A few others murmured their agreement.

Dorian did not react to the accusation. "The doors will not be locked."

"That doesn’t answer me."

"You may leave your rooms whenever you wish."

Brad’s nostrils flared. "With your people watching us."

"Yes."

The bluntness caught him off guard.

Misha almost smiled, not because it was funny. Dorian understood somethin people often missed. A believable lie was useful, and an obvious truth was sometimes better.

Dorian continued, "You don’t trust us, and we don’t trust you. Pretending otherwise would be a terrible decision for everyone involved."

One of the women narrowed her eyes. "So you admit you’re watching us."

Dorian gestured toward the central corridor. "You’ll receive the same food as everyone else, and we will share our supplies. You’ll have access to the common hall, and no one will search your belongings without cause.

None of my people will enter your rooms without warning unless there is an emergency, but until we know whether we can trust each other, I’m not scattering unknown people throughout a building where my people are sleeping while a quest tells us five of you may be carrying parasites that kills us."

That earned a few uncomfortable looks.

The argument dragged on for several more minutes. Questions were thrown at him one after another.

What counted as cause? Who decided what an emergency was? Could families stay together?

Dorian answered each without raising his voice.

Eventually, the resistance began to lose its edge. The strangers exchanged looks among themselves before the same man who had spoken first let out a frustrated breath.

"Fine."

One by one, the others reluctantly agreed. No one looked particularly happy about it.

Dorian controlled movement without ever using the word control. When a resident objected to Blackthorn overseeing the food stores, Dorian asked whether he had a better system. The man did not, and that ended the argument once more.

Misha turned her attention to elsewhere and began approaching some of the residents to check their pulses.

A woman pulled her sleeve away before Misha could touch her. "I’m fine."

"I didn’t say you weren’t."

"You were going to check my pulse."

"Yes."

"Why?"

Misha almost said that is how an examination works. Instead, she kept her voice level. "Because if the parasites change the body, I need to know how."

The woman looked at the daggers on Misha’s hip. "That’s what you say now."

Misha did not argue. There was no good answer to suspicion when the suspicion was rational. If she was in the woman’s position, she would not want a masked stranger with two blades checking her pulse either.

She lowered her hand. "We need to start trusting each other if we want to survive this floor."

The woman stared at her, and Misha stared back. After several seconds, the woman finally extended her wrist.

By late afternoon, she had incomplete sets of observations and nothing worth killing anyone over. Several people had fevers, three had elevated pulses, one local man had tremors, and two women showed signs of dehydration.

===

Evening arrived at exactly six. Nobody noticed that until it happened.

A lamp along the wall dimmed, then another.

Misha looked up, and heaviness dropped through her body. It was not fatigue, not the slow fog of exhaustion she knew intimately. This was immediate and artificial.

Not far from her, Caius swore softly and reached for a pillar that was no longer within reach, while Astrid caught the edge of a table.

"Don’t—sleep," Misha managed.

That was a stupid instruction.

Misha knew it the moment her blurred vision caught the bodies around her dropping one after another.

Her knees gave out. The floor rushed up to meet her, and before she could brace herself, darkness swallowed the hall.

===

Misha woke with her cheek pressed against cold stone.

Her first thought was that she had failed, her second was that someone was screaming.

All across the hall, people were beginning to stir. Groans broke the silence as bodies shifted against the floor and hands reached instinctively for aching heads.

She rolled onto one elbow and swept her gaze farther across the room.

Caius sat hunched slightly forward with one hand pressed to his temple, while Astrid had gone pale but remained alert, her eyes already tracking the others around them.

Then another scream was heard.

"AAAAHHH!!!"

One of the sixteen knelt beside a body. An elderly man lay on his side between two benches, eyes open, blood dried beneath his nose and mouth. Other than that, there were no obvious wounds.

"He was fine!" the woman cried.

That got Misha moving. Just before she reached the body, a hand closed around her shoulder, and she twisted free before registering who had grabbed her.

"Careful," Dorian said.

"He’s dead."

"We know."

"I need to check the body."

He looked toward the gathering residents, then back at her. Only then did he finally let her go.

Misha crouched beside the body and worked quickly. The skin was cool, no pulse, no breath. Livor began along the dependent side, so it only meant that he had been dead for hours.

"What are you doing?" one of the strangers asked.

"Checking the body."

"For what?"

"The cause of death."

Her voice came out sharp and no one interrupted again since she seemed to know what she was doing.

She searched his mouth and found blood, plus small abrasions along the inner cheek and a torn line of tissue near the back of his throat. Then, she looked toward the residents.

"Who slept the closest to him?"

Nobody answered her. Instead, three people stepped backward.

"Seriously?"

An old woman pointed at another man. "He did."

The accused man’s face changed instantly. "No, you’re lying."

"You were beside him!"

"So were you!"

"I was across the room!"

"You moved after lights-out!"

"There were no lights out! We all collapsed!"

Voices piled over one another. The younger man, Werio, took another step back, and someone beside him moved away too.

"I-I really didn’t touch him!" His breathing quickened. "I didn’t!"

Misha watched the room change around him. Fear did not spread evenly, it jumped from one person to another.

A man looked at his hands, another looked toward his face, and a Blackthorn member shifted closer to his weapon. Werio noticed all of it.

"Stop looking at me like that!"

Nobody did. They all kept staring at him.

"I didn’t do anything!"

The old woman pointed again. "You were beside him!"

"So were three other people!"

"We saw you arguing with him yesterday."

"That doesn’t mean I killed him! I was unconscious too!"

"We don’t know that for sure! What if you’re just pretending? You’re an infected, aren’t you? The parasite is in you!"

People began shouting over one another until Dorian raised his voice and cut through it. "Enough!"

Silence slowly filled the room as they all turned their way to him.

<The Saint Buried Upside Down> I wonder if they’ll find the culprit~ Should I give a hint?

<Endless Dominion> It’s not like they can see us commenting on them.

’They know who did it?’

Misha pressed her lips together into a thin line. She wanted to ask but doing that would mean admitting she could see the Observer’s chat in the first place, and she had no intention of handling information that could put her at even greater risk.

So she kept quiet and forced her attention back to the room.

"No one leaves this room." Dorian spoke more carefully now. "That includes my people. If someone moved while we were unconscious, we need to know. If nobody did, then proximity means nothing."