These days, of course, keeping to land was no longer any guarantee that the EurAfricans wouldn't be shooting at you. There'd been a time when they'd only shot at targets trying to cross the pond; but given a half-dozen landside missile attacks since Easter they were obviously itching for more effective containment. It was a wonder that the whole seaboard hadn't been slagged to glass by now. If the dispatches could be believed, N'Am's defenses were still keeping the worst of it back. Still. The defenses wouldn't hold forever.

Rossini surrendered to Handel. Ouellette's line-up was growing. Perhaps three people accumulated for every two she processed. Nothing to worry about, yet; there was a critical mass, some threshold of personal responsibility below which crowds almost never got ugly. These ones didn't look like they had the strength to go bad even if they'd been motivated to.

At least the pharms had stopped charging for the meds she dispensed. They hadn't wanted to, of course: hey, did anyone think the R&D for all these magic potions had been free? In the end, though, there hadn't been much choice. Even small crowds got really ugly when you demanded payment up front.

A forearm the size of a tree trunk, disfigured by the usual maladies: the leprous, silver tinge of stage-one ßehemoth, a smattering of melanomas, and—

Wait a second. That's odd. The swelling and redness was consistent with an infected insect bite, but the puncture marks...

She looked up at the face above the arm. A leather-skinned man in his fifties looked back through eyes blotchy with burst capillaries. For a moment it seemed as though his very bulk was blotting out the light, but no—it was only dusk, creeping in overhead while she'd been otherwise occupied.

"What did this?" she asked.

"Bug." He shook his head. "Last week sometime. Itches like a bugger."

"But there's four holes." Two bites? Two sets of mandibles on a single bug?

"Had about ten legs, too. Weird little bugger. Seen 'em around once or twice. Never got bit before, though." His red eyes squinted with sudden concern. "It poisonous?"

"Probably not." Taka probed the swelling. Her patient grimaced, but whatever had bitten him didn't seem to have left anything embedded. "Not seriously, not if it happened last week. I can give you something for the infection. It's pretty minor, next to…"

"Yeah," her patient said.

She smeared a bit of antibiotic onto the swelling. " I can give you a shot of antihistamines," she said apologetically, "but the effects won't last, I'm afraid. If the itching gets too bad afterward you could always piss on it."

"Piss on it?"

"Topical urea's good for itching," Taka told him. She held up a loaded cuvette; he made the requisite blood offering. "Now if you just—"

"I know the drill."