I pleaded for an explanation. “What’s happening to me?”

“You have cholera. Drug-resistant cholera. We can control the fever, and keep you hydrated – but the disease is going to have to run its course. So you’re in for a long haul.”

Chapter 19

As the first wave of delirium subsided, I tried to assess my position dispassionately, to arm myself with the facts. I was not an infant, I was not old. I was not suffering from malnutrition, parasite infestation, an impaired immune system, or any other complicating factor. I was in the care of qualified people. My condition was being monitored constantly by sophisticated machines.

I told myself that I was not going to die.

Fever and nausea, absent in “classical” cholera, meant that I had the Mexico City biotype – first seen in the aftermath of the quake of ’15, long since distributed globally. It entered the bloodstream as well as the gut, producing a wider range of symptoms, a greater risk to health. Nevertheless, millions of people survived it every year – often in much worse circumstances: without antipyretics to control the fever, without intravenous electrolytes, without any antibiotics at all – making drug resistance academic. In the largest metropolitan hospitals, in Santiago or Bombay, the particular strain of Vibrio cholerae could be sequenced completely, and a de novo drug designed and synthesized in a matter of hours. Most people who contracted the disease, though, had no prospect whatsoever of receiving this luxurious miracle cure. They simply lived through the rise and fall of the bacterial empire inside them. They rode it out.

I could do the same.

There was only one small flaw in this clear-eyed, optimistic scenario: Most people had no reason to suspect that their guts were full of a genetic weapon which had detonated one step short of its target. Engineered to mimic a natural strain of cholera as closely as possible – but engineered to push the envelope of plausible symptoms far enough to kill a healthy, twenty-seven-year-old woman, receiving the best care that Stateless could provide.

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The ward was clean, bright, spacious, quiet. I spent most of my time screened off from the other patients, but the white translucent partitions let the daylight through – and even when my skin was on fire, the faint touch of radiant warmth reaching my body was strangely comforting, like a familiar embrace.

By late afternoon on the first day, the antipyretics seemed to be working. I watched the graph on the bedside monitor; my temperature was still pathological, but the immediate risk of brain damage had passed. I tried to swallow liquids, but nothing stayed down – so I moistened my parched lips and throat, and let the intravenous drip do the rest.