“Sorry, I forgot; you wouldn’t know. Whatever Linn and Tick-Tick have, it’s achieved epidemic status, and The Lilacs is the only medical facility in town that specializes in treating the Trueblood population. They’re too crowded and too busy to put on airs, right now.” She took another pull at her cigarette, and nothing happened. “Shit,” she said, with a little more force than was called for. I fumbled for matches, but didn’t have any. Hers were in her jacket pocket; she took them out and struck one. When she cupped it to her cigarette, I saw the reflection off the wet lines on her face.

“My God. What’s wrong?” I asked her.

She tossed the match away as if it had betrayed her, which it had. “Ms. Wu lost her first two patients to it today.”

I didn’t stop thinking—or if I did, it was only for an instant, and after that my head was full of thoughts, running around like people trying to get out of a burning building. This didn’t mean Tick-Tick would die. Maybe those two elves were already weak, old or wrung out with wild living, or susceptible to this sort of thing. Tick-Tick wasn’t susceptible to anything. She was strong. We’d caught her illness early, earlier than Linn’s even, and maybe those two people hadn’t realized how sick they were until too late. Just because some people died of a disease didn’t mean every person who got it would. People had died of the flu, of pneumonia, of heart attacks, and none of those things killed every person who had them. It would be all right.

But Rico was scared enough to cry. And she’d said “her first two.”

“How… Does she think she’s going to lose more?”

A deep breath from Rico, fairly even. “She thinks so. It’s too early, I gather, to get a really clear picture of the progress of the disease. She can’t tell yet who to be hopeful about.”

I grasped at my last straw. “But she’s sure that Linn’s got the same thing, and that Tick-Tick has it, too?”

Her head turned a little toward me. “Yeah.”

We smoked in silence for about half a minute, before I said, “Should I take her to The Lilacs?”

“You should ask Ms. Wu, but I wouldn’t think so. She’ll probably rest better here. Keep her isolated, though.”

“It’s still only elves that get it?”

“So far. Not even any halfies reported, though if I were them, I wouldn’t press my luck. Humans don’t seem to get it, which means The Lilacs is pulling in human doctors and teaching them fey medicine and therapeutic magic. It’s unheard-of, but they have to—three-quarters of the Trueblood staff is either down with it, or showing symptoms, and can’t break quarantine.”