I roll over, my breath rasping through my throat as my eyes settle on her. She’s about my mother’s age, and only now do I notice her roughly spun clothes and the uneven walls of the room that holds me. “Where am I?” It doesn’t look like the dungeons. Maybe I’m still dreaming. Or maybe my captors have finally succeeded in driving me mad.

“An hour’s walk from Khaygal.”

I’m no longer in that accursed military outpost? Still, an hour doesn’t feel far enough. I grab the sheet from around my legs and pull it up to cover myself. My fingers shake.

“What’s your name?” the woman asks.

“Don’t ask his name.” A man comes up and puts a protective arm around the woman’s shoulders. “Don’t ask anything. The less we know about him, and he about us, the better.” He scowls down at me. “Behave yourself, boy. My wife might have pulled you out of the pile of bodies, but I’ll throw you right back out there if need be.”

Pile of bodies…I rub my aching temples and gradually, the memories return. The rose plague outbreak in the dungeons, the panicked guards…I remember coming down with fever, looking down to see red marks on my skin, lit by the dungeon’s flickering torchlight. And I remember feeling happy, because it meant they wouldn’t be able to hurt me anymore.

“You were dumped outside the fort, along with the rest of the diseased prisoners,” says the woman. “The sole umbertouched body in a pile of corpses.”

Only then do I see that the marks on my skin have turned dark brown, and I have a perverse urge to laugh. I just can’t die, though I’ve begged Zenagua, goddess of death, to take me countless times. Everyone knows the stages of rose plague. First comes the fever and the delirium. It kills most people up front, though a few manage a stay of execution. Their fever ebbs, and they regain their strength, but their rash stays red, which means they can still pass the disease to others. Those are the rosemarked, and they’re banished from society until the fever reclaims them a few years later.

Besides the rosemarked, there is one other group of survivors: the umbertouched, who beat the disease completely. Those lucky bastards have marks that turn brown. They also regain their strength, and they’re immune to the disease from there on forward. Seems I’ve now joined their number.