Dineas looks at her in shock. Before he can react, I take his hand and pull him around the edge of the crowd. “Don’t listen to her,” I say. “She’s just one bitter woman.” Though the glares from others around us belie my words.

Finally, we get close enough to see through the gate. There’s a parade outside led by two women in dark flowing gowns. They carry bowls of incense, and their cheeks are streaked with soot. I know enough about Amparan gods to recognize them as priestesses of Zenagua, the goddess of death. Both these priestesses are umbertouched, and I wonder if a priestess of the goddess of death would consider it an honor or a snub from Zenagua to survive a bout of rose plague. Behind the priestesses are four umbertouched soldiers wearing cloaks of loosely woven red fabric, like plague veils dyed red. And marching under their guard are three rosemarked: two older men and a boy of perhaps eight. The boy’s plague veil is too big for him, and he gets tangled up in the cloth every few steps.

The wailing comes from a woman trailing the procession. There’s a man holding her around her shoulders, and three children at her side. All of them wear coarse homespun robes covered in patches.

As I watch, the woman lunges toward the condemned. “Who will feed him? Who will look after him?”

Her husband grabs her around her waist, even as he himself stares after his son. The woman’s other children look terrified. The soldiers remain stone-faced, staring ahead as if the woman wasn’t there.

My heart squeezes. This family’s certainly too poor to buy any help or protection for their son. The mother looks as if she would move into the colony herself if she could.

I feel a touch on my elbow.

“Can I help?” says Dineas, strain clear in his eyes as he watches the woman. “I can go speak with her.”

His words bring me some relief. “Can you go out the gate and tell the woman we’ll look after her son?”

The guards remove the condemned’s plague veils and wave them in after a cursory inspection. The boy walks in a daze I remember well from my first days after waking up rosemarked. He stumbles into the open space beyond the gate, looking uncertainly at the faces of illness around him. Some people look back with pity, while others simply walk away. I wonder how many scenes like this they’ve witnessed before, and how many it’s possible to see before becoming completely numb.