Jesmin looks up from his desk when I return. He doesn’t speak, and I walk quietly to the table where I’d been reading. Just as I think he will let the incident go without comment, I hear his voice.

“Perhaps searching for a cure is too great a leap,” Jesmin says gently. “Perhaps it would make more sense to pick a more tractable goal first.”

The words on the scroll blur in front of me. It’s easy for Jesmin to say so. He’s not the one whose days are numbered. The instinct to argue with him is overwhelming, but he’s right about one thing. As loath as I am to admit it, my cures are based more on leaps of reasoning than any real knowledge or experience.

“And what do you recommend?” I ask.

“We could focus on the spread of the disease. There, at least, we have a body of knowledge to work off of. You’ve told me that the Dara keep their rosemarked under far less isolation. We could pool our knowledge and try and codify a better way to treat the afflicted.”

My mind goes back to the boy abandoned at the compound a few days ago, and his mother’s grief. Jesmin and I could indeed make his last years more bearable for both him and his mother. It wouldn’t take much effort to come up with ideas, and they’d likely be much more successful than my cure attempts.

“Very well,” I say, though I add a silent “for now” at the end of it. I roll up my scroll and turn my chair to face Jesmin. “Shall we start with the terms of quarantine, then? I’ve already told you the limitations that were placed on me at Dara. I could still receive visitors, as long as we were careful about what they touched.”

He nods, acknowledging my easy acquiescence. “Yes, I remember. And I see how that might work in Dara, but in Sehmar City and the rest of Central Ampara, we have a problem of scale. In your village, the people are spread out and there are simply fewer rosemarked. The likelihood of a mistake, and the cost of any one outbreak, would be much smaller than here. Could we trust all thousand rosemarked within this compound to be as careful with their disease as you were?”

His words make sense, but I refuse to be so easily discouraged. “Perhaps some of Baruva’s reports would help. He’s listed many ways to minimize the spread of the disease. A distance of five paces when speaking, bright sunlight…Even if visits could only be conducted occasionally, under the strict supervision of soldiers who could make sure that the healthy stayed a good distance away from the sick…and all water drawn from near the rosemarked colony should be boiled thoroughly, of course.”