Whatever Kaylah says does not mollify my father, and the arguing continues. I drop the bucket I’m holding and dig my nails into my palms, willing my hands not to shake. If I’m honest with myself, part of me hopes my father will win. The rose plague terrifies me, and I know the worst is yet to come. But to leave the quarantine would be to abandon Kaylah and the other healers, and that I will not do.

In the end though, it doesn’t matter what I want, because I have no choice. It’s not about my life, or the other healers’ lives, or even the soldiers’. It’s about our village. If word gets back to the empire that we withheld an able-bodied healer when the soldiers needed attention, all our people would pay the price.

And so my father relents, as I know he must. By dawn, everybody is gone except for four healers and one hundred soldiers. The dust of last night’s exodus settles, carrying with it an eerie silence. Any sound, the stomp of boots or a sick soldier’s cry, seems strangely dampened.

Doron divides the remaining healthy soldiers into two groups.

“Clear out three cottages and divide the sick among them,” he tells one group. He charges the other with digging a trench. When one soldier asks how big the trench should be, Doron falls silent for a moment. “Fifty bodies, at least,” he says, his voice flat, and then he heads into the nearest cottage.

More soldiers fall ill by the hour, collapsing and having to be carried in turn by their comrades. There’s so much sickness around that it’s easy to imagine myself light-headed as well, to sense a prickling on my own skin. I tell myself that the plague takes days to manifest, and force myself to keep working. By evening, eighty of the one hundred soldiers lie on sleeping mats inside our makeshift hospital.

“This isn’t natural,” Kaylah says. “Rose plague simply doesn’t spread this way. Someone must have deliberately infected these soldiers, perhaps with blood in their water or food.”

I count the days in my head. Rose plague takes nearly a fortnight to take hold, and the soldiers arrived five days ago. “They weren’t infected here.”

Everybody nods in agreement. They’ve been doing the same figures.

“It doesn’t bode well for the future,” says Zad. “If deliberate infection becomes a weapon of war…”

A soldier calls out for water, his eyes wild with fever delirium. I rush to his side and hold a cup to his lips. Just a day ago, he would have swaggered down our streets, taking what he wished. Should I pity him now? Hate him still?

When I straighten, Doron is beside me. “Come, Zivah,” he says. “I have a job for you.”