Initially she had simply felt tired—nothing new, as her work had been arduous physically, high altitudes had affected her, and she was sleep-deprived with long flights and early starts for weeks. She had begun the contract under par, recovering from a long bout of bronchitis—a weakness inherited from her mother that was inclined to disrupt her life during damp winters. When she set off in January she was still a little weak, but not enough to turn down an offer of work that really excited her. Days after her return in March, Lucy noticed a bad swelling over her eye; and then the fever came. Grace, rarely a person to panic, had pushed her into a cab and taken her immediately to the Hospital for Tropical Diseases. She was alive to the possible connection with Lucy’s recent location work, and was insistent she see someone quickly. A swift barrage of blood tests ascertained—without any time lost—what her diarrhea, vomiting, total loss of appetite, and dramatic weight loss had already suggested: she had picked up Chagas’ disease. The telltale parasite, transmitted by a small bug, was easy to detect.

She was extraordinarily lucky, they said, though she didn’t quite feel this herself. Only a small number of cases were acute enough to react so soon in this way; sometimes there were so few symptoms that diagnosis wasn’t possible for years—meaning you would never be entirely free of the disease and it would grow more sinister with time. But fortunately for her, they could start her on the medication immediately, which normally meant a high chance of successful treatment.

Here, however, Lucy’s luck ran out. Although she’d responded in reasonable time to the medication that effectively beat the Chagas’, the vile disease had taken its toll and left her heart ravaged. It was apparent to everyone who knew her; and her gamine beauty had faded beyond recognition so that she was now a ghost of her former self. She was transferred to the Brompton for its cardiological expertise in early May, but the temporal world seemed lost to her in the days that heard the sentence pronounced: she would almost certainly need a new heart.