Chapter 169 The Plague Ship
POV: Isla Reid | Southwark Bank, Thames Dock
She had not stayed at the shelter.
Callum had redirected her to medical prep and she had agreed and then she had loaded her kit and followed the extraction route at a distance, because she was a nurse and there were children coming out of a Hermetic facility and the idea of sitting in the Rookeries waiting for them to arrive while she could be at the point of extraction was not something her hands or her training were willing to accept.
She reached the dock as the children were being loaded onto the first boat, which was when she saw what the facility had done to them.
She had treated packless wolves for two years. She had seen silver poisoning, feral regression, malnutrition, the particular damage that the system inflicted on people it had decided were expendable. She thought she understood what she was going to find.
The understanding she had arrived with was not adequate.
Three of the twelve children had the grey-pallor and tremor pattern of magical poisoning, which was different from silver poisoning in mechanism but similar in presentation, the body's systems disrupted by sustained exposure to external magical manipulation at levels they were not built to process. In adults, magical poisoning at this level took months to produce visible symptoms. These were children. Their systems were smaller and less resilient and the exposure had been sustained and the symptoms were advanced.
She went to the worst case first, which was a boy of about eight with dark circles so pronounced they looked like bruising and hands that wouldn't stop shaking even when she held them steady. She ran through the assessment she could do without equipment, pulse irregular, breathing shallow, skin temperature wrong in the way that suggested the body was diverting resources away from the extremities.
She had silver antidote in her kit. She had wolfsbane compound. She had the standard packless wolf emergency supplies she carried everywhere.
She did not have anything specific to magical poisoning, because magical poisoning in children had not existed as a clinical category before tonight, because no one had been doing this to children before tonight, or at least no one she had known to prepare for.
She worked with what she had.
The three worst cases got everything available in her kit that could address the overlapping symptoms, the fever management, the circulatory support, the anti-inflammatory compounds that would at least slow the cascade if they couldn't stop it. She moved between them on the rocking boat with the efficiency of someone who had learned to work in inadequate conditions because adequate conditions had never been an option.
The Parliament guards were on the dock. She was aware of them the way she was aware of everything peripheral when she was working, present in her attention but not the focus of it.
The second child she had categorized as serious rather than critical deteriorated while she was treating the third.
She felt it before she saw it, the change in the quality of the child's breathing, the subtle shift that her body had learned to register over two years of working with patients who sometimes crossed a line that medical care couldn't bring them back from. She turned and moved to the child immediately but the movement was already too late, because the line had been crossed in the seconds she had been facing the other direction.
The child was six years old. Female. Hybrid, werewolf and something else that the facility's experiments had introduced into her biology that Isla had no name for yet.
She worked for four minutes. She did not stop because stopping was not what you did.
The child died in her arms at the four minute mark.
Isla held her for a moment, the small weight of her, and then she set her down carefully and pulled the emergency blanket over her and turned back to the two remaining critical cases because turning back was the only thing available and the living needed her more than the dead did right now.
"We were too late for some of them," she said, to no one and to everyone on the boat at the same time.
The Parliament guards were boarding the second boat. She could hear the sounds of fighting starting on the dock.
She kept working.