"Boy. Who are you looking for?"
A nurse appeared at his elbow, already moving, already steering him sideways without waiting for an answer. "You're standing in the way. Can't you see the nurses are trying to work? Are you here looking for your parents?" He pressed a mask into Lucien's hand without breaking stride. "This is required. Especially now."
Lucien put the mask on. "I'm looking for Rocco Trafalgar. He's a doctor here."
The nurse's manner shifted slightly, not warmer, but more organised. "Doctor Rocco. Right. Find a seat and I'll let him know someone's asking for him. Name?"
"Lucien. Lucien Vosgrave."
The nurse disappeared into the ward. Lucien looked at the seating area and didn't bother. Every chair had someone in it. He found a stretch of wall and leaned against it instead, watching the room work.
"Lucien."
He turned. Lira was coming down the corridor toward him, clipboard under her arm, moving with the particular efficiency of someone who had stopped wasting motion weeks ago. She was thinner than he remembered. The dark circles under her eyes were the kind that didn't come from a bad night.
She caught him by the wrist before he could speak and pulled him after her. "You shouldn't be out there even with the mask. Come."
She brought him through the ward and into a room with a small desk, two chairs, and a door marked Dr. Trafalgar. She sat him down, filled a cup from a jug on the desk, and looked at him properly for the first time. Something in her expression settled into something that wasn't quite a smile but was adjacent to one.
"Look at you." She sat across from him. "You were such a small thing when you turned up here. How long ago was that? How old are you now? Fourteen? Fifteen?"
"Fifteen. Sixteen in a few months."
She nodded slowly. "Almost four years."
"You look exhausted, Lira. Are you eating? Sleeping at all?"
She waved it off, but not dismissively. "We manage. We have to." She set the clipboard on the desk. "It started about a year ago. Cases of severe coughing, all across the city, all at once. Before we understood what we were dealing with, one in every hundred was dying. We still haven't found the source." She said it plainly, the way people said things they had already turned over too many times to be shocked by them anymore. Then she straightened slightly. "Rocco is in a meeting. Wait here until he's done and we'll take you back to the house. I'll cook something. And there's someone there you should meet."
Lucien looked at her for a moment. Then he picked up the cup of water and held it out to her.
"Drink that before you go. Can't have you getting sick before you've finished treating everyone else."
She looked at the cup. Then she took it.
Rocco arrived an hour later. Lucien had counted without meaning to, an old habit from training, time measured in intervals. The man who came through the door was recognisably the same person he had met at fifteen, but condensed somehow, like something had been pressing down on him steadily for a year and hadn't let up. He stopped when he saw Lucien.
"Well." He looked at his wife, then back. "He got tall."
"He did," Lira agreed.
Rocco pulled the second chair around and dropped into it with the weight of someone whose feet had been going since before sunrise. He studied Lucien the way a doctor studied anything, quickly and without being obvious about it. "You're not sick."
"No."
"Good. Keep it that way. How long are you in Flevance?"
"I was leaving tomorrow."
Rocco glanced at Lira. Something passed between them that Lucien didn't try to read. "Come back with us first," Rocco said. "One evening. Lira hasn't cooked for anyone but patients in months, and she'll be insufferable if you leave without letting her."
The words had barely left Rocco's mouth before Lira's hand found his waist and pinched, hard. He didn't flinch. The expression on his face suggested he had accounted for this.
"Anyway." Lira moved toward the door with the composure of someone who had won on points regardless. "Law will be waiting for us."
Lucien stood. "Law. Boy or girl?"
Rocco laughed, the first genuine one Lucien had heard from him since he walked in. "Boy. I knew the name would do that. Lira chose it, after a character in some book she refuses to let me read in peace." He held the door open. "Trafalgar D. Water Law. Born the year you first came through here, as it turns out. Lira was already pregnant and we hadn't realised it yet. He just turned four." He glanced back at his wife with something quiet and certain in it. "Come on. Let's get you two introduced."
Lira passed him with a look that addressed his earlier remark without requiring words.
They left through the front of the hospital and walked out into the evening. The sun had already gone. The streets of Flevance held their particular quality at this hour, the white stone catching what was left of the light, the amber ash still drifting in slow diagonals the same way it had been when he arrived that morning.
Lucien watched it settle on the ground around them as they walked. On the rooftops. On the shoulders of the few people still moving between buildings. It landed on everything and stayed there, fine and pale and constant.
He said it without deciding to. "This could be the cause."
Rocco slowed. "You think Amber Lead is the problem? It has been part of this kingdom forever. Why would people only start getting sick now?"
Lucien shrugged. "I don't know. I'm not a doctor. But breathing something in from birth, living inside it your whole life, it seems like that would add up eventually. It was just a thought."
Rocco nodded, but he had gone somewhere else behind his eyes. Whatever Lucien had said out loud without meaning to had caught on something in the man's thinking and pulled.
They walked the rest of the street in silence.
************************************
Remember 1 Chapter For Every 50 Power Stones. Please Do Support.