Burning Bright

The streets were still busy with costumed figures, despite the impending storm. A cloaked trio was visible in the window of a restaurant, masks set aside to let them eat; a bedraggled pair—male and female? no, two women—were obviously on their way home after a long night of revelry, the skirts of their straight gowns hiked up to make walking easier, their feathers drooping. Yet another indistinct shape wrapped in a cloak lay sound asleep under a bench in one of the little parks, mask tucked under its head for a pillow. Others were just starting the day—another Avellar, a striding Baron Vortex, an odd shape like an egg with trousers that everyone else seemed to recognize—and Lioe was suddenly glad of Gelsomina’s mask. It made her feel less alien, among the bright maskers, more as though she belonged on Burning Bright. And I want to belong here, she realized suddenly. I’d like to be a part of this. She shook the thought away as impractical, left her mask hanging around her neck where it couldn’t tempt her, and kept walking.

As she came up on the Underface helipad, she saw the lights flashing to warn of an incoming flight, and then recognized the figure sitting on the bench at the edge of the pad. At least I can ask him about my hat. “Good morning, Ransome,” she called, and the man on the bench lifted a hand in answer. He did not speak, and Lioe wondered if she’d offended him. He looked up as she approached, met her eyes fully, and she was shocked by his pale face and the brown shadows like ugly bruises under his eyes.

“Jesus, you look awful,” she said, and bit her tongue as he managed a wry grin.

“Tactful.”

There was something wrong with Ransome’s voice; even the one word came thin and breathless, as though he had been running. “Are you all right?” she began, and realized in the same instant what it had to be. White-sickness was most common in HsaioiAn, among jericho-humans, but it was not unknown in the nonaligned worlds, or in the Republic. And this was white-sickness, no question about it: like all pilots, she’d had enough basic medical training to recognize the symptoms.

Ransome read that recognition in her face, and his grin skewed even more. “I have what I need at home,” he said, and Lioe had to lean closer to catch the strangled words. “The doctors changed the medication; I’m not as stable as I used to be. So I got caught short again.”

Lioe nodded, wordlessly, hearing the voice of the school’s medical trainer droning in her mind. White-sickness—pneumatic histopathy, also known as lung-rot oruhanjao, drown-yourself, in HsaioiAn—is classified as a dangerous condition less because it is fatal, which it is, than because it is contagious until treated. Once proper treatment is begun, the danger of infection is over, but the damage to the victim is irreversible. Most planets require a certificate of treatment before customs will admit an infected person; pilots are advised to adopt the same precaution. There had been more—details of how death occurred, how and why simple organ transplants inevitably failed, the mechanisms by which the disease altered the lung tissue, slowly dissolving it into a thick white mucus, so that the patient drowned in body fluids even as the lungs themselves stopped working—but she did her best to push that aside. “Do you want me to come with you?” she said cautiously, and did her best to keep her voice normal.

Ransome looked for a moment as though he would refuse, but then made a face. “Yes,” he said, and then, with an effort, “Thank you.”

“No problem,” Lioe said, and seated herself on the bench beside him. But it was a problem, it was a hell of a problem, and she found herself filled with an irrational fury. How could he be sick—how dare he?—just when she’d found—She stopped abruptly, closed off that line of thought. Found what? You barely know him, except through the Game. Just because he showed you the imaging system he uses doesn’t mean that he’d want to teach you—or that you could learn, or even that you want to.