Of Caverns and Casters ✓ [TLRQ #1]

Chapter 4 - Sean

Blackbread—it's about as tasty as rocks and only slightly softer, but at least it's filling. Three days of traveling and I've managed to limit myself to consuming only seventy-five percent of the loaf overall.

Riveirre tugs her jacket off and lays it flat, her long, moonlight arms bared in a short, puff-sleeved shirt. I'm shocked she didn't have sense enough to bring something warmer, but my gaze chases the shadows playing on her skin.

Her fingers slip into the jacket pocket, drawing out a handful of light grey mushrooms and sprinkling them over the garment. Her eyes are intense as she studies them. Sorting through the collection, she tosses discolored or crumbled ones to the side. Once she's satisfied, she snaps the stems off, setting them with her pile of trash. A strand of inky hair falls across her face, and she brushes it back as she straightens.

Reaching around the fire, she deposits five of the caps into my lap.

I look at her askew. "What are these for?" It's like she thinks I don't eat enough.

"I can take them back if you don't want them."

I scowl, thinking back to the lab.

We pulled an all-nighter. At least, I had. I wasn't sure if she'd stayed in the lab. I wasn't really paying attention to her.

But, at some point in the morning, she cocked her head at me. Didn't say anything, just looked. A few minutes later, she left.

When she came back, she dropped a biscuit on the counter beside me.

I glanced up. 'What's this?'

'Breakfast.'

Her hand holds steady over the fire, slowly rotating a mushroom skewered on a scalpel. The waves of her hair have crashed in around her face once more, but this time she leaves them be. The mushroom spins. Spins again.

I'm staring again. I glance away, searching for some piece of conversation to cover my blunder. "So do you usually carry random funguses in your pocket?"

Her eyes lift to meet mine, then drop back to her task. "Fungi. I harvested them while we were walking."

Her food has puffed out to look like some kind of angry monster. She pops it off her improvised skewer and into her mouth. Preparing the next one, she maintains her downward gaze, eyes fixed on her hands and clearly disinterested in me. "They taste better cooked."

Her brusque words remind me of the pile of food in my lap. I fumble for my pocket-knife, flick the blade out, impale a cap, and shove it over the fire. As I spin it, the space for words disappears.

It's silent. Just like the last two months. Better than bickering at least. She doesn't seem to know how to talk without arguing, sneaking in those little needles. Just because she got her masterate at sixteen doesn't make her anything special, or at least not as special as she thinks. After all, we're the same age, and I already have my doktorate.

My mushroom finishes cooking. The crisp, earthy taste breaks over my tongue in satisfying contrast to the blackbread I've been eating. I wonder if she'll pick more tomorrow.

I watch the sparks. Better than staring at her—again. I pop a mushroom into my mouth and stab another to start roasting it.

She puts her skewer away, and my gaze slips back to her. Done cooking, she stares at the wall like some hidden message lies there, waiting for her to decode it. The firm set of her delicate jaw is strangely demanding. I can't shake the notion that if she were to truly smile, her expression would light up completely, the grin transforming her face from the somber and businesslike girl that I know into a warm, enthusiastic person.

Not that I have evidence to back that up.

Her gaze flicks to mine, just long enough to let me know I've been caught, then back to the wall. And we're back to where we started.

When she finishes eating, Mushroom Girl beds down, pulling her jacket close around her shoulders. She keeps her back to the fire—and me. After I eat my last fungus, I roll into my blanket and pretend to go to sleep. As I lay there, heat against my back, I try not to think so I can actually drift off.

It doesn't work. As usual.

Instead, in trying so desperately to ignore my thoughts, I end up rehashing everything. How the Blistering Death's sixty-one percent infection rate is shockingly high. How, in the slums alone, nine thousand are estimated to already be dead. How likely it is that less than a fifth of the city will survive.

How there's absolutely nothing I can do about it.

I tried. As much as I detest the little city that pretends to be a top-class research town, I tried to help. Being a doktor—the penultimate level of education a scientist can earn—that specializes in neuro-alkemi, I had access to some of the few files they'd gathered on the Death. I was able to analyze the possible effects the sickness has on patients' brains and got to see just how bad it is. How dangerous. With the resources at our disposal, there's little that can be done. For now, they can make the sick a little more comfortable. Do their best to keep them quarantined. That's the whole treatment plan—they can't save the ones already condemned. I wasn't going to stay there and let myself fall into the numbers of the dead.

I roll over. I don't want to go back to my topside hometown, but Xela is the only place that might take me right now. Though I'll be trading the steam-thick technology of below-ground for the hand pumps and plows of above ground, at least those people know me. And don't know about the plague.

But first, I have to get out of these tunnels, and to do that, I have to make sure I'm not a carrier.

I was walking. Left, right, left, right. Tap, tap, tap, tapping on the side of my leg. The stench, the sights, the occasional scramble of rats. Or something worse.

Tap, tap, tap, tapping. Turn the corner and—

Schlick! I tripped.

Bloated and blistered, a child's mutilated body lay on the cobblestone. A horde of flies burst from where my shoe collided with the corpse's gory side.

I retched.

Then I ran.

As soon as I exited the district itself, I yanked out the warm boots I was saving for winter above-ground and kicked off the bloody shoes I was wearing.

I shudder, forgetting that I was pretending to sleep. Oh, well. She's most likely asleep anyway.

I'll be out too. Eventually.