Page 210 of Mates for the Raskarrans #1-6

But even the strongest men can be brought low by an infection, and when Dad started coughing up great gobs of yellow phlegm, he had to admit that something was wrong.

“I’ll go to the medic, kiddo. Don’t you worry. They’ll have something to sort me out.”

I remember going to the medic centre with him, and then I’m there, the forest around me replaced by clinical white walls, the grim features of the raskarrans swapped for harried looking humans.

Medics rushing back and forth, so few of them compared to the number of bottom tier workers looking for help.

Across from me, a man clutches his hand to his chest, cloth wadded around it.

Blood has just started seeping through it.

Next to us, a few seats down, a woman wails as her baby lies limp in her arms, barely breathing.

This is before Mercenia banned births without a licence.

Before they started slipping birth control into our food.

It takes a long time, but eventually Dad is called.

He goes to the examination room, sitting me on a chair in the corner as he sits on a strange high bed, taking off his shirt so the medic can listen to his breathing.

I wait for the medic to say it’s nothing to worry about, that Dad will be fine, but when he puts his instruments down, his expression is grim.

“You’ve got an infection,” he says. “A bad one.”

Bottom tier folks aren’t educated, but if there’s one thing we all know to fear, it’s infection. My little heart thunders in my chest, tears pooling in my eyes. Even Dad pales a little, his usual smile vanishing from his face.

“Is there something you can give me?” he says, the words quiet, pleading.

The medic looks at Dad, then looks at me. Sighs. Reaches for a key in his pocket and uses it to unlock a cupboard.

“I can give you something, but you have to listen, and listen close,” he says, voice low and urgent.

“I’m going to give you two medicines. Blue and red.

” He shows Dad the bottles in turn, pointing to their caps like we’re so stupid we needed it spelling out as plain as possible.

“Blue you take when you want, up to six times a day. When the cough gets really bad, it will ease the pain, soothe the airways. Make things a bit more tolerable for a while. Try to save your doses for the nighttime because everything’s worse at night.

Don’t want to get to nine o’clock, hacking your guts up, and have taken your last dose hours before. ”

Dad nods along to all this, listening with a solemn sort of intensity. I mimic his pose, nodding along with him.

“Red you take twice a day, just twice a day. Once in the morning, once in the evening. It’s not going to feel like it’s doing anything, but you keep taking it, regardless.

Blue treats the symptoms, red treats the illness.

Blue will make you feel a little better in the short term, but red is what’s going to make you well again.

But listen real close to this part - you take your whole course.

That’s this whole bottle. Three or four days in, you’re going to start to mend.

You’ll think you’re past the worst of it and you don’t need medicines anymore.

But you’ve got to keep taking it. Take it twice a day every day until that bottle is empty, okay?

Or that sickness is going to come back twice as mean, twice as hard to shift, and then there’ll be nothing I can do for you. Understand?”

“Yessir,” Dad says, so I say it too.

I lurch awake, the medic’s office fading around me, the trees and the raskarrans coming back into view. We’ve slowed, I realise, the raskarrans passing food amongst themselves as they walk. A hurried meal, shadowed all the time by the threat that’s somewhere out there in the trees.

Jestaw hands a little of his food to me. I’m not hungry, but I know I need the food to keep my strength up, so I put the morsel in my mouth, chew and chew until finally I can swallow it down.

Then we’re off again, the rocking rhythm of Jestaw’s steps sending me right back into my memory dreams.

It’s four days later, and just like the doctor said, Dad is back up and about, feeling much more his usual self. The same day, the red topped bottle disappears out of our cabinet.

“But the doctor said you have to take it ‘til it’s finished,” I wail.

Dad chuckles, putting an arm round me, pausing to cough before he could speak. A mild cough, not the hacking, rattling cough of four days before.

“Doctor only said to take it all because he doesn’t want me selling it.

I’m fine, kiddo. I’m all better.” He tweaks my nose, bending close so I can tweak his back.

“There’s a bright side to everything, remember?

Been struggling to work out what the bright side was to all this.

This cough has been pretty wretched, but now I’m all better, I can take this medicine and give it to Mrs Walinski.

Her little boy has been coughing, too, and there’s enough medicine left over for him to get better, just like me.

That’s a pretty good bright side, don’t you think? ”

I nod and smile, but I don’t feel it the same way I usually do. Even at seven years old, I can sense that this is a mistake, a terrible sense of foreboding coming over me as I watch Dad whistle as he heads out of our house to take what’s left of his medicine to our neighbour.

Then the dream shifts, and it’s some days later, and Dad has taken a real turn for the worse.

He’s too weak to get out of bed, to go to his shift, and I’m too terrified to leave his side to go to mine.

We’ll be punished, I know we’ll be punished, but I just stay at his side, bringing him glasses of lukewarm water. Mopping his brow with a damp towel.

“Shouldn’t have given those tablets away, kiddo,” he says on a wheeze between coughing fits. “Don’t you be like me. You make sure you always take your medicine.”

But there’s no medicine here in the forest to take.

Not like those little bottles with red and blue caps, anyway.

Maybe Grace would know what they were, maybe between her and Shemza and Sally they’d be able to figure out a raskarran equivalent.

But these guys haven’t even given me medicine for my head, they aren’t going to start worrying about this cough.

I’m half asleep, barely conscious when at last we arrive at the destination these raskarrans have been heading for.

I know it before the trees clear, before their village comes into view, because I see them relax.

Jestaw’s shoulders drop down, his arms softening around me, the grim set of his lips lifting a little as relief floods his features.

Then the trees thin out, and we emerge into a large clearing. I look round, expecting to see huts similar to Walset’s or Gregar’s. But in the glimpses I get between the bodies surrounding me, I only see clear, open space.

Then the raskarrans around me separate a little, relaxing their guard now they’re so close to home. The view ahead of me opens up, and I see where we’re going, the reason why there aren’t any huts here.

It’s a building. A proper concrete building. Large enough for there to be many rooms inside it. It looks so odd, so out of place, that for a long moment I think I must still be dreaming. But no, it’s there - grey and straight and so very wrong against the backdrop of the trees.

Not just a building. A Mercenia made building.

I know because of the symbol on the front entrance. The logo that Mercenia brand everything with. Our clothes, our tools, our homes. In case we didn’t know who we belong to.

What the fuck is a Mercenia building doing in the middle of the raskarran forest?