Nel gave a short laugh as he saw her staring so intently. “The eggs aren’t even a millimeter across. They are basically impossible to see with the naked eye. If I hadn’t happened to see some of the live parasites coming out onto the skin to lay their eggs, I never would have found them.”
Nel continued with his dissection. Stomach, guts, liver, and kidneys. Bladder, reproductive organs. Heart...
“And here are the lungs.” Nel extracted and placed the lungs on the table, longer and thinner in shape than the pictures Misha had seen of human lungs in books.
“This is where the parasite that causes the Red Eye plague gathers, right?”
“Correct. Now, let’s take a look.”
Misha watched nervously as Nel’s blade sliced into the light pink flesh. Inside, she saw a large number of small, rash-like lesions, each about two or three millimeters across.
Misha tilted her head in confusion, surprised at how small the lesions were. “That’s it?”
“Yes, these are the colonies. Let’s look inside.” Nel stuck the smallest of his scalpels into one of the lesions, peeling back its surface. The inside was filled with a whitish, translucent substance. Misha frowned, leaning in closer. Seeing she couldn’t quite tell what she was looking at, Nel handed her a small tube the size of his palm.
“What’s this?”
“A portable microscope. It’ll help you see a lot better.”
“A microscope?” Misha echoed the unfamiliar word, accepting the cylinder. A quick inspection showed there was glass on each end of it.
“You can think of those glass ends like lenses for a pair of glasses. Anyway, let me show you. You put your eye on this end.”
Because she wasn’t sure of what she was doing, Nel took the device back and showed her how to use it.
So I look through one of the lenses and point the other one at the thing I want to examine. I wonder why the tube spins like that?
“I’ve adjusted it now, so just take a look like I did.” After he handed the microscope back to her, Misha looked through it as Nel had shown her.
“What?!” The sight nearly made her jump. When looking at it with just her eyes, the colony looked like an unidentifiable white mass, but now...
Misha took a deep breath, trying to calm down enough to stop her hands from shaking, then looked through the microscope again.
“Wow...”
She saw a world unlike anything she’d ever seen with the naked eye. The unidentifiable white mass was actually a bundle of little white eggs. There were so many stuck together that they seemed like a single substance. In addition, she could see translucent worms among the eggs, and upon closer inspection, she could tell they were squirming around.
“This is the parasite?” Misha asked, looking up at Nel bewildered. They were so small, she doubted she could even pick them up with her fingers. It was hard to believe something so minuscule was so deadly.
“Yes. That’s the little bug that started it all,” he replied with a quiet nod.
On closer inspection, they did indeed seem to be living things. They had something resembling eyes and a mouth, and she could make out shapes that appeared to be organs within their translucent bodies. The way they writhed and wriggled made it clear they were moving intentionally.
“This little bug started it all,” Misha repeated. The faces of all the people she had seen suffering came up in the back of her head. People who struggled to breathe, who suffered with intense fevers, who had those red lines snaking across their skin, whose eyes had gone bloodred...
“Okay, now we’ve confirmed they’re there. On to the real show.” Nel clapped her on the shoulder as she fell silent. “They should be ready for us now. Let’s take a look at how they look in a human host.”
Nel began to push Misha from behind, urging her out of the room while signaling the others that had appeared to clean up after them.
“The real show? What’s next?” Misha asked as Nel led her out of the building.
Once they started going behind the clinic, Misha finally realized where they were headed and immediately tensed up. They were heading to a small church, a place where they prepared the bodies of those who had died to the Red Eye plague for funeral services, and then sent them off for burial.
In order to stop the spread of the plague, families of the victims had been forbidden from taking their bodies home, so all of the dead, rich and poor alike, passed through there. Until the People of the Forest came and revealed the cause of the plague, many families hadn’t even been able to see their loved ones before their deaths.
“A rather precious individual has gifted us her body, so it is time to do some research,” Nel whispered as he led her to a room inside the church.
Misha recalled what Ryne had told her when he first met her in Redford: If she had done an autopsy on one of the victims of the plague, she would have recognized the cause of it.
One of the people who passed away...?
Misha remembered the face of a particular woman. She was one of the first patients to be brought in, a middle-aged woman living together with her elderly mother. They were quite close and had no other family between them.
“She had told us her mother wasn’t doing well. After a few days passed, we realized we hadn’t seen either of them for a few days, so we went to make sure they were okay,” one of the neighbors said, the one who had discovered them. News of the Red Eye plague returning had reminded him the mother and daughter hadn’t been seen recently.
The mother had already passed, and the daughter had collapsed at her side, unconscious, covered in red lines, her eyes bloodred. She had still been breathing, but only barely. Brought to the infirmary, despite best efforts at treatment, she had never regained consciousness. Misha never even heard her voice. She had tried to give the woman some medicine, but she hadn’t had the strength to swallow anymore, so Misha could only watch helplessly as she continued to deteriorate.
The morning of the day before, she had quietly passed away. Everyone sent her off with tears, hoping she would at least now be in a world without suffering.
“Miss Hannah?”
In the middle of the empty, sterile room, that same woman now lay in front of her. Her face was pale and strangely peaceful, as if she were asleep. She looked so much like Misha’s own mother had on that fateful day.