“Ever since coming to the clinic, Miss Hannah didn’t wake up a single time. Her only relative I heard about was her mother, who died before her. Who gave permission to do an autopsy on her?” Misha asked softly, voice trembling as she looked up at Nel. “You think it’s okay to carve up someone’s body just because there’s no one to tell you not to?!” By the time she finished, she was shouting.
Hannah had suffered so much from the plague, but now she was finally at peace. Misha couldn’t see cutting apart her body as anything less than desecrating it. Even if she knew the value a body like this would provide for research, she couldn’t stand by without saying anything.
“Well, yes. But that’s not the only reason,” Nel responded, voice subdued. There was no sign of surprise in him at Misha’s shouting.
As an old man, he had lived many times longer than Misha had. His methods had faced criticism plenty of times in the past. He had been a part of this very conversation more times than he could count. He was more than comfortable navigating these waters.
“Judging by the timeline of her illness, her mother was probably the first to fall victim to the Red Eye plague during this outbreak. Learning from the last plague, the people were instructed very clearly to inform the kingdom if anyone were to die of suspicious causes. And yet when her mother died, this woman was too scared to say anything. She kept it a secret.” Nel’s voice echoed from the stone walls of the empty room. The dignified, austere tone in which he spoke helped cool Misha’s head.
“But then the daughter... Hannah contracted the disease. As badly as she was suffering, she had hidden the terrifying truth of the plague in her mother’s death. She couldn’t very well leave home herself. She was suffering so much and overwhelmed by fear for having ignored the commands of the kingdom. Among all those feelings, she also seemed overwhelmed by remorse.” Nel could only imagine what kind of fear, what kind of despair she had felt as she lay wasting away at her dead mother’s side.
He held out a piece of cloth to Misha. It was an old scarf. It was old and faded, but something seemed to be drawn on it using ashes from a spent hearth. Closer inspection revealed they were letters, spelling out the words “I’m sorry” over and over and over, together with a prayer for salvation.
“‘Please make the plague go away’...” Misha gulped as she read the words aloud.
Literacy wasn’t especially common among the regular population. One could take what she had written as the best way she had known how to write a wish that she be cured.
“She was supposed to be unconscious the whole time, but her hands were always folded in prayer. I’d pull them apart when I was wiping her down to keep her clean, but then the next time I saw her they’d be folded again...” A tear rolled down Misha’s face. She reached out and put a hand on Hannah’s cheek. “She’s so cold...”
There was no soul left in this body, but it still served as proof that the woman named Hannah once lived. Misha could tell from the wrinkles around her eyes that she must have smiled and laughed a lot. Even after wasting away from disease, there was still plenty of muscle on her arms, proof she had worked hard every day.
“Miss Hannah... Please teach us how we can fight the Red Eye plague,” Misha whispered as she closed her eyes and folded her hands in prayer. There was such as much heartfelt sincerity in her words as there had been in the prayer she offered for her own mother.
I wish I could have heard her voice.
She had heard from Hannah’s neighbors that she had been a great singer.
“Okay. Are you ready now?” Nel asked once Misha had said her piece.
“Yes. Please go ahead, Grandpa Nel. Show me what Hannah has left to say to us.”
Misha wasn’t the only one who was there to witness the autopsy, though with how busy the medical professionals were, coupled with the cultural taboo against dissecting bodies, ultimately only Conan and a small handful of other doctors joined them. This was actually the third autopsy they were performing, so for Nel and the other People of the Forest, this one was more to confirm what they had found than to discover anything new.
“There are quite a few more colonies in the lungs than I expected. It took quite some time for her to be brought to the clinic, so perhaps the parasite had more time to grow.”
Misha looked down at Nel’s work from the side. “They’re quite a bit bigger than the ones we saw in the karas. I can see them with just my eyes.”
While the parasites in the karas were too small to be observed with the naked eye, the ones they extracted from Hannah’s lungs were almost twice the size, large enough that she could have picked them up with a pair of tweezers.
“The abundance of nutrition they could extract from their much larger host must have led to them prospering as well. That would also explain why the parasite’s behavior is so much more complex in humans. In karas, they never seem to reach the creature’s brain,” Nel responded, carefully placing one of the insects on a glass dish with his tweezers.
“I see...” Watching the specimen as it was placed there, Misha caught a faintly sour smell in the air. It seemed strangely familiar. “Oh, it was Miss Mary,” she murmured after some thought. With how empty the room was, her soft murmur quickly drew the attention of the whole room to her.
“Miss Mary? You mean the woman you brought here first?” Ryne immediately asked.
“Er... Y-Yes...” she replied meekly, faltering at the sudden attention.
“Why do you mention her? She is still alive, is she not?” Conan asked, evidently confused.
“I smelled something sour just now and was trying to remember why it was so familiar. I smelled something similar mixed in with the smell of blood from Miss Mary’s lung hemorrhage. I suppose the parasite gives off that smell...”
“A sour smell? Really?” Nel asked, bringing the dish close to his face and sniffing.
Ryne repeated the action after, but neither of them seemed convinced. “I suppose now that you mention it...maybe? But you sure have a sharp sense of smell, Misha.”
Each of the observers in the room gave it a shot, but none of them could really pick up the scent to the same degree that Misha could.
“I suppose it’s not really important. I just thought it was strange,” Misha said, not even sure why she had taken such notice of the smell. But Nel still looked at her with a heavy frown.
“What’s wrong, old man?” Noticing the look on his face, Ryne called out to him, bringing the old man back to reality.