The "strategy room" was getting messier and messier.

  We'd been meeting here for a week, the four of us, trying to solve a problem that none of us was experienced in. Maps covered the scarred wooden table, marked in red ink. Infection zones spreading across the Sump like wildfire. Three sectors now. Eight hundred people inside them. Three hundred and forty already showing symptoms.

  Nyssara stood at the window with her arms crossed, deep in thought. I could see it in the tension along her shoulders, her fingers fidgeting the hilt of her blade.

  Lillian sat at the head of the table, sorting through supply ledgers with the mechanical efficiency of someone who hadn't slept in three days. Her hands were stained with Sump dirt and cheap ink.

  Silas stood near the door looking worried. Reaching for something in his pocket and stopping himself. Brass eyes didn't itch, but his hands hadn't learned that yet.

  "The infection rate has increased again since yesterday," I said, spreading my hands across the map. "Three new cases reported in the merchant district this morning."

  Nyssara didn't turn from the window. "What are you proposing?"

  "Containment. We seal the infected sectors. No one in or out. Controlled resource distribution through designated checkpoints. We let the plague burn itself out in isolation while we focus resources on protecting the uninfected population."

  The room went quiet.

  "That's a death sentence, Yozi," Lillian said, her pencil finally stopping on the ledger. "The sectors you're describing contain nearly a thousand people. When we first met, you asked me if I expected quarantine. Well, I didn't excpect to be present while you proposed it."

  "Eight hundred and seventeen as of this morning. Three hundred and forty infected. Four hundred and seventy-seven exposed but not yet symptomatic." My eyes were locked onto the red on the map. "If we act now, we contain the damage to these three sectors. If we wait, the infection spreads. Twelve hundred become three thousand, and soon ten thousand."

  "All the people inside the containment zone." Nyssara's voice was dangerously quiet. She still hadn't turned. "What happens to them?"

  "Medical support where possible. But the primary focus shifts to the uninfected population. We can't save everyone. We save who we can."

  Now she turned.

  "Those are people, Yozi." She stepped away from the window, her boots deliberate against the stone floor. "Grandmother Isis taught three generations to read. Mr. Hartmann made furniture that lasted fifty years. The twins, Petra and Hans, they just turned seven." Her voice held steady through all of it. "I know their names."

  I did too. Lillian had taught them to me. But the only thing I could do with those names was know them.

  "Yes they all have names," I said. "But the infection rate is exponential. Every day we delay means more names in the red."

  "So we abandon them. Lock the door and walk away because the math says it's efficient."

  "The math doesn't say anything. It's just a means to grasp reality. We save the many, or we lose everyone trying to save the few."

  Her ceramic mug shattered against the table. Fragments scattered across the red markings on the map. It reminded me of how a pool of blood full of broken teeth looked in the arena.

  "You can't feel their suffering," she said in a quiet tone. Quiet Nyssara was worse than shouting Nyssara. "All you can do is count."

  I felt Malgrin flinch somewhere in the back of my mind, even though my face didn't change.

  "She's right," Malgrin said. "You know she's right."

  I didn't respond to either of them.

  Lillian let out a long, slow breath and set her pencil down carefully. "A middle ground," she said, cutting through the tension with the heavy calm she used to manage panicked crowds. "We prepare the containment barriers as an emergency option, but we don't drop them yet. Give me a few days to run targeted evacuations for the unexposed. Let us try to save them before we lock the door."

  And Nyssara was looking at me with an expression I'd never seen before, and hoped I'd never see again.

  "I'll accept Lillian's suggestion," she said flatly. "Because refusing means accepting your plan by default." She straightened, pulling her hands from the table. "But understand this. Those are people in those sectors. Hopes and dreams and fears are not reflected in a 1 or 0 variable."

  She left without another word. The door closed quietly.

  Silas shifted uncomfortably. Lillian rubbed her eyes, her attention already drifting back to the crushing weight of her ledgers. I stood alone at the table, surrounded by maps marked with red ink and the fragments of a shattered mug.

  "You should go after her," Malgrin said.

  I knew I should. And I wanted to. But I couldn't think of a single thing to say that wouldn't make it worse. So I sat in the empty strategy room and stared at the map, and tried to feel something about the red ink spreading across it.

  The numbness that made me effective also made me a monster. And Nyssara had started accepting this.

  The next three days became grey and rhythmical.

  We worked together, coordinating plague response with Lillian's evacuation efforts, feeding intelligence to Damian's increasingly erratic court, watching the red lines on the map creep outward despite everything. Nyssara and I moved through the motions of partnership with the precision of people who'd practiced the same routine a hundred times and had stopped feeling it.

  That kind of distance that hadn't existed between us before. She still stood beside me in meetings, still covered my back in dangerous situations, still shared the safe house. But she didn't reach for my hand anymore. Slept on the far side of the bed with a careful space between us that felt larger than the few of mattress that were actually there.

  Our relationship's degradation was accelerating. At current trajectory, within two to three weeks, emotional severance would be absolute.

  I hated that I thought about it that way. But I couldn't stop.

  On the third morning I found her in the kitchen before dawn, staring at a cup of tea that had gone cold.

  "The Hartmanns died last night," she said without looking up. "All of them. The brass finished its work around midnight. Lillian was there. She held Grandmother Isis's hand until the end. Said the old woman's eyes were still moving, even after everything else had frozen. She was still hoping someone would come."

  Her lips trembled. I knew I should say something. Comfort her. Demonstrate that I understood the weight of what she was telling me by expressing grief.

  "The infection rate in that sector has dropped by seventeen percent," I said instead.

  "Their deaths will slow the spread to the neighboring blocks."

  Nyssara looked up.

  The expression on her face was one I knew I'd remember for a long time.

  This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  "I'm going to pretend you didn't say that." Her voice was flat. Controlled with everything she had. "I'm going to pretend you didn't just tell me that an entire family dying is good news because it improves your statistics. And you're going to pretend you understand why I'm upset."

  "Nyssara."

  "Six metres apart, Yozi." She stood, leaving the cold tea on the table. "That's where we are now. Even when we're standing next to each other." She paused at the door. "When you figure out how to feel something again, let me know. Until then, we have work. And that's all we have."

  She left, the door closed quietly again.

  I sat in the kitchen surrounded by the smell of cold tea and the weight of every word I couldn't find, and tried to remember what it felt like to mourn.

  Six metres apart is not that far, right?

  It is completely unreachable.

  I went into the Sump that afternoon alone.

  I went because sitting in the safe house with the distance between us was unbearable in a way I could feel, which meant some part of me was still working, still capable of being hurt, and I wanted to be somewhere that hurt made sense.

  The Upper Terraces' gates were still closed. I had sent word to two gate wardens. Neither had responded. The families Lillian had placed with Copper Quarter contacts were still in the warehouse, still waiting for something to happen.

  I found Lillian at the warehouse entrance, arguing with a man in merchant's clothing who had the look of someone delivering bad news.

  "The owner wants the space back by end of week," she was saying.

  "I understand that. Tell him I need two more weeks and I'll pay double the rate."

  "He doesn't want double the rate. He wants the space. He has buyers."

  "He has buyers for a warehouse in an infected district...?"

  "He has buyers who don't ask questions about what the previous tenants were doing with the space."

  I stepped up beside her.

  The merchant glanced at me and something in my face or my shadow or the way I stood made him take a half-step back without knowing why he'd done it.

  "Tell the owner," I said,

  "that the Bloody Left Hand is personally aware of this property and its current humanitarian function, and that the Empire takes a dim view of landlords who obstruct plague response efforts for personal profit." I let the silence sit for a moment.

  "Tell him I said so specifically."

  The merchant left without another word.

  Lillian watched him go. "That was effective."

  "The Upper Terraces gates are next. I've sent word. If they don't respond by tomorrow morning, I'll go there myself."

  "Will that actually work?"

  "People who close their gates against plague victims are afraid," I said. "Fear responds to something more frightening than what it's already afraid of."

  She was quiet for a moment. Looked at me intensely.

  "You are different today. Something happened."

  "The Hartmanns died."

  "I know that." She looked at me with the steady calm she always had. "How are you taking it?"

  The honest answer was that I didn't know if I was taking it at all. That somewhere inside the machine I was becoming there was still a person who knew the Hartmanns had mattered, who knew the seventeen percent figure was not the right response to a family dying and hadn't been able to stop himself from saying it anyway.

  "I told Nyssara their deaths improved the statistics," I said.

  Lillian closed her eyes briefly. "Yozi."

  "I know."

  "That's not what I was going to say." She opened her eyes. "You knew it was wrong the moment it came out, didn't you?" She touched my arm. "That's not nothing, You are not what you think you are yet.

  "That distinction doesn't help Nyssara."

  "No. But it might help you." She turned back toward the warehouse. "Come on, now! There are forty-seven families inside who need to know someone with authority is paying attention. You can feel terrible about this on your own time."

  I followed her in.

  The families looked up when we entered. Frightened, tired faces. And in some of them, when they saw Lillian, they smiled nonetheless.

  Probably because she knew all their names.

  I started learning them too. Names take longer for me to learn than numbers.

  The warehouse was quieter now that it’s dark. Forty families naturally produced a constant low hum of breathing and shifting and the occasional whispers from all corners, but the talking had stopped. The crying had stopped. The children were tired.

  I sat on a crate near the entrance with Lillian's list in my hands. Forty-seven families. Two hundred and nine names. I had memorized all of them in under fourty minutes, which was faster than I expected. Ages, conditions, family connections, symptom status. This could be important later on, maybe.

  Tam. Seven years old. Early-stage infection. Liked to draw horses.

  I knew this. But I couldn't feel it.

  Then, two cups were set down on wood. Lillian settled onto the crate beside me and pushed one toward my hand. The liquid inside was dark and smelled like someone had burned a field and then strained the ashes cooked the ashes until they tasted even more burned. Which is impossible.

  "Chicory," she said. "One part coffee, three parts optimism."

  I took a sip. It was terrible. I drank it anyway because she'd made it and brought it to me. That was a kind thing to do.

  "You're studying that list like it owes you money," she said, giggling softly.

  "I'm trying to connect the names to something."

  "Something. Like what?"

  "I don't know. Concern. Whatever it is that makes you get up at dawn and hold people's hands for fifteen hours." I set the list down on the crate between us. "I have two hundred and nine names in my head but this is all just letters arranged in a certain order so people can pronounce them.

  She didn't flinch. Lillian just took a sip of her terrible coffee and looked out across the rows of sleeping families.

  "My sister did that," she said.

  "Did what."

  "This… mechanical compassion." She took a sip off her cup.

  "Berna. My older sister. Something happened to her a few years ago. I won't tell you what because it's hers and not mine. But afterwards, she was different. Hollowed out in a way.

  The word landed with specificity. Hollowed out. A structure that looked intact from the outside, with nothing inside holding it up.

  "She forgot how to be a person," Lillian continued with a quiet smile on her face.

  "So she started faking it. She'd smile when the conversation dictated a smile. She'd ask about my day because that's what sisters do. Not because she actually wanted to know the answer. Completely mechanical."

  She glanced at me.

  “...ever felt like that?”

  It was like a rhetorical question but she still gave me time to response.

  "I do."

  "I watched her do it for months. The smiling, the asking, performing to be a human being.”

  “She and I should exchange notes.”

  "I hated it. It felt like I'd lost her and what was left was this… thing wearing her face and going through her routines."

  Across the warehouse, a child coughed in their sleep.

  "What changed?"

  Lillian was quiet for a moment.

  "One morning, Berna brought me tea without being asked. Just appeared with it. Put it down and said, 'You looked tired.' And I could see it in her face.”

  Lilian’s smile widened while she looked up at nothing in specific.

  “The moment she said it, she felt it. It was real."

  Her voice softened. "The faking had built a bridge and her feelings walked across it before she realized the bridge was there."

  I turned the list over in my hands. Two hundred and nine names.

  "You think faking it is proof that you're done," Lillian said. "That you're just a machine now, counting and memorizing, going through the motions, being functional and nothing else."

  “That’s what it is, right?"

  "Well. When a house collapses, you can't wish it back up. You build scaffolding first. The habits, the polite questions, the holding someone's hand even when you can't feel the warmth. Scaffold the human and the human will grow into it."

  She looked at me directly.

  The list sat between us. I read the first name again. Tam. Seven years old. Liked to draw horses.

  Still nothing.

  But I was reading it.

  "I see you building the scaffolding," Lillian said quietly. "Especially with Nyssara. And I know it's exhausting, and I know it hurts, because you can feel how hollow it is right now and she can feel it too. But you have to choose to keep building it."

  She held the cup in both hands, close to her face. Maybe the warmth mattered more than the taste.

  HOTTIES FROM HELL — Private Channel

  [Group chat. Members: KHAMSA, TALATA, TAMANYA. Archived by the Abyssal Intelligence Directorate.]

  KHAMSA: He's fascinating. Empty but not hollow, broken but functional. Corruption at 45% . The broadcast doesn't capture how interesting he is up close.

  TALATA: The inquisitor shows promise. she's already sooooo angry with him! I can work with that. :))

  TAMANYA: What about the performance demon?

  KHAMSA: Malgrin is... attached. More than he admits even to himself. Hehehe

  TAMANYA: The prince just messaged me. He is pleased with the progress. Here are our next assignments: [...]