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He said, ‘If something unfortunate does happen, we can go back in time and pull Ms. Engle out before it happens, can’t we?’ The man has no notion of how the net works, no notion of the paradoxes, no notion that Kivrin is there, and what happens to her is real and irrevocable.”
“Quarantine?” she said and jerked so the punch missed her arm completely. The idea of a disease she might contract had not affected her at all, but the mention of a quarantine did. “I have to get back,” she said, appealing to Mary. “You mean I have to stay here?”
“Explain! Perhaps you’d like to explain it to me, too. I’m not used to having my civil liberties taken away like this. In America, nobody would dream of telling you where you can or can’t go.” And over thirty million Americans died during the Pandemic as a result of that sort of thinking, he thought.
“No,” Dunworthy said. “There are some things one shouldn’t have to endure, even in an epidemic. Have you told William his mother’s coming?”
It’s not the plague, she told herself firmly. People who have the plague don’t wonder if they have it. They’re too busy dying.
No matter what happens, she told herself, you’re not completely alone, and that comforted her. Because she was completely alone.
“Aye,” Lady Imeyne said, managing to get impatience, disdain, and distaste all in one syllable.
“It’s always this way,” the vicar said. “I remember the beginning of the Pandemic. Largest collections ever taken. Later on you won’t be able to get them out of their houses, but just now they want to huddle together for comfort.”
A woman in a Burberry stood in front of the Casualties Ward holding a picket sign that said “Ban Foreign Diseases.” A man wearing a regulation face mask opened the door for them and handed Dunworthy a very damp flyer. Dunworthy asked at the admissions desk for Mary and then read the flyer. In boldface type it said “FIGHT INFLUENZA, VOTE TO SECEDE FROM THE EC.”
“They’re like time-travel rules?” “The space-time continuum doesn’t allow paradoxes,” Dunworthy said. “It would be a paradox if Kivrin made something happen that hadn’t happened, or if she caused an anachronism.”
Heating systems and the EC and time travel. During the Pandemic it had been the American germ warfare program and air conditioning. Back in the Middle Ages they had blamed Satan and the appearance of comets for their epidemics. Doubtless when the fact that the virus had originated in South Carolina was revealed, the Confederacy, or southern fried chicken, would be blamed.
“They’re saying it’s some sort of biological weapon,” Colin said. “They’re saying it escaped from a laboratory.”
And how will I defend myself? By saying, I’m from the future, where we know everything about the Black Death except how to cure it without streptomycin and how to get back there?
“Get out,” she said. The rats on the table didn’t even look up. The one who was praying did, across its folded paws, a cold, appraising look, as if she were an intruder.
“What was he, a knight?” Colin said wonderingly. “No,” Kivrin said. “A saint.”
She traced a line down the side of her wrist with her finger. “Io suuicien lui damo amo, ” she said softly. “You are here in place of the friends I love.”
