Chapter 13: Fever Chart

Haruna carried her to the back room because there was nowhere else to put her.

Kuzunoha weighed more than she looked, and she burned through the indigo haori.

Haruna laid her on the cedar bed, loosened the red cord and took the first reading with her own thermometer.

Forty-three point six.

She wrote the number on the back of a prescription pad, with the time beside it, and drew a line under it.

That was how a pharmacist coped with fear.

You made a chart.

At midnight the door appeared in the alley wall, as it always did, and the paper lantern swung on its hook.

Haruna had phoned Natsuki twenty minutes earlier, and her sister was on the doorstep before the lantern had stopped moving.

She wore her navy scrubs under a parka, and she carried a hard black case in each hand.

"Where is she?"

"Back room. Forty-three point six."

"Right," Natsuki said, and walked past her without another word.

She knelt by the bed, took Kuzunoha's wrist and held it for a full minute, watching the second hand on her watch.

Then she opened a case and started laying out cold packs in a neat row.

"Pulse is one-forty and thready. Skin's dry. She stopped sweating?"

"Hours ago, I think."

"That's the bad part, Haru. Get me wet towels, as many as you've got."

Haruna ran for towels.

Tsukumo met her at the kitchen door with an armful already, her yellow raincoat dripping and her eyes swollen shut.

"I counted," she said, and her voice cracked. "I counted every night, and it was never this high."

"I know. Give me those."

"I should have said something. I should have said it was getting worse."

"You were there every night," Haruna said, and took the towels from her. "That counts. Come and help."

Together they wrapped Kuzunoha's arms and legs in wet cloth.

Natsuki checked her eyes with a penlight and frowned at what she saw.

"Her pupils are normal. Her heart is steady under the speed. This doesn't look like an infection, or a stroke, or anything I know."

"It isn't a disease," Haruna said.

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