Chapter Text
He pulled himself out of the river, gasping, crying with relief as he flopped onto his back at the edge of the harbour. Jordie's body, pale with death and fat with riverwater, floated just beyond his reach. Somehow, somehow, Kaz pushed himself to his knees. He should have let his brother disappear down the river, should have made it so he would never have to think about this ever again.
But Jordie had been his brother, at least until the plague took him. So Kaz knelt at the water's edge, and though he couldn't bear to touch his face for any longer than a moment, he brushed his eyelids closed with the tips of his fingers. One last goodbye, one last moment to mourn. Then he let Jordie drift away, and stumbled to his feet. Towards East Stave.
—
The university was eerie, to say the least, all tall cinderblock walls and polished tiles that belied the stench of rotting bodies and vomit emanating from the hospital. But Kaz had few options in a time of quarantine. Any stallholder worth their kruge was probably holed up behind barred windows and tight gas masks. Gone were empty houses with conveniently placed loose windows he could have stolen from, let alone unattended storefronts that he and Jordie would have snuck pastries from. Only the university hospital, white tiled corridors gleaming stubbornly around sick stains and dirt, remained open. Here, at least, he could take a shower, maybe even steal some food or money if he could find it.
There: a half-eaten sandwich, abandoned at the receptionists’ desk. Someone in a white coat- no, ‘white’ would be too clean a word for the patchwork of stains and possible vomit on the fabric- dashed past him. Across the hallway, a voice yelled for some sort of chemical. The potted plant beside the receptionists’ desk drooped from weeks of neglect. Sensing the food would not be missed in the chaos of the hospital, Kaz grabbed it and left the hospital, just as a harried nurse ferried a cot past him, its occupant groaning in agony.
He ducked into the first warm place he could find: the Boeksplein, although he would not know its name until months later. With his ragged clothes and emaciated frame, he looked painfully out of place amongst the scholarly journals and piles of old paper. The librarian was nowhere to be found, so no one troubled him as he tucked himself at the foot of a shelf and began to chew. Eyes closed in ecstasy and mouth full of stale bread, he looked almost like the happy child he was meant to be rather than the terrified thief he was.
Maybe he could stay in the nice, warm library forever, stealing food from bins or wherever else he could find it whenever he got hungry. Kaz’s fingers plucked a random book from the shelf he was leaning on, as was his habit whenever he had finished his work around the farm in Lij. With the comforting smell of paper around him and the dim light from a window to see by, he could almost pretend he was back home, either Jordie or Da reading to him on the rocking chair beside their meagre bookshelf.
He sniffled, and a tear dropped onto the page, followed by a dot of watery sauce from his sandwich. No longer dizzy with hunger, memories of the past twenty-four hours hit him all at once: Jordie lying dead on the riverbank. The feel of his cold, wet skin against Kaz’s. The cloying stench of bodies on the Reaper’s Barge, surrounding him and pushing him down down down until he was buried under a tangled mess of limbs.
Jordie was gone, and somehow, somehow, he was still here. It occurred to Kaz that the sandwich could have very well been infected. He realised he didn’t care. Maybe if he died here of the plague like he was meant to, he could join Jordie and Da or even meet Ma at last.
But no. No. He couldn’t let himself think that. Jakob Hertzoon had brought him here, had taken Jordie away from him, had exploited the brothers’ desperation. He had promised them a family then he had taken and taken until Jordie was dead and Kaz was alone. He would pay in blood, Kaz would make sure of it. He would make him feel the pain he lived in a hundred times over, then bury the rich mercher somewhere in Reaper’s Barge where no one would ever remember his name.
Kaz took a deep breath and stood up, a plan already forming in his head. Join a Barrel gang, any gang that would have him, take any jobs necessary to put a roof over his head and to Hertzoon in the ground. Brushing the remains of the sandwich off his book, he made to slot it back in the shelf, before a diagram caught his eye.
It was skin. Dirty, mottled skin, paintbrush bruises sketched over and over its surface. Jordie’s skin, his skin, within the first three days of their infection. His breath caught in his throat. Was this the answer? If he had read this book before the plague, before Hertzoon, would him and Jordie still be safe? It was only when he made it to the end of the chapter that he realised the diagram was describing a different plague, one that had struck decades earlier. But maybe the next page would help him understand, or the next… Before he knew it he had read the entire infectious diseases textbook cover to cover. Dawn was breaking, and now he saw his true target, clear as day. Hertzoon had put him and Jordie at risk of the plague, for sure. But he was only part of the problem. The plague itself had been the one to deal the killing blow, to steal his last chance at a happy life, and then do the same to so many others. Kaz remembered the chaos of the hospital. How many people were mourning, just as he was, not knowing what to do with the ache in their chest and the empty space beside them where their loved ones once were?
He would wage war, and he would get his revenge. On Hertzoon, yes, but also on the plague. He would learn its secrets, unravel every cause and symptom until he understood what had happened to him, why he had survived but Jordie had not. He would burn the city to the ground then raise it from the ashes, change it so irreversibly that no one would suffer the plague again. But not before he replicated each element of the plague on Hertzoon’s own body, and watched him beg for mercy.
Kaz tucked the textbook under his arm and made his way towards the hospital.
—
The first few months were hard. The next few years were hell. With not an ounce of kruge to his name, Kaz knew his chances of buying his way into a medical education were nonexistent. He started small: showing up at the ridiculously understaffed hospital, hair slicked back with water from the Geldcanal and clothes tucked as best he could to hide their stains. The nurses saw him, a tiny boy no older than nine, underfed with the pallor of the newly recovered (or perhaps recently dead?) on his cheeks, and shooed him away from the wards.
But even then Kaz never knew when to quit. A plan was forming itself in the recesses of his mind, one only a child who had seen too little of the world and even less of his freshly traumatised mind could conceive.
He waited at the stoop of the door, just out of sight of the nurse as she hurried away. In the chaos, no one would notice another dirty body, sneaking into the hospital to find those who could no longer be saved.
They were lining the corridors at the back of the infectious diseases ward. Children too weak to raise their heads as Kaz approached, old women coughing blood into unwashed sleeves. All of them, sunken cheeks like skulls, with circles under the eyes to match. Their eyes were hollow, unfocused. Already halfway to death’s door.
Kaz forced his nausea down, down, down. He saw Jordie in their pale faces, dying quietly because no one cared enough to help. He could be that person for them, now. So he took a deep breath and a long step towards the dying, hooking his fingers around a roll of bandages from a nearby cart as he passed.
A toddler lay with her head on her mother’s lap, a hungry fly already buzzing in lazy circles around her body. The mother’s eyes were closed, and Kaz did not dare to wake her. The fly alighted on the girl’s arm, so he shooed it away as best he could. There were sores on her body, whether from the disease or another infection, he could not tell. But bandaging was something easy, something he had seen Da do so many times before when he or Jordie scraped a knee climbing somewhere they shouldn’t have been. Kaz unwrapped the bandage with clumsy fingers. Maybe if the nurses saw him taking care of these people that no one else wanted to help, they would let him stay. Maybe they would even pay him for it.
His fingertips brushed against the girl’s arm.
Her flesh was cold and clammy to the touch, sticky with half-dried sweat and mucus she must have wiped on herself. She was already gone, but he wasn’t to know this, because he squeezed his eyes shut and jerked his hand away from her as if he had been burned.
He heard waves lapping against the shore, deafening in his memory. Suddenly he was back there, bodies pressed against his skin, fingers and elbows and legs tangled around every part of his body. Someone’s hair, grainy and foreign, had found its way into his mouth. He could taste the tang of its sweat on his tongue. The stench of rotting flesh was all around him, sickly sweet and heavy with disease. And he was drowning, drowning in a sea of bodies.
It was the dull sting on his palms that brought him back to the present. He was curled into a ball, knees drawn up to his chest and head between his knees, crouched on the cold hospital floor. Dimly, he registered the fact that he had scooted far enough away from the bodies that he was now backed against the adjacent wall of the room. His hands were clamped tight over his half-opened bandages, fingernails digging into his palms hard enough to draw blood. Each breath came like he was drowning and had just surfaced for air; loud, fast gasps rather than smooth breaths through his nose.
He staggered upright, clumsily wiping the blood on his hands onto his shirt. A doctor wheeling a bed past him stole a quizzical glance at this deranged child, but hurried past. If he was a grieving son coming to take one last look at his dying mother, it was none of their business.
Kaz forced his heart rate to slow. Deep breaths now, Kaz. In… out. In… out. You’ve got this. I’ve got you. Jordie’s words to him as he cried his eyes out at a haunted house when he was seven. You’re not in danger anymore. You’re safe now.
There are people that need your help.
Hastily, but without quite knowing why, Kaz wrapped the bandages around his fingers to form thick, crude gloves. Leaning his weight against the wall, he took a step forward, then another. He stopped when he was an arm’s length away from an old lady leaning against the wall.
Unlike the others, she was gasping for air, taking great, hacking coughs into her handkerchief. One glance told him it was already spotted with blood. When she turned to Kaz, her eyes seemed to clear, if only for a moment.
“Bill! Aw, my darling, you came back. You came back for me.”
She reached out a hand to grasp Kaz’s bandaged one. He stiffened, but did not pull away.
She saw his hesitation. “Please stay. Stay for your Mama. I’m scared, Bill. I’m so scared. It… it hurts.” Her last word came out broken, weak, the plea of a small child looking for comfort. A single tear rolled down her hollow cheeks.
Kaz forced himself to speak. “It’s okay, Ma- Mama. Don’t worry. I’m here. You’re safe now. It’s going to be okay.” Empty words, he knew. But they seemed to help. The lady’s shoulders relaxed, and she leaned back against the wall.
“I knew you would come back in the end. I always had a soft spot for you, you know, out of all your siblings. Always the kind one, quick to comfort and slow to anger.” As if gripped by a sudden, invisible energy, her voice grew insistent. “Please take care of yourself when… when I’m gone. Say hello to Lena and the kids for me.”
Kaz nodded wordlessly. Satisfied, her eyes softened, then her shoulders seized again as she began to cough.
He held her hand until she passed.
—
Hours later, in the quieter hours of the night when the worst of the wave had subsided, a doctor found him. Kaz was talking quietly with the sick, listening to their last words and holding their grief until they left. They brought him inside, to them only another orphan, and gave him food and water. When he begged them, he got a job, too. It wouldn’t hurt, they thought, to let him care for the dying that no one else could afford to look after. He seemed to know his way around a first aid kit, and at least he could tend to their sores and offer some small comfort before they passed. They told themselves these were the reasons they hired a scruffy street rat to look after the sick, but in truth, the earnest, profound grief in his eyes (too deep, too dark for such a small child) was what convinced them.
Kaz put on his first pair of surgical gloves, grateful for a comfort he still did not quite understand he needed. Hour after hour, his eyes stayed dry as he talked to the dying. Only later would he realise he had lost the ability to cry; as if his tears had leached out of him into the river water he had almost drowned in.
During those two months, Kaz had a temporary post in the hospital, leftovers from the staff pantry and a couch from the office to sleep on if he wanted. And after those two months, when the worst of the plague was over, he had a job.