Dr. Voss stopped walking. The students carrying the stretcher stopped too. "We're taking her to the health center for medical treatment," she said. Her voice was level, professional. "She's very ill."

  "We have healers here," the man said. "Boris has been treating Katya for months. She doesn't need city doctors."

  "Boris has been poisoning her for months," Dr. Voss said bluntly. "Those medicines he's been selling are killing her. She needs real treatment or she's going to die."

  The man's smile didn't waver. "That's a serious accusation. Boris is a respected healer. He's helped many people in this village. If Katya is sick, it's because her condition is beyond help, not because of Boris."

  "Get out of our way," Dr. Voss said.

  "Or what?" One of the younger men stepped forward, and I could see the challenge in his posture. "You'll call the police? By the time they get here, it'll be tomorrow. And by then you'll be gone anyway. You city people always leave."

  "We're here to help," I said, and I was surprised by how steady my voice was. "That woman is dying. We have medicine that can help her. Are you really going to stand there and stop us from trying to save her life?"

  "Maybe she doesn't want to be saved by you," the man in the center said. "Maybe she wants to die with her dignity intact, surrounded by people who care about her, not strangers who think they know better than our healers."

  "She can't speak for herself," Murin said. "So how would you know what she wants?"

  "Her daughter can speak for her."

  All eyes turned to Vera, who was standing next to the stretcher, looking terrified. The man in the center smiled at her, and there was something in that smile that made it clear what was expected. What would happen if she didn't say the right thing.

  "Vera," he said gently. "Do you want these people to take your mother away? Or would you prefer to bring her home, let Boris continue his treatments, let her die peacefully in her own bed?"

  Vera looked at her mother on the stretcher. Then at the man. Then at Dr. Voss and us. Her hands were shaking.

  "I..." she started. "I don't know what to do."

  The old woman's hand moved again. That same weak gesture, fingers curling and uncurling. She was trying to communicate something, but without words, without the ability to point or gesture clearly, it was impossible to know what.

  "Let her choose," I said suddenly. The words came out before I'd fully thought them through, but once I'd said them, I committed. "Katya. You can hear us, right? You can understand what's happening?"

  The hand moved. A squeeze.

  "If you want to come with us to the health center, if you want us to try to help you, squeeze your hand again."

  Everyone watched. The hand moved. And unmistakably, a squeeze.

  "She chose," I said, looking at the man in the center. "She wants our help. So get out of our way."

  The man's smile finally faded. His expression went flat. "You're making a mistake."

  "Maybe," Dr. Voss said. "But it's our mistake to make. Move."

  For a long moment, nobody moved. The six men stood there, blocking the path, and we stood there with the stretcher, and it felt like the entire village was holding its breath. Then the man in the center stepped aside. Just one step, but it was enough to create a gap in the line.

  "Go ahead," he said. "Take her. But when she dies anyway, remember that you were the ones who took her from her home. You were the ones who promised to save her and failed. And this village will remember that too."

  Dr. Voss didn't answer. She just gestured for the stretcher bearers to keep moving, and we walked through the gap, past the men, toward the health center.

  I didn't look back. But I could feel their eyes on us the entire way.

  We got Katya inside and onto one of the examination tables in the back room. Dr. Voss immediately started barking orders—IV access, fluids, oxygen if her sats were low, baseline vitals every fifteen minutes. The fourth-years and interns moved and within minutes Katya had an IV line in her arm with saline running, a pulse oximeter clipped to her finger, and a blood pressure cuff wrapped around her other arm.

  I stood back, out of the way, watching Dr. Voss work. She was examining Katya—pupillary response, cranial nerve function as best as she could assess it, motor strength in all four limbs. Katya could barely move, but there was some residual movement. Her right hand more than her left. Her toes on both feet could curl slightly when prompted.

  "Peripheral neuropathy," Dr. Voss muttered, more to herself than anyone else. "Probably from the toxins. Along with hepatic encephalopathy, renal dysfunction..." She pressed on Katya's abdomen again, feeling the fluid shift. "Ascites from liver failure. God, this woman is a textbook case of multi-organ poisoning."

  Vera stood in the corner, hands clasped in front of her, watching everything with wide, terrified eyes.

  Dr. Voss straightened up and turned to one of the interns. "I want hourly neuro checks. GCS, pupil size and reactivity, motor response. Also vitals—BP, heart rate, respiratory rate, oxygen saturation, temperature. Write everything down. If anything changes, you get me immediately."

  The intern nodded and started setting up a monitoring sheet on a clipboard.

  Dr. Voss then looked at me. "Ashrahan. That bag of medicines. Where is it?"

  I held it up. "Here."

  "Give it to me."

  I handed it over. She took it and walked to the small desk in the corner of the room, dumping the contents out. The packets and bottles scattered across the surface. She started opening them one by one, examining the contents, smelling them, even touching the powder and rubbing it between her fingers.

  After the fifth packet, she stopped and turned to face all of us.

  "This," she said, holding up one of the packets, "contains what looks like industrial talc mixed with some kind of herbal powder. This one," she picked up another, "has heavy metal particles in it. I can see them. Probably lead or mercury or both. This one," another packet, "smells like pesticide. And this," she held up one of the glass bottles, "is just vegetable oil with food coloring."

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  She set them all down and looked at Vera. "Your mother has been poisoned. Systematically, over months. These are not medicines. They're garbage."

  Vera's face crumpled again, but this time she didn't cry. She just stood there, shaking, like she was too overwhelmed to even process what she was hearing.

  "Can you fix her?" she asked in a small voice.

  Dr. Voss was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "I don't know. The damage is extensive. We can give her supportive care. We can stop the poisoning and give her body a chance to heal. But whether she'll recover, how much function she'll regain... I can't promise anything."

  "But you'll try?"

  "Yes. We'll try."

  Vera nodded, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. "Thank you."

  Dr. Voss turned back to us. "Ashrahan, Murin, I want you two to go back out. Keep doing house visits. See if you can find more cases like this. If that healer has been operating for years, Katya won't be the only one. There will be others."

  "What about the men who stopped us?" Murin asked. "They're not going to let us just walk around freely now."

  "Probably not," Dr. Voss said. "But you're not doing anything illegal. You're offering free medical care. If they try to stop you, you come back here immediately. Don't engage, don't argue, just leave. Understood?"

  We nodded.

  "Go," she said. "We've got maybe three more hours of daylight. Use it."

  We left the health center and walked back out into the late afternoon sun. It was colder now, the temperature dropping as the day wore on. My breath came out in small clouds.

  "That was fucked up," Murin said quietly as we walked.

  "Yeah."

  "Those medicines. That healer. How does someone do that? How do you sell poison to dying people and take all their money?"

  "Because they can," I said. "Because people are desperate and they don't have options and they'll believe anyone who offers them hope."

  We walked in silence for a while, heading back toward the cluster of houses we'd been working through before we'd found Katya. The streets felt different now. People who'd been merely indifferent before now actively avoided us, crossing to the other side of the path when they saw us coming, going inside their houses and closing doors.

  Word had spread about us taking Katya. And the confrontation with the men at the market.

  We knocked on more doors anyway. Most didn't answer. The few that did told us, in various ways, to leave. One old man actually shook his fist at us. A woman spat in our direction, though she missed by several feet.

  At the thirty-second house, I'd been counting, though I wasn't sure why, a man in his forties answered. He looked us up and down, then said, "You're the ones who took Katya."

  "We're trying to help her," I said.

  "You took her from her home. You think you know better than our healers."

  "Your healer was poisoning her," I said bluntly. "The medicines he was giving her were full of industrial chemicals and heavy metals. They were killing her."

  The man's expression didn't change. "That's what you say."

  "That's what the evidence says," Murin interjected. "We have the medicines. We can test them and prove it."

  "And who's going to believe you?" the man asked. "You're here for three days. Then you leave. Boris has been here for twenty years. Who do you think people trust more?" He closed the door.

  We kept walking. At the fortieth house, we got lucky. An older woman answered, maybe in her sixties, and when I introduced ourselves and explained why we were there, she didn't immediately shut the door in our faces.

  "Free medical care?" she asked skeptically.

  "Yes. Completely free. We're students, we're here to learn and to help. No payment required."

  She looked us over, then said, "My grandson. He's been coughing for weeks. Won't eat. Just lies in bed all day."

  "Can we see him?" I asked.

  She hesitated, then nodded and stepped aside.

  We followed her into a small house, similar Katya's. In the corner, on a thin mattress, was a boy who was eleven years old. He was curled on his side, breathing shallowly.

  I knelt down next to him and pulled out the stethoscope. "Hi. My name is Ashrahan. I'm going to listen to your chest, okay?"

  The boy didn't respond. His eyes were half-closed, and he looked completely exhausted.

  I placed the stethoscope on his chest and listened. Crackles throughout both lungs. Respiratory rate elevated. When I touched his forehead, it was burning hot. The System activated.

  I pulled the stethoscope out of my ears and looked at the grandmother. "How long has he been sick?"

  "A month or maybe more. It started as just a small cough. We thought it would go away. But it got worse."

  "Has he been losing weight?"

  "Yes. He used to eat like a horse. Now he barely touches his food."

  "Night sweats? Does he wake up in the middle of the night soaked in sweat?"

  The grandmother blinked. "Yes. How did you know?"

  Because those were classic symptoms of tuberculosis. Chronic cough, fever, weight loss, night sweats. The textbook presentation.

  "Has anyone else in the family been sick?" I asked. "Anyone with a cough that won't go away?"

  "My husband," the grandmother said slowly. "He died two months ago. He had a cough too. Bad cough for months. But he was old, we thought it was just age."

  Not age, it was TB. And now the grandson had it, probably transmitted from the grandfather.

  "We need to take him to the health center," I said. "Right now. He needs to be tested for tuberculosis, and if that's what he has, he needs to be started on treatment immediately."

  "Tuberculosis?" The grandmother's eyes went wide. "No. No, that's not possible. TB is for poor people in the cities. Not here."

  "TB is everywhere," I said. "And it's very treatable, but only if we catch it early and start the right medications. If we don't treat it, it will kill him."

  The grandmother looked at her grandson, then back at me. "The healer gave us medicine. He said it would help."

  "Did it help?"

  She didn't answer, which was answer enough.

  "Please," I said. "Let us take him. Let us test him properly. If it's not TB, we'll figure out what it is and treat it. But if it is TB, every day we wait makes it worse."

  She looked torn, the same expression I'd seen on Vera's face. Trust versus distrust. Hope versus fear.

  "I'll come with him," she said finally. "I won't leave him alone with you."

  "That's fine," Murin said. "You should come. We'll need more information about his symptoms anyway."

  We helped the boy to his feet. He could barely walk, leaning heavily on me as we made our way out of the house. The grandmother grabbed a shawl and wrapped it around her shoulders, then followed us.

  As we walked back toward the health center, I noticed the same thing as before—people watching, conversations stopping. But this time their expressions changes from suspicion to fear.

  They saw us taking another person. Another member of their community disappearing into the health center with the city doctors. And when we were about halfway back, the men appeared again.

  Same six man, same positions blocking the path. The man in the center, I still didn't know his name, but I was starting to think of him as the Leader, stepped forward.

  "Another one?" he said, looking at the boy leaning against me.

  "He's sick," I said. "He needs medical care."

  "Boris can treat him."

  "Boris can't treat tuberculosis," I said. "And that's what this boy probably has. Which means he's contagious. Which means if we don't isolate him and treat him, he's going to spread it to other people in this village. Maybe people you care about."

  The Leader's expression flickered for just a moment. Then it hardened again. "You're spreading fear. Tuberculosis? In our village? We would know if we had TB."

  "You had it," I said, gesturing to the grandmother. "Her husband died of it two months ago. This boy caught it from him. And there are probably others who have it too and don't know it yet. That's how TB works. It spreads silently until suddenly you have an outbreak."

  "You're lying," one of the younger men said.

  "I'm not," I said. "But you don't have to believe me. You can wait. And in a few months, when more people start coughing, when more people start dying, you can think back to this moment and remember that we tried to help."

  The Leader stared at me. I stared back. Then he stepped aside again. "Go."

  We walked past them, and this time I did look back. The Leader was watching us, and his expression was really irritated.