Page 99 of Lethal Game

With the woman on her side, Sophia was only visible from the eyes up and she kept those down as if she were praying.

After a couple of minutes of charades, she whispered, “I’m done.”

“Don’t get up yet,” he cautioned her. “Put everything away now, so it doesn’t look like you just took samples from her. Have a look at a couple other bodies too.”

She stayed where she was for several more seconds, then got to her feet and bowed a little to the old man.

She turned and looked down at the body of a boy. She didn’t touch him at all, just examined what she could see with a sharp gaze. “Do you see the sweat?” she asked Con, gesturing at the stained blanket on the cot.

“Yeah.” He glanced around. “They all look like that. Is it from the fever or something else?”

“I don’t know. It just seems excessive, and yet they look dehydrated. See how the eyes are sunken and the lips shriveled.”

“What does it mean?”

She tilted her head to one side and looked at body after body. “I don’t know.” Her voice had a hard edge to it.

Dr. Sophia Perry didn’t like it when she couldn’t understand a disease.

Chapter Twenty-One

“Dr. Perry?”

Sophia looked up to find Dr. Blairmore coming toward her. “Yes?”

“What are you doing?” he asked in a tone so accusatory she wanted to smack him. Idiot. She was doing her job whether he liked it or not.

“I’m doing the only kind of examination you’ll allow,” she said, not caring that she sounded snotty. She hoped she sounded snotty and completely out of patience. “A visual one. I’ve noted a few other symptoms that you failed to mention.”

He reared back at that. “You have?”

“Look at these people,” she ordered, pointing at the bodies. “Excessive sweating, yet there also signs of severe dehydration. Add those to the confusion and seizures and I’m comfortable narrowing down the pathogen to one that attacks the brain or CSF.”

He shrugged. “I would tend to agree with you. What does that get us?”

“Closer to the answer.” She forced herself to look at him the same way she looked at Max while trying to solve a problem, like he was part of the solution. “Please, talk to whoever is in charge of the camp. Explain that without a sample from one of the dead, I may not be able to identify the pathogen. Without that answer, no one else is going to come to help, and hundreds morewilldie. I don’t have to have anything to do with the collection. Obviously, you’re the best person for that. You have a relationship with the people here.” Some of them, anyway. “I don’t.”

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