The morning driftsby in uneasy slow motion.
Those of us who still feel mostly functional go through the motions: grinding fibers for mats, mending clothes, scraping the flesh out of gourds. But the usual hum of chatter is muted. Every cough, every shift, every pause draws eyes.
We’re all waiting for the other shoe to drop.
It does, just before midday.
Amelia is helping Erika sort through the bundles of firebloom we’ve collected. I’m close enough to hear them talk—argue, really—about whether the firebloom is more like paprika, or just straight-up painful like biting into a raw pepper.
Then Amelia goes quiet.
She presses one hand to her stomach, fingers splaying.
“You okay?” Erika asks, head snapping up.
“Yeah. Just… cramping.” Amelia tries to wave it off, but there’s a stiffness to her voice that sets my nerves buzzing.
Fifteen minutes later, she excuses herself and retreats toward the sleeping area. When I slip back to check on her, she’s curled on her side on her mat, arms locked around her middle, face slick with sweat.
She manages a small, brave smile when she notices me. “Hey. It’s fine. Just… feels like my intestines are trying to claw their way out. Nothing I can’t handle.”
But I see the death grip she’s got on her waterskin. The way she flinches when she shifts, thinking I’m not watching.
I find Erika near the cooking fire a little later, and we trade one of those loaded looks where no one wants to say the quiet part out loud.
“Is it just me,” Erika finally murmurs as I crouch beside her to help turn skewers of lizard-chicken over firestone, “or does this feel like something’s going around?”
“It’s not just you,” I say. My voice comes out flatter than I intend.
She swallows, jaw tightening, and we both turn back to the fire as if cooking harder will fix anything.
The rest of the afternoon leaks away. We keep busy because that’s what humans do when we’re scared and can’t fix theproblem in front of us. We scrub, we organize, we double-check stores.
My body is weirdly tired even though I haven’t done anything physically demanding. My thoughts keep circling back to Tina. To Lucy. To Amelia and Pam.
By evening, the exhaustion has settled into my bones.
I sit with the others near the fire, meat on a rib in front of me. It tastes like dust in my mouth. I chew, swallow, take another bite more out of duty than hunger.
When Erika suggests I turn in early, I don’t argue. That alone tells me something is off.
But sleep does not come.
I’m hot. Not feverish-hot, exactly—just…wrong. Like I’m wrapped in a heavy coat on an August afternoon and someone keeps edging the heater closer.
I roll onto my other side, pressing my back against the cool stone of the wall. The chill seeps through my scale-tunic, but the relief is brief. My skin still feels too sensitive.
The cramping starts sometime around what I guess is midnight.
At first, it’s just a slow ache, deep and low in my belly. The kind of dull pressure that reminds me of a period cramp that’s about to become A Situation. It builds in a slow wave until I have to curl around it, knees drawing up toward my chest.
Breathe in through the nose. Out through the mouth.
It’ll pass, I tell myself. It’s probably nothing. Maybe something in the food didn’t agree with us. That happens. New environment, new microbes, new… everything.
Except we’ve been here for weeks now. We’ve been eating the same core diet for weeks. If the Drakav food were going to wreck us, it should’ve done it already.
The cramp eases. I uncurl, muscles trembling a little with the release.
