She had resented it, but thinking of him standing before the crowd with anyone else—pretending to love anyone else—made her want to kick something.

She stepped into the clean, bright waiting room of the hospital, only to find it packed with people, most of them anxious and looking about for help. Fathers clutched children to their chests, and people sat in visible clusters, shying away from their neighbors. A man stood at the front desk, his loud voice filled with frustration as he railed at the intake nurse. “How can you make us wait when we are sick with the Prince’s plague? It is his fault, and he must fix this!”

Could all of the people before her possibly be sick? How could she help all of them? The urge to back out of the door was strong, but then she thought of her grandparents and girded herself. She wanted to help people, and now was her opportunity to do just that.

She made her way through the crowded waiting room and a nurse buzzed her through. “We’ve been waiting for you,” the young woman said. “They’re in the back.”

Thabiso was talking to Dr. Bata, the epidemiologist, and Ledi ran over to them.

“Is what that man’s yelling true? Are all of these people sick?” Nothing in the data she’d pored over the night before had indicated that such an explosive uptick in the number of cases was possible. In fact, the disease had seemed to be moving at a snail’s pace, its spread following a yet-to-be identified and completely random pattern. If it hadn’t stricken two of the most important people in the kingdom, it might have gone unnoticed for months.

Dr. Bata gave Ledi a tired smile and removed the round glasses perched on her nose to rub at the lenses with the hem of her shirt. “There have been no new cases reported, but apparently there was a town hall meeting last night. It seems that the symptoms of the disease were discussed in quite the convincing, and blatantly incorrect, fashion, and now half the town believes they have the Prince’s plague. My apologies, Your Highness.”

Thabiso smirked. “I quite like the ring of it actually. It isn’t every ruler who will be known for bringing sickness upon his people. It’s very biblical.” His frown and the way he tilted his head to the side and stroked his beard belied the jokiness of his words. She had seen him make the gesture several times since she’d arrived. She remembered him doing the same that night in her apartment as he’d tried to talk to her—the night where she’d basically told him that nothing he said would change what she felt for him.

So he’s not the only liar in the room, it seems.

Judging from the way she wanted to reassure him, to talk some sense into the people in the waiting room who had been misled by people they trusted into anger at him, perhaps nothing had changed at all. That was the thing about viruses—once they got through your defenses, sometimes they’d never go away, the remnants of them lingering in your bloodstream long after you thought you’d recovered. Sometimes they changed you down to the DNA.

“So this is basically like an old-school version of WebMD-itis?” she asked Dr. Bata, pulling her gaze away from Thabiso. “They were told vague symptoms and now they all believe they’re sick?”

“Yes. Someone was irresponsible—reckless, in the event that any of the people here are actually sick and spread the illness to others. We’ll have to evaluate every patient, just in case. The first day of your internship is going to be quite fun!”

“Great,” Ledi said, and she wasn’t entirely sarcastic about it.

“Likotsi told me she downloaded the appropriate apps on your tablet. Can you pull up the SansFrontiere app?”

Ledi did as she was told while Dr. Bata dug into a bag full of cords. She grabbed the end of a cord and plugged it into the jack on Ledi’s tablet; the object on the other end wasn’t a charger, it was a high-tech version of an otoscope. Without preamble, she stuck the device into Thabiso’s ear and, a moment later, a reading popped up on Ledi’s screen.

“Oh yesss!” Ledi exclaimed. “I didn’t have the prereqs for the Modern Medicine class, but I’m fascinated by the use of technology in the field.”

Dr. Bata grinned. “It’s an app that’s being developed for use in large-scale outbreaks, especially useful in places without much medical infrastructure and nomadic communities. That’s not the case here, of course, but it’s also just cool, yes?” The woman’s eyes glinted with excitement. “There are three different attachments that take your readings and upload them, creating a digital file for each patient, an easily searchable database. It also cross-references other medical database apps to provide likely prognoses. You do have to input patient name, check off their symptoms, add notes, but at the end of the day we’ll have lots of data to work with. Be sure to check for hives or rash developing along the neckline. That seems to be ground zero in the cases we’ve seen.”

Ledi thrummed with excitement. Some of her cohorts had thought she’d be dealing with woebegone hospitals and difficult conditions when she’d mentioned her field study, but even Ledi hadn’t realized she’d be working with equipment that wouldn’t be common in the US for years—maybe never if the science regressivists got their way.

“Let’s get to work,” she said, feeling a surge of energy despite her lack of sleep.

She had a promise to keep, after all.