He shuddered. Worse? What was worse? The term was meaningless. The blood? The hunger? No, the disease … the corruption in every- one’s veins. Scales and shingles covering thin limbs. Eyes oozing mucus, coughs racking whole frames. Their slow descent toward uncaring death.
That was it, of course, the heart and soul of Downwind. Death. Com- ing at them from so many angles, attacking them, and they had no chance to defend themselves. Like his mother: the hard work she’d en- dured, the food she’d denied herself so that her children could have one more mouthful. What was it that finally killed her? Was it one of the many diseases ravaging her? Was it the fear? No, she was past that in the end. Past desperation. Past hope . . .
For her, as for so many, it had been the humiliation. The constant unending shame of being trapped, of having failed. The self-hatred for all those things she’d had to do just to survive. Cade still remembered the first night she had sold herself to a man. How she had bathed afterward in a decrepit washtub borrowed from a more fortunate neighbor. How he had stumbled upon her naked. The water red with her blood as she scrubbed and scrubbed, her skin floating like bits of dried leaves in the soft pink water.
He sobbed once at that memory, but he didn’t cry. He had only cried twice in his lifetime. The first time when poor Terrel came home with his broken fingers, the pieces of his slate clamped between two swollen and useless hands. The second time . . .
His mother had been thirty-one when she died. She had looked much Older. He could remember it so well. Her once thick black hair was gray Sod thin, the skin wrinkled with grime caught in the folds, her eyes dull and empty as they had never been in life. He remembered the hollow thump as her hardened corpse was tumbled into the shallow pauper’s grave. He heard the sound all the time, every day-thump-thump-thump -as he waded through hell, his hands red with the blood of those he set free, to one fate or another.