“From your symptoms, I cannot safely assume you have one or the other." He approached her. "Tell me, how do you currently feel?”

Lilly sat up slowly, resting herself against the headboard, adjusted her pillow, and sighed very slowly. “I can’t breathe through my nose, and I ache all over. I am tired, and I’m finding it extremely hard to keep my eyes open.”

Dr. McNathy stood up, took the girl’s wrist in his hands and checked her heartbeat; it was faster than normal. “Well,” he began, “your heart rate has increased so, if you had oxeparitis, you’re in the clear right now.” He chuckled, but Lilly found his humor tasteless and stared at him. He cleared his throat and continued, “I’m going to give you a sedative to help you sleep. It’s very powerful, so take only one a day.” He removed a small orange glass bottle filled to the brim with pills from his bag and placed it down on Lilly’s nightstand. “Also, I want you to take this.” He held up another bottle filled with a blackish, opaque liquid. “This is... something that can combat your cold symptoms and kill the virus.” He placed that next to the pill bottle. “Take three spoonful’s of this, by mouth, one in the morning, one at noon, and another before retiring. Understand?” Lilly nodded, and the doctor departed from the townhouse.

The sedative allowed Lilly sleep until the late afternoon. The actually dark purple-colored sludge lightened the indicators of her illness, but tasted like she was licking bitter, fuzzy fruits. Her condition improved within the following week, and she began participating in society and receiving gentleman callers again.

The medications disappeared halfway through the next week, but Lilly felt right enough to ignore them.

At an evening dinner two days later, Lilly collapsed from what appeared to by acute dehydration and exhaustion, but she actually had lost the feeling in her legs and passed out, a rare, combined side effect of the sludge and the pills that she had drank earlier in the week. She was immediately taken home, and Dr. McNathy returned again, this time baffled with her symptoms. He attempted to wrap his head around the sudden case of oxeparitis, which he now suddenly believed she had contracted.

As Lilly sat in her bed stiff, exhausted, and uncomfortable, she closed her eyes, listening to Dr. McNathy speak to her mother down the hall outside her room. “She’s extremely sick, ma’am. We need to transport her to the sanitarium. They can treat her there. They can contain it.”

“W-what about the hospital on the other side of the city?” asked her mother, who had begun to weep.

“If she has oxeparitis, then we need to remove her from the city. Antham is not even close to standing on its own feet again; if she has the virus, the city will fall faster than a rock through the air.”

“What about the hospital?” Mrs. Prescott asked again, her voice shaking.

Dr. McNathy took two deep breaths in and explained, “The hospital is ill-equipped to handle something like this; an outbreak would threaten the city if you took your daughter there. She must be delivered to the Citadel Sanitarium.”

There was a long pause accompanied by the sound of heels pacing in the hallway. “Can you promise me that she will be safe and secure there?”

“I cannot promise anything if she is infected.”

Her mother's gasping rattled her breaths. “...is this her best chance?”

“As I said, I cannot promise anything if she is infected, but...her best chance would be at the Citadel.”

Lilly closed her eyes, tears building in her eyes. She had been ill before, but never with this severity. At worst, Lilly had spend a fortnight at the hospital with a childish illness where red, itchy blotches had erupted from her skin, and nurses rubbed an anti-itch cream all over her daily.

But as the following day began, Edith, wearing a cloth mask that covered her nose and mouth, walked in and packed many of her lady’s gowns, shoes, accessories, and other necessities into a large trunk. An hour after finishing, as the sun began to set, she was wrapped up in a clean blanket and departed from the townhouse, unknown to Lilly, for the last time.

With her mother at her side and with the doctor’s notes on her treatment, they rode in silence, her arms wrapped around a book, out of Antham to the “Strip of Paradise”. Gone were the city’s lights that had bled into Lilly’s room when the interior shutters had been drawn; gone were the endless stream of gentlemen callers and social engagements, though she didn’t mind it in the slightest; gone were the plain façades, tropical tree-lined sidewalks, and damaged, artistically curved streetlights that lit up the city’s streets.

Lilly fell asleep.