Chapter 43: Chapter 43

After about a month, Sophie found herself to be the more or less official doctor of the island. She wasn’t sure how it happened.

Maybe Nadia had talked about how she had stitched up her back, or maybe James had been secretly encouraging the whole thing. In any case, a few days after the incident with Nadia and Karla, a number of people began to show up at James' house asking for medical help or advice. There were some who had had small accidents by working in the fields or with animals; others had some minor medical issue (those involving stomach and teeth were especially frequent; respiratory ailments seemed to be less common among the plague survivors).

At first Sophie could not say she was enthusiastic about this trend. She tried to send some of them away, saying that she couldn’t help them, that she didn’t know the way their bodies worked, that she didn’t feel like it... it was useless. People just kept showing up.