A Hypothesis

"Huh? So it really works?" Lucius pulled out the medical record and handed it to Kraft, pointing out the altered "drowsiness" entry.

"Lecturer Liston thought it didn't qualify as drowsiness, so he crossed it out. I wasn't sure whether I should put it in the notes."

Kraft didn't seem to hear what Lucius was saying. As soon as he got the record, he flipped to the first page and looked up the patient's occupation and address.

"Baker, third building north on Elm Street? What kind of place is that?"

"I'm not sure. It should be a small street, I think. I'm not sure where it is, and we haven't gotten around to following up with this patient yet."

Lucius knew his way around Wenden Port, but if someone asked him the name of a particular road, he could only name a few that he often visited.

There were too many crisscrossing streets and alleys, with all kinds of names. He forgot unremarkable ones as soon as he saw them.

"Didn't you think you might need to follow up when you took down the information?" Kraft demanded.

"Uh, I didn't write it down. Liston did. Maybe he knows where it is?" Lucius quickly disclaimed responsibility. It looked like they'd found a problem, and he absolutely couldn't let any flaws in the record be pinned on him. Liston could take responsibility for it.

"Come on. Let's go find Liston."

Kraft picked up the medical record and dropped his work without hesitation, ready to head out.

Oh no, Lucius thought. He hoped it wasn't anything serious. He hurried after Kraft, quickly trying to remember whether he'd made any mistakes himself. If they couldn't find the exact location later, they'd be in trouble.

Fortunately, Kraft maintained the good manners everyone had come to expect of him. He simply hurried Lucius back to the clinic and cornered Liston, who was packing up to go home.

"I have a question I need to confirm as soon as possible, so I came over myself." Kraft pressed Liston back into his chair and took out the medical record for him to see.

"Are you sure the patient said he was waking up later and was difficult to rouse? Did he say exactly how much later?"

Liston jumped, then looked at Lucius, who was hiding behind Kraft. Lucius gave him a look that said, You're on your own.

"Yes, that's the patient."

"So how much later was it?" Kraft was unusually insistent about this question.

"Let me think, let me think. He wasn't very clear." Liston broke into a sweat. For a moment, he had the eerie feeling that Professor Calman was standing in front of him. "He said he used to get to the bakery before the Clock Tower struck seven, but now he woke up at around that time."

"Right, about an hour later. Did his family have similar symptoms?"

"He didn't say," Liston replied, guiltily, as if he were saying, "I didn't ask."

Fortunately, Kraft didn't press him any further on that and changed the subject. "Do you know where Elm Street is? I'm not very familiar with Wenden Port."

"Why are you asking all of a sudden?" Liston couldn't follow the abrupt change in topic.

Kraft took back the record and flipped to the first page. Someone had drawn a black circle around the address, setting it apart from all the other information.

He pushed the paper back in front of Liston. "Until I know the exact location, I can't tell whether I'm overthinking it. So try to remember where it is."

His tone was calm, but it seemed to conceal some emotion. It wasn't irritation at having his work interrupted, nor displeasure with anyone. It was a trace of unease that the listener couldn't understand.

Liston met his gaze. Kraft's face showed no expression as he watched him intently, bringing an indescribable pressure to bear.

"It's a small street, pretty close to the Salt Tide District. I've been there before, so I remember it a little."

"Wait... the Salt Tide District?" It was the third time in the past few days that Kraft had heard the name. A deeply unsettling hypothesis began to form in his mind. "Do you have a map? I want to see where this place is."

The words of the day laborer from a few days ago flashed through his mind. "My wife." "My neighbor, too." "Hard to wake up."

"Who would have something like that?"

"Then draw me a rough sketch. I just want to know how close it is to the Salt Tide District." Kraft took out a fresh sheet of paper and handed it to Liston along with a pen.

He still had no concrete evidence, but Kraft's suspicions were growing. He felt he might have to overturn his earlier judgment about that case. The situation was considerably more complicated than he'd thought.

His initial assessment of the day laborer named Gary had been that changes in his living environment had affected his and his neighbors' routines. In a place with conditions as poor as the Salt Tide District, that was the most reasonable explanation.

Another possibility was an infectious disease, and Kraft hadn't overlooked it. But Gary and his wife had no other complaints besides sleeping longer. They had none of the usual symptoms—not fever, coughing, or diarrhea. With no leads, he'd ultimately ruled out the possibility.

The case on Elm Street had quickly put him on alert. He realized he'd made a basic mistake at the time: he hadn't asked Gary if he knew of anyone else with similar symptoms.

Liston scribbled on the paper, explaining as he drew for Lucius and Kraft.

"This black area here is the Salt Tide District. It's roughly in the southeastern part of Wenden Port. There's no way to draw a detailed map of what's inside."

He shaded an irregular shape in black and labeled it "Salt Tide District" in large letters, then drew two vertical lines to its left.

The two lines were straight, with even, natural shading—a testament to the drawing skills of an anatomy lecturer. Using a hand accustomed to sketching tissue structures for this was a waste of talent.

"Then these two lines are Elm Street." He labeled the ends with letters to show the directions. "Just think of it as running north to south. It's not exactly to scale, and it's very short."

"To be more specific, how far off is this from reality?" Kraft stepped behind Liston and studied the two lines.

"Elm Street is roughly a third as long as the Salt Tide District is wide from north to south. I don't have a good sense of especially long distances."

A horizontal line cut off the bottom end of Elm Street. "I've forgotten the name of this street, but Elm Street ends here. And the house we're looking for is?"

"Third building from the north," Lucius reminded him.

Kraft added, "On the east or west side? There can't be buildings on only one side of the street, right?"

"Sorry, I didn't think of that at the time."

He'd thought the information was detailed enough, but it still wasn't reliable.

"Never mind. It's no trouble to ask at one extra house. Mark the place first."

At Kraft's urging, Liston thought for a moment, then marked the estimated location with an X, not far from the Salt Tide District's northwest corner.

The room fell silent. Liston and Lucius watched Kraft, waiting for him to explain why he suddenly cared so much about this.

Kraft sat down beside Liston, took the pen and paper, and added an X in the northwest part of the Salt Tide District.

"Too close," he murmured. "It's much too close."

"What's this?" Lucius leaned over curiously. Judging by the distances on the sketch alone, the two X's were less than a third of Elm Street's length apart.

Kraft drew a dotted line between them, connecting the two marks. "I treated another day laborer named Gary before. His account sounded similar, but his symptoms were much worse."

"And it wasn't just him. He said his wife and neighbor were the same: they woke up later and later and were hard to rouse. I thought it was just a problem limited to the area around his home."

"Now that we've found this case, I suspect there's a connection." Kraft added two more X's beside the one in the Salt Tide District. The three marks formed a cluster.

"Could it have something to do with the Clear Clarity Potion?" Lucius naturally connected the growing sleepiness to the effects of the diluted potion. It sounded just like a weaker version.

"That doesn't make sense. None of the other patients have ever reported anything like this. Kraft, did Gary or his wife use it?" For Liston's sake as well as the potion's, he didn't want this tied to Clear Clarity.

Kraft shook his head. He, too, had instinctively connected the symptoms to Black Fluid and its diluted form, Clear Clarity, but it didn't add up. "No. We keep records of everyone who's used it. I can say for certain that no one in Gary's family has."

A cluster of cases, connected in both time and place. The possibility of an infectious disease had come before Kraft once again.

The famous Cockroach Law stated that when you first spotted a cockroach, there was probably already a whole swarm of them in the room. Kraft strongly agreed with this theory and believed it applied to a great many situations.

Using the dotted line between the marks as a radius, he drew a circle enclosing a large part of the Salt Tide District and the ordinary neighborhoods around it.

"If we've run into two cases already, there must be more than that. I suspect it affects an area much larger than this circle, and it may still be spreading."

"A plague?!" Liston's eyes nearly bulged out of his head. "Don't scare me! Two of the three of us have already had direct contact with patients."

"It's only a hypothesis. It may not spread through contact, and the symptoms don't fit, either. We need more evidence."

Kraft looked at the circle, imagining that a contagious disease with symptoms no one had ever heard of had truly emerged, starting in the Salt Tide District and gradually spreading outward.

His finger swept across the sketch, tracing the outline of the Salt Tide District. With worse sanitation and more crowded conditions, the disease would surely spread faster within the district than beyond it, though investigating there would be much more difficult.

Whatever the case, he needed more patients and more detailed information. Only then could he draw a more accurate boundary and prove his hypothesis.

"We can't just sit around." Kraft stood up and mourned for one second over the next however many days he'd have to take off work. "Whether or not I'm right, I have to go over there and look around. Do you want to come?"

"You're serious?" Liston wasn't convinced by Kraft's theory. He couldn't see any benefit to investigating this sort of thing. If Kraft was wrong, he'd waste time; if he was right, he'd risk his life.

"Then I'll come too. Besides, we only have two Bird-Beak Masks." Lucius had a strong sense of self-preservation, inherited from Kraft's belief that it was better to prepare for the worst.