John Snow's Map

"Exactly. It's getting late. We should be in our first morning class by now."

Lucius straightened up and adjusted his mask by its beak. "Have you decided where to start? If we head back early, we can still make lunch. Gris asked me last time why you didn't come by more often."

"Quiet for a moment. I really don't understand how you can talk about food in a place like this." Kraft raised a hand in a gesture for him to stop.

The only two voices faded away, and silence quickly closed in around them, like quicksand filling every crack and enveloping them in a frozen atmosphere.

Kraft usually enjoyed quiet, but the kind he liked came with the sense of being away from it all, with the occasional distant sound. This was the unnatural silence of being shut inside a soundproof room.

In this foul, chaotic place, every sensation was amplified to the extreme: the nauseating stench, the bizarre buildings, the damp, slimy feel of every surface. Only sound had been taken away, leaving one of his senses missing.

Lucius soon noticed something was wrong, too. The silence reminded him of stepping out of the anatomy classroom late at night into an empty corridor, with every sound stilled and everything sunk into quiet.

But this wasn't the middle of the night, when everyone was asleep. It was a bright, sunny morning.

He strode to the nearest door and pounded on it. The hollow knocks echoed through the frozen silence, but no one answered.

"Is anyone there?" Kraft called out at an opening that was probably a window. He could just make out someone asleep on the floor in the dim, cramped space, still sound asleep and oblivious to the noise outside.

Starting at the Red Algae Well, the two of them worked their way outward, knocking on every door.

There was no need to ask anymore. If a door was locked from the inside and no one answered, they were definitely still asleep.

Kraft put his memory to work, trying to commit the location of every home to memory and match them to the spatial layout he remembered, building a map in his mind.

The further their investigation went, the more serious the situation seemed. Half an hour had passed, and they had knocked on dozens of doors, but still hadn't found anyone who was awake.

It was as if an invisible wall separated the sleeping people from the two of them. They moved through a transparent maze, hearing only their own voices and echoes that sounded like hallucinations.

The rate of this pathological sleep disorder was alarmingly high. No one in the area they had covered had escaped it, and they hadn't yet found its boundary, so they couldn't estimate how many people were affected.

Lucius couldn't see the map in Kraft's mind or tell where they had been. He hadn't even noticed that they were gradually moving farther from the Red Algae Well. Mechanically, he followed Kraft, knocking on doors and calling out, his anxiety growing with every passing moment.

He was completely lost and couldn't understand what had caused such a widespread illness.

"This makes no sense. None of this makes sense. It looks so much like the effects of Black Fluid, but there are so many people affected. What could it be?"

Kraft couldn't answer him. He felt that his latest theory was wrong, too. If the influence weakened with distance from the source, then the patients they encountered should have shown varying degrees of severity. They had been walking for so long; at least someone should have answered by now.

Still puzzled, they continued their investigation. Kraft felt they were nearing the edge of the affected area, and faint voices drifted over from farther away.

A dozen or so minutes later, Kraft came across the first group of people they'd seen awake in this area.

Several people, men and women, wore the same crude hemp clothes as the gaunt man they had seen earlier. They glanced in surprise at the black-robed figure emerging around the corner, then went back to what they were doing.

As they went farther, they saw more and more people, passing from the land of the sleeping into a normal area.

The number of wooden houses with shut doors and no answer quickly dwindled. In their place were open doorways, people dumping waste and carrying water home.

Kraft called out to a woman carrying a bucket.

"I'm a doctor from the Academy. Have you and your family been waking up later and later lately?"

"The Academy? A doctor?" The woman looked Kraft's strange outfit up and down in confusion. "I think I understand what you mean, but that hasn't happened in my family."

She set down her bucket and pointed behind Kraft. "There are plenty of people like that over there, though. You'll have to wait until noon to see them get up."

"What about the others?" Hearing the clamor of voices and clattering sounds, Kraft felt relief for the first time. "Your neighbors, for example?"

"That family's just like you said. I don't know which devil cursed them, but now they can only work half a day. How are they supposed to get by?"

After asking several people in a row, Kraft realized that even the progression of the illness was different from what he'd expected.

Based on Gary and Blade's descriptions, he had expected to find patients whose sleep times had increased by varying amounts.

But there were only two kinds of people here: those who slept until noon and those who were completely unaffected. And in most cases, the whole family was the same—either none of them could wake up, or everything was normal for all of them.

In this border area, the two groups lived side by side without affecting each other, as distinct as oil and water. Only the density of cases changed; the severity of the illness did not.

That was... strange.

"So what's causing it, then?" Lucius began fiddling with his beak the way Kraft did, hoping the gesture would help him collect his thoughts.

Unfortunately, it didn't seem to help. He still couldn't come up with an answer.

Three women carrying buckets had passed by in the time they'd been standing there. There didn't seem to be many adult men around.

Laborers did make up the majority of the residents here. They got up early to look for work at the Dock, then came home in the evening with their day's wages. They spent most of it on bread and cheap seafood, saving a little or using it to buy a few small items.

The women stayed home to do handicrafts for extra income, as well as taking care of the house and watching the young children.

The hard labor and poor living conditions steadily damaged their health, leaving them no time to think about much else. Just keeping their lives as they were already took all their energy.

And if something unexpected upset the balance of their lives—an illness that appeared out of nowhere, for instance... Kraft glanced behind him. The people in this silent zone, for example.

In less than a month, such misfortunes could bring an entire family to its knees.

He found a fairly clean spot to lean against and sighed.

He had been sighing more and more often lately, usually because he was being pushed along by one chaotic problem after another, half work and half personal matters. In the midst of all the busyness, he sighed over plans thrown into disarray.

But sometimes, like now, he sighed because his own abilities were limited.

He pieced together the route they had just taken in his mind: a strip of land filled with cases, growing sparser until they disappeared.

Whatever the cause, some factor's influence clearly weakened with distance. But what was it?

And for that factor, it seemed to make little difference whether people were isolated or not. They lived next door to each other without being affected by it.

He had definitely seen a similar map somewhere before, one where the locations of cases had been used to figure things out, with no need to consider anything else.

The pages of memory turned in his mind. Once he had the slightest clue, he could dredge up anything related to it.

"Lucius! Those women carrying buckets just now—they all came from the same direction, right?"

Kraft suddenly sprang away from the board he had been leaning against and called Lucius by name.

If Lucius had ever lived in another world, he might have thought of some schoolboy who brought death wherever he went. Like Kraft, the boy's broad lenses would flash brightly.

Though he still had no idea what was going on, he tried to remember. "Um... I think so? I'm not sure."

"That's right. They all came from the opposite direction from us." Kraft had figured it out. The situation in the Salt Tide District was a classic case, plain and simple.

In the Otherworld Soul's nineteenth century, a famous disease had swept through London. It spread rapidly, and countless people fell ill; tens of thousands died.

Once one person in a family caught the disease, it wasn't long before the rest of the family became infected, too.

Even stranger, isolating the patients had no effect, unlike with other diseases. It was as if some eerie phantom had taken up permanent residence in the area.

Two names had been etched into memory by that terrible epidemic: "cholera" and "John Snow," the father of epidemiology.

John Snow marked every person who had fallen ill and died on a map. Before long, the famous cholera map showed a clear pattern: the cases clustered around a central point, growing sparser farther away.

Here, the pattern was even more obvious.

"Water, Lucius. It's the water."

Compared to London, the Salt Tide District had a truly appalling lack of water sources.

Its low-lying position by the sea made it extremely difficult to find drinkable groundwater. Most wells, like the Red Algae Well, yielded useless salt water, making the effort a waste.

That meant any reliable water source would affect a much wider area than it would elsewhere, since so many residents would draw water from the same place.

Every day, the water a family drank was carried home in buckets from a communal source. That also explained why the cases in the Salt Tide District clustered so distinctly by household.

As people moved farther from that water source, they became less willing to go there to draw water and started using other wells instead. So the cases grew sparser, until the source was too far away for anyone to bother going to it.

Not one of the people they'd just seen carrying buckets had come from the direction of the main cluster of cases, which further supported his theory.

A clear path had appeared before him again. Kraft gave Lucius the spot he'd been leaning against and began pacing excitedly.

"W-wait until noon, when they wake up. There's a contaminated water source here, and I'm going to find it."