I was tracking Livvi through the crowd by the mild exasperation of the grown-ups she elbowed or shoved. I was a little ahead of Kalton, I remember. He was off to my left, and never as good a runner as me. But then I saw a space I could shortcut across, and maybe make a lunge for her so we’d both end up tumbling together to the ground, which seemed like an inexplicably fine thing to my thirteen-year-old body right then. Except it wasn’t a space. Except it wasn’t a shortcut.
It was Doctor Corto’s cauldron, of course, that the old man had just abandoned because his mind never stayed in one place long enough to do his job properly. I burst from the crowd and saw it, too late to dodge aside. Instead I tried to jump it, just one big flailing leap, arms and legs everywhere. I thought I’d cleared it. I remember the exultation at having done a mad thing and got away with it. Wouldn’t Livvi be impressed? Except even as I thought it, my heel caught the rim of the pot and I crashed down on the far side, and the scalding Severance slopped over my leg and halfway up my side, and a splash of it up my cheek and onto my brow.
I was screaming right off because it was boiling hot and it hurt like nothing I’ve ever suffered before or since. Everyone came running with cloths and gloves and they got it off me as quick as they could while I cried like the child I really was. I remember how careful they all were not to get a drop of the stuff on themselves even after it was cool. They were all telling me it was going to be all right. I don’t think people realised just what had happened or how things would go.
I remember sitting at the front of the crowd, still racked with the pain of my burns, wrapped in wet cloth, while Sethr got anointed. The Severance was cool by then, because none of this was about hurting Sethr. It was because he was a burden and we had limited food and time and energy. Everyone knew that a troublemaker took too much and gave back too little, and that wasn’t our way. Our way wasn’t to punish troublemakers, either. We didn’t care about revenge or retribution for wrongs done, although I know now that there are ways of being that make those things a priority. For us, we couldn’t see the point of that; who would it make things better for? Our justice was purely to ensure the optimal survival of the community, and the Lawgiver had judged that the community would be better without Sethr in it.
Lawgiver Elhern daubed the Severance across Sethr’s skin, dark red like old blood. It soaked in, and I knew it would stain him forever, no water or scrubbing would ever get it out. After that was done, they let him go. People were already backing off, because Sethr was different now. He was Severed. They looked at him and they didn’t see One Of Us anymore. He had become something alien. I remember seeing even the fleas abandoning him, springing off, almost invisible save for their movement, to find more agreeable hosts.
I remember sitting there watching Sethr as he stumbled and entreated and was turned away. I couldn’t tell. He was just the same to me, the same man he’d always been, despite the harsh, revolted way everyone looked at him. I couldn’t tell he was an outcast. That was the first clue I had that I was marked, too.
They brought me to Doctor Corto, of course. I still wonder whether, if he had been younger and fitter, and if the ghost could speak through him properly, maybe he could have made everything right. Maybe there was some antidote to the Severance, if he could have applied it quickly enough.
He examined me, and I remember his eye, its pupil going big and small and big again as the ghost tried to reach him. He would open his mouth, and that voice that wasn’t quite his would say, “Secondary decontamination onset,” just like the ghost should, but then his lip would droop and twitch and his attention would wander. “I’m cold,” he said, not seeing me, and even with a fire riding high in his hearth right next to him. “Sera, where are you?” Calling for his wife, who’d been dead since I was very small. His hands would shake and the ghostlight would gutter in his face, flaring fitfully in his creases and in the cracked and swollen skin about his empty socket.
II.
THIRTY DAYS LATER one of Aro’s hunters came across Sethr out in the wilds. He was stick thin, skin stretched taut over bone, but his belly had burst open. He’d crammed himself full of edrauthaberries. The purple stains of their juice overlaid the red marks of Severance on his hands and mouth. They had clogged up his innards in an indigestible mass and eaten away at him, bloating him out with toxic gas until the pressure had ruptured his insides and he’d finally died.
I remember loving edrauthaberries. Whenever we kids had work that took us beyond the village boundaries, we’d keep an eye out for the red leaves of their bushes and go prying about the base of their stems for the fruit. I could eat a hundred, back then, and we’d squabble and barter over the biggest ones, so sweet and rich. To Sethr they were poison and he’d known it. He’d only gorged himself on them when he was too hungry to care.
Ten days before they found Sethr, I ate some edrauthaberries for the first time since the accident. They were bitter on my tongue, bile rising in my throat even at the taste. I forced them down, because I was desperate to be the person I’d been before, as though just going through the motions would somehow overwrite what had actually happened. My stomach rebelled. They were not poison to me, they wouldn’t sicken and kill me like they had Sethr, but still I couldn’t keep them inside me. They were one more pleasure of the world I would never know again. I still remember the taste—how joyous they were beforehand, how acrid and vile after.
Meat was worse. I tried the flesh of every animal we kept and everything the hunters came back with, and even a mouthful had me vomiting up what little I might have in my guts, or retching out bitter spittle when there was nothing left to me. Bread I could eat, though it had to be cooked so hard it was almost burned. Even then I got sick a lot, just from the air, from the water. I had pains, fevers and cramps. My eyes stung and burned and I coughed all the time, waking myself up over and over each night. The red stains of the Severance were joined by blotchy rashes and sores from touching just about anything. I learned to go about covered head to toe because all of a sudden the world and everything in it was my enemy.
But I could have lived with that. Only just, but I wasn’t Sethr. They’d got the Severance off my skin as quickly as they could, rather than leaving it to soak into my bones like they had with him. If it had been that, then my life would have been pain and suffering but it would have been bearable. We were a community, after all.
Except the lines of our community had been redrawn, and I was on the outside looking in.
I was scarred by the Severance—just the heat of it. It raised a great streak of a welt on my face that lasted for days. I couldn’t stop touching it—it felt huge under my fingers, tender and throbbing. At first I thought it was that, which made people look at me the way they did. I thought they didn’t like me because I was ugly.
I told myself that, anyway. I must have known, deep down, it was more. What had happened cut both ways, after all. I must have felt that lack of connection inside me, only there were so many of them staring suspiciously at me that my reactions got lost in it.
But I’d got the Severance on me, a good long splash of it. It had soaked in, despite everything they’d done to scrub it off my screaming, kicking body. I was marked.