• The traveller opened his eyes several hours later. The nurse was different this time: lighter hair, rounder face. She bustled around, checking other patients in adjacent beds. He was awake enough to realize that he and his brother were not the only two patients at the hospital, such as you might call it. This particular hospital was not in its best condition. It consisted of three main rooms, all filled with rows of curtained beds, and what looked to be a quarantine room, as well as a preparation room and a bathroom. It was falling apart, looked like it was actually cracking, and covered in dust. However, he was glad to be there. A hospital falling apart was better than dying in the desert, prepared to do so as he might have been.

    To the right of him, now that he could turn his head, there was about half of the room full of the sick and injured. To the left of him, a familiar dark figure in the bed next to his. He tried to reach out to his brother to wake him up and help him, the most he could move his hands was to flex his fingers.

    The new nurse saw him trying to move and quickly came over as fast as she could waddle. "Dokktah," she cried behind her as she shuffled over. "Dokktah Abbas, come quick. Numbah Se'nteen is awake!" The round nurse shuffled back to find this Doctor Abbas and emerged again with a dark, wiry man with large head in tow. She was babbling incoherently and quickly while the man listened quietly, or pretended to in the least. The look on his face denoted more to the latter. When they finally reached the bed of Number Seventeen, he turned to her and took a deep breath. "Francine, I am aware of de situation. Tank you. Please, go help de patiens with matching stab wounds. Dey are treatening each oder again."

    She beamed with pride that he had thanked her, and hurried off to save two men from injuring themselves, and each other, further. Doctor Abbas shook his head as she left and turned to the new, now quite awake traveler. "Hello," he said in a much less irritated tone. "I am Doctor Abbas." He smiled as he tried to suppress his accent. He wasn't proud of it. It wasn't professional to call someone "Dokktah," even if it was yourself. "Are you feeling bettah?"

    The traveler rolled his head to the side and opened his mouth to speak, and found that he finally could speak. The dryness of the desert had waned and now he felt much less tethered, much lighter. There was something covering his left eye. "I'm," he began, then cleared his throat. There was still sand caught in it. Try again, try again. "I am... much better now. Thank you," he said in a voice that was deep enough to rattle chains and shake the ground if it wanted to. Right now it didn't want to. It was much more content telling the doctor that its owner was fine.

    "Good, good," said the doctor, taking out a notebook and pen. "Adja says she found you during de night sheeft. She tells me dat you walked all de way here from de west. Is dat true?"

    "How is my brother," he asked immediately. Doctor Abbas furrowed an eyebrow.

    "What is your name," the doctor asked. It was rare that someone would be less concerned about himself in this hospital. People in this town more often looked out for themselves and blamed each other; not the other way around. Even if the other person was your brother, when you could pass the blame on someone else, you did it.

    "Leonard," he said. "My name is Leonard. Please tell me about my brother."

    "Is your brother de one dat Adja says you carried in here?"

    "Yes, Leonard said, growing impatient. "I carried him here. Now, please, tell me that he is okay." He did not mean to sound rude, but after the third time he asked the question, or any question for that matter, he felt that his politeness begin to slip. He did not like repeating himself.

    Doctor Abbas nodded in the direction of the adjacent bed. "Your brother is going to be fine," he said. "He is as you were: tired, exhausted, dehydrated, and a leetle beat up. Tell me, Mister Leonard, how long were you carrying him?"

    Leonard thought for awhile on the question. He knew the answer that Abbas wanted to hear, but a strong part of him wanted to tell him that he had been carrying his brother all of his life.

    "Two days," he said, much more cooperative now that he knew his little brother was going to be alright. The first day, everything was fine, though we knew we were going to die. His eyes kept wandering over to the man with the boyish face who lay sleeping so peacefully. It was amazing what kind of trouble he could cause when he was awake. It was amazing what kind of damage he could cause when he wanted to.

    "Its a good thing dat you got to us when you did," continued Abbas. He eyed something just below Leonard's left eye. "Much longer an' dat cut on your face would have been infected and caused many more problems."

    Leonard was now aware of the bandage on his face. The tape was distracting. He remembered how he had gotten this cut. He remembered what had happened out there, not that he understood any of it. Hans' nose will have to be reset, he thought.

    "It will leave a scar," Abbas continued. "But with a cut dat deep it was bound to take a long time to heal, anyway, especially wit' all de sand in it. You are very lucky dat dere was no infection. It would have easily spread to your eye."

    "Yeah," he said, half-listening. "Very lucky." He wondered if it would be wise to have them wake up his brother. What kind of state of mind would he be in was the great mystery. Would he be angry, or would he simply be glad to be alive?

    "Now, what were you two doing out dere in the west? Don' you know dat's a good way to kill yourself?"

    This was one those questions that had many answers. Father always said it that the road was longer every time he walked it, he thought. We wanted to see if it was true. We took it as a challenge. We wanted to find a new life, even if i meant finding death along the way. We wanted to see if the old stories were still true; if it was the world that had changed, or just us. Of course, he couldn't say any of these things to the doctor. He was sure he already thought he was crazy: showing up at four in the morning with and unconscious man on his shoulders. He was probably right.

    "Going east," he said quietly. He was fairly certain that the doctor was unaware of the village that lie out to the west. Most people were. The road had gone missing years ago.

    "Well," Abbas said, puzzled. "I suppose you made it here. You're lucky you ended up here and not out on de street somewhere."

    "Why," Leonard asked with passive curiosity.

    Abbas looked at him as if he were an imbecile. Did he know where he was? "Dis is not a safe city to be wandering around alone in at night."

    "But I wasn't alone," Leonard insisted. "My brother was with me, and I was with him."

    The doctor shook his head. He had seemed smarter than this. "If you had collapsed on de street, it is likely dat someone would have found you, taken everything from you, even the clothes off your back, and left you dere. Dat is, if dey were feeling generous."

    Leonard seemed to give this some thought. "Well, that would have been very rude of them," he said finally. Doctor Abbas rubbed a spot above his temple, as if soothing a migraine.

    "Yes. It would have been quite rude of dem." Its a damn good thing you ended up here, he thought.

    A door slammed behind him and Doctor Abbas turned, Leonard peered around him curiously. A woman with long, dark hair rushed in. Leonard thought she looked familiar.

    "Right on time, Mees Adja," Abbas proclaimed as she rushed through the door. Adja, Adja, Adja... the name was familiar, too.

    "As always, Doctor," she called back as she prepared immediately for work. "Is Number Seventeen awake?" Her speaking skills were certainly more precise than the rest of the staff. Though, Leonard did not appreciate being called by a number. Of course, little could be helped since his last attempt to introduce himself had fallen flat.

    "Yes," Abbas replied blandly. "Would you like to talk to him?" Leonard's face twisted into a look of disapproval, as much as he could with a bandage on his face. I'm right here, he thought. I could ask her myself. As much as he was thankful for the doctor's generosity, he was beginning to find this hospital to be quite rude.

    "Yes, please," she called back from the preparation room. "I have many questions for him."

    "Good good," Abbas replied, putting his pen and notebook back into his pocket. Francine popped back in just as he did so.

    "Dokktah Abbas," she called frantically. "Numbahs Tirteen an' Fourteen are tryin' get oudda dere beds again!" To which Abbas replied simply by rushing towards to the other side of the open hall.

    As the two of them ran off to dissipate the situation, Adja moved towards the bed. She had a confidence in her that was admirable, especially for woman in Neptha. While the culture of the city wasn't wholly abject to women working real jobs, it was a bit farther behind in the advancement of women's rights than the rest of the world. A lot of women here were still content with staying at home and raising children.

    But not Adja. Adja carried the world on her shoulders sometimes, but at least she held her posture.

    She sat down on a chair that Abbas refused to sit on when talking to patients. She assumed it was because he didn't want to be on the patient's level. He preferred to be tall when he could be. "My name is Adja," she said quietly.

    "My name is Leonard," he returned. "You were the one that found me and my brother."

    She looked a little shocked that he remembered. He had been, after all, barely conscious at the time. "Yes, that was me. Do you mind if I ask you a few questions about that? It will help us decide if you and your brother need to stay here longer."

    "Doctor Abbas already asked me some questions," Leonard said, protesting a little. This was the longest he had been awake in a few days. It was beginning to wear him out. And he had a feeling he would be repeating himself again.

    "Doctor Abbas didn't write down the answers," she said. And when he thought about it, during that whole exchange the doctor's pen had not moved at all. She took out an identical pen and notebook. "Now, you say that your name is Leonard. Do you have a last name?"

    "Erland," he replied automatically.

    That was an odd name for someone who looked like he might have been a Neptha native. "Erland" was a northern surname, and in her mind did not belong on someone with a dark face and dreadlocks. She jotted down only his name. It lead to her second question, anyhow.

    "And where are you from?"

    "Postenmile."

    "I've never heard of that place," she said, pouting at the unfamiliarity.

    "Its out west," he explained. To this, her expression contorted a bit more; raised one eyebrow, furrowed the other.

    "You're making that up," she said. "There's nothing west of here but more sand and vultures."

    "There didn't used to be, he said quietly. "The road to Postenmile closed five or six years ago when people stopped traveling there. It wasn't worth the trouble."

    She wrote all of this down skeptically. "I'm not sure I can believe you," she said, shaking her head. "Going west of Neptha is suicide."

    Leonard laughed a bit. "So is going east of Postenmile."

    Adja narrowed her eyes. She supposed he had her, there. "Next question," she commanded.

    "How did you get the cut on your face?"

    Leonard hesitated to answer this right away, unlike his near immediate answers to the other questions. He liked to think of himself as a fairly truthful man, even when it came to to admitting when he'd done something wrong. He would rather tell the truth and take the blame than have to pay for it later with a lie.

    "Hyenas," he said after a long pause. "Hyenas came and attacked us while we rested."

    "Hyenas," Adja repeated skeptically.

    "Yes. Hyenas." His eyes suddenly seemed very dark, very intense, as if to say do you have a problem with that?

    This was not a satisfactory answer. Adja may not have spent a long time out in the desert like these two had, but she knew that if she had been attacked by anything with sharp teeth that was smaller than the average dog, she wouldn't have gotten away with just a scratch on the face and a broken nose.

    Furthermore, there would be teeth marks.

    Furthermore, they would be dead.

    "I am required to believe you," she said after this assessment. "But I am inclined to disbelieve you."

    "Then disbelieve me," Leonard said, his flat gaze never changing, without even a twitch of an emotion. The man could win a staring contest with a snake.

    It occurred to her now that all of his answers could have very well been nothing but lies. After all, why should he tell her the truth? She was just a nosey nurse. It wouldn't matter if you lied to your doctor if you didn't plan on being in that hospital ever again. What did it matter, as long as you kept everything nice and smoothed over? This had to be an alibi. There was no Postenmile. There was no closed road, no hyenas. Something was being covered up.

    "You're very well-spoken for someone from a place that no one has had any contact with for the past five years," she accused. I know you're lying, she thought at him, wondering by some off-chance that he could tell what she was thinking. Just tell me the truth. I'm trying to help you.

    "You're very well-spoken for someone this far-East," he retorted. Not even a flicker of change in his expression. It probably wouldn't change until this interview was over.

    She scribbled down some notes, some of what he had said, some of her own speculations, and closed her notebook. "I can see that we are done here." She stood up and walked off to give her notes to Doctor Abbas, like a good nurse.