Urine and feces from patients who couldn’t control themselves. Disinfectant splashed over everything that might carry microbes. The strong metallic smell of Oolom blood, taken as samples so we could plot the advance of the disease. The work sweat of human volunteers, everyone changing bed linen in the gray dawn or rotating the patients to prevent bedsores. The earthiness of mud underfoot, tangled with the lye-soap fragrance of Demoth yellow-grass.

The Ooloms could smell none of it, the bad or the worse. Thanks for that went to a flaw in their engineering. When the prototypes of the breed were created centuries ago, their ability to smell had been lost… derailed as an accidental side effect of the mods made to their bodies, some dead-gap in the skimpy neural pathway leading from nose to brain. The DNA stylists who made them were working on a budget and didn’t consider the shortcoming important enough to correct; and the Ooloms, of course, didn’t know what they were missing.

Lucky them.

Approaching row five, cot three, I wondered who’d occupied this bed the day before. It says something, doesn’t it, that I couldn’t remember. I’d chatted with so many patients over the previous weeks, got to know them…

No, no, no. The point is, I hadn’t got to know them. I’d picked up trivial facts about certain people — where they lived before the plague, what work they did — but I was all surface, no salt. Most patients could barely talk; and I could barely listen. When you’re fifteen you want to be so slick, you want to swallow the world and stool it out… but you haven’t half learned to deaden yourself, not the way adults artfully, reflexively deaden themselves every hour of the day. At fifteen, all you can do is close down bolt-tight: go through the motions of caring and concern but shut your eyes and ears, not let the bad bitchies in. That’s not deadening yourself, it’s internal bleeding. Swinging back and forth from "Oh God, I don’t want to be here," to "Oh Christ, I have to help this person!"