So much for the "before" picture — before the plague. After? I’ll get to that.

It was late summer in Sallysweet River when we first heard tell of the disease. My father, Dr. Henry Smallwood, was the town M.D., always reading the medical newsfeeds to me and giving his on-the-spot opinion. A session with Dads might go like this: "Well then, Faye-girl, here’s some offworld laze-about who’s come to Demoth for a study of our poisonous animals — lizards and eels and what-all. Can you imagine? He wants to protect us all from snakebite or some fool thing… as if there’s a single creature on the planet that wants to bite us. Complete waste of time!"

(Which was and wasn’t true. Neither Ooloms nor humans were native to Demoth — Homo saps had only been around twenty-five years, and Ooloms about nine hundred — so to the local animal population, we smelled disgustingly alien. Nothing in the woods would ever try to nibble us for food… but they’d be fast enough to give us the chomp if we stepped on their tails or threatened their young. I’d never say that to Dads, though; before the plague sent us all stress-crazy, I was his own little girl, and so swoony fond, I never questioned him. When I felt like a fight, I picked one with my mother.)

So. One trickly hot evening, Dads looked up from the newsfeed, and said, "Listen to this, my Faye — they’re reporting a rash of complaints from Ooloms all over the world. Teeny numbnesses: a single finger going limp, or an eyelid, or one side of the tongue. Investigators are expressing concern." Dads snorted. "Sure to be psychosomatic," he told me. "A grand lot of Ooloms have worked themselves into a tizzy about some idle nothing, and now they’re having demure little hysterical breakdowns."

I nodded, trusting that Dads knew what he was talking about.