We were in a cinderblock apartment building made from stacks of tile-floored homes walled with peeling plaster. The units were called "coffin houses", and not without reason. The Lark family's home was barely twenty by twenty in square footage. Broken drywall ran in a jagged edge up the middle of the wall, across the ceiling, and down on the opposite side, like a rib. Once, that rib had been a wall, but, years ago, it had been demolished, merging two homes into one.

It was a deluxe package, Lark's spirit told me.

The bathroom on the apartment's left side had been converted into a kitchen. A tarp hanging from the ceiling separated the unit into two halves, one for the family to sleep and to shit in; the other for them to eat and commiserate. Hooks studded the walls, bearing clothes, and bags, and precariously perched, makeshift shelves.

We were lucky. The second half of our unit had a window! Imagine that, a fuckin' window!

As part of the deluxe package, the toilet in the kitchen-section had been retrofitted to function as a standing oven. There was even a two-burner stove built on top of the former water unit. A third, portable burner sat atop the metal cabinet next to the toilet, where they kept the single set of plastic ware that they used as eating utensils. The family television was on a dresser next to the front door, a couple feet from the round, four-seater wooden table where the family ate its meals.

Lark's spirit was nowhere to be seen, merely a voice narrating in my head. As for myself, I was a semi-translucent phantom floating in the unit, with my back against the ceiling as I watched the family Lark eat and drink.

Mom had made chicken dumplings again. They were always Zongman's favorite.

"When is this?" I asked.

About a week after I broke my leg, Lark's spirit replied.

Zongman and Shen sat catercorner to one another, with their parents on the opposite diagonal. Somewhat to my disgust, I noticed Zongman was wearing the same clothes he'd had on when he'd fallen into the Chu River.

"Please tell me you got them cleaned…" I said.

We got it clean enough, Lark replied.

"That doesn't make me feel better," I muttered.

Zongman kept his head low. His parents had berated him enough over the past few days. He didn't want to do anything that might make him stick out, or otherwise draw undue attention to himself; his parents' anger could rekindle at any moment.

The soft, foamy-textured cast around Zong's leg was positively killing him. It was like a big dog with a serious tooth-grinding problem had its jaws in a death-grip on the lower half of his leg. The pressure was immense. Every step threatened to hurt, and all that he had to help him move was his grandfather's cane, currently leaning against the table.

At the time, Lark said, I almost wished the doctor had cut off my leg. At least that would have ended my misery.

"Actually," I said, "amputation can cause chronic neurological aftereffects," I said, "from Phantom Limb Syndrome to bouts of psychosomatic pain."

I could feel the singer's spirit roll her eyes at me.

By accident, Zongman looked up and saw his father staring at Shen in disapproval.

Zongman's jaw went slack.

This never happened.

"You haven't been eating your food, Shen?" their father asked, pointing at Shen's styrofoam plate. "What's wrong?"

From an early age, our parents made it very clear that leaving even a single pea uneaten made you worse than the old Soran Emperor.

Shen had propped himself up against the table with his elbow. Like Zongman, Shen kept his head low, shrouding his face behind his bangs.

"Shen?" their mother asked.

Shen pushed his chair away from the table. The wooden feet scraped on the floor.

"I…" Shaking his head, Shen twisted his neck left and right, and then pulled off his glasses and rubbed his shoulder. "I feel pretty damn crummy. It's been going on for a couple days. Ugh, I can't eat anymore." He bowed to his parents. "I'm sorry."

"What's wrong?" Zongman asked.

Shen moaned. "I feel like I'm about to throw up and… someone's got their arm in a lock around my head, and they're squeezing and squeezing and—"

"—Just go to bed, Shen," their father said. "You've probably picked up a bug."

"Right." Shen nodded. "Right."

He staggered through the curtain toward the other side of the apartment. He turned off the light.

Their mother stared at the curtain. "Something's wrong. I can feel it."

Dad scoffed and rolled his eyes. "Just like you felt Zongman would become an idol? Please."

"He pushes himself too hard," she said.

Both his parents' eyes bore into Zongman. He tried to ignore them and focus on the noodles and oily stir-fried vegetables on his plate, but that only made things worse.

"Do you not care about your brother, Zongman?" his mother said.

"You should look out for Shen," his father said. "If you can't be successful, at least you can make sure nothing gets in his way. You should get in his good graces as soon as you can, 'cause, unless a fuckin' miracle happens, you're gonna need your brother's help just to keep a roof over your head."

Clenching his fists. Zongman brought his plate up to his face and titled it. He used his fork to sweep all the food into his mouth. With stuffed cheeks, he got up from the chair and walked out the door, chewing and swallowing as he moved—a rude thing to do in that part of the world. He kept his hands in his pockets, running the fingers of his right hand along the thin steel of the used razor blades he kept in his pocket.

At that, I paused the memory. The warning signs were obvious.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

"You were cutting yourself, weren't you?" I asked.

Of course, Lark replied. I wrote a freakin' song about it! It's like they tell writers: write what you know!

Unpausing the memory, I phased through the wall and followed Zongman into the hallway, all the way to the emergency fire-exit door at the far end. No alarm went off as he opened the door and stepped out. It was a sticky, sweaty night, brightly lit by the riverfront's never-ending industry. The scents of the potted flowers lingering on top of the fire escape balcony couldn't fully mask the stench of pollution and decay. Lark stood by the railing, bent over its edge, clutching his razor blade in his hands.

He was crying.

It was hard for me to watch.

I turned my back to him, though that didn't stop me from knowing everything he was doing. He was talking to himself, lamenting his uselessness, and as he did so, he scraped the razor's edge along the undersides of his arms, gently at first, but then with more and more force.

He scribed a bloody tally into his flesh.

Time passed. Half an hour. An hour. He itched for another high.

I knew something bad was going to happen. Dread was bubbling up inside Lark's soul.

"Lark, what's going on? Talk to me, please."

"Just watch."

And I did, and I kept watching, and just when it seemed like the singer might have pulled a prank on me, out of nowhere, I heard a scream.

Zongman heard it, too. Startled, he jerked his head up, dropping the razor blade in the process. He pulled the sleeve of his hoodie over his arm with a slovenly tug, and then turned around and ran back inside.

The screaming got louder, and it was more than one voice.

He realized he'd left the door to his family's apartment open. He stormed in, heart racing. Both rooms' lights were on, and the separating curtain had been drawn out of the way. His parents were on the tiled floor, beside Shen's bed, with their knees pressed onto a flimsy rug.

"What's happening!?" Zongman cried.

His mother turned around, looking over her shoulder. Meanwhile, his father grabbed Shen by the shoulders.

"Shen!" the man yelled. "Talk to me! Say something!"

The first scream had been Shen's. It continued, uninterrupted, like the police sirens that often shrieked through the neighborhood more nights than not. He writhed in his bed like he was being boiled alive. Shen kicked and flexed, knocking his thin sheet and blanket onto the floor.

"Get help!" their mother screamed. "Zongman, get help!"

There, the memory froze.

Wisps of light wafted off Zongman's surroundings. The wisps quickly condensed into a single, glistening mote that hovered in front of me.

It was Lark's soul.

"Forward, please," the soul begged. Its light pulsed as it spoke.

The singer was all heartbreak, now.

The next few scenes were hard for both of us.

I saw Lark's family carry their ailing son to the too-narrow elevator and beg their neighbors to drive them to the nearest hospital.

I saw them gather in the back row of seats in a volunteered car, clustered around Shen, watching the lights flicker by in the passing dark.

I saw Zongman and his parents sitting in the oppressive, never-ending brightness of a hospital waiting room. They stayed there for three days and three nights. The time blurred together into stretches of nothing punctuated by moments of horror where Shen's voice would crash through the hallway and scream and scream. By the night of the second day, Shen had fallen into a coma.

By that point, he looked more like a machine than a person. Tubes piped into him, down his throat and into his arms.

On the fourth day, he died. The memory ended with Zongman's mother sobbing into her dead son's pale, unmoving corpse.

And then everything cut to white.

Lark and I stood in an emptiness within arms' reach of one another. Both of us were human again.

"What happened?" I asked.

I could have pried into Lark's mind to figure it out for myself, but I had more than a shred of decency, so I didn't.

Lark had her hands jammed into the pockets of her blazer. She was downcast, broken and morose.

She muttered: "A fucking amoeba ate my brother's brain."

"What…?" I conjured a chair into the void, and sat down.

Lark started to explain it to me, but I waved my hand. "No, no," I shook my head, "I know what primary amoebic meningoencephalitis is," I said.

Lark narrowed her eyes at me.

"It's the medical term for what your brother had." Our eyes met. "I'm so sorry. That…" I shook my head again. "I wouldn't wish PAM on my worst enemy."

In the olden days, in the age before vaccines, after Darkpox, few diseases evoked primal terror like rabies. Prior to the fungus' arrival on our world, the rabies virus was the closest thing we had to one of those zombie-apocalypse viruses. For canids and other carnivorous mammals, infection with rabies meant being transformed into a bundle of froth and rage that lashed out at everything in its path, inflicting bite wounds to spread the virus further.

Though human beings' higher brain functions prevented rabies from turning us into feral brutes, it could not protect us from the neurological damage the virus wreaked. Depending on how close the bite wound was to your head, it could take the virus anywhere from a week to years for it to make its fatal migration to the brain where it would finally steal your soul away. One by one, your mental faculties would shut down. You'd be buried under hallucinations, paranoia, confusion, delusions, undying terror, and, most of all, jaw-breaking spasms that convulsed you in agony whenever you saw water, or so much as even thought about having a drink.

It's hardly a surprise, then, that the ancients viewed rabies as the curse brought on by the wrath of a slighted god.

In the end, though, the ageless terror was vanquished with surprising ease. If you had even the slightest concern that you might have been exposed to the virus through contact with a rabid animal, a dose of the rabies vaccine would allay your worries, and leave you happy and healthy.

PAM was like rabies, except without the hydrophobia, or any possibility of treatment.

In primary amoebic meningoencephalitis, the amoeba was introduced to the interior of the victim's nose, where it burrowed up through your olfactory nerve and cribriform plate. From there, it made its way to your brain, where it and the ever-increasing numbers of its asexually reproduced progeny chowed down on every brain cell within reach. If the amoeba managed to get to the pain center of your brain—as it surely had in Shen's case—it could cause unending agony that not even the most potent analgesic cocktails could relieve.

When Jonan had presented the CMT with his list of recommended anti-fungals to consider using against NFP-20, he'd explained how fungal infections were far more frustrating to treat with drugs than bacterial ones, due to the closer evolutionary affinity that humans had to fungi compared to bacteria. As eukaryotes, humans and fungi shared many of the same fundamental metabolic processes. The same went for protozoa like the amoebas that caused PAM. In fact, the standard "treatment" for the condition was to administer antifungals to the patient, because they worked just as well against protozoa, and if you survived, you were likely going to experience severe neurological damage which could affect everything from bodily movement to learning and cognition. But that would only be if the disease was caught early enough, and the disease could kill in a matter of days.

Really, it was only slightly less fatal than the Green Death, in the sense that your chance of becoming a wyrm instead of dying was only slightly less than your chance of surviving a case of PAM.

I sighed. "It must have been the river water."

"No duh," Lark said.

The species of amoeba that caused PAM could normally be found in stagnant or eutrophic freshwater. Ordinarily, it was harmless, but in those rare cases where it managed to get up your nose, you were dead meat.

Lark was crying, and it didn't take a neuropsychiatrist to see why.

"It's not your fault," I told her.

She wiped away her tears and scoffed.

"Of course it's my fault. I fried my brain with drugs and carelessly threw myself at death, and Shen saved me, and died because of it."

"Zongman," I said, calling Lark by name, "It's not—"

She glared at me. "—Doc, just shut your mouth. I know what accidents are. Shen's death wasn't one of them. My stupidity put him in danger. Had I successfully killed myself before that day, he wouldn't have died the way he had."

"Shen made his choice, Lark," I said. "He was a smart kid. I'm confident he knew that diving in after you was dangerous, but he did it anyway."

"I should have been the one that died!" Lark thundered. She swung her arm. "Shen was going places! He was the one with talent. He's…" the signer wept. "…he's the one that deserved to live." She ran her fingers through her short-cut hair. "I jumped in the fucking water, wanting to die—anything would be better than the shittiness I felt all the live long day—and yet, it was my brother who ended up being on the receiving end of my death wish."

The pieces of the puzzle were falling into place.

"You have survivor's guilt," I said, as much for my own sake as for Lark's. "That's why you pushed yourself to be a success. You feel obligated to compensate for what the world lost in your brother's death."

"Yeah, I know," Lark replied, crossing her male body's arms, "and there's nothing I can do about it! That's why there was never and will never be any point in showing the world who I really am. What I wanted for my life had to die in order for Shen's potential to live on through me. I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place no matter what I do. That's why I didn't want to do this in the first place."

I pursed my lips. "But there's still one part I don't understand."

She raised a bushy eyebrow. "Oh yeah?"

"You were a success!" I said. "You became an international celebrity. You were a household name. My son loves The Morgans! And, yeah, though I know a lot of rotten stuff happens in the record business, I can't imagine you haven't made at the very least a small fortune in profits. So… why try to kill yourself? Why give all that up?"

Lark let out a long, quiet sigh. "You were right: my pursuit of success did come back to bite me." She tapped her shiny shoes on the void's white floor. "I spent the past week or so holed up in my penthouse suite, watchin' the world burn around me. Then, a couple days ago, I…—"

Lark raised an eyebrow as I stretched out my arm.

"—What are you do—"

—Lark vanished along with the changing scenery as I conjured up the memory.

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