Red Rainbow by G Johanson (best e reader for academics txt) 📕

her, but there seemed to be a block imposed when it came to returning that favour. The miscarriage felt like it was only the tip of the iceberg, Patience barely able to imagine the experiences the stripping exposed her to. Only Plague sounded more lost, Patience unable to meet her due to her ‘gift’ making everyone she came into contact with ill, as well as herself. Patience was willing to risk it but wasn’t given the option.

Interlude II

Sick Girl

Nadine Tasse was praised for her curly locks from a very young age. Her hair had been very light blonde then, a little darker now, and while she’d often wished it was straight like her friends, she saw some advantages to it now. It didn’t need that much maintenance and, thankfully, did not require looking in her smashed mirror to arrange. It wouldn’t comb straight, she could get away with tying it back and having the odd trim. The very odd trim, Nadine barred from most hairdressers within the Paris district.

Cutting her hair meant coming into close contact with her, something nobody was keen to do twice. Her groceries were delivered to her at no extra cost, the delivery boy knocking at the door to her basement flat, old servants’ quarters, and fleeing before she opened it. She did not have to pay extra for this service for the shopkeeper preferred this over having her come anywhere near his store. Nadine took no offence, grateful that he didn’t outright bar her and refuse her service like most traders did. She had food and drink, a roof over her head, essential things for her welfare.

What she did not have, and she had not enjoyed for 14 years, was her health. She sometimes wondered if she’d have been better always being sick. She wouldn’t know any different then. The memories of healthier times were not much consolation as they were so long ago and seemed unlikely to be recaptured.

Nadine only had herself to blame for her illness. She was 13 and travelling with her friends on the Metro. They’d seen the dishevelled old woman on multiple occasions on the platform, never boarding a train. She always looked a state, sick as a dog, shivering, a stained hanky returning to her mouth after throaty coughs doused in spittle and who knew what else.

Nadine walked over and sat next to her as her friends watched. She commented on what a beautiful dress the lady had on, asking her where she’d bought it and if anyone would be taking her out soon as she looked ready for a ball. The fake sincerity must have been transparent, in retrospect, Nadine laying it on with a trowel, making her out to be a fashion and beauty icon with her words while her friends sniggered.

Two days’ later, Nadine felt most unwell. She put the blame on getting close to the old bag, the viral infection the worst she’d ever known. Vomiting round the clock, shitting through the eye of a needle, shivering as though in a freezer...

14 years later that virus hadn’t gone. She’d learned how to cope with it, how to keep the grossest parts in check, but she was still gravely ill constantly. As was everyone she came into contact with. Breathing the same air was enough for anyone to be struck down for a week or two, depending on their constitution. Everyone wised up to it quickly. She was unclean and nobody wanted to be near her. That included her family, months of relentless sickness wearing them down. Hospital stays didn’t help. She got sympathy there, though even here this became distant. One nurse was lovely to her throughout, choosing to sit with her on her bed and hold her hand when she needed it, even when it made her violently ill. That nurse was the reason Nadine ultimately discharged herself, because she was taking her down with her.

Being a member of the Foundation didn’t help her health. It made it worse if anything, wandering the streets to find the haunts of the Germans or anyone else the Love Phantom or Marcella told her about. He phoned her on occasion with coded messages, but the majority of her contact with them came through notes Marcella posted through her letterbox (she wisely never knocked or came in for coffee). One thing it did was ensure the Love Phantom continued to financially support her in the form of large lump sums to cover her for all expenses for a calendar year. He started doing this before the group even began (from practically their first meeting, a generous gesture considering she had made him as sick as everyone else), so while it was not tied to her membership, it did make her more inclined to help him. She was able to hold back her vomiting and her diarrhoea enough to walk around without the plague within being immediately apparent in others. She missed the effects of her presence provided she was gone within 20 minutes.

The Love Phantom had suggested other aliases for her over her own choice of Plague. They were all sickly characters from novels – Tourvel, March (apparently he read the book she was in to his young sister) or Nana. These were never under consideration for her, Nadine having no time for cryptic literary references that meant nothing to her. She wanted something suitably horrendous that summed up the wretchedness of her existence – Nausea was the only other name she entertained (though she darkly mentioned Vomit, Diarrhoea and Gastroenteritis to César for a reaction), Nadine opting for Plague as it conveyed the contagious nature of her curse better. By venturing out on her bicycle every day and trying to limit her proximity to her countrymen and women and the duration of it and just staying close to Germans, she was infecting the invaders a man at a time. She did it without hate, without enthusiasm. It was just something to