Lin Page 22 legs being used as obstacles or weapons. She knows the hall as well as she knows her own body, and she dodges and sways and strikes at thin air until her arms grow taut with sweat. Then she greedily swallows a pail full of fresh water and collapses on her bed, not to move again until noontime. The older she gets, the more she realizes she needs sleep. Maybe that is the secret, she thinks; you get older, you need more and more sleep to remain young, until finally sleep dominates everything, and you are dead. Did you bring enough vaccine today? she asks. He sighs. Last time he was a few vials short, and as a result one of the girls in the house had died during the night. There was little point in trying to save her anyway, as a cursory examination had revealed that she had already progressed to the second-stage fever, where life is reduced to a collision of percentages and probabilities, none of them favorable. And yet this woman who rarely smiles of her own free will, who sits as straight as a tree growing from the ground, threw her arms around the dying girl and stayed there all night, until the girl breathed her last and her body was a bag of sharp limbs, and even then she continued to hold her, until all heat had left the body and the lips were turning blue, and finally she laid the corpse down gently on the bed, staring at it until the morning hours, as if straining to understand something. You take so much responsibility, he says. Why don't you go to the capital? They could use someone like you.