---

She flashed her gold colored badge at the entrance to the emergency room waiting area, cutting ahead of at least 50 desperate people waiting outside for their turn to continue waiting inside.

The smell of rank illness accosted her immediately upon entering, interspersed with acrid sweet whiffs of ostensibly lemon scented cleaning fluid. The two odors waged an unrelenting war for dominance, neither winning outright, both intensely unpleasant.

Eager to leave this place, she rushed to the front of a second line of people, a couple of them coughing suspiciously. The hospital was supposed to screen for TB at the front door, followed by immediate quarantine if someone tested positive. In reality most hospitals ran out of portable TB tests half way through the month.

It was April 25th. Detective Lowry tried her best not to breath.

Another flash of her badge and Lowry was walking through the swinging doors, beyond the waiting room. Inside, every bed was full and medical detritus piled up in corners, the overworked doctors and nurses racing from patient to patient, wearing the harried looks of professionals grappling with impossible demands, endless responsibilities which were certain to spill over into tomorrow, and the next day, and every day after that.

Detective Lowry wanted to take a deep, calming breath, but resisted the urge out of fear of what might come along with it. Instead she found a box of masks, donned one, and began roaming the floor in search of her complaining witness.

The ER had once been broken into a reasonable number of beds, separated by curtains and painted, yellow lines. Lowry could see the worn remnants of those lines, tattered yellow numbers between them, all over the floors. On the ceiling she spied the disused metal tracks along which privacy curtains once rode, now empty.

In lieu of the old system, the ER now resembled a triage station in war time. Beds beside beds beside beds. Beds wherever a bed could be squeezed, and upon each a person, writhing, bleeding, coughing, staring in a confusion of pain and fear, wracked by violence or, more often, a host of ‘tropical’ diseases, now unleashed by heat and moisture on a population ill equipped to combat them.

Detective Lowry walked the room, dodging a distracted nurse, searching for her victim.

A hiker had called it in as a ‘slow motion explosion’, his words. First responders found a half acre circle of smoldering char. Lowry arrived a few hours later, after the child and the two human remains, just ash and bones, had already been removed.

She drove along a decrepit gravel road, thick green kudzu forest pressing in on either side, until the car passed a well defined line beyond which there was only a picture of hell, as if a precisely designed nuclear weapon had gone off and turned everything in a 400 meter radius into slag.

Lowry pulled the car up near the center of the lifeless circle, the wheels kicking up spirals of ash and coming to a sliding stop on the soft top layer of dust. Lowry got out and even the small breeze from the car door sent a plume of gray into the air. Her shoe impacted the powdered ground as though she were the first person on the surface of the moon.

Standing at the epicenter of the blast zone, Lowry looked down at two tiny oases of green grass, each the size and shape of a child’s bare footprint.

“Can I help you Detective?” An exhausted doctor broke Lowry out of her reverie, dragging her back to the ER, to the foot of a bed, and a crumpled, child-like figure coated in oozing gauze.

Lowry pointed meakly at the prostrate figure, still and silent, but for the sound of a respirator’s electric whisper. “Does he need new bandages? They’re orange.”

The doctor glanced at the figure in the bed as though it was a glance he could hardly spare. “We changed them ten minutes ago. Burns suppurate.”

Lowry nodded. It felt as if the air around the bed was deadened, as if sound itself was aghast. “Has he spoken?”

“She. Based on hip structure anyway.” The doctor bent over to the side of the bed and came back with the girl’s medical chart. “She hasn’t regained consciousness. And anyway,” the doctor didn’t make eye contact, “she couldn’t speak if she did. Her face is a mess. Everything is a mess. Her tongue was terribly burnt. We partially amputated to . . . stop her from choking.” The doctor stopped talking and held the medical chart out in front of him. Lowry took it.

She scanned through the chart. Jane Doe, female, DOB April 25th, 2043. Details about the terrible extent of her burns, and not much else. Lowry looked up at the doctor. “You have her birthdate as today.”

He nodded. “The hospital administrator won’t accept ‘unknown’ dates of birth, so if a patient’s DNA isn’t in the registry, and we can’t get the DOB elsewhere, we just put down whatever day we entered them into the system.”

The DNA registry was still voluntary for everyone except convicted criminals and recipients of public assistance. This was why Lowry supported automatic DNA entry, everyone entered into the registry at birth. “Won’t that mess up her records or something, in the future?” Lowry regretted the question immediately – as if it mattered to this burnt husk of a little girl whether her paperwork was in order.

“Detective, no one survives these kinds of burns. If she wasn’t a child, we wouldn’t even have admitted her.” After a beat of silence, the doctor’s voice indicated he was bringing the conversation to a close. “Is there anything else you need?”

Is there anything else I need? Detective Lowry thought, ruefully aware of her abject ignorance. How about any-fucking-thing?

“You said her DNA wasn’t registered, what about the other two bodies?”

A shake of the head. “No – and about that, some of your EC buddies messed up the sample collection royally.”

That was a surprise – there were a lot of weak links in Lowry’s department, but evidence collection was not one of them. “How do you mean?”

“There were three bodies,” the doctor pointed a finger at the small girl, “including her, but only two DNA hits. One was the girl’s biological mother, and the other was the girl.”

Lowry’s consternation showed on her forehead. That result made no sense. Even if the EC officers fucked up completely, cross contaminating everything, they should have at least gotten a 3 person genetic mixture. The only way they could get two of the same DNA hits was by sampling the same body twice, which was an outrageous mistake, even for a novice.

The doctor was finished, his eyes already on a new admission at the other side of the room. “Goodbye Detective,” he said. He might have added ‘Good Luck’, but what was the point – they both knew Lowry would never find an answer, unless someone turned themselves in.

Detective Lowry didn’t even nod, and the doctor walked away, leaving her with the child.

What happened to you? Lowry thought. Who did this?

But there were no answers, just the silent, still figurine of a little girl wrapped in protective gauze.

Thinking of her own loss, of what she knew of burn wards, of the excruciating pain of healing, of the mental scars a trauma this severe would leave on the mind and spirit of a child, alone and lost, without a parent, without a name, without even a birthday – thinking on all of this, Lowry hoped, for the girl’s sake, that she did not wake up.

Lowry leaned over the bottom of the bed to see where the thin basket for the medical chart was and noticed something. Peaking out from beneath the otherwise unbroken layer of gauze, hidden loosely under a light blanket, the small girl’s right hand was perfect. Lowry dropped off the chart and gently lifted the blanket to look at the left, and it too was entirely, miraculously untouched by flame, the skin porcelain white and supple, the fingers graceful, delicate, and long.

“A pianist’s fingers”, Lowry whispered quietly to no one, “a princess’s.”

---

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