Nina went to Yusuf believing he needed adult patients for a new assessment method.
It was a thin cover. She accepted it the way you accept things from people you love when the alternative is making them carry your reluctance on top of everything else, they're already carrying.
Sid went the morning after.
Yusuf Amara opened the door without surprise. Fifty-two, careful handed, with the stillness of someone who had learned to slow down in rooms where rushing cost too much.
He had trained in Zone Two. Got his certification. Practiced for two years. Then his wife got sick, and the hospital debt attached to his address, and the address lapsed, and the recertification process required a valid address as a precondition, and the circle closed cleanly on him the way those circles always did.
He had tried twice to get back in. Failed both times. After the second attempt he went to Vera's stand and sat for three hours. She poured tea and said nothing. When he left, he went to his Bloc Seven room and set up his practice and started keeping records — every patient, every visit, every compound — because the training lived in him regardless of what any document said, and the Ash needed what he knew.
He had been doing it for fifteen years.
He led Sid to the two chairs by the window and sat and said: "What do you need to know."
"The full picture," Sid said. "Not the managed version."
Yusuf told him. Lung inflammation. Chronic exposure from the eastern processing room in Bloc Three. Early stage. The specific compound blend — he named each one — had been accumulating in her tissue for years without announcing itself. Manageable with medication and reduced exposure.
Not reversible.
"How long if nothing changes," Sid said.
"With the compound — years. The progression slows significantly."
"Years is enough time," Sid said.
Yusuf looked at him.
"To fix it properly," Sid said.
He said it the way he said things he had already decided — not as a hope, as a fact that hadn't happened yet.
"She's lucky to have you," Yusuf said.
"I'm lucky to have her," Sid said, and stood.
Yusuf watched him go. He sat with the file open in front of him — Nina Cole, Building Four, second floor, Bloc Seven. He added her name to the list of patients whose lungs had told him the same story. Forty-two names now. The same compound profile. The same bloc.
He didn't know the list would reach four thousand and seventeen.
He kept it anyway.
Sid went to Vera's stand on the way home.
She poured before he sat. He held the cup and let the lane move around him.
"Did you saw Yusuf," Vera said.
"Yes."
"And."
"Manageable. Not reversible."
Vera was quiet. She looked at the lane the way she always looked at it — like she had been watching it long enough to know what it was about to do.
"It's not just your mother," she said. "The cough. Bloc Three. I've had how many people at this stand with that cough." She turned her cup. "Someone knows. Someone has always known."
Sid said nothing.
"My husband," Vera said. Quiet. Into the steam. "He found the contamination report. Twenty-eight years ago. Filed it properly. Believed that was enough." She paused. "They removed him from his position in six months. We crossed the Gate with nothing. He died in the Bloc Nine flood four years later."
The lane moved. A child ran past. Somewhere the standpipe kicked on for its afternoon run.
"He put a true thing in front of the wrong kind of right person," Vera said. "And he had nothing around it. No structure. No protection. Just the truth on its own."
Sid turned the cup in his hands.
"I'm not telling you what to do," she said. "I'm too old for that. I'm just telling you what I know."
"I'll come back to it," Sid said. "When the structure is ready."
She looked at him then. Really looked.
"I know you will," she said.
He finished the tea and stood.
"Vera."
She waited.
"I'm going to fix it," he said. "All of it."
She said nothing. She didn't need to. Something in her face shifted — just slightly, just enough. The look of a person who has been carrying something alone for a long time and has just, for the first time, believed someone else might carry it too.
He walked back toward Building Four.
She watched him go.
She poured herself another cup.
She waited.
She had always been good at that.