Beyond the Border | ✔

20 | rule 02

RULE 02: REPORT ANY SIGNS OF ILLNESS TO THE COUNCIL. IT MEANS SOMEONE FROM THE OUTSIDE HAS PENETRATED IN. ANYONE WITHHOLDING INFORMATION ABOUT SUCH A LEAK WILL BE CAST OUT OF THE BORDERLANDS.

✷ C H A P T E R T W E N T Y ✷

"You have the flu," Mina stated once I woke up.

Surprisingly, I was in the room I had called mine for the past week or so in the Alpha Wing. It must have been a good sign I had not regressed to the medical wing. Everything was leading me to believe I was not indeed dying, but I just couldn't shake the feeling the exact opposite was occurring.

The flu? It sounded like a death sentence, but I could not know for sure. We knew of diseases and viruses that plagued the Outside. All of them had been eradicated from the Borderlands existence when the founding families were quarantined before sealing the Border. Of course, the Borderlands was not free of inherited diseases or cancer, but sickness was not something encountered in the Borderlands.

"The flu? Am I dying?" I asked in a sweaty haze. My hair clung to my face, and I did not have the energy to tuck it behind my ear. Each inhale made my stomach shake in disapproval. My throat was hoarse from repeatedly throwing up intermittently the last couple of hours before my body no longer could stay conscious.

"No, you're just sick," she said as she came over to my side to rest a damp cloth on my forehead."There's no sign you've ever been vaccinated."

My body relaxed from the contact of the cool cloth.

"Because I haven't," I responded weakly. It was getting harder to speak without my voice croaking and cracking with each word I said, but the thought of having anything — even water — digested made my body want to collapse in on itself.

"I ran your bloodwork," Mina started to say as she took a seat on the edge of my bed. She let out a sigh. "You're not from around here."

"What do you mean?" I asked, not knowing how she could get that information from my blood. How could my blood tell her where I came from?

The Borderlands was not too far away from Theo's pack, so I couldn't imagine my blood would be too different than an ordinary Outside human's blood, right? My mind was swirling, and I couldn't process anything clearly with the unrelenting pounding in my skull.

"Your blood showed an unusual genetic marker. I had never seen it before, so I compared it against the genetic database our alliance packs share. There was a match." Mina gulped before continuing. "It matched the same genetic marker Eva Longshire has. You're from the Borderlands."

My blood ran cold, and the world spun — from my illness or the news Mina knew I was from the Borderlands, I was not sure. Before I could respond, my stomach lurched, and I threw up, just barely managing to turn my head and lean over the side of the bed. My stomach long ago expelled everything that had been contained within.

"You should have told us, Sage," Mina scolded me, as she began cleaning up the clear liquid I had thrown up. "Your body is not equipped to deal with the diseases outside the Borderlands. You could have died if you caught something more deadly than the flu. Most escapees from inside the Border die from disease. You're lucky you're not one of them."

My heart beat erratically in my chest at her words. Tears threatened to overpour, as I squeezed my eyes shut. My brain was slow to process what I had realized: the Council did not prepare me for the diseases I would encounter on the Outside.

At first, I hopefully thought maybe it was because they wouldn't have known about the dangers of leaving the Border, but I quickly shook off this notion. They did know about the diseases that plagued the Outside because it was written into the rules which all Borderlands follow. We must alert the Council of any sign of illness because an illness spreading throughout the Borderlands would mean a breach in the Border.