"Whatever it is, it's food. Thank you." Though Myr hasn't much appetite for it; grief has a funny way of making things like eating seem trivial. Not worth the effort.

"I don't suppose it's too much to hope it's contagious?"

Even so. He stifles a noise between a laugh and a sob, reaching out for the bread not to eat it but to tear at it mindlessly to crumbs with his fingers. "I'm afraid," he replies softly, "we'd both have it by now, if it were.

"This isn't--it doesn't have to be their fate. We've not done everything we can. They aren't so far along--that they're beyond help." He says it in defiance of Simon hiding under the covers against the awful noise and light of the outside world, of Cade lost and drifting in memory, of ice-cold hands and tremors and unceasing thirst.

They aren't beyond hope. Knowing that this disease did kill didn't mean it would.

The crust comes off the top of the bread like a scab from a wound as he pries at it.