Chapter Twenty-Nine
Fatigue nagged at Cariad as she arrived at the room she shared with Ethan. It had been a long day at the infirmary. Yet her tiredness wasn’t due to the long hours she put in—she had worked most of her waking day for years. What wore her out was the boredom of unchallenging work and the unremitting tension due to the constant threat of attack.
The patients Cariad helped to treat suffered from the typical range of run-of-the-mill ailments to be expected in an otherwise healthy population: chronic diseases of old age, pregnancy complications, and accidental injuries. The colony was free of the viruses that had circulated through Earth’s population, and so the close living conditions in the underground settlement did not pose the threat of epidemics. A supply of antibioti
