“Did she tell you where?”
“Village inside Myanmar. Twenty kilometers from border. She say this where everything start.”
Which meant he’d need a tour guide. Unless she’d parked herself at the hospital Selah had mentioned.
Great.
He returned to his rental car. The AC kicked off halfway across Chiang Mai as he wound through streets barely wide enough for two cars. Past open-air markets where vendors sold everything from live fish splashing in plastic tubs to pyramids of dragon fruit and rambutan.
Children played football in any open space they could find. Empty lots. Temple courtyards. Even the wider sections ofsoiwhere traffic temporarily cleared. Street dogs loungedin random patches of shade, too heat-stunned to chase the motorbikes that wove around them.
He stopped at a roadside vendor whosesom tamcart occupied the same corner where he’d eaten three years ago. Same weathered woman. Same plastic stools. Same explosive combination of green papaya, chilies, and fish sauce that had burned his tongue and cleared his sinuses during his last assignment here.
The memories had started to stir.
And maybe not just for him.
“Farang come back.” Broken English, but did she seriously recognize him despite the years and the baseball cap? “Same-same spicy?”
Huh.“Same-same.”
She pounded the ingredients in her wooden mortar, and the aroma rose in waves—sweet palm sugar, sour lime juice, fermented fish sauce, and enough chilies to make most tourists weep.
Pure Thailand in a plastic bag.
He ate standing beside the cart. Letting the familiar flavors ground him in the present.
Around him, the neighborhood continued its evening hum—shop owners hosing down sidewalks, families gathering around shared meals, the endless flow of motorbikes carrying people home from work.
This was the Thailand most tourists never experienced. Working-class neighborhoods where foreigners came to teach English or volunteer at clinics. Where rent was cheap and life moved to the rhythm of monsoons and market days rather than tourist seasons.
Traffic thickened as he drove toward the clinic, urban sprawl thinning into an area where development had started but never quite finished. Half-built apartment blocks stood next torice paddies, concrete shells sprouting weeds and housing the occasional family too poor to wait for completion. Banana groves pressed against the edges of new roads.
Concrete shophouses gave way to small apartment blocks, then to scattered houses with tiny gardens where families grew vegetables and raised chickens in the spaces between buildings.
The medical clinic sat where the city finally gave up trying to modernize itself. A single-story concrete building with peeling blue paint and rusted security bars. A faded sign in Thai and English identified it as the Northern Borders Medical Assistance Foundation.
The building’s flat roof sprouted a forest of satellite dishes and cell-phone antennas. Window-mounted air conditioners dripped condensation into small puddles.
The waiting area held twenty plastic chairs. Nineteen of them occupied. The smell of disinfectant fought a losing battle against the competing aromas of traditional medicines, unwashed clothing, and human misery.
What was he doing here again? He’d look like an idiot if Chloe came from the back area and spotted him, a babysitter, eight thousand miles from home.
Overkill much?But his boss had said “Go to Thailand,” so yeah, he’d gone to Thailand.
He should probably figure out how to say no sometime.
A female doctor emerged from the treatment area looking as if she’d been running on coffee and determination for weeks. No-nonsense, petite, mid-forties, she wore her black hair pulled back in a practical ponytail. Exhaustion had carved lines around her eyes that spoke of too many patients and too few resources.
“I’m Dr. Malee. Can I help you?”
“I’m looking for information about Chloe Silver. I’m a friend from America—her family’s concerned.”
Dr. Malee’s expression shifted, and then she sighed. “Two days ago she left with Dr. Tobias Nnamdi, our Nigerian doctor.” Dr. Malee gestured toward the treatment area, where a dozen beds held patients in various stages of neurological distress. “She’s been documenting these cases for six months. Every symptom, every progression.”
The treatment area told its own story. Children, mostly. A few adults whose symptoms seemed less severe but equally mysterious. Trembling bodies, glassy eyes.
“They stop responding and eating and fall into a coma. And the progression is getting faster.”