He did glance back as motion caught the corner of his eye, and frowned when he saw the raw line down her back. Nudity didn't bother him much. The apocalypse, at least for his upbringing, had meant that things like nudity were commonplace. The scar, though, made him wonder. He turned his attention back to the fire and unwrapped the knife carefully. He took a bit of wire from his belt, which he'd hung from a nearby tree, and wound it around the pommel and grip, then lowered the weapon blade-first into the flames. He settled its tip down into the red-hot coals and let go carefully, allowing it to fall fully into the heat. He stood and backed away, wiping sweat from his forehead. His shoulders and chest felt damp, too, but he made no move to wipe it away. The light cotton shirt he wore already left little to the imagination as it was.<br/><br/>He glanced back when she emerged and shrugged, turning back to the fire, hands on his hips again as he watched the embers and sparks flicker and dance. "I don't think that's it, necessarily. I've been trying to figure it out, though. The Plague's relatively recent--it only cropped up in a few isolated cases about ten years ago, but then it began to spread at a terrible rate thanks to an infected river. I don't know if you've heard of the Rio Grande, but it's completely toxic, all the land around it is utterly uninhabitable. Since then Striders have tried to slow it down with moderate success. Based on what I know from reports at Central, only three cases have come up in the last three years, and each time the victim's body was burnt and the ashes buried."<br/><br/>He paced around the fire, arms folding over his broad chest, stroking the stubble along his jaw as he thought. "We've suspected for a long time now that the Plague wasn't some natural phenomenon. That someone deliberately, decisively introduced it to the world and used it to try and cull the human population. The fact that it turned up on that knife only helps confirm that suspicion. And now these skull tattoos... there's no way Gregor knew about the Land Runners, or if he did then he must have thought you'd all been wiped out. Even so, why would he poison the knife? If not him, then who? Huntsmen? Some other raider clan? I don't know. I don't know, Malia, it's kind of driving me insane." He paused next to her again, closer than he had been before, subconsciously drawn to her. "I need to sit down and write it all out. Put all my thoughts down so I can organize them properly. I know there's something to all of this, I just can't see it yet."