Rescue Mission

Disease. It was a new word. A new concept. A demeaning, alien way to die. It had recently come inside the deme's fanatically guarded borders. Now it seemed to have sifted into the deepest levels belowground. What it was, how it spread, was unknown.
The healers shaved Deit's head, looking for more signs of this sickness. Deit's long single braid -- her pride, symbol of her warrior caste status -- dropped onto the floor. As Rocise watched, a healer kicked the braid under the table, out of his way. Just another piece of trash.
"Have we seen enough?" one of the healers asked.
Had they?
Rocise looked down. Deit, Rescue Team 3's kommes expert, lay
 

Teasing isn't nice. Just tell us, really. Its more interesting if we know

 

I don't know how well this works. For me, when I first read it, it seemed as though it were in past tense, so when it became clear it was in present tense I was a little confused. And I agree with pantros. The whole disease thing seems a little too vague. We need to know what it is, what it does. Is it contagious (is that why they're cutting off her hair?)

Other than those, it wasn't bad.
 

And, no. the disease is not influenza, polio, leukemia or any other human disease. They have no name for the particular -- which they don't even recognize as a class of illnesses -- so they use the one generic term from outside for the thing itself.

Remember, disease is a new concept. They have broken arms, kidney failures, animal bites, poisons, worms etc. but not infectious disease. That's real alien, to them.

How to make that clearer without ruining the flow of the text?
 

1) We're talking about a closed, highly protected society, which has not had anything like disease for a long time.

2) However, they've still got warriors, so we're not talking utopia either.

3) I liked the casual loss of dignity as Deit looses her braid; instant sympathy for the character there, and by extension the culture.

I would certainly keep reading this. I didn't think it was too little information or consider it confusing.

Minor nitpick: avoid the use of weasel phrases like "seemed to". "Now it seemed to have sifted..." is a much weaker construction than "Now it had sifted...." but they're saying the same thing.
 

You will need to find a way to make it clear that infectious illness was a new concept for them. If they just use one term for it, use a word other than Disease, since we already have a meaning for that and you do want us to discover the reality as the PoV character does. Using a word with a definiton for something they cannot define will break the story immersion.

Don't worry about the flow of the text. That is something you, the author, are emotionally attached to. You need to break that attachment if you want to improve. No one else sees the same flow you do. Your goal is to immerse us in the paragraph so that we are thinking about the story, not the words.

It is definitly a tough job to describe something familiar to the reader but new to the character. Good luck with that.

Call the disease what they call it. If it looks like an illness, its an illness. If your people would see it as a curse, call it a curse.

if they have the word disease but only the one disease, use "The Disease" capitalized both at the T and the D.

Remember we are seeing the story through the PoV character's perceptions, not from a Movie camera hovering nearby.
 

(Thus combining the warrior metaphor in the way the POV character might think with the infectious disease information?)