کتاب 02-03

3

Harper sprang shuddering to consciousness from an ugly dream, twisting in her bedsheets.

Carol Storey leaned over her, a hand on her wrist.

“You’re all right. Breathe.”

Harper nodded. She was woozy, her pulse rapping so hard it made her vision flash.

She wondered how long she had slept. She remembered being half carried up the steps into an infirmary, recalled Ben Patchett and Renée Gilmonton following her careful instructions as they set her ankle and bound it in rolls of gauze. She dimly remembered Renée bringing her lukewarm water and some gel tabs of acetaminophen, remembered the older woman’s dry, cool hand on her forehead and worried, watching gaze.

“What were you dreaming?” Carol asked. “Do you remember?”

Carol Storey had enormous, wondering eyes with irises of chocolate, flecked with gold speckles of Dragonscale. Hoops of gold and ebony circled her wrists, and she wore a short T-shirt that rode up to show crossed belts of the ’scale above her hips. It gave her the look of a goth gunslinger. Where her skin was unmarked, it was pale almost to the point of translucency. She was so delicate it looked as though, if she stumbled and fell, she might shatter, like a ceramic vase.

Harper’s breasts were sore, there was a dry spoke of heat in her fractured ankle, and her thoughts were muddled and slow with the dregs of a deep sleep. “My husband wrote a book. I dropped it. The pages went everywhere. And . . . I think I was trying to put it all back in order before he got home. I didn’t want him to know I’d been reading it.” There had been more—more and worse—but it was already slipping away, dropping out of sight, like a stone kicked into deep water.

“I thought I’d better wake you,” Carol said. “You were shivering and making these awful noises and—well—smoking a little.”

“I was?” Harper asked. She realized she could smell a faint odor of char, as if someone had burned a few pine needles.

“Only a little.” Carol gazed at her with a look of pained apology. “When you sighed, there’d be a blue puff. It’s stress that does it. After you’ve learned to join the Bright, that won’t happen anymore. Once you’re really one of us—part of the group—the Dragonscale won’t ever hurt you. It’s hard to believe, but one day, you may even look at the ’scale as a blessing.”

In Carol’s voice, Harper heard the innocent and utter belief of the fanatic, and was dismayed by it. She had learned from Jakob to think of people who spoke of blessings and faith as simple and a little infirm. People who thought things happened for a reason were to be pitied. Such folk had given up their curiosity about the universe for a comforting children’s story. Harper could understand the impulse. She was a fan of children’s stories herself. But it was one thing to spend a rainy Saturday afternoon reading Mary Poppins and quite another to think she might actually turn up at your house to apply for the babysitting job.

She did her best to appear blandly interested, but her distress must’ve shown. Carol rocked back in her chair and laughed. “Was that a little too much, a little too fast? You’re new here. I’ll try and go easy on you. I warn you, though, in this joint, the lunatics really are running the asylum. What does the cat say to Alice in Wonderland?”

“‘We’re all mad here,’” Harper said, and smiled in spite of herself.

Carol nodded. “My father wanted me to take you around and show you the camp. Everyone wants to meet you. We’re late for lunch, but Norma Heald, who runs the cafeteria, promised to keep the kitchen open until we ate.”

Harper lifted her head and squinted out the windows into a darkness so complete she might’ve been underground. The infirmary’s single wardroom had three cots, with curtains hung between them to create some privacy; she occupied the central bed. It had been dark when she dozed off and was dark now, and she had not the slightest notion what time it might be.

As if Harper had asked, Carol said, “About two A.M. You slept through the whole day . . . which is just as well. We all live like vampires here: up at sundown, back to the crypt at dawn. No one is drinking blood yet, but if we run out of canned goods, it’s hard to say what will happen.”

Harper sat up, wincing—just the fabric of her hoodie brushing against her sore, swollen breasts was enough to make them hurt—and discovered two things.

The first was that one of the curtains was pushed back and a boy sat on the next camp bed over, a boy she recognized . . . a boy with dark, curly hair and delicate, elfin features. The last she had seen him, he was suffering from acute appendicitis, his face greasy with sweat. No—that wasn’t quite right. She supposed she had seen him more recently than that. It had surely been him at her door in the Tiger mask with Allie. Now he sat cross-legged, watching her with the intentness of a child in front of a favorite television show.

The second was that a radio was on, tuned to static. It sat on the counter, next to a plaster model of a human head, the skull removed to reveal the brain.

Harper remembered the boy was deaf and moved her hand in a slow wave. In response, he reached behind his back, found a sheet of paper, and handed it to her. On it was a drawing—a little boy’s drawing, although it showed skill—of a large striped cat walking across green grass, tail in the air.

TEMPORARY CAT read the words beneath the stalking feline.

Harper gave him a quizzical look and a smile, but he was already sliding off the cot and trotting out.

“That’s Nick, yes?” Harper asked.

“My nephew. Yes. Odd duck. It runs in the family.”

“And John is his stepfather?”

“What?” Carol said, and it was impossible to miss the sudden edge in her voice. “No. Not at all. My sister and John Rookwood dated for a few months, in a very different world. Nick’s actual father is dead, and John—well, he barely registers in the boy’s life anymore.”

It seemed to Harper this was a little unkind—not to mention unfair—considering the Fireman had carried Nick to the hospital in his arms and had been ready to fight security and everyone in line to get him treatment. Harper also knew when a topic was an unwelcome one. She left the subject of John Rookwood for another time and said, “Nick gave me a temporary cat. Why did he give me a temporary cat?”

“It’s a thank-you note. You were the nurse at the hospital who saved his life. That was an awful week. That was the most awful week of my life. I lost my sister. I thought I was going to lose my nephew. I knew we were going to be best friends and I was going to be crazy for you, even before I met you, Harper. Because of what you did for Nick. I want us to have matching pajamas. That’s how crazy I am for you. I wish I had a temporary cat to give you.”

“If it’s temporary, do I have to give it back?”

“No. It’s only to tide you over until he can get you a real cat. He’s hunting one. He’s made some snares and complicated traps. He goes around with a net on a stick, like catching cats is the same as catching butterflies. He keeps bugging people to find him catnip. I’m not sure the one he’s hunting is real. No one else has seen it. I’m starting to think it’s like Snuffleupagus, Big Bird’s friend? Just in his head.”

Harper said, “But Snuffleupagus was real.”

“That is the most wonderful sentence I have ever heard. I want that on my gravestone. Snuffleupagus was real. No more. Just that.”

Harper couldn’t put her weight on her right foot, but Carol got an arm around her and helped her stand. As they hobbled past the radio on the counter, Carol reached out—hesitated a moment—and moved the dial slowly through bands of static. That anatomical model of a human head gaped at them in amazement. It was a grotesque thing, skin peeled away from one half of the face to show the sinew and nerves beneath, one eyeball suspended in a fibrous red nest of exposed muscle.

“What?” Harper asked. “Are you listening for something in particular?”

“Snuffleupagus,” Carol said, and laughed, and switched the radio off.

Harper waited for her to explain. She didn’t.