کتاب 02-07

NOVEMBER

7

Harper woke the night of Thanksgiving from a dream about Jakob and Desolation’s Plough. She smelled smoke and couldn’t figure out what was burning and then she realized it was her.

Harper wasn’t in flames, but the stripe across her throat had charred the collar of her Coldplay T-shirt, causing it to blacken and smoke. Beneath the shirt, she felt a sensation like bug spray on a scrape, only all over.

She threw aside her sheets with a cry and yanked off her shirt. The stripe marked her skin in inky lines flecked with grains of poisonous red light. The jellyfish sting intensified, made thought impossible.

The sound that went up all around her, from the other women stirring in their beds, made her think uncharitably of pigeons startled into flight: a nervous cooing. Then Allie was with her. Allie put her legs around Harper’s waist and clasped her from behind. She sang, in a soft, barely audible whisper, lips close to Harper’s ear. In the next moment Renée was beside her, holding her hand in the dark, lacing her fingers through Harper’s.

Renée said, “You’re not going to burn. No one burns here, that’s one of the rules. You want to break the rules and get us all in trouble with Carol Storey? Deep breaths, Nurse Willowes. Big deep breaths. With me, now: Innn. Out. Innnn.”

And Allie sang that old Oasis song. She sang that Harper was her Wonderwall, in a sweet, unafraid voice. She even did it in her Fireman voice, in a darling faux-snotty English accent of the sort best known as Mockney.

Harper didn’t start to cry until the Dragonscale dimmed and went out and the pain began to pass. It left behind an achy, sunburnt feeling, all through the spore.

Allie stopped singing, but went on holding her. Her bony chin rested comfortably on Harper’s shoulder. Renée rubbed her thumb over Harper’s knuckles in a loving, motherly way.

Nick Storey stood in the dark, four paces from Harper’s cot, watching her uneasily. Nick was the only boy who slept in the girls’ dorm, splitting a cot with his big sister. He clutched a slide whistle to his chest with one hand. He couldn’t hear it, but he knew he could blow through it and call the Fireman. And what good would that do? Maybe the Fireman would’ve brought a hose to douse her ashes.

“Attagirl,” Renée said. “You’re okay. All over. Could’ve been worse.”

“Could’ve been better, too,” Allie said. “You just missed a perfectly good opportunity to toast an awful Coldplay T-shirt. If I ever spontaneously combust, I hope I’m holding a whole stack of their CDs.”

Harper made sounds that might’ve been laughter or might’ve been sobs; even she wasn’t sure. Maybe a bit of both.