کتاب 07-17

17

Harper returned in darkness, the air curiously warm and aromatic with the smell of pines and rich black loam. When she ducked into the infirmary, there was a thin line of milk-colored light drawing a pale gleam along the far eastern edge of the Atlantic. She found Michael sprawled on the couch in the waiting room with a Ranger Rick spread across his chest and his eyes closed. When she shut the door he stirred, stretched, rubbed at his soft boy’s face.

“Any trouble?” Harper asked him.

“Bad,” he said, and lifted the Ranger Rick. “I’m stuck halfway through the word find, which is pretty pathetic when you think this is for kids.” He showed her a big, sleepy, innocent smile and said, “Way I heard it, the prisoners got back fine, and no one the wiser. I guess Chuck Cargill was pretty huffy about spending an hour shut into the meat locker. He told ’em he’d take scalps if any of them said anything about it to Ben Patchett and got him in trouble.”

“One of these nights, Michael, I’d like to set up a transfusion, and run some of your blood into me. I could use a dose of your courage.”

“I’m just glad you got a couple hours with your guy. If anyone in this camp deserves one night of TLC, it’s you.”

Harper wanted to tell him that the Fireman wasn’t exactly her guy, but found when she tried to reply that her throat was choked up and there was an uncomfortable burning in her face that had nothing to do with Dragonscale. A different sort of boy might’ve laughed at her embarrassment, but Michael only politely redirected his gaze to his word find. “My two sisters would’ve finished this thing hours ago, and they weren’t either of ’em even ten years old. I guess I’ll get it tomorrow. I arranged with Ben to watch the infirmary all week. In case you needed more time to work things out with Mr. Rookwood, or to pass messages to the others, or whatnot.”

“I could kiss you on the mouth, Michael.”

Michael turned scarlet, all the way back to his ears, and Harper laughed.

She thought she would find Nick asleep when she came in, and she did . . . but he wasn’t in his bed, or in hers. He was stretched out alongside his grandfather. Nick’s arm was across Tom Storey’s chest, his pudgy hand resting over Tom’s heart. That chest rose, caught in place for an unnerving length of time, and then sank, in a slow, weary cycle that made Harper think of a rusting oil derrick about ready to grind to a halt.

A pale slash of dawn fell across Nick’s cheek, bringing out the pink, healthy warmth in his impossibly flawless complexion. It touched some curls of his tousled black hair and turned their tips to brass and copper. She could not help herself. When she came around the side of the bed to check Father Storey’s IV, she reached out and lightly mussed Nick’s hair, delighting in the boy-silk of it.

He slowly opened his eyes and yawned enormously.

“Sorry,” she said, with her hands. “Back to sleep.”

He ignored her and replied in sign: “He was awake again.”

“How long?”

“Just a few minutes. He said my name. With his mouth, not with sign language, but I could tell.”

“Did he say anything else?”

Nick’s face clouded over. “He asked where my mom was. He didn’t remember that part—that she died. I couldn’t tell him. I said I didn’t know where she was.” He turned his face away, stared out the window into the blood glow of morning light.

The Dragonscale could rework the biology of a person’s lungs so he could breathe even in suffocating smoke. But it couldn’t do anything about your shame, couldn’t make you breathe any easier when you had a four-hundred-pound beam of guilt across your chest. She wanted to tell him that he didn’t get anyone killed. That blaming himself for what happened to his mother was as silly as blaming gravity when someone stepped out of a window and fell ten stories. Nor was there any sense in blaming his mother—when Sarah Storey stepped out the window she had honestly believed with all her heart she could fly. Death by plague was, after all, not a punishment for moral failings. Men and women were firewood, and in a time of contagion the righteous and the wicked were fed to the blaze in turn, without any discrimination between them.

“Some will come back to him,” Harper said to Nick.

“And some of it won’t?”

“Some won’t.”

“Like who tried to kill him?”

“Give time,” she told him. “With time, he may remember big lot.”

Nick frowned, then said, “He told me he wants to talk to you. He said he just needs a little more sleep.”

Harper grinned. “Did he say how much more?”

“Just till tonight.”

“Is that what he said?” Harper asked.

Nick nodded solemnly.

“Okay,” Harper said. “But try no be disappointed if he no wake tonight. This will be long slow get well time.”

“He’ll be ready,” Nick said. “What about you?”