“This is the Whiteflower Assisted Living Center,” said Brooke. “My name is Nobody and I was born ten thousand years ago in a shepherd’s hut on the slopes of the great mountain. And Meshara was there and now he’s here.”
I sat up straighter; this was different than her usual ranting. She called me by old names occasionally, thinking I was someone from her past, but she’d never referred to anyone else that way except for the actual Withered: the two we’d known in Clayton were named Mkhai and Kanta, just like Nobody was named Hulla. These were their old names, the names they used for each other; to hear her use such a name for someone she’d seen last night, and to connect it with something so deep in the past, was troubling, to say the least. Who was this Meshara? “You saw somebody here?” I asked. “You recognized him?”
“In the lobby downstairs,” she said. “The doctor took me for a walk. I almost didn’t recognize him, it’s been so long. Maybe a hundred years.”
We thought there were only two Withered in Fort Bruce. If there were three … “Did you tell Trujillo who you saw?”
“I don’t like Dr. Trujillo.” Brooke scowled. “He never lets me cut my own food.”
“Can you describe Meshara to me?”
“He’s sad.”
“What does he look like?”
“He looks sad.”
I stood up and walked to the door; I needed to talk to Trujillo. “Could you point him out to me if you saw him again?”
Her voice changed suddenly, losing the odd, disconnected tone she always seemed to use when she was remembering things and becoming suddenly sharp and pained. “Please don’t leave me.”
“I’m coming back, I just need to—”
“No one ever comes back.”
“I promise,” I said, and knocked on the door. “Just try to remember everything you can about Meshara, okay? Can you do that?”
“He’s here,” said Brooke.
“I know, and I need you to remember everything you can about him—”
“Not Meshara,” said Brooke. “The doctor.”
Half a second later Trujillo stepped into view through the window and did a visual check of the room before opening the door. “Is everything okay?”
I shot one last look at Brooke; she had tears on her cheeks and look of abject despair in her pale, haunted eyes. I turned away, stepped into the hall, and closed the door firmly behind me.
“Did you take her on a walk last night?”
“Yes, down to the lobby and back. We bought some candy from the vending machine.”
“She’s found another Withered, here in Whiteflower.”
His brow furrowed in worry. “There were only supposed to be two in the city.”
“Exactly,” I said. “And if there’s an extra one, and if he’s here, right under our noses, it only means one thing: the Withered are hunting us now.”
*
“Ghita is a Romanian name,” said Nathan. “Her greeting was also Romanian: ‘buna ziua’ means ‘good morning.’ That’s all in line with the kind of flashbacks we tend to see from Brooke: she woke up with the wrong memories on the surface of her consciousness, and so she thought she was a Romanian villager. Not exactly the worst-case scenario for her, all things considered.”
“And Meshara?” asked Agent Ostler. The entire team was gathered around a table in our office, a rented space across the street from Whiteflower. I could tell by the way they were fidgeting—drumming their fingers on the table, glancing at the windows, shifting their weight from foot to foot without bothering to sit down—that they were just as tense as I was.
“That one’s not Romanian,” said Nathan. “I haven’t had time to look into it too deeply, but my preliminary research suggests that Meshara is Sumerian, like Hulla, which suggests in turn that this is another Withered. Kudos to John for spotting it.”
I ignored the compliment, taking as it a bald attempt to get back on my good side after yesterday’s argument. The joke was on him for thinking I had a good side. “How do we track him down?” I asked.
“I was able to pull last night’s security footage from the lobby cameras,” said Kelly, laying a stack of low-res photos on the table, hastily printed on plain white office paper. She pointed at the top photo and tapped her finger on an average-looking man in a loose jacket. “I took these to Brooke and she identified this man as Meshara.”
Potash pulled the photo toward his side of the table, rotating it for a better look at the image. “Is this our best shot of him?”
Kelly nodded. “This isn’t a convenience store, where the cameras are positioned to get clear face shots of the customers at the counter. Whiteflower’s main security risk is patients leaving unaccompanied, so their lobby camera is a wide-angle pointed at the front door. The image you’re looking at comes from a hallway camera and offers a slightly better look at his face than the one in the lobby.”