Ruby’s Fire

He shakes his head.

 

“You must not have taken as much as me then. It made me terribly sick.”

 

He nods, and gives me another puppy-dog hug, clearly happy that I’m awake now. My heart wrenches.

 

“Shall we go—?” The whispering inside my head finishes it for me. Outside, outside, outside.

 

Thorn answers without speaking, Outside, outside, outside.

 

We slip out the door and tread on light feet to sloping dunes. They look like Bea’s drawings of angel wings—curved, graceful, arching over the flatter sands. This is the first time I’ve been out in the open desert since Depot Man dropped us off, and it feels singular, daring, exciting.

 

Maskless, we turn our faces to the sun, to the accompaniment of two hundred red plants humming food, food, food, just inside the quadrants.

 

Blane finds us there. We are belly down, our teeth chewing sand, their grains sandpapering our burned, oozing skin. He drags us inside and onto the parlor floor. Now it’s not just my windpipe and lungs that sting, it’s every part of me that was exposed to the killer sun. I hear him say, “Geez, Ruby, you two must’ve been out there for a good two hours! What were you thinking?”

 

I have no idea what I was thinking. None. I don’t think that I was. It was more a blind motion—the way the moon follows a sunset. The earlier singing inside my head has transformed into a long yelp of pain. Thorn, too, is rocking and rocking, groaning as tears stream down his red, oozing cheeks.

 

Nevada stands over us, her expression a combination of horror and anger. “I was just getting ready to tell you that you two could stay on when you do this! Why? Why would you go outside with no mask? Were you trying to kill yourselves?”

 

Once again, I’m speechless. There’s no way to explain my behavior.

 

“I should take you back to your Fireseed compound,” she says. “Clearly, you have no interest in following rules.”

 

In response I emit an agonized moan.

 

“Is that what you want? You want to go back? Talk to me in English.” Her kohl-lined eyes are monstrous with a gray, whirling intensity. They scare me, I scare me, Thorn scares me. The burn on my face scares me. I can’t take much more.

 

Where’s Armonk? He won’t understand either, but at least he’s kind.

 

“And your brother,” she continues, “did he learn to break rules from you? First holes in the tarp, then, he disobeys my house laws, and now this. How can I possibly treat your burns? You need to be in a hospital.”

 

This is when I realize Nevada’s more afraid than angry. She has no idea what to do and it’s clear from the sound of her voice that we are very bad off.

 

I summon up words. “Tincture.”

 

“What?” She leans over me. “You’ll have to do better than that.”

 

“Armonk,” I mutter as clearly as I can. “Get Armonk.”

 

Lost in pain as the burns throb to my heartbeat, I clutch my brother who is writhing on the parlor floor next to me. The sting is so bad I feel myself slipping in and out of reality.

 

I must’ve lost some minutes, because when I come to, Armonk is whispering in my ear. The airflow from his words pierces the skin around my ear with darts of agony. “What can I do to help?” he asks me.

 

“Upstairs, in the project room,” I gasp. “My elixir. The one I put on your face.” I stop talking to suck in the pain, in order not to scream. “Can you get it?” I add.

 

He’s already out the parlor door and I hear the thump of him climbing upstairs. The sheer relief that he’s understood me has me floating in another nether zone. When I come to again, he’s swabbing goo on my face with fingers that feel like sharp stones. I swallow another scream.

 

When he’s finished with me, he slathers the tincture on Thorn.

 

After what seems like another half an hour, I can unclench my muscles enough to lie flat and stare numbly at the Axiom poster, at its blue scalloped waves. Thorn too, has stopped whimpering. I take his hand and we lie like that, while Armonk keeps watch over us in the dusty armchair.

 

A strange, humming peace washes over us as the sun lowers itself behind the dunes.

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 14

 

 

 

Thorn keeps wandering out to the western quadrant where Blane caught him that first time. I always find him cuddled against a Fireseed stalk and ask him what he’s doing. He never tells me. But every time I go out there now, the humming starts. Sometimes it’s saying food, food, food, and I can actually hear the branches sigh as they stretch out through the new cuts in the tarp. Other times they seem to murmur come, come, come, come outside. Those times, it’s all I can do to stop myself from ducking under the high fence to stand again in the fevered sun.