“You would. Yes, you would. To study under me. To call me your teacher.”
Lewis feels something like fingers inside his mouth, his throat, making him gag, making him say, “Yes.” He snaps his jaw twice, biting away the word, the sensation. “No. No, I would not. I consider myself a man of science, but what you’re doing here seems to go against God.”
“What God?” Burr croaks out a laugh. “If there was a God, he made cats that play with birds before eating them. Just the same as he made stillborn babies and rapist fathers and brain tumors and viruses that make you cough your lungs inside out. There’s no right and no wrong in any of that. Only the survival that comes with strength and a little bit of luck. We’re God, Lewis. You and I. We’re the gods of this time.”
Again the fingers in his mouth, pinching his tongue, clawing his throat, drawing something submissive from him. But he fights back with a word, “No.”
The lights blaze. Burr seems suddenly to grow larger. Lewis swears he stands, even as he plainly remains seated. “I hoped you wouldn’t say that, but I expected you might need some convincing.”
Footsteps clomp down the hallway. Two figures appear in the doorway. One of them is the man who escorted him here—the one with the arms too big for his body—and the other is a woman with her hands secured and a burlap sack over her head. She struggles against the man’s grip and tries to stomp on one of his feet. He brings a fist to her stomach to quiet her. With a moan she bends in half and he rips off the sack to reveal a fiery tangle of hair. Her face is bruised, but Lewis recognizes her all the same.
“Clark!” He tries to move toward her but something invisible grips him, anchors him in place.
“She arrived two days ago by train. I’ve been very happy to make her acquaintance.”
Lewis’s face twists in several directions. He can’t decide how he feels. First an ebullient giddiness. Then a lingering fury. This mellows when he realizes why she is here, how Burr hopes to use her against him. Lewis feels more and more like a marionette tugged by strings, dragged thousands of miles and now asked to dance, shaken when not compliant.
“You see, don’t you?” Burr says gleefully. “You understand? You’ll maybe listen a little better now?”
Lewis thinks about lying, about saying she means nothing to him, but he feels as if an eye is rolling through the corridors of his mind and he must dim the lights and close the doors on it. He removes from his mind any thoughts of Clark. In defense, he focuses all his attention instead on the grain of the wood in the floor, how much it looks like the whorl of a fingerprint. For the moment that is all he knows.
“I understand,” Lewis says and he feels the eye retreat, releasing him. He realizes only then that he is crumpled on the floor, like a boneless pile of clothes.
He reaches into his pocket—his habit from long ago, when he would seek comfort in his snuffbox—and finds not a silver tin but a wooden case. The coffin-shaped one containing the vial. He transferred it there when they left their bags in the cove. He didn’t want to leave it behind, thinking it too valuable and dangerous. How easy it would be to snap its top, shake its contents into the coffee cup beside him. He wonders how much time would pass before Burr began coughing, before his fever spiked. He wonders how long it would take for the infection to work its way through all of Astoria. A viral infection that would wipe away the human infection.
It is then that a thunderclap sounds, though only a few clouds spatter the sky. They all hunker down. A crack runs through the window. A book falls from the shelf. Outside, down the hill, a bloom of fire, a plume of smoke. The aftermath of a bomb. A concrete building crumbles in half, opening its dark, gaping center. The noise of the explosion lengthens as it orbits the town.
Burr has risen from his chair and stands by the window. Lewis can sense his anger, but it is momentarily directed elsewhere. “It’s those goddamned women again,” he says.
Now. Now would be the time. To crack the container, to twist open the vial, to dose his coffee.
Then he hears a crying. The boy stands in the doorway. The boy with the cleft palate and the marbles. His cheeks are wet with tears. He runs to Burr and clings to his leg and the old man pats him and says, “There, there. Nothing to be afraid of. Just some bugs that need to be squashed.”
Boys. Girls. Men and women. The innocent and the terrible alike. If he shook out the specimen and infected Burr, this is what Lewis would be destroying. Then he would indeed be playing God. He will have to find another way.
Outside, with every passing second, the smoke blackens and thickens. Then comes a second explosion, farther away than the first, that jangles the cups on their saucers.
The wrinkles in Burr’s face seem to multiply when he turns from the window. “I’m needed elsewhere. Which will give you some time to think about this,” he says, with a voice with a lot of teeth in it. “Adapt. Or face extinction.”
Chapter 57
IT WAS NEVER going to be easy. Gawea knew that. But she thought the trouble would come from hunger and thirst, storms that spit snow, sunlight that scorched, insects that stung and animals that clawed. She thought her flesh would be vulnerable, not her heart.