“A minute more,” she told him. “Michael promised he could cover for me all night if he had to.”
He rolled halfway over to look into her face. “You have to take care of yourself, Harper. There’s a boy who loves you very much. You’re the one thing that keeps him going.” It took her a moment to realize he was talking about Nick, not himself. “He’s still got all that guilt on him. He’s trapped under it, as badly as he was ever trapped under the beam.”
“Look who’s talking,” she said.
For a moment he couldn’t meet her gaze. “You see why I don’t want you doing anything ever again like what you did with the arrow. I’ve already lost one woman I care about. You don’t get to burn yourself up like her, Nurse Willowes. I can’t lose you, too.”
She held him a moment longer, then kissed his whiskery cheek, and climbed from the bed. She arranged his sheets over him, tucked him in. Harper stood above him, looking down into his lean, tired face.
She said, “What happened to Sarah Storey isn’t your fault, you know. Or Nick’s. Neither of you has any right to blame yourself for her death. Harold Cross could’ve explained why. I love you, John Rookwood”—she had never said this to him before, but she said it now, firmly and calmly, and continued without giving him a chance to reply—“but you are not a doctor and you do not understand the nature of this infection. Sarah Storey didn’t die because Nick taught her badly. She didn’t die because she lacks a Y chromosome. Or because she was missing some necessary mutation. Or any other random reason you can think of. In between his horrible poetry and stomach-turning misogyny, Harold filled a notebook with solid research. The spore only penetrates the human brain very slowly. It takes about six weeks to reach Broca’s region, the area that processes communication. Even in the deaf. You said she had only been infected for—what? Two weeks? Three? She rushed it. That simple.”
He gazed at her in bewilderment. “You can’t know that. Not for sure.”
“But I do, John. You have every right to grieve, but I’m afraid your guilt is undeserved. So are your fears about my safety. I’ve been covered in Dragonscale for almost nine months. It’s in every cell of my body. There is nothing you know how to do that I can’t learn. You should’ve talked to Harold.”
The Fireman let out a long sighing breath and all at once seemed smaller, hollowed out.
“I—I didn’t have much to do with Harold in the last weeks before the poor boy died. He was grotesque to Allie and I was out here on the island in mourning. I hardly saw him. Actively avoided him, in fact.”
“What are you talking about? You’re the one who snuck him out of the infirmary. He said so in his journal.”
The Fireman shot her a surprised, wondering look. “Either you’re mistaken or he was keeping a diary of daydreams. In which case I’m not sure we ought to place much confidence in his medical information, either. I didn’t help him slip out of the infirmary. Not once. You can’t imagine what an odious little troll he was.”
Harper gazed at him blankly, feeling wrong-footed and mixed up. She had looked through the diary plenty of times and was sure Harold had said John Rookwood had been his one ally in the last days.
“Enough of this,” he said and nodded at the door. “You have to go. Keep your head down and hurry right back to the infirmary. We’ll figure it out later. There’ll be another night for this.”
But there never was.
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.”