Harper woke the night of Thanksgiving from a dream about Jakob and Desolation’s Plough. She smelled smoke and couldn’t figure out what was burning and then she realized it was her.
Harper wasn’t in flames, but the stripe across her throat had charred the collar of her Coldplay T-shirt, causing it to blacken and smoke. Beneath the shirt, she felt a sensation like bug spray on a scrape, only all over.
She threw aside her sheets with a cry and yanked off her shirt. The stripe marked her skin in inky lines flecked with grains of poisonous red light. The jellyfish sting intensified, made thought impossible.
The sound that went up all around her, from the other women stirring in their beds, made her think uncharitably of pigeons startled into flight: a nervous cooing. Then Allie was with her. Allie put her legs around Harper’s waist and clasped her from behind. She sang, in a soft, barely audible whisper, lips close to Harper’s ear. In the next moment Renée was beside her, holding her hand in the dark, lacing her fingers through Harper’s.
Renée said, “You’re not going to burn. No one burns here, that’s one of the rules. You want to break the rules and get us all in trouble with Carol Storey? Deep breaths, Nurse Willowes. Big deep breaths. With me, now: Innn. Out. Innnn.”
And Allie sang that old Oasis song. She sang that Harper was her Wonderwall, in a sweet, unafraid voice. She even did it in her Fireman voice, in a darling faux-snotty English accent of the sort best known as Mockney.
Harper didn’t start to cry until the Dragonscale dimmed and went out and the pain began to pass. It left behind an achy, sunburnt feeling, all through the spore.
Allie stopped singing, but went on holding her. Her bony chin rested comfortably on Harper’s shoulder. Renée rubbed her thumb over Harper’s knuckles in a loving, motherly way.
Nick Storey stood in the dark, four paces from Harper’s cot, watching her uneasily. Nick was the only boy who slept in the girls’ dorm, splitting a cot with his big sister. He clutched a slide whistle to his chest with one hand. He couldn’t hear it, but he knew he could blow through it and call the Fireman. And what good would that do? Maybe the Fireman would’ve brought a hose to douse her ashes.
“Attagirl,” Renée said. “You’re okay. All over. Could’ve been worse.”
“Could’ve been better, too,” Allie said. “You just missed a perfectly good opportunity to toast an awful Coldplay T-shirt. If I ever spontaneously combust, I hope I’m holding a whole stack of their CDs.”
Harper made sounds that might’ve been laughter or might’ve been sobs; even she wasn’t sure. Maybe a bit of both.
8
Harper filed into the night in her singed Coldplay shirt, moving along toward the cafeteria and breakfast with all the rest of them. She walked without seeing where she was going, letting the human tide carry her along.
A dream. A dream had almost killed her. She had never imagined that going to sleep might be as dangerous as a glass of wine with Jakob over a loaded gun.
In the dream, she was enormously pregnant, so huge it was both horrible and comic. She was trying to run, but the best she could manage was a tragic, hilarious waddle. She was clutching Desolation’s Plough to her sore and swollen breasts and the pages were sticky with blood. There were bloody handprints all over it. She had the confused idea that she had beaten Jakob to death with it and now she had to hide the evidence.
She was running across the road to bury it, as if it were a corpse. An icy wind sheared up the highway, caught the manuscript, and dashed it to the blacktop.
Harper got down on the frozen asphalt, grabbing pages and trying to collect the manuscript there in the dark and the cold. In the logic of the dream it was necessary not to lose a single page. She had gathered up about a third when a pair of headlights snapped on, three hundred feet down the road. A two-ton Freightliner with a plow the size of an airplane wing was parked along the curb.
“Oh, you bitch,” Jakob called from behind the wheel. “Do you know how hard I worked on that? Where is your respect for literature?”
The gears ground. The Freightliner began to roll. Jakob flicked the beams to high, pinning her to the road with a blinding blue light. He accelerated, crunched up into second gear, the noise of the engine rising to a diesel scream, and the headlights were piercing her right through, the headlights were hot on her skin, the headlights were cooking her—
Just remembering it made her Dragonscale prickle with an unwholesome heat.
She walked with her head down, so lost in her hopeless, dismal thoughts that she was startled when someone planted a cold, gentle kiss on her cheek. She looked up in time to be kissed again, on her right eyelid.
It was snowing. Great fat white flakes as big as feathers floated aimlessly down from the darkness, so soft and light they barely seemed to be descending at all. She closed her eyes. Opened her mouth. Tasted a snowdrop.
The cafeteria was steamy and smelled of seared Spam and white gravy. Harper shuffled through a din of shouts, laughter, and clattering utensils.
The children had made paper place mats shaped like turkeys and colored them in. All the kids were working as waiters that evening, and wore Pilgrim hats made out of construction paper.
Renée steered Harper to one of the long tables and they sat down together. Ben Patchett glided in from the other side, bumping Harper’s hip with his own as he settled on the bench.
“Did you want to sit with us, Ben?” Renée asked, although he had already plopped himself down.
In the last three weeks, Ben had developed a habit of hovering. When Harper walked toward a door, it seemed like he was always there to hold it open for her. If she was limping, he slipped up against her, unasked, to put an arm around her waist and serve as her crutch. His fat, warm hands reminded her of yeasty, uncooked dough. He was harmless and he was trying to be useful and she wanted to be grateful, but instead she often found herself wearied by the sight of him.
“You okay, Harper?” Ben narrowed his eyes at her. “You look flushed. Drink something.”
“I’m fine. I already had some water and you wouldn’t believe how much I’m peeing these days.”
“I said drink.” He pushed a paper cup of cranberry juice at her. “Dr. Ben’s orders.”
She took the cup and drank, mostly to shut him up. She knew he was kidding, trying to have fun with her in his clumsy way, but she found herself even more irritable with him than usual. It was no problem for him to join the Bright. Ben Patchett always lit right up in chapel, from the first chords Carol played on the pipe organ. He was never going to wake up burning. He didn’t have to be afraid of going to sleep.
Harper’s bad dreams of being run down in the road didn’t surprise her in the least. She felt trapped in the path of oncoming headlights at least once a day, when all the rest of them sang. More and more, she dreaded entering the chapel for services. She had been in camp all month and had not been able to join the Bright, not a single time. In chapel, she was the one dead bulb on the Christmas tree. She clenched her fists in her lap throughout each day’s ceremony, a white-knuckled flier gritting her teeth through a battering stretch of turbulence.
Recently, even Ben had stopped reassuring her it was just a matter of time before she connected, before she plugged in, joined up . . . all those phrases that made it sound like a matter of getting online with some modem of the soul. When services were over, and they all filed out, Harper saw people avoiding eye contact with her. Those who did meet her gaze did so with small, cramped, pitying smiles.
There was a stir of commotion halfway across the room as Carol helped Father Storey up onto a chair. He raised both hands for quiet, smiling down at the almost full room and blinking through his gold-rimmed bifocals.