“Take the damn pill, Atticus,” she told me, her gaze darkening.
I thought on it a moment, and in the end decided I had better do what she said. Not because I probably needed the medication this time to stave off infection, but because Thais was not in the mood to listen to my reasoning she would consider ridiculous.
I wedged the pill in-between my swollen lips and drank it down with pine-needle tea.
A fire burned in a small barbecue grill on four skinny legs near the glass windows; Thais left the door open to let the smoke and deadly fumes out. The flames were low, casting small shadows on the wall. Outside the rain fell steadily, without thunder or lightning, just a peaceful downpour, my favorite kind. It must’ve been how I could’ve slept so long.
I gazed around the rest of the room, taking in for the first time, what kind of building it had once been. It was also the first time I was fully conscious of my surroundings since the gauntlet in Paducah. I remembered when it happened, when I’d lost consciousness: the fighters had piled on top of me all at once, shutting out the light; I felt the heat of their bodies closing in all around me, robbing me of oxygen; the sensation of knuckles and knees and rock-like toes pounded on me from every angle; and then the searing-hot sensation of a blade splitting flesh, and then another. As if the pain from the stabbing and the broken fingers and the dislocated elbow wasn’t enough, I felt the moment when my ribs fractured, and then in the same instant my head struck the gymnasium floor, and everything went black.
After that moment, I remembered bits here and there: Thais standing above me, talking loudly as if to an audience, but I couldn't recall sentences, just words—Spanish, French, Roman Empire, American Autocracy—and trying to make sense of them on my own was a wasted effort; and I remembered being thrown back into a cage, and then—it seemed like only one second later—Thais and a pretty Black girl were dragging me from it; and I vaguely remembered seeing the city’s lantern lights in the windows as I was carried away; and then the stars above me came to mind, and my memory had strengthened. I remembered Thais lying beside me; I could feel the warmth and smoothness of her fingertips tracing my eyebrows. Lastly, I recalled—in great detail—Thais resetting my elbow.
But now I was fully awake, and nothing was happening in frames anymore, and although every part of me hurt like hell, I was glad to have control of my mind again at least.
I looked down where a bruise had spread out like spilled paint across my midsection.
“Must be broken,” I heard Thais say.
I looked up at her.
“Same side as before, isn’t it?” she asked. “When you were attacked in Lexington.”
I nodded.
“Yeah. But dis time dey’re fractured for sure.”
“How do you know it’s more than one?”
I thought on it. “Well, I don’t, really.”
Then I noticed the black tape stuck to my left arm, right thigh, and right hip, securing three rectangular pieces of something white that looked like paper towels but were not.
“Dried up baby wipes,” Thais explained.
I looked up.
“Unused?”
Thais smirked, and then it turned into a smile. “Yes, Atticus, unused.”
I smiled lightly on the side of my mouth that could still show it.
Thais pointed to the table beside me.
“I collected rainwater to clean your wounds,” she began. “Couldn’t find anything to pass for antiseptic, and nothing to stitch them up with, but I suppose the penicillin makes up for that.”
“Can’t ‘ave it all,” I said.
“No. Can’t have it all,” Thais agreed.
She looked down at the floor then, and I couldn’t help but notice that something was bothering her.
“Thais, vat’s vrong?” I reached out the hand with the broken fingers and I touched her wrist.
Thais knelt before me, her knees pressed against the dirty floor, and she touched her forehead to my knee.
“Thais, vat is it? Tell me.” I stroked her hair, and then fitted my hand underneath her chin to lift her head, not caring about the pain it caused my splinted fingers.
Suddenly, I felt my heart ram upward into my throat, like being punched there, and without even knowing if my assumptions were true, I was ready to fly out of the chair, go back to Paducah and kill whoever had harmed her.
“No, Atticus,” Thais urged, putting a hand on my waist and forcing me to stay seated. “Please, don’t get up.”
“Vat did vey do to you?” My unbroken fingers clutched the arm of the chair.
“I wasn’t harmed,” she assured me. “And I had help. But no one hurt me.” She sighed and looked at the floor again. “That’s not what’s wrong with me.”
“Ven…vhat is it? Tell me.”
When she raised her face to mine, tears trailed down her cheeks; I reached out and wiped them away with the pad of my thumb.
“I was just so scared,” she said. “I thought they were going to kill you. And then when I saw you—when I look at you now—Atticus…” She stopped to steady her breath, and then hit fast-forward. “Atticus, what are we going to do? How long has it been since we escaped Lexington City? A month? Maybe two? It has to be at least that long, and we’ve only gotten this far—I don’t even know where we are. A day from Paducah. That’s all I know.” Her voice rose, and her desperation deepened.
I let her speak, let her get it all out; I felt her hands clutching my leg.
“Everything that has happened to us since we left—oh, Atticus, the odds are so stacked against us that I’m beginning to think we’re never going to make it to Shreveport. And look at us now”—she shot into a stand and threw her hands out at her sides—“we have nothing: no guns, not even a knife”—she plucked a pair of scissors from the folds of her skirt—“this is the closest thing I’ve found to a weapon. And we have no food. Atticus, I looked everywhere. There’s nothing. I looked under rocks for worms and in windowsills for dead flies—nothing.”
Thais stopped, and she stood there for a moment with her hands balled into fists at her sides. I could only wonder what she was thinking, what war was raging inside of her, and still, I didn’t have the heart to interrupt; I let her words cut me because they were true and I could do nothing to change the facts.
She knelt in front of me again, and her angry face had softened as if in that moment she had forgiven the world. Tears were still wet on her cheeks, brimmed in her eyes. She took my hand into hers, careful with my broken fingers, and then she kissed it.