“Then take this out of my share,” I said tightly.
He cursed. “Damn it, Luna. We’ll need every bit of that. This man is going to be dead soon. I know it’s hard, but surviving means making hard choices.”
His words were a splash of cold reality. He was right and I resented him for it. I turned my face toward the man wheezing for air on the ground. He was alone in this world. With half his face missing and his blood soaking into the floor of the hut, his only thoughts were for his child. I couldn’t refuse him this relief.
Fowler’s hand squeezed mine. “Be strong, Luna.”
Anger spiked through me and I jerked my hand free. “Not in this. If turning my back on him makes me strong, then so be it. I’m weak.” I slipped a hand under Amose’s head, lifting him up so his mouth could find the rim of my flask. He slurped greedily. “Easy,” I advised when he broke into a sputtering cough.
“Thank you,” he huffed.
I lowered him gingerly back down, plugged my flask shut, and claimed his hand again.
Fowler made a sound of disgust deep in his throat and I squared my shoulders, pretending that I didn’t care what he thought of me.
“I suppose we’re staying,” he grumbled.
I tossed the words over my shoulder in a rushed whisper: “I doubt this will take long.”
He said nothing. After a while, he moved away, his boots thudding a hard line to the door to stand watch. Or perhaps he simply didn’t want to witness this.
I settled on the cold floor, resting Amose’s head in my lap, careful to touch only his hair and not the toxin-soaked wounds of his face. “Tell me about your daughter. What’s her name?”
“Nessa.”
“That’s a pretty name.”
“Yes. She was . . . is beautiful. Like her mother. Like you.”
He touched me then, pressing one finger directly over my heart. “You have it in here.” He coughed violently, his hand dropping away from me. “It’s a beauty that nothing can take away. Not this world or its monsters.” His voice faded. His breath grew too labored for him to talk anymore, just a heavy cadence of puffs and wheezes.
I stopped asking questions and just talked, about everything and nothing, swatting away the bloated gnats and flies that circled him, hungry for their next meal. Conscious of Fowler standing vigil at the door, I whispered a steady stream of words. Stories. We had a few books in the tower left by my parents. Perla often read aloud to me. One of them was a collection of love poems. It was my favorite. I would hold the rich leather-bound volume in my hands, caressing the pages, stroking where the words rested, imagining my mother holding the book, reading from it. It was my connection to her. I had most of the poems memorized and I recited them now, pausing at the scuff of Fowler’s boot on the ground, mortified that he was listening to me share words that were so personal, that spoke of longings etched so deeply in my soul. “And in your arms, I find truth . . . the burn of an unbroken light.”
Amose’s sawing breaths grew more labored and spaced apart until he took a last shuddering drink of air. He went utterly still.
Silence pressed down, a palpable weight on my shoulders as I bowed over him. There was only the noise of whirring insects circling his lifeless body.
I held his rough hand even as the warmth started to slip away from him.
Fowler approached behind me, his right heel hitting the ground a little harder than his left in his trademark tread. “Come on, Luna.”
“This doesn’t even affect you. Does it?” My lips felt numb as I spoke. And yet my body didn’t feel numb. All of me ached as raw and exposed as an open wound. I felt too much. That’s what Fowler was probably thinking. He thought me soft and weak and fragile. He didn’t need to say the words for me to know.
“You get accustomed to it.”
“I suppose that’s true.” Out here, how could anything else be? He had seen more death than me. Except I didn’t want this to be my normal. I shook my head. “But I don’t want that. I don’t want to be like you.” I turned and lifted my face in his direction, my voice cracking in supplication, as though he could somehow stop this from happening to me.
His fingers closed around my arm, his touch solid and impersonal as he helped me to my feet. “I don’t want to be like me either.” There was a hard edge to his voice that made something inside me wither away with the realization that this world could bend and twist people into things even they didn’t want to become. That perhaps I was destined to change whether I wished it or not.
He led me from the hut. I inhaled the musky air as soon as we cleared the threshold, the coppery-sweet odor of death less strong. There was that at least.
“Thank you for letting me stay with him until the end,” I said, deciding some acknowledgment needed to be given. “I know you didn’t want to. Perhaps you’re not as hard as you think—”