“Are you sure?”
Samara nods as she slips her hand beneath Jill’s head, tilting it, trying to open her airway. Jill is twisting, choking for breath, while I toss infusers left and right trying to lay my hands on the one for anaphylactic shock. Samara is using both hands to force Jill’s head back, staring down into her wide-open eyes as she flails, and I see Samara go stiff, her hands slipping.
“Samara, stay here!” I yell.
But she’s leaving again. I find the right infuser, press it against Jill’s neck to let it calculate the dose. She’s moving too much.
“Samara, hold her still. Hold her arms still!”
Samara holds one arm, though not hard enough. Jill is struggling, and Samara’s gone rigid, breathing hard, looking down into Jill’s wide-open eyes, but I’m not sure she sees her. Jill isn’t wheezing anymore; she’s not making any noise at all, the redness paling from her face. I lay my body on Jill’s other arm, pinning her down. The infuser gets the dose and I hear the whoosh as it goes in. Jill twists beneath me for another second and then she doesn’t move.
Everything pauses. My heart, the river, time, a long moment that squeezes inside my chest, that hurts like I’ve been hit. I care about Jill, I realize. A lot. Jillian was everything there was to have on the ship. I care, just maybe not in the way she wanted me to. And that hurts, too.
“Jill?” I say, like I’m asking a question. Asking if she’s alive. And then I feel movement beneath me, a tiny wheeze, a gasp. Jill coughs, and the relief leaves me too distracted to think about anything else. I get off and see her chest moving, the color coming back to her face, though her eyes are still closed.
She murmurs something I can’t understand, and then I glance up at Samara. She’s still on her knees beside Jill, staring, but she is gone. Something else is in her vision. And then she opens her mouth and screams. Not just a yell or a shout. She screams from the pit of her stomach, and it’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard. She draws breath and starts to do it again. I step over Jill and take her by the arms.
“Stop it!”
She doesn’t. This time I shake her a little.
“Samara!”
She stops, blinks, looks at me, and she really sees me, not the terrible something else. She’s shaking beneath my hands, one tear streaking down a cheek. Then she pulls away and turns back to Jill, like she wasn’t just shrieking her head off.
“She breathes?”
“Yes.” I may never get over the relief of it.
I watch Samara lift the lids of Jill’s closed eyes, feel for a pulse, see her inspect the little red dots on Jill’s neck where the infusion went in. Then she takes her wet pack and mine and stuffs them under Jill’s legs, raising them. Jill doesn’t respond to any of this. She’s breathing without the awful wheeze, and the swelling is going down almost as quickly as it came. She seems peaceful, but I don’t know whether I can trust that.
“Will she be okay?”
“She’ll need to sleep,” Samara says. She’s still shaking. “And she is cold.”
I hadn’t had a chance to feel it yet, but the glasses say this cavern is twenty-seven degrees cooler than the one we left, and there’s a draft pulling from somewhere. The suits are waterproof on the outside, and I’m mostly dry, but Jill was up to her neck at one point. She’s probably wet inside and out, and that water is not anything like warm anymore.
We go to work like we’ve talked about it. I get the blanket out of Jill’s pack while Samara discovers the art of the magnetic zipper, working Jill out of the jumpsuit while keeping her legs in the air. Jill isn’t moving, and Samara isn’t okay, either. She’s at least half not with me.
I give Samara the blanket, go to the boat, and grab one of the light jars. The water in the boat is barely glowing now. We’ve let most of our light drown. I gather what we have left, give that to Samara, too, then go to stand beneath the hole in the ceiling, about ten meters beyond the other boats. Straight above me is a beautiful, fiery sky, clear and shining like a ruby. I don’t know how close we are to Samara’s city, but those boats mean people, and if we can’t go far, we have to at least get out of sight while Jill gets better.
Please let Jill get better.
It’s drier near the hole in the ceiling, and I think light must shine in, because beyond a small mountain of fallen rock, probably the rock that fell in from the roof, there are plants growing, thick tufts like coarse grasses, tall, almost to my chin, dying off in blues and yellows now that the sun is gone. We’re only four or five meters from the riverbank, but out of sight and out of the draft. I think this will have to do. I go back and help lift Jill onto the spread blanket, wrapping her in it like a cocoon. She murmurs something incoherent as I carry her. I kick away the loose stones and lay her down in the grasses.
Samara brings the rest of our stuff. She’s put the infusers back into the medical kit, stowing it all away in Jill’s pack. But she doesn’t question me. At least not yet. And I’m not questioning her. I’m pretty sure we’ll get to it. This time she puts my dry pack under Jill’s head.
“How long will she be like this?”
“She has been dyspneic, and—”
“What does that mean?”
“That she could not breathe, and shock has caused muscular function of her blood vessels to fail. Now that the reaction has stopped, her body will recover on its own, but she may still have some of the allergen in her system, so we need to watch her carefully, especially her pulse and her breathing. Do you have more of what you gave her?”
I look at Samara. She’s just standing there, waiting for me to answer, shaking. Not from nerves or whatever she saw inside her head. She’s soaked, and freezing, and this is nothing like being a little uncomfortable beside the lake.
“Here.” I kick off my boots, unzip the suit, and start peeling it off. I opted for my jogging clothes underneath like Jill, but at least mine are a little warmer than hers were. Samara is taking a step back. “Don’t argue,” I say, even though she hasn’t made a sound. “You can’t stay that wet in here. I’ll use the blanket this time.”
She takes it, and I’m not sure if her reluctance is because of the suit or me. It ought to be the jumpsuit, because it may be dry, but it’s not really all that clean. I turn my back to her and sit cross-legged beside Jill, so she can change.
I watch Jill breathe, still relieved to see it, and listen to the sound of Samara taking off her wet clothes behind me, which is weird and a little uncomfortable. And it really is cold in here. After a few minutes, there’s no sound of movement. And she isn’t saying anything, either.
“Samara?” I don’t know if I can turn around.
Nothing. I peek over my shoulder. And then I’m up. She’s in my jumpsuit, but she’s also flat on her back in the grasses, eyes wide open, staring at the hole in the ceiling. Only she isn’t seeing it. I take her by the arms, sit her up, and shake her a little, like I did before.