“Stop. Stop,” Wes said, holding up a weak hand. “I get it. I’ll go in the trunk.”
“No, you’ll do no such thing,” Marta said. She looked at Violet, as if Violet were their leader now and hers the final word on the matter. Wes wasn’t so confident this was the case. “We can’t put him back there. We won’t know how he is, we won’t be able to hear him if we need to stop. Let me sit in the front seat with you. We’re both small.”
“I’m not OK with that,” Ken said. He looked at Wes apologetically. “I just can’t risk it. I hope you understand.”
“It’s fine, Marta,” Wes said. “The trunk’s fine. I can lie down. I’ll be more comfortable if I’m not worried about hurting someone.”
“Are you sure?” she asked doubtfully.
“Positive,” he said. Though that trunk ranked just above the Ruby City storage shed in places Wes wanted to be right now.
“I guess we’re decided, then,” Violet said. “Let’s get on the road. Maybe we can reach it by nightfall.”
—
It took almost five hours, and Wes spent them with his arms and legs braced against the confines of the trunk so he wouldn’t go slamming into one end or the other each time the wheels jostled over another divot in the road. He didn’t throw up, but he felt for most of the ride like he was just about to. And if he did, would it be carsickness or the earliest signs of Shreve’s? How would he be able to tell the difference?
The itching in his arm, the crawling in his head—they continued, worsened. He supposed, lying in the dark, that there was a sort of gift in not being able to see the state of his arm, though he found himself compulsively rubbing the fingers on his left hand over the rough terrain, counting the little raised places. Eight. Eleven. Nineteen. And then, after a while, there were so many that he couldn’t tell where one left off and the other began, and so instead he measured the distance from the edge to his wrist and the other edge to his shoulder, and by the time the car finally and mercifully stopped, the raised places formed an interrupted band all the way around his arm.
The trunk lid popped open, and a rush of cool air swept in, hitting his sweaty skin and setting Wes to shivering.
“I tried to get them to stop,” Marta was saying, her hands on his hands, tugging him. Blood rushed to his head, and he swooned, gripping the car’s side for balance. “I told them you’d need a break. I’m sorry.”
Wes came to a shaky stand. “It’s OK. It was probably better to just get it over with. I don’t know if I’d have gone back in if you let me out.”
“Was it that bad?”
“It was rough,” he admitted.
Edie joined them. “How’s the arm?”
“I don’t know.” He rolled the sleeve of his microsuit gingerly over his forearm. There was a lot of swelling, and the skin now seemed tight and full of heat, so this wasn’t as easy to do as it had been five hours ago. They all pulled back from the sight of it, grimacing. If Wes could have detached his arm and thrown it over the edge of a ravine, he’d have done so with barely a pang of regret. “So much for SecondSkins,” he murmured.
“That looks . . . bad.” Edie winced.
“But no other symptoms?” Marta asked hopefully.
The others gathered around them. Berto, Wes noticed, kept some extra distance between himself and Wes.
“Nothing so far. I didn’t throw up.” He wiggled his fingers, wiggled his toes in his boots. “Everything’s still working.”
Andy came over for a closer look. “Yeah, that’s on schedule. It’s been, what? Six and half hours?”
Wes nodded.
“At least it’s your arm. It could be worse.”
“It could be better.”
Andy turned around and pulled up his shirt to expose the flesh on his lower right back. Here, instead of the uniform Stamp scars, was a hand-sized scar with irregular edges and texture, striations that reminded Wes of tree bark. “Listen, when I say I know how you feel—I know how you feel. It’s shitty. It’s about to get shittier.”
“Can we get inside now?” Ken asked wearily.
This was cause for more negotiation. Wes had thought himself immune to spoiling, prided himself on how well he’d handled his early fame and success: he didn’t do drugs or drink; he didn’t sleep around; he donated a generous portion of his Pocketz profits to a variety of worthy causes; and he lived simply, keeping a modest apartment (and, OK, a modest beach house, little more than a shack, really), a compact car, a wardrobe of mostly blue jeans and fleeces and whimsical canvas sneakers. But it had been a long time since he’d been denied anything. Even in his gawky, geeky early teens he’d not been ostracized or bullied so much as left alone, and that had been fine with him since he did his best thinking alone and could find company in Land of Shadows if he really needed it.
But being Wes Feingold, Pocketz creator and CEO, came with perks that had become nearly invisible to him now: how quickly people accommodated him, ceded to his opinion. More than that—how often his needs and wants were anticipated. He never had to apologize for choosing the vegan restaurant when he went out for a business lunch. He never had to feel self-conscious when he entered a meeting in yesterday’s fleece and jeans. When he was dating Sonya, she complained once about the lighting in his office and his apartment. “Are you a vampire?” she’d asked. “Do you have some kind of light-sensitivity disease? Are you developing film? I can’t stand how dark you have to have things.”
“I don’t have to have things dark,” Wes said. “I like it that way at home, but the office—I mean, that’s the office managers. I didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“Ha!” Sonya said. “Keep telling yourself that, bud.”
One tick bite, though, and he wasn’t Wes Feingold anymore. He was toxic.
“Doesn’t bringing Wes in compromise the chalet?” Ken asked. The chalet was built into the side of a mountain, an elegant, mod structure of horizontal lines and spindly structural pillars, with a broad bank of windows that glowed brilliantly in the sunset. They had approached the entry—a small door built, like something from a fantasy novel, into the hillside. The chalet loomed out maybe twelve or thirteen meters above them, and Andy had told them that this door was the single access point. “The only way you’re getting in from up there is with a wrecking ball or a missile.”
“Each room has its own vac seal,” Andy said now. “So the answer is, I guess, ‘Not exactly.’”
“What happens when the ticks come out?” Berto asks. “Do they just . . . crawl off?”
Wes felt faint, and again he wished he could just separate himself from the arm. Ken’s talk of amputation didn’t seem so ghastly all of the sudden. It seemed, in fact, like precisely the thing to do. His body knew this with as much certainty as it knew that it needed water when it thirsted, or sleep when it dragged with weariness.