A rush of heat starts at my feet and shoots up my body, over my stomach and chest. My neck and face get painfully hot, and I can’t help but moan. He dives forward, grabbing a candle from the bedside table, and leans down to look into my face. The candle flickers on his eye mask.
“I feel sick,” I murmur. Maybe for both of us, this represents something of a truce. He quickly reaches over to the restraint on my wrist. I don’t know what he does, but it clicks open. Just as he helps me sits up, I vomit all over myself. He doesn’t even flinch, but pulls a towel from the pile on the bed and mops me up as much as he can. Tossing the towel aside, he places one gloved hand on my forehead. It feels surprisingly soft, almost like flesh, but cool.
“I have a fever.” He nods, laying me back on the pillows. I press my newly freed hand onto my forehead. It’s as hot as a sidewalk in the sun, almost as if it could burn me.
He turns and unlaces my boot. My whole leg tingles with pain as he slips it off. The army pants I wear are loose enough that he can push the leg up to my knee, but the blood-soaked thermals underneath are too fitted. He slips a knife from somewhere in his armor. I cringe at the sight of it, then again when he cuts the cloth away, and I see the severity of the wound. It looks like the knife went right between the two bones of my shin, completely through my calf from front to back. It’s swollen and kaleidoscope-colored. The blood still seeping out is red mixed with bright yellow pus.
“That looks really painful.” The Nahx turns to me, and I imagine a perplexed expression in the tilt of his head. “Just trying to lighten the mood.” My words are starting to slur.
I lie back and let the room swim around me. When I look up again, he has a bowl of sudsy water and another pile of towels as well as torn strips of lighter fabric, possibly a sheet. Washing the wound involves the kind of pain people probably go mad from, but I’m already pretty delirious, so I giggle through most of it, when I can keep from whimpering. Maybe the pain is bad enough for me to zone out again, because the next time I look at my leg, it’s loosely bandaged in clean, torn sheets.
The next few minutes pass in a haze as he helps me sit up and slips off my layers of coat and sweaters. When he lays me back, wearing just a bra and cotton undershirt, the cool sheets soothe my scorched skin. He reaches forward, uncertainly, delicately, and lifts the side of my undershirt. My ribs are eggplant-colored and puffed up like a cake that’s ready to come out of the oven. He runs his fingers over the bruising, and though his touch is achingly gentle, bolts of pain shoot through me.
By this time I think the fever must have risen dangerously. The daylight is completely gone, the scene lit only by candlelight. When I turn my head from side to side, the candles streak in my vision, like shooting stars. My mouth is as dry as the ashes of the burnt forest where . . .
“Was that you too?” I ask, then remembering that he’s not privy to my thoughts, add: “By the river. You let us float away?”
He nods, pulling my undershirt back down. That’s all the torture in that area for now. As he prods my bruised cheek, I find my words getting thick as uncooked sausages. My lips feel like they are inflated.
“Have you been following me?”
A second passes before he shrugs. There’s a small part of me that is outraged by this answer; how can he not know? Either he has followed me or he hasn’t. But the fevered part of me understands completely. Sometimes a path is something you float along, not something you make. The path followed me; he just followed the path. That makes a kind of delirious sense.
I try to look at him in the near dark, but he looks more like the absence of himself than anything solid. He’s like a negation of a person, the blank space left when a person is lost. How many people did he . . . ? But I can’t finish this thought because my eyes fill with tears.
“Tuck . . . ,” I whisper. “Tucker. . . .”
And Lochie, and Felix, and Sawyer, and Mandy. And God knows who else. My parents, Tucker’s parents. Xander’s family. Millions, billions. All our shared history, good and bad. Gone. It’s hard to reconcile this gentle one with that level of destruction.
“Just following orders . . . ,” I hear myself mumble. He wriggles his fingers in front of his mouth, and I must be high as a kite, because I understand this sign immediately.
What did you say? What are you talking about? Explain.
“Just following orders, right?” I say, in a wave of lucidity. “I could tell you stories from our history about that. Is that why you do what you do? Walk around with a rifle creating human mannequins? How many of us have you dispatched, anyway?”
He turns away from me, staring out at the dark window. I hear him take a deep, rattling breath in and out. His hands find my broken forearm. The shot of pain makes a red flash in my eyes. He produces a little light from somewhere and shines it down on my arm. I can see a raised, swollen bump there, but no bone sticking out—that’s something.
“It’s going to really hurt, isn’t it? If you set it?”
He doesn’t look at me as he nods. He stands, and I see he has the shackle in his other hand.
“Don’t. Please. I won’t go anywhere. I promise. I can barely sit up.”
He hesitates, but tucks the shackle away and looks down at me, his head cocked to the side.
“So,” I say. My voice is like two sheets of sandpaper rustling together. “Should we do the arm with screaming or without?”
He makes a circle with his thumb and forefinger. Zero. I guess that means no screaming.
“Maybe if I had something to bite down on?” He flicks his head back twice, like a reverse nod, and holds out the hand that I bit earlier.
Really? He’s making jokes? I guess I’d laugh if I could, or smile, if my face weren’t so mangled. The fever is starting make everything look like it’s been decorated in gaudy streamers and glitter, like I’m at a New Year’s Eve party.
Wait, he signs. Another unmistakable one. He disappears for a few moments and comes back with several kitchen utensils, some for biting and some splint shaped. He also has, mercifully, a bottle of bourbon.
I don’t really like bourbon. I’m not averse to a little underage drinking, but purloined wine and beer are my usual poisons. Broken prisoners of hostile aliens cannot be choosers, I guess. I uncap the bottle and take a swig. It burns on the way down. I imagine it will probably feel as bad if not worse on the way back up.
While I drink, he wets a cloth and presses into onto my steaming forehead. I wonder if he knows what the fever means. How much can he know about human medical care?
“My leg is getting infected, I think,” I say. “Do you know what that means?”
He nods slowly.
“I need antibiotics. Can you look for some? After you do the arm?”
He wriggles his fingers in front of his mouth. Explain.