Emma Bull (34 page)
Authors: Finder
Tiamat drew a sharp breath, as if she meant to use it in snapping at me. But a cough interrupted. When she was done, she said, "The—the disease. Like that." She nodded at the paper.
Rico had mentioned, last night, that flyers had been posted all over town. This was one of them. I tried to read the warnings, the description of symptoms, the recommendations, but they kept going in and out of focus. This was a much more comprehensive list of symptoms and consequences than Ms. Wu had
recited for the Ticker and me, I could tell that much. Of course, now that Ms. Wu had seen the end of the disease as well as the beginning, she had a better idea what it could do.
"I have it, don't I?" Tiamat asked, her voice bobbing and cracking.
In my mind I held up her white, frightened face to Tick-Tick's; then to the face of the girl in the Bolt Street Clinic. I had been so stupid. I had asked the wrong question. I'd wanted to find the drug that had killed her, but of course, she hadn't been killed by a drug. She'd been killed by a virus. The evolving half-humans, with their underdeveloped, un-fey immune systems, were the vector that Ms. Wu had
speculated on.
"Yes," I said. "You have it."
I'd asked the wrong question. I could ask the right one now, and find out where the passport was. Did I want to do that? I had no obligation to, I realized. It was my choice, and Rico would know I'd made it only if I chose to tell her.
The girl who waited, still barely hopeful, on the sidewalk in front of me had nothing to do with that choice. She was an imperative, the responsibility of life for life.
I stood up. "Come on," I said to Tiamat, "we have to get you to a hospital."
A B B YY.c
And a
s I dusted the gri
t off the back of my jeans, I asked the question. Thataway, Thataway, Thataway.
It wa
s all over town.
Ghost of a Chance
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"Number six," Sunny said when I came back to the car. She could have sounded accusing, or bitter, or even mocking, maybe. What she did sound like was the way I felt—a little numb, a little spacey, a lot tired. We'd been chasing after my sunburst of Thataways. It wasn't a speedy process, no matter how careful we were about the geography. Each location had to be triangulated; each had to be carefully surveyed to see if it was full of dangerous wicked people and their hirelings trying to subvert the human youth of Bordertown (this part was exclusively Sunny's—I was ordered to stay with the car). And since none of the six locations we'd checked so far had been the hoped-for issuing office of the passport, the next part was mine, as a relatively well-known and trusted face around town. I got to play public health officer, going into each place and finding out which resident or residents had gotten their passports, explaining to them about the virus, and making them swear to report to the closest of the free clinics for monitoring. As some of the residents were inclined to be resentful and belligerent, this wasn't much like selling candy bars door to door. It was sunset. I wanted some dinner, and I wanted to go visit Tick-Tick at the care hostel. I told Sunny so.
"Which first, dinner or Tick-Tick?"
"Tick-Tick," I said, realizing that it ought to be dinner. The last thing an invalid needs is a visit from her partner when he's low on calories and running on half a brain. She'd be patient, but I ought not to make her work so hard. And it wasn't as if she were alone, since Wolfboy had volunteered to sit with her.
Nobody knew if Wolfboy, himself something of an avatar of Borderland transformation, could get the bug. But when asked, he'd raised one jutting hairy eyebrow, considered it, and given a bark (literally) of laughter that I thought was meant to be ironic. He'd written on his notepad,
Doesn't jive with my secret
origin. Only vulnerable to silver bullets and the color yellow
.
"Yellow?" I'd said.
He'd written,
Clashes with my eyes
.
Sunny drove with her usual terrifying panache, which didn't have any apparent effect on her
conversation. "How was that last one?"
"Not so bad. Except—" I sighed, which she wouldn't hear anyway, in the open car at this speed. "I don't know. I just get around to deciding that I won't mind anything as long as somebody doesn't threaten me with a baseball bat again, when I walk into a little bare squat with cardboard over the windows and find nobody there except one undernourished thirteen-year-old girl with a pain in her chest and half her fingers longer than the other half, who only wants everything to be beautiful."
A B B YY.c
We w
ent about a block and a half before she said.
"You know, you're pretty articulate when you're revolted. That's what this one was?"
"That's what this one was."
"Well, try to think positive thoughts. We're here."
We hadn't been when she started the sentence, but at that speed, she wasn't a liar by the time she got to the last word.
It was very little like a hospital: an enormous brick pointy-Victorian mansion that at one time had served as a convent. It was still a little of that, since it was being run by the Daughters of Brede, an all-female Celtic Pagan nursing order. They took their work seriously, and had been one of the first places to volunteer their services when the epidemic became public. I'd roused Tick-Tick up and moved her
there—with her consent, of courseùas soon as I'd come back from getting Tiamat down to Bolt Street, and sending someone off with a message for Ms. Wu at The Lilacs with the particulars as I knew them and a recommendation to find Rico and pump her for the rest. Which she must have done, since in fairly short order Sunny found me. No, she didn't draft me. She didn't know yet that there was something to draft me for. I volunteered.
The Daughter on visitors' duty looked like she'd just walked out of an old Marlboro cigarette ad, tall and bony and tan with cropped gingery hair and a network of crow's feet at the corners of her blue eyes. She smiled at me, which I decided she wouldn't have been able to do if Tick-Tick were failing.
"The Trueblood girl in room 24, right?" she asked me. I nodded. "I'll check. I think second floor meds were half an hour ago, so it should be fine." She went to a cord hanging behind the visitors' desk and tugged on it several times in an irregular rhythm. After a moment or two.
there was a short spate of clacking from a box mounted on the wall next to the cord, and I noticed that a similar cord, coming from the box and disappearing up through the ceiling, was moving.
The Daughter came back to the front of the desk. "You can go up." She saw the direction of my gaze, and added, "Morse code, levers, and string. Real hospitals have radio things, they tell me, but this works fine for us."
The Ticker would like it, I thought. When she got well, I'd show her the setup on our way out. She'd probably make me learn Morse code.
Sunny and I went upstairs, past a brown-skinned woman in jeans and a gray cotton sweater who
balanced a tray of bottles and jars against one shoulder. She didn't seem to hurry, but she got down the stairs pretty quickly for all that, and without so much as the clink of glass on glass from the tray. Not much like what
I
thought of as a hospital, anyway. There were more members of the staff working upstairs, in their assorted clothes and their quiet, competent style.
"I'll wait for you," Sunny said outside the door of 24.
"You can come in if you want."
"I know. I'll wait."
A B B YY.c
Wolfb
oy must have overheard us. He came out of the Ticker's room and showed a few of his teet
h in a
smile, then ga
ve a casual index-finger-to-the-eyebrow salute to Sunny.
"How is she?" I asked him.
He made a gesture with his hands and shoulders that was expressive of not much of anything. Since it obviously didn't satisfy me, he sighed and took out the notebook.
Not any better
, he wrote.
"Are they treating her okay?"
Like a goddess
. He paused, then wrote,
I have to go back to the store tonight. Think that'll be okay
?
I knew what he meant. There was nothing either of us could do, by being there, to make her well, but if we went away, it felt as if we weren't trying. Still, Wolfboy had a business to run and a relationship to keep up. "Go ahead. I'll tell her you'll be back in the morning."
As soon as I saw her, I knew Tick-Tick was worse. I'd been warned that she would get worse before she got better, but that didn't really make it easier to look at and smile. Her face seemed sunken and worn away, her eyes and hair dull. She wasn't coughing, but I knew she was being medicated for that, and that it was only a symptom.
