Godspeed (16 page)

“I know that Quinn has withheld answers you've asked for. But then, he does this to us all. On this subject, I don't believe he would feel the need to be as secretive. If he had not wanted you to get to know the others, he would have continued on keeping you sequestered from them.”

“Well, perhaps he would explain it in terms I could not understand anyway. So it is still better if you try.”

“You should be flattered.” Schuyler shrugged as he fussed with the lace on the cuff of his sleeve, first on the left, then the right. “Quinn never condescends to you. Never tries to oversimplify things in explanation which would be, to his mind, considered an insult.” He now straightened the lapels on his jacket and seemed to take stock of his appearance in the faint reflection he saw in the window.

He lifted his eyes to look at me, or rather I should say at my reflection as well, as he never actually turned to face me the entire time we were speaking.

“He thinks very highly of your mind,” Schuyler added. The tone of his voice changed a little, just for a second, and that change troubled me. It implied that even if only for a moment, he envied me.

“Nonsense,” I quickly added, moving away because I could no longer stand the power of his penetrating stare. “I am but a girl, and that is how Doctor Godspeed sees me. That is why I believe if I asked him this question, he would not answer. So please, Schuyler, will you, at last, answer?”

“Very well.” Schuyler sighed. He moved away from the window and took up his usual spot in the velvet-covered chair in the corner. “Jib's ailment is, as I said, one of his body's own creation. His body
seems to be attacking itself, that is the way Quinn described it to me. His systems all gone mad, and destroying his organs in the process.”

“Is there nothing for it?”

“Quinn has tried many treatments over the past five years, since the boy first presented with the symptoms. But, sadly, none have held the destruction at bay. It was very difficult the first time that we…” There was an obvious hitch in Schuyler's voice now, and he stopped to clear his throat before continuing. “The first time that we saw him wheel himself in, in that chair.”

“What does the future hold for him, if the doctor cannot find a cure?”

Schuyler looked at me, his eyes pooling with tears he could not prevent, and he simply shook his head. Clearly overcome by emotion, he sought to escape the room, and the conversation. “Pardon,” he whispered, as he rose from the chair and swept past me, leaving me to draw my own heartbreaking conclusion.

*   *   *

Still deep in thought, I retreated to the silence of my room.

Not long after, I heard the sound of footsteps and immediately sat up straighter in the rocking chair.

I heard a voice outside the door and sank lower into the cushion again.

It was not Quinn.

Quinn never spoke beyond the door; he only knocked once and then waited; though lately he had cut the waiting time down to a certain number of seconds seemingly agreed upon by us through force of habit. After that, his key would go into the lock, assuming I was too fatigued by then to open the door myself, which was a good thing because usually, I was.

“Else?” I recognized the muffled, familiar speech pattern as belonging to Penn. “Open the door, will you?”

Too tired to both speak and move, I stood slowly. I knew the creaking in the floor would sound louder to him than anyone else in
the house. I cringed. I hated so much the thought of causing him pain, and so many things did.

I turned the key in the interior lock. Upon opening the door, I saw Penn holding a tray fixed for a proper tea.

My heart sank ever lower — apparently Quinn was too busy for our usual tea today. The days went by so much more slowly when I didn't get to spend that time with him, time as informal and, risking misuse of the word, as
relaxed
a time as I believed Quinn spent with anyone.

“Schuyler says you need to eat something.”

“I am not hungry.”

“He said you would say that.”

I grumbled softly as Penn set the tray down on the small table beside the rocking chair. He jumped as the china teacups clinked against their saucers, shook his head and looked up at me.

“Don't know if I'll ever get used to it.”

I regarded him with the deepest and sincerest sympathy one human being could offer another, for I didn't know if I would ever get used to the changes that had been inflicted upon my body either.

He poured the tea into my cup and without asking added in a good amount of cream and two teaspoons of sugar.

“Nothing much gets past you, does it, Penn?” I tried to steady my hands as best I could to take the cup and saucer from him, but still I sloshed some of the contents over the side before the liquid actually reached my lips.

“Not even the things I wish would get past me.” He was still standing, I realized, and I glanced over to the small, tufted stool that sat before the mirrored vanity.

“Please, sit down. There are two cups here; apparently, I was not meant to take tea alone.”

He looked anxiously at the door, then back at me, before finally taking hold of the stool. His eyes asked me if he should continue moving nearer the table and I nodded. I watched him, so uncomfortable in his own skin, and wondered if he had been that way before he'd come to be one of the latest patients of Doctor Quinn Godspeed.

He grimaced as the metal legs of the stool dragged across the wood floor. I winced once again at the very sight of his pain, and I thought now to ask him a question that I never had before.

“Does it always hurt?”

“Does what always hurt?”

“Hearing.”

He looked away. “I'm grateful to be able to hear. The doctor has been very good to me.”

“That's not what I asked you.” I felt the tea begin to revive me and suddenly had more energy, with this opportunity to ask not only questions about Penn himself, but also about the entire structure of this family of sorts as I had come to see it.

“Yes.” He reached beneath his shaggy, sand colored hair and ran his fingertip gingerly along a dark object that was readily visible against his pale skin. It was about the size of a small coin and I knew that it was as much integrated into the organic circuitry of his body as the charm was to mine. It was both blessing and malediction: both gift, and curse.

An identical device was affixed to the opposite side of his head.

“How long have you had them?”

“The amplifiers?”

I nodded, and slowly reached out for one of Schuyler's famous powder-dusted sugar biscuits.

“Soon it'll be one year since.”

“How did you meet him?”

“The doctor? I knew of his existence before I actually met him. Unlike the others, who took a very long and indirect route to get here, I searched him out. I…” He sighed, ignored the tea but reached for a biscuit. “I actually came
looking
for this.”

“Is it too much to ask, if I told you I'd like to hear the story?”

He shrugged. “Not too much.” He bit off a large chunk of biscuit, chewed it thoughtfully, then popped the rest into his mouth and poured himself some tea. He waited a moment after he'd finished swallowing to speak, appearing almost dizzy for an instant. When he looked up at me again, his eyes were rimmed with red and watering. “Even eating,” he said in his usual, muffled manner, “is loud.”

“I'm sorry,” I said, and he could tell I truly was.

“Don't be. I mean, look at yo—” He stopped before he finished, but it was too late. I knew what he'd been thinking, and he looked at me apologetically. “I didn't mean it like that, Else. I only meant that you've got your own troubles. You don't need to be worried about mine.”

“But I do worry about you, Penn. So I'd like to know, if you don't mind telling me, as much as you wish to tell. And I'm sorry for upsetting you at dinner that first night. Forgive me, please.”

“Nothing to forgive.” He shrugged. “So you want to know about me? I'd bet you're not going to return the favor though, are you?”

I shifted uncomfortably and set down my teacup, still brimming. What little appetite I'd had now deserted me.

“That's what I thought.”

“I'll understand if that means you don't want to—”

“It's not that.” He looked me over carefully, lifted and dropped his shoulders. “I wonder if you finally told somebody where you came from, if you wouldn't feel a little less alone.”

My cheeks took on color — a rare thing, these days, except in the doctor's presence. “I'm used to being alone.”

“That doesn't mean it's good for you.”

“I'm ready to listen whenever you're ready to begin, Penn.” I said with a slightly sharper edge to my tone. I had no intention of talking about myself. If he had no intention of talking about himself, then there was little point in continuing.

“Well, you know my name is Pennington Renfrew,” he began, with the weary tone of a man many times his age. “I'm sixteen years old, and my whole family died of the Dread Fever, just a little more than a year since. Least, I think they did, there's one I still don't know about.”

My eyes instantly took on the weight of tears. “I'm sorry.”

“Yeah. Well.” He fidgeted with one of the teaspoons on the tray, until it accidentally hit the edge of the table and the sound caused him another jolt of pain. “I'm not the only one who has lost to it.”

I reached up to touch the lead wires to the charm again and thought about my father.

“You say that you had heard of the doctor before coming here.” I shook my head and wondered how anyone would possibly be able to seek Quinn out on purpose. “How can that be?”

“My father was a dreamer. He always saved the most fantastical articles he found written up in the news.” He smiled a sad, fond smile of remembrance. “He kept a clipping about a young doctor who was experimenting with helping those that no one else could. He told me that men like this would someday even be able to cheat Death itself, if they only had the time and chance to do it.

“My mother called this blasphemy. She believed that a person's time to die was predetermined before they were born. Father disagreed with this, but quietly. No one…” He paused. “No one ever wanted to disagree with mother
loudly
.” His expression was a mixture of discomfort and nostalgia. “You know how mothers are.”

“Actually I—” I stopped. I had so few memories of my mother, and those I had were little more than impressions of feeling safe in her arms, and how lost I felt when that safety was suddenly snatched away. I didn't want to distract him from telling his story with one of my own, so I simply nodded once.

“Mother was the first to die of the Fever.” Tears formed in just the corners of his bright green eyes. “They took my little sister Pearl away and I never saw her again. I don't know if she's living or dead, I only know she's gone missing. In the Child Protection System somewhere, maybe. I still want to find her. Jib's parents tried.” He hung his head for a moment, and I could tell that of all he'd suffered, this was the thing that pained him the most.

“My father died, then my Grandmother, last. I was sick, so sick I didn't know if I would live to see morning. But right before she died, my grandmother told me where the money was hidden in the house, a decent sum of it. Soon as I could stand, I put it into a suitcase and I disappeared before anyone found my family. I didn't want to end up in the Protection system too.” He shook now, from head to toe, at the memory.

“I made my way to a boarding house in the worst end of town. I had to buy off the prostitutes to keep them from attempting to sell me themselves. I'll never forget the way that they looked at me. They said I was—” still he trembled and his voice reflected his horror, “—a very pretty boy.

“I came to Fairever by train. I bought a ticket with rest of the money I had to my name. I sought out the last known location of Doctor Quinn Godspeed, only to be told that he was dead. That it had been a death by hanging, he'd taken his own life.”

The image that the very thought put into my head was devastating, and I felt my throat constrict in response to it. I said nothing, only waited for him to continue.

“I'm getting ahead of myself, though. I forgot to tell you how I'd already lost most of my hearing, and how difficult it was for me to understand what exactly had happened to me. I could hear noises around me at almost normal volume, but voices were impossible to separate, one from another. Words washed together, and I struggled to hide this from the people I met, for fear they would think that it was a defect with my mind. You know how those who cannot hear are perceived in our so-called upright, enlightened society.”

I thought about this for a moment and it truly saddened me. He was right; even in this supposedly civilized time, there was still an unfortunate stigma attached to deafness that did not immediately plague the blind. It was intimated that they were possessed, or lacking in mental ability. I had, of course, questioned this in my heart even before I met Penn, and knowing him now, I was completely convinced that there was no correlation between inability to hear and the ability to think.

It was amazing how quickly I forgot entirely about his slightly altered pronunciation of words; it was so slight, really, and so inconsequential that almost immediately upon meeting him, I'd dismissed it.

“With no money and nowhere to stay, I started going shop to shop down the streets, looking for a position that would at least provide me a room. I was actually in the grocer's shop, exhausted, and if truth be told, near tears as I begged for a job sweeping up in exchange for a piece of fruit. That was when he found me.”

“Godspeed?”

“No, Schuyler. He took pity on me. He ushered me outside, gave me food out of the order he'd just paid for. I devoured the first, then the second piece of fruit as nothing I'd ever eaten before. I've never been so grateful for a meal in my life.”

I began to weep and did not even attempt to conceal my emotions from Penn.

“He invited me to his house for dinner and at first, I was apprehensive…” He widened his eyes, and I understood his meaning. Again, however, I said nothing.