The Ward (35 page)

Again, I find myself frog stroking for the surface with my body fighting a thousand icy jackknives, each one telling me to stop moving. To stop moving means to stop fighting, but I’m so far away, and the sack is so heavy, and my boots . . . my boots are also dragging me down.

Almost fifty feet to surface and it’s taking too long. Callum’s Omni will hit any second now, and if I’m in the water when it does, that’s it. Underwater explosions are even more dangerous than ones on land—the blast from the pressure wave would turn me into a ball of ruptured junk. I’m fuzzy on the science, but it’s bad. Of course, that’s for, like, a hand grenade. Who knows what happens when a mobile explodes.

I drag my toes against my heels, lifting the soles of my feet out of my boots. One drifts off, then the other, and I can’t even afford to spare a glance at my beloved Hessians as they sink to the floor. Nor will I tell myself that they’re just shoes. They’re not.

They were like a second pair of feet.

The upward haul goes slightly faster, now, with the boots gone. I’ve still got the weight on my back to deal with. Only twenty feet or so away. Ears crackle as I close the distance, and then my temples flare under the pressure.

That’s when I feel the first wave.

It pushes me to the side, takes the rest of the air from my lungs.

I open my mouth—I don’t want to; I know not to, but I swallow the greenish-tinged water by the mouthful. I’m only four feet, three feet. . . . Fingertips break the surface—they hit hard wood. My head comes up too quickly.
Boardwalk
, I remind myself, but the need to breathe trumps all. A thwump to my cranium, and outer space has direct mailed me every one of its stars. Planets too, free of charge. I see black, black, and more black. I won’t go under again though, and I grip the planks, keeping afloat.

After a few retching gasps, I can actually begin to start breathing again instead of just hacking up water. I swim under the boardwalk till I reach the dockside. Wet and bedraggled, I haul myself over the edge.

First things first—I reach around my back, feeling for the rubber pack.

It’s there. Setting it down, I look for any holes in the rubber. Seeing none, I decide a little jig is in order. In honor of the sack, and me.

People start circling around the edge of the walk, about thirty feet off, where a chunk of the wooden planks has gone missing. Someone calls the DI: “A huge collision under Mad Ave, yes,” I hear them say.

Any other day of the week, the Blues wouldn’t care less about that sort of thing. They’d ignore the call till the monthly arrests. Then,
maybe
they’d send over divers.

Today, though, they’ll be on it.

And they’ll find my shoes.

Soon enough, I’ll be off their radar for good.

My cuffcomm beeps its reminder and I glance down:

Q5/6. B-sickhouse on the Strait. Apt PH305

Callum’s new address . . .

I hardly believe it.

And not because it’s all the way west, practically in the DI’s backyard. Or because he’s chosen to hide out in a sickhouse. Both those are either brilliant moves or sheer idiocy.

But they’re not why I’m standing still. That sickhouse—the only one in Hell’s Kitchen—is the last place on earth I want to go back to. That’s where I found Aven after my DI training was up. Seeing her alone, looked after by strangers who could do nothing for her ’cause she had no money for daggers—I still feel the guilt of leaving her behind three years later, though I was snatched up, no choice in the matter.

She’s alone right now.
She could die like that
.

My chest holds in a boulder, one that keeps getting pushed up- and downhill, and the only thing that seems to make it better is being near her.

Yet here I am.

I should be with her—I
want
to be with her. But I’m so close . . . so, so close to getting her a cure.

Starting the shoeless trek back to Hell’s Kitchen, a cure in reach, I wonder why my guilt feels no different today than it did the day I found her. Like nothing’s changed.

Maybe nothing
has
changed. Instead of being
with
her, I’m always off someplace else. Off far, far away, thinking that I’m big enough and strong enough to fight her death for her—

And win.

PART THREE

40

6:00 P.M., SUNDAY

T
he suspension bridge sways under my feet, heavy with me, and the sack, and other things like life and love that you simply can’t touch with your hands.

Overhead, quiet and perfect like nothing could ever go wrong in the world, I see the stars. Out in full force.

If Callum and I can pull tonight off . . . My brain don’t even know how to think that kind of thought—it can’t imagine it. The borders will open—I’ll be able to see the West Isle for the first time. But would I even want to? A city with people who’ll push
for
genocide?

Maybe, when you’re not fighting to survive, you can afford to think about wiping others off the map. Either way, it’s not important. Tonight isn’t about getting tourist visas so we can take vacations to the Isle.

I’m here—
I see the roof of the Hell’s Kitchen sickhouse only feet away, but I stop moving. Stop crossing the bridge.

Below, the wooden planks creak, and ahead of me the Strait splashes between us and the Isle. The Ward isn’t silent tonight, though. Not too far off I hear the high-pitched whistle of a firecracker. Then its thunderous finish. Like it is its own exclamation point announcing itself to the sky.

Telling the world to get ready for what comes next.

Tonight is about Aven, and the girl in the contagious ward, and everyone else afraid to go outside. It’s about putting
us
back on the map—as people, and as a city.

We’re not
hosts
.

I let go of my fist, tight around the suspension rope, and jump onto the rooftop.

Opening the door out of the stairwell into the top-floor hallway, I nearly gag. Have to hold my nose as I walk. The smell . . . it’s worse than the dying stink of the hospital.

Rank viscera. Old, decaying flesh. Blood loss, coppery and acrid.

This high up, and they usually just weight the bodies before tossing them into the canal below. But sometimes the flesh is dying and the body’s still alive. The smell is the same.

I can taste it all in the air, passing room after room. My stomach twists, and though this isn’t the floor I found Aven on, it may as well be. All the doors look the same, and I can almost see myself pushing them open. Frantic.

Yelling for anyone who might’ve seen the girl with the near-white hair.

I come up on apartment 305, my footsteps quiet and even. Candlelight flickers under the door, and I don’t even have to knock. It opens, and there’s Callum.

He pulls me in. Wraps me up in a hug. Seeing the sack, his face is a mixture of wonder and even more wonder. “You made it. . . .” he says, and kneels beside it. “Is this really it?”

Disbelieving, he lifts it up by the straps to feel its weight.

“To the brim,” I say softly, and I pat the rubber, a little bit proud. Then I look at him—really look at him—give him the once-over, two . . . three times. “You’re
whole
,” I say, wide-eyed, and he manages a weak laugh, nodding.

Even with the cure . . . everything is tense. There’s too much dying.

As he carries the sack to a corner of the room—a huge room—I see all the big furniture’s still here from after the Wash Out. Everything else, though—picked clean.

“That I am,” he answers, lowering the sack onto a bulky wooden table. Careful not to spill, he pours the water into a glass basin, shaking his head as he watches. He murmurs, “Only you,” then glances at me with that strange, awed look again.

I avoid his eyes; each time that happens, I find myself going more and more red in the cheeks, like I’m
too
unusual.

As he pours, the tiny green mushrooms fall out too. “What’s this?” he murmurs, leaning in to get a closer look. Then he answers his own question. “A bioluminescent fungus . . .”

I don’t know much about that first word, but I nod anyway. He’s talking about the aliens, all right. “It’s the plant you were talking about, right? It’s how the water got those phytothings,” I ask, but he don’t answer.

He’s totally absorbed, filling an eyedropper with the springwater. “Amazing,” he murmurs.

Through the tube, I see now that the water is darker than I thought. A brownish, reddish color. Flecked with neon. When he swirls it around, a glow-in-the-dark galaxy whirlpools in his very hand. He droppers it onto a glass slide, then adds a dye or something. He lays that under his ’scope’s lens. For a moment I’m surprised—I’m thinkin’ the ’scope got lucky. Survived the ransacking of the first lab. But then I see Callum hold a super-duper bright flashlight over it: Kitaneh’s handiwork must’ve included bulb smashing.

“Shine it here, please?” he asks.

I take it from him, trying to beam the light where he wants while he looks through the lens. After a few moments of him lifting his eye, moving the slide, adjusting the focus, and repeating the process about a half dozen times, Callum stands.

In a whisper, eyes glazed like he’s way too happy: “This is . . . I have no words. The fungus—it grows underwater, and the hot spring seeps out its nutrients. Kind of like a tea. You know, I’ve heard of something like this before.” He pauses, recalling as he looks up. “There’s a place called Siberia where a tree-growing mushroom exists, one with similarly beneficial properties. Antiviral, antitumor, antibacterial, et cetera. Locals make tea out of it. Still, this one blows it away. Far more potent. Take a look.” He nudges me in front of the ’scope.

Peering down, I see a half dozen other patterns, similar to the desert dunes and the bubbles. One looks like a fence, all Xs and diamonds. Another ripples like the Hudson on a windy day.

“The antivirals, along with all the other necessary chemical compounds, are there. We can cure the Blight with this,” Callum tells me, tapping the table. When I look up he adds, “Along with your blood, that is.”

I laugh, nervous. “Again?” I say, gesturing to myself. “Remember, Callum, limited quantities only.”

He chuckles and walks over to me, syringe in hand. Motions for me to roll up my sleeve. “Don’t worry, I won’t need much.”

I step back—I don’t believe him for a minute. We’re talking enough for at least eight hundred people. “Why? I thought with the mushrooms we’d have enough antivirals. . . .”

“We do. But, like I said before, your blood does something to jump-start the recipient’s immune system. With it, we only need to administer one dose. Follow-up doses would be necessary otherwise, and we just don’t have enough time—or water—to do that.”

I nod. Without another thought—we’ve come too far to get tripped up over a little blood donation—I extend my arm, exposing my inner elbow. The tip of the needle pierces flesh. I watch my blood go away. And away. And away . . .

“Okay, mister,” I grumble after even more time passes. “Leave some for the girl in the body, will ya?”

Callum laughs, but doesn’t move. Only when
he
feels he’s taken enough does he steps back. Then he looks at the desk.

On it, three glass bowls. All different sizes. The first and smallest (thank goodness) holds my blood. In the second, our alien mushrooms. The springwater is in the third bowl, swirly and neon.

Biting his lower lip in a smile, Callum double punches the air. I’m fool-grinning too. “We’re going to do it,” he says. We stand there, our eyes first caught on the bowls, then on each other, because hope has the perfect face.

“We need a plan. To get it to everyone . . . and Aven,” I say softly, afraid of sounding too selfish.

Even with all the others, I want to get her the cure first.

“Yes. We do. And we will. But first I need to figure out what ‘it’ is,” he tells me. “There’s still so much we don’t know.”

“True,” I say. I’m about to say more, but I stop. Cross my arms. As soon as
his
name entered my head, the writhing came back. The anger. All of a sudden, it’s like I’m holding that album again, filled with Derek and Kitaneh’s joy, centuries of love-dovey, gooey-eyed crap.
Derek
. Who kissed me back. Who would drink the water for himself, and let me watch my sister die.

“The Tètai, Callum . . . They’re not just guardians of the spring. They’ve
been
the spring’s guardians. All along. Centuries. I saw pictures. Actual old-school flash photography.”

Callum eyes me, but not with disbelief. Then he laughs, brows sky-high, and scratches his head. “I’d suspected that was possible, to be perfectly honest. But without seeing it in the water, I couldn’t even attend to the possibility.” He points back at the ’scope. “I still can’t see how, actually. We know that, for someone who’s sick, the water has restorative properties if administered in multiple doses over time. But immortality? That’s a whole different ball game, I’m afraid.”

I walk back over to the ’scope to have another look. “What if . . .” I start, and peer down into the lens. Just in this tiny microcosm of a swab, there are dozens more patternlike phytothingies than there were before—ones that look like hologram images of grassy fields, or rainbow feathers, or cords and cords of twisty rope. “Maybe there’s a new nutrient in here that does it. Or maybe if you’re not sick, drinking it regularly stops you from getting older. The governor did say something about the results being ‘miraculous’ when a healthy person drinks it every day.”

Callum’s hand is firm on my shoulder as he says, “You’re kidding, right? You never mentioned that—”

“I dunno,” I answer, standing up and turning to face him. “He said a lot of stuff. It was hard to keep track.”

I’d also just found out Derek is part of a secret guild, responsible for hiding a cure that could save my dying sister, so there’s that. . . . I was kind of distracted.

No need to mention that bit, though.