Vale of Stars (17 page)

“Come on, dear. Get up now.” Rice said, recovering his calm. He wanted to protect Yallia’s dignity as well as her body. “You kids go back to the playroom. I’ll be there soon,” he said over his shoulder. He managed to pick Yallia up and took her into the staff room beyond the kitchenette.

“Yallia, why don’t you lie down here on the sofa. I don’t want you to move from here. I’m going to call your daddy,” he said. Yallia nodded mutely, her eyes glazed.

It took Rice an agonizingly long time to reach Dolen, who was in class, lecturing. Presently, Dolen answered the call on his headphone.

“Yes?”

“Professor, this is Langis Rice at Emerald City Crèche. Uh, Yallia has eaten an awful lot of salt just now and I’m worried about her. I was going to call medical services but I thought I’d call you first.”

“Salt?” was Dolen’s only question.

“Yes. She had the container upside down and was literally pouring it into her mouth. Earlier, she drank salt water and even though I tried to keep her out of it. I’ve got more children to—”

“No, no, I understand. I’ll be right there.”

“Should I call medical services?”

“No,” Dolen said with enough conviction as to cause Rice to frown in surprise. “I’ll handle it. Thank you so much.” Rice heard the connection break and blinked. He looked at Yallia—despite Dolen’s wishes, if she looked to be in distress, he would call medserv on his own. But the girl seemed all right, if a bit listless. She had risen from the couch and was standing calmly next to him.

“Yallia, honey, how are you feeling?”

Yallia was a moment before answering. “I feel okay. My stomach is rumbling a little.”

“I guess so.” Rice had no idea what that much salt would do to a child, aside from making him or her ill. But Yallia was not complaining of anything serious.

“Can I go back and play?” she asked brightly.

“Well, why don’t you stay here until your daddy gets here. He’s coming now to pick you up.”

“Why?”

“Honey, you ate so much salt I’m afraid you’ll get sick.”

“No I won’t. I’m fine,” she said, with enough girlish enthusiasm as to make Rice doubt his own common sense. She couldn’t be covering any kind of distress—she wasn’t guarding her stomach, wincing, or acting in any way like a child in pain. Still, he suspected that the salt would effect her suddenly and that he would have to clean it up. He wanted to localize the problem.

“I need you to stay back here, dear. I’ll go get you something to play with while you wait.”

Yallia looked dejected, but Rice assured her it would not be for long and she seemed to accept the situation. He went back into the main playroom where the other children were playing. One of them, a pudgy argie boy named Pem, looked up at Rice.

“Where’s Yallia?” Pem asked. Rice frowned inwardly. Pem was an aggressive boy who was really too old for the Crèche—his parents coddled him too much. While Rice treated all his charges fairly and with love, he did not
like
Pem.

“She’s in the back. I’m going to take her a puzzle,”

“I’ll take it to her,” Pem offered. Rice’s inward frown intensified. Pem was uncomfortable with Yallia in the Crèche—attention he might have had from Rice was diverted to her and Pem resented it. Pem was also a troublemaker—Rice’s instincts were to tell him ‘thank you, no.’ As he opened his mouth to say just that, he heard a child’s shout of anger in another corner of the Crèche. Two youngsters had begun a rough-and-tumble over a toy, a commonplace event but one that demanded his instant attention. He dropped the puzzle and headed off to end the skirmish and adjudicate.

Pem quietly sneaked out of the main room to deliver the puzzle to the weird shippie girl.

Yallia was waiting in the room, sitting on the couch and kicking her feet against the cushions. She got up when Pem entered with the holopuzzle.

“
You
brought it,” she said in a half statement, half question.

“Yeah. Are you coming back tomorrow?” Pem asked as pointedly as only a child could.

“I don’t know,” Yallia said, reaching for the puzzle.

Pem held it out of her reach. “You can only have this if you promise not to come back. You smell funny,” he added, wrinkling his nose in disgust.

“That’s not nice,” Yallia said quietly. She stopped reaching for the puzzle and a curious expression came over her face. She felt a slight swelling in her stomach.

Pem pressed the attack. “So? You’re
weird
. You have funny hair. I hope you get lost outside and never come back to the Dome.”

Yallia felt the strangeness inside her growing. It was as if a bubble of fire were rapidly erupting in volume inside her lungs. She spoke to Pem in a whisper. “You should stop talking,” she said, looking at him with barely concealed hate.

“
You
stop. I hate you. I hate all you stupid shippies. I hope you
die
!” He punctuated his wishes with a violent shove that almost knocked Yallia down.

It was, of course, a child’s threat, but in that moment, Pem Wenakasaki meant what he said, even if he did not fully understand the nature of death. It was enough to know that he wished her out of his life entirely, and if that meant death, so be it. In that, his desires were not too incompatible with those of the adult argies around him, even if his expression of them was more direct.

The shove shattered the delicate equilibrium Yallia had been trying to maintain in her midsection. The fire inside her grew quickly, and she instinctively opened her mouth as it rose through her throat. She had no choice in the matter—she could no longer contain the pressure.

She expelled a green-yellow jet of gas at the older boy, heaving her body grotesquely to do so. The jet of gas ignited brilliantly a few inches away from her mouth and covered Pem in a wash of lime-colored flame. He dropped to the floor and screamed in agony as Yallia turned the fire on his writhing body. Pem rolled helplessly on the carpet, which was also aflame by now, and abruptly stopped screaming as the superheated gas choked off his breath.

Yallia ran out of breath, and the flame stopped. As if waiting for her wrath to end, the building’s heat-sensitive sprinkler system began dousing the room with water. An urgent computer voice spoke loudly in the Crèche: “Fire! Evacuate the building! Fire! Evacuate the building! Fire! Evac—”

Another computer voice added to the first one. “Atmosphere warning! Chlorine detected in toxic amounts. Evacuate the area!” The low hum of blowers added to the noise.

Rice burst into the staff room and hesitated a fraction of a second, trying to put together what he saw through the rain. His eyes stung when the chlorine and smoke assaulted them. Pem was still ablaze on the ground, silently rolling on the carpet. Yallia seemed all right, so Rice jumped on top of Pem and tried to smother the flames with his body. It was all he could do to stay in contact with the boy and fight off the agonizing pain of the fire as it burned his own flesh. It seemed to take hours to put the fire out, but Rice, coughing and choking in the stinging air, extinguished most of the flames and patted away the pockets that still smoldered. Pem lay motionless in his arms, and Rice started CPR, knowing emergency services had been alerted by the Crèche computer. He was only able to complete three cycles when his own breath gave out, and he collapsed on the floor, coughing and holding his tearing eyes.

Yallia watched him as if in a dream—her child mind was putting the events of the past few seconds together. She was not aware of the chlorine in the room, nor was she affected by the smoke that obscured the upper half of the office. She saw Pem’s body, curled in the mantis-like fighting stance all burn victims assumed, and felt…nothing. She knew, intellectually, that she had burned him, but at that moment, her sympathy was reserved for Mr. Rice. She bent down and shook him.

“Mr. Rice! Get up, Mr. Rice!” she shouted above the din of the computer warnings and sprinklers. Rice coughed and screamed at the same time, pressing his palms into his eye sockets. “I’m burning!” he managed to shout between coughs.

“You have to get out of the room! There’s bad air in here,” Yallia said, trying to lift him from the floor. Rice fought her off, insane with the pain of his melting eyeballs. Yallia continued to tug at his arm but she could not budge him. Rice buried his head in the now-soaking carpet and tried to hide his eyes from the air.

Yallia could think of nothing to do but try to lift his body, to carry him out of the room. She tried for several minutes but could not move him. Part of her failure was due to her youth and Rice’s weight, but she was also hampered by a growing realization of horror at what she had done.

“Watch out, there!” Voices behind her startled Yallia. Two firefighters in environment suits had entered the room, their faces ugly, insect-like behind their scrubber masks. One of them snatched up Yallia in a gauntleted hand and removed her from the scene. As she left, Yallia caught a glimpse of the other firefighter bending over Pem’s body. She could see, for a fraction of an instant, the firefighter’s expression through his faceplate as he lifted the boy from the carpet. Yallia saw the hope in the man’s eyes vanish.

And then she was outside, cradled gently in the other firefighter’s arms. He set her down outside the Crèche where the other children wailed in mindless terror. The firefighter removed her mask and looked intently at Yallia. “My name’s Ioli. What’s yours?”

“Yallia.”

“Hello, Yallia. Are you having trouble breathing?”

“No. Is Mr. Rice—?”

“He’ll be fine. I need to put this on you, okay?” the firefighter said, withdrawing a plastic mask from her belt. A thin loop of plastic stretched to a small tank. She unclipped the tank and dropped it on the ground next to Yallia.

“Oxygen?” Yallia asked.

“Yes. It’ll make you feel better.”

“But I feel fine.”

The woman nodded dismissively. “Well, just put it on and keep it on.” She slipped the mask over Yallia’s face and looked to someone outside Yallia’s field of vision. “Make sure she keeps this on. She seems okay, but I want her on the oxygen until she gets to the hospital.” The firefighter got up and dashed back into the Crèche

An adult whom Yallia did not recognize came around to face her. “Hi,” he said uneasily. He was an older argie man with wrinkles. “My name is Suth. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Yallia said, through the mask.

“Good. We’ll just wait here until the doctors come, all right?”

Yallia just nodded.

Inside the Crèche, Ioli’s partner had run an intubation tube into Pem and was securing the area for field treatment. Ioli checked the atmosphere reading displayed on the inside of her faceplate. “Chlorine’s down to three p.p.m. in here,” she said through the radio to her partner. She took off her mask and blinked. The air was still acrid from the smoke, but whatever chlorine smell might have been present earlier was almost undetectable now. The computer warnings had ceased, and the sprinkler system shut down even as Ioli took her mask off. She bent to Rice and shook him. “Can you speak?”

“Yeah,” he croaked, and coughed.

Ioli fastened her facemask on Rice’s head and opened the valve. Rice immediately started coughing again.

“It’s going to hurt, but you’ll need to take deep breaths if you can,” Ioli said. She waited for him to stop coughing, then added, “I’m going to help carry you out. Just relax and let me do the work.” She slipped one arm under him and lifted him off the ground. “Karem, stabilize the kid as soon as you—” A look from her partner stopped her in mid-sentence.

“Stay with CPR, then,” she said in a low voice and left the room, carrying Rice over her shoulder.

“How is he?” Rice asked when Ioli placed him gently on the ground outside. His eyes were still closed.

“He’s in trouble,” Ioli said simply. “We can’t tell anything yet.”

“Is he dead?” Yallia asked through her mask.

Ioli stared at her. The girl was perhaps three, maybe a young four, she estimated. Time enough to know the truth. “He is now,” she said, “but the doctors at the hospital might be able to bring him back.”

“Ms. Ioli?” Yallia said timidly.

“Yes?”

“I have to tell you something.”

“What?”

“I killed him.”

Ioli felt something melt inside her stoic heart. Unlike her partner, she had seen death by fire before. Three years ago, when the Dome had been victim to an unprecedented storm which had opened a three-foot split in both inner and outer shells near Botanical Preserve Two, five people had died instantly when chlorine poured into the sector before the dome could be brought to overpressure. But thirteen people had been blinded. They had since been fitted with artificial eyes, but the initial pain of burning membranes had expressed itself in ghastly screams. Ioli thought she had hardened herself to anything after that, but now this child’s expression of guilt melted her again.

“Oh, no, sweetie, you didn’t—”

“Yes, I did. I threw up fire on him,” Yallia said, tears forming in her eyes as she finally admitted to herself what she had done.

“No, no,” Ioli said, not really listening.

“Yes, I did! I got mad at him and I felt it inside me and I ate all that salt today and I just—just—spit it at him and he was on fire and screaming—” Yallia broke down. The old man named Suth wrapped his arms around her and made soothing sounds.

Ioli watched Suth comfort the girl, then forced herself to turn to Rice. “You need to do something for me,” she said carefully. “You need to open your eyes.”

Rice shook his head in terror.

“Yes. I need to see them.” She removed the faceplate and grabbed his cheeks.

Rice opened his eyes slightly, mere slits.

“Farther,” she said.

Rice opened his eyes and Ioli placed her fingers above and below one eyelid, jamming it open and holding his face in her hands.

Rice yelped but otherwise kept his composure.

“Can you see anything?” Ioli asked.

“I—No, not really. I see light, but nothing distinct.”

“Good,” Ioli lied. “You can close them again.”

“Will it come back?” Rice asked.