by Ann Pino
“Of course,” Cassie said.
“So what’s this about sugar?” Galahad asked.
Doc explained as they found a place to sit and he was still discussing the nuances of wound care when dinner was brought out. To everyone’s delight, it was macaroni and cheese again, this time with a bit of meat mixed in and some spinach on the side. Cassie was skeptical about the meat and thought the spinach tasted like the inside of a can, but was too excited to have noodles and cheese again to complain.
“I thought they were going to save this stuff for a holiday,” Galahad said.
“You mean it’s a one-time thing?” Cassie asked.
“Until we find more. Might be tomorrow, might be never. You know what it’s like out there.”
Cassie nodded, remembering all the ransacked houses.
“Well, it’s the nutritionally correct thing to give us the best they’ve got when they’ve got it,” Doc said, then went on to expound on the merits of calcium, iron and B vitamins.
Even with Doc’s tedious conversation, it would’ve been a pleasant supper except for the rumors. There had been more child kidnappings and it was becoming clear that the Pharms were getting in on the act. Even more unsettling, some kids were saying that a few of the Obits looked like grownups.
“That’s impossible,” Doc said. “Telo is a virally-transmitted genetic disease that lies dormant until the telomeres shorten—”
“We know,” Galahad reminded him. “But what if—”
“Unlikely.”
They were still arguing over the matter when supper ended and the next day’s assignments were announced. Then while Galahad went to talk to David, Cassie followed Doc to the ward where Bethany lay on a mattress, hugging a stuffed dog to her chest and humming to the songs from an mp3 player. Sasha, the night nurse, was quick to apologize. “She’s still on her fifteen minute battery allotment.”
Doc was unconcerned. “A kid who might lose her foot before her fourth birthday should be able to listen to more than fifteen minutes of music every four hours.”
Proudly, he showed Cassie his chart and list of abbreviations for common terms. Then he unwound the bandage on the girl’s foot and shone a light on it.
Cassie thought it looked worse, not just greenish with pus and blackening at the edges, but now wet and glistening with a shiny yellow crust in the center. “At least it smells better,” she offered.
Doc bent his face to Bethany’s foot and took a hard sniff, then made a note on his chart. “Maybe a little. It’s a good sign if it does, though.”
“If this works, do you think it will be easier to get sugar than antibiotics on a regular basis?”
“If we can find some bees, we can use honey for free,” he offered. “But no, I have no idea. Julilla wouldn’t say how she traded for the three caramels she brought me, but I suspect she did some sort of triangulation with May—jewelry or aspirin in exchange for the candy, or something like that.”
“Risky,” Cassie said. “May is supposed to only give meds to the Pharms. It’s the deal.”
“Well, their deal is also supposed to include protecting her and look what’s been happening.”
They talked for a little longer about sugar treatments, then Cassie read Bethany a Dr Seuss story. She was about to wish Doc a good night when Galahad came into the clinic. He looked at her, but his words were for Doc.
“Just thought maybe you should check my arm one last time before I go to bed.”
Doc looked from him to Cassie and back again. “I told you this afternoon I didn't need to see you until morning.”
“I’m worried I might’ve broken open one of the stitches.”
Doc led Galahad to one of his bright lights and turned it on. Cassie watched him unwind the stained bandage and she sucked in her breath at the long row of stitches, the gash red and puckered, bruised purple around the edges. “No wonder you needed help with the potatoes.”
“He’s lucky he didn’t bleed to death,” Doc said, reaching for a fresh roll of bandages.
“Don’t be so dramatic,” Galahad said. He gave Cassie a smile. “It’s not as bad as it looks.”
Doc started wrapping Galahad’s arm. “Right, it’s worse. You may end up being test subject number two on the sugar treatment.”
“I always did like sweets.”
“Just be careful.” Doc said in annoyance. “I’d prefer you didn’t go foraging for a few days, but I guess that’s not possible.”
“It’s possible, but not likely.”
Doc finished tying the new bandage into place and Cassie thought she heard him mutter, “Showoff.”
Galahad thanked him, then offered to walk Cassie to her room. She gave a little nod and waited until they were in the hallway to speak. “You didn’t need to go making up excuses to hunt me down like that,” she said. “You’re wasting bandages and Doc’s time.”
“Was it that obvious?”
“Yes.” She tried to hurry ahead, but he kept pace.
“I wanted to talk to you before you went to bed. Have I done something wrong?”
Cassie paused. He stopped, too, and looked at her, his eyes kind and slightly hurt. What on earth was she supposed to say? That she had heard he was a cold-blooded killer? “It’s the way you act,” she said. “You’re nice one minute, then you’re sneaking off the next, not telling anyone where you’re going or what you’re up to, and then there’s those rumors—”
His face grew still. “What rumors?” When Cassie didn’t answer, he took her arm in his good hand. “Let’s go somewhere we can talk.”
Cassie pulled away. “No, I’m tired.”
“You don’t need to be afraid of me.”
“I’m not.”
“Then tell me what you’ve heard, and I’ll tell you whether it’s true or not.”
Cassie let him lead her to the garden where they seated themselves in a quiet spot among the rose bushes on the chaise lounge that Bethany had lain on earlier in the day.
Galahad tried to take her hand, but she wouldn’t let him. “Tell me what they’re saying.”
“Not they, just Leila. David told her…” she paused, unsure whether to say the words. Here in the stillness of the garden, it was just too silly to think he could’ve been….
“Told her what?” he said, this time with an edge in his voice.
“That you were a Kevork.”
“And?”
“You killed people.”
Galahad hesitated before answering. “Is that what David said?”
“He didn’t have to. Everyone knows that’s what the KDS was about.”
“So he wasn’t specific.”
“Should he have been?”
He took her hand again and this time didn’t let her pull away. “I can’t excuse my past because there is no excuse, but that wasn’t who I wanted to be.”
“Then why did you do it?”
“I was stupid enough to take my parents to the hospital.”
Over the next half hour, Galahad told her his story, starting with how his parents died in the overcrowded wards and how he struggled to find someone to release them to him for burial. “I didn’t want them thrown into the pits,” he said. “But it was a madhouse and no one would release them to me. I met David outside the morgue. He was just some kid I had sometimes seen in the halls at school. We didn’t really know each other, but he was having the same problem and we teamed up because we were mad as hell.”
In their anger and frustration, they walked the streets, plotting what, if anything, could be done. When they came upon a pub being ransacked by a group of teenagers, they joined in. “It was a way to take the edge off. It makes no sense when I look back at it now. Fighting and drinking weren’t how we coped in my family. But at the time….”
Cassie edged closer. “I think we all had those moments when totally crazy stuff made perfect sense.”
“You can’t think straight when everything around you is falling apart,” Galahad went on. “It�
�s no excuse for what we did next, but those kids tearing the pub apart were Kevorks and they said if we’d help them, they’d help us get our parents’ bodies so we could have a proper funeral.”
“Did they?”
Galahad looked away. “We killed a few people at the morgue, but it did no good. We never found my parents or David’s.”
She squeezed his hand. “I’m sorry.”
“We drank some more so we wouldn’t have to feel anything and kept on with the Kevorks. What was there to go home to? Whatever we needed, we took. Whoever tried to stop us, we stopped them.” He shook his head. “I spent most of those weeks drunk or under the influence of other things. There weren’t many Pharms yet and we got all kinds of pills from the pharmacies we raided. I don’t even know half of what I took. Blue pills, yellow pills, white ones…made no difference. The only thing that mattered was that I didn’t have to feel anything.”
“Who wouldn’t want the pain to go away?”
“There were better ways to do it. I took the easy way out.”
“But not forever,” Cassie said. “You stopped.”
“Yes.” He frowned in the darkness. “But not until after a lot of things happened. Things I don’t even remember.”
“So why did you quit?”
“Paul. I came out of a blackout one day and there he was. He says he found me wandering alone on a bridge, acting like I was going to jump. He brought me here to the hotel. I was sick coming off the drugs and alcohol, but Paul sat with me the whole time, reminding me who I had been and who I was capable of being again.”
“I’m surprised he didn’t just read the Bible to you.”
“He did that too, but he mostly just talked. He saved my life, which is why even though he’s gotten a little crazy on this Jesus thing, I still stick by him.”
In the silence that followed, the moon came out from behind a patch of cloud and the wind rustled the branches of the rose bushes. Somewhere far below, kids on the street shouted at each other.
“Is that all?” Cassie said.
“Isn’t that enough?”
He drew her toward him with his good arm and this time Cassie snuggled into his lap, leaning against his chest where she could hear the strong, steady beat of his heart. As he closed his arms around her, she wondered why she had resisted this before and wished it could be like this forever—just the two of them, safe in a peaceful place, free of worries about dirt, disease, armed killers and where to find their next meal.
“Do you forgive me?” he asked.
“There’s nothing to forgive you for.” She pressed herself against him, wishing there were some way to crawl inside his skin so they could be together like this always. “We don’t have to apologize for being human.”
Galahad pushed her away, but it was only so he could see her face in the moonlight and find her lips with his.
* * *
When they went back inside, it was with a sense that something momentous had happened, even though their kisses had been cut short by Galahad’s gesture of annoyance at his injured arm. “I’m sorry. It hurts and it distracts me. You deserve to be kissed right.”
“You can kiss me any way you want.” Nevertheless, she let him walk her to her room. She had thrown her arms around his neck for a final kiss good night when a shadow at the end of the hall caught their attention. As one, they turned to see someone in black slip out of a room. The intruder was slim and androgynous, with hands and face painted gray and eyes ringed with black like a raccoon.
“Hey!” Galahad shouted.
The shadow turned to him, startled, then took off running. Cassie and Galahad tried to follow, but the shadow was faster and ran to an open hall window. By the time they got there and could investigate the knotted rope tied to a radiator post, the shadow had shimmied down the side of the building and two figures in black were running down the street.
“Thing One and Thing Two,” Galahad said.
“What were they doing here?”
“No telling,” he said, “But it can’t be good.” He guided Cassie back to her door. He bent to kiss her, but this time it was a distracted brush of his lips over hers. “Go to bed. I need to tell Alex about this.”
“I’ll go with you.”
“No. Let an injured guy feel useful, okay?”
Cassie went into her room, confused and frustrated that the earlier glow of their kisses in the garden had been ruined by the mysterious intruder. As she fumbled in the dark for her flashlight, a voice startled her and she nearly leaped out of her skin.
“Can’t you be a little quiet?”
Cassie took a deep breath, trying to calm the pounding of her heart. “Well,” she told Leila, “How was I supposed to know you’d be spending the night in your own bed for once?”
EXCERPT FROM CASSIE’S JOURNAL:
We had a security breach tonight. What a commotion! After Galahad told Alex and Mundo, the whole third floor turned to chaos with guards going room to room asking questions and checking for signs of trouble. Leila was pissed since she was trying to get some sleep for once, and there was Zach, stomping around our room, looking under and behind things as if we had been invaded by a tribe of gnomes that might still be hiding somewhere. Finally Julilla came and dragged him away, apologizing for his behavior, which makes me think he was just looking for something to start a rumor about.
When the ruckus died down it seemed that Doc’s room was the only one broken into and the only thing missing was his father’s old e-planner. I’m not sure why Thing One and Thing Two would want it, since the batteries are dead and it held only sentimental value, but Doc was pretty upset. Some of us suggested maybe it hadn’t been stolen at all and was just lost. He agreed that this was possible, but I think he was lying so everyone could go back to bed.
Before I went back to my room, I saw Julilla at the window that Thing Two (or Thing One—I can’t tell them apart) had jumped out of. She was examining the rope and some marks on the windowsill. Then she leaned out the window, feeling around the edges. She looked down at what could be seen of the street below, then stood there frowning. I could almost see the thoughts adding up in her mind. Then she ran down the hall and caught up to Alex and I watched them turn the corner together.
As I was closing my door I heard footsteps again. I looked out and it was Galahad, trying to move quietly and keeping his light covered. He went into the stairwell and I chased after him, wanting to know where he had been during all the commotion and if he had learned anything more about what happened. But like the other night, once I got to the stairwell I heard his footsteps going up to the unused floors. After the things he told me and the way he kissed me in the garden tonight, I was almost confident enough to call after him, but in the end, I didn’t. If he has any other secrets, I don’t think I want to know what they are because it might be too depressing.
CHAPTER TEN
For the next few weeks Mundo kept the Regents busy with training and security measures. Julilla led Cassie and the other teenage girls in morning stair runs and weight lifting, followed later in the day with target practice when there was enough ammo to spare. The youngest children were taught to be alert to trouble and sound the alarm at any odd activity, and the halls thundered with the older boys’ daily training runs.
Sid was given the task of designing alarm systems and he quickly warmed to the project, suggesting ways to make the walls unscalable and designing ever more complicated structures of bells and netting to alert the group to intruders.
In spite of all the activity, no one felt safe. The children whispered of people in black lurking in the shadows and slept fitfully, only to wake up shrieking or in tears, complaining of nightmares. Several notebooks went missing from the clinic, even though no one could have gotten into the room without someone’s knowledge. Even more mysteriously, the notebooks reappeared a week later in almost the exact spot from which they had been stolen. Lying nearby was the missing e-planner.
Doc examined the e-pl
anner as if it might be possessed. “It’s definitely the one, but I’ve never had it out of my room, I swear.”
“No one came in through the ward or the clinic door,” Rochelle said from where she was making tinctures under Cassie’s guidance. “We’ve been here all morning.”
“You didn’t see or hear anything at all?”
Cassie shook her head. “It’s like they reappeared all by themselves.”
“That’s impossible.” Doc slipped the e-planner into his lab coat. “I don’t know how I’m going to explain this to Mundo. He’ll want me to say how it happened and I have no idea.”
“Nisha wasn’t at breakfast this morning. Her blood pressure is up again. Maybe he’ll be too distracted by her problems to care,” Cassie said.
Doc rubbed his forehead. “Don’t remind me about Nisha. I think I’d rather try to explain the e-planner fairies than deal with a preggo who’s having complications.” He glanced at Cassie over the tops of his glasses. “You sure you don’t want to take the lead on delivering her baby? I’ll give you all the books and if you read fast, you’ll know as much as I do by her due date. I’ll even weed the potatoes to give you extra reading time.”
“No way. I’ve heard delivering babies is messy and it smells.”
“I’ll do it,” Rochelle said. “I love babies.”
Doc and Cassie shook their heads. “It’s not about liking babies or not,” Cassie told her. “It’s about knowing how to handle a serious medical situation.”
“But I—”
“You will assist,” Doc finished for her. “And some day I’m sure you’ll make a great midwife.”
Rochelle bowed her head back over her work. “Until I get Telo and die.”
Doc pretended not to hear. “I guess I better go tell Mundo what happened.”
“Want me to go with you?” Cassie offered.
“No, it’s going to be a weird enough conversation as it is. No need to turn it into a circus.”
As he reached for the door handle, Cassie said, “Are you going to ask again if you can go on the mission to the lab? I can cover for you if he says yes.”