Yakob
I wake to sunlight and the certainty that someone is watching me.
Twenty years of conditioning fire at once.
Assess. Orient. Locate the threat before it locates you.
My hand is moving toward a weapon that isn't there before my brain finishes remembering the room.
Stone walls. Shutters open to a hard blue morning.
Lamp oil, iodine, and underneath both of them, faintly, soap.
The watcher is asleep.
Iris is folded into the chair beside the cot, knees drawn up to her chest, cheek pressed against her own shoulder at an angle that's going to cost her when she wakes.
One hand has slipped off her knee and hangs in the air between us, palm open toward me, like even unconscious she's keeping it available in case I need it.
My pulse is steady. The last dregs of fever leaving my body.
The dressing at my side is fresh, taped, clean, no blood.
There's a cup of water on the floor within reach of the cot and a damp cloth folded over the rim of a bowl, and a second bowl beside it holding the old dressings, packed away neatly instead of scattered, because apparently, she cleans a sickroom the way she does everything else. Thoroughly and without being asked.
She was up all night. The evidence is everywhere and I know she'd still deny all of it.
Fragments come back to me from the dark.
Cold on my forehead. A hand under my skull, lifting, careful, the way you'd hold something that might spill.
And a song. Low, worn in at the edges, a tune that rose and fell like water against a hull.
I don't know the words. I know that somewhere in the worst of it, the heat and the noise inside my own head, the song was the thing I steered by.
I know something else too, and it sits in my chest like a stone.
I was talking. My throat is hoarse with it.
I don't know what I said. I don't know how much.
Years of silence, of controlled sentences, and a fever undid it in one night in front of the one person I can't seem to keep my walls standing around.
I need to move. Get upright, get functional, restore the balance before the imbalance becomes a habit.
I get an elbow under myself and start the slow negotiation with my own body, and I've made it halfway to sitting when the wound states its objection and the breath leaves me in a hiss I can’t hold back.
Her eyes open instantly. No transition, no confusion. Asleep, then fully awake, the way soldiers wake. The way I wake. It's unsettling to see it on her.
"And where," she says, "do you think you're going?"
"Toilet. Water. Food."
"The water is directly beside your hand.
" She unfolds from the chair, wincing as her neck gives her trouble, and she's already got two fingers against my wrist, counting, her eyes on the small face of my watch while she does it like she's done this a hundred times.
She has now, I realize. A hundred times, all night, while I was somewhere else.
"Better," she announces. "You're allowed to live. I've decided."
"You didn't sleep."
"I slept. You just watched me do it."
"In a chair. For minutes." I look at the bowl, the cloth, the neat stack of spent dressings. "You've been up all night."
"You were busy having a fever. Somebody had to supervise." She takes the cup, puts it in my hand, closes my fingers around it like I'm a child, and stands there until I drink. "All of it."
I drink all of it. It's easier than arguing, which is a sentence I've never once had cause to think before this woman.
"You should rest," I tell her. "I'm stable. The dressing will hold. There's nothing here that needs you standing over it."
"Mm." She's not listening. She's peeling the tape back at the corner of the dressing, checking underneath with a frown of concentration that belongs on a surgeon, and her hands are steady and impersonal and gentle all at once, and I don't know where to put any of that so I stare at the ceiling instead.
"Iris."
"Yakob."
"I'm not your responsibility. You need to get home to your family.”
She presses the tape back down, smooths it flat, and sits back on her heels to look at me properly.
There are shadows under her eyes deep enough to hold rainwater.
She's wearing a spare T-shirt and a pair of boxer shorts and a week of survival, and she still manages to look at me like I'm the one being unreasonable.
"You walked into a fortress for me," she says. "You got shot getting me out of it. You've been my responsibility since the vineyard, and I don't recall asking your opinion on the matter then either."
"That was a contract."
"That was a Tuesday, probably. I've lost track.
" She pushes to her feet. "I’ll help you to the bathroom and I’ll make us something to eat.
You're going to eat whatever I conjure up, and you're going to hate how weak you are while you do it, and I'm going to pretend not to notice. That's the arrangement."
She's gone before I can refuse, and I sit there listening to her move around the kitchen, the scrape of the pan, the clink of a spoon, a stream of commentary directed at the camping stove that seems to have a personality now, and possibly a name.
I've stayed in this house four times over the years. It has never once made noise.
She comes back with two bowls, hands me one, and drops into the chair with the other, hooking one leg over the arm in a sprawl that has no business being that comfortable in a wooden chair.
The rice is plain and slightly overdone. I eat all of it. My body is a machine that has run out of fuel, and the machine doesn't care about seasoning. She watches me eat with open satisfaction, like every spoonful is a point scored.
"Ma would be horrified," she says. "Plain rice for an invalid.
She'd have had broth going by now. Real broth, bones and all, the kind that takes two days and the whole kitchen smells like it.
" She stirs her own bowl without eating from it.
"She does this thing when anyone's sick.
Doesn't matter who. Brother, wife, baby, the man who fixes the gate.
She feeds you and she puts a blanket on you even if it's summer, and she sits with you exactly long enough that you know you've been sat with, and then she leaves before you can feel watched.
It's a science. I've studied it my whole life and I still can't tell how she figures out the timing. "
"You learned it," I say.
She looks up.
"The water was within reach of my hand," I say. "The cloth was wrung out. You packed away the old dressings where I wouldn't see them from the cot. You sat long enough to be here when I woke and you'd have left the room the moment I was steady, if I hadn't caught you sleeping first."
She stares at me for a second too long, and surprise moves behind her face, or something adjacent to it, there and covered in the time it takes her to smile.
"Well," she says. "Somebody's observant."
"It's my job."
"Watching people?"
"Knowing them faster than they know me."
"And what do you know?" She says it lightly, but she's stopped stirring the rice.
That you sang to a dying stranger in the middle of the night because it was the only medicine left in the box.
That you said you’d keep me, and I want to know what that really means.
"That you should eat the rice instead of stirring it," I say.
She laughs, caught out, and eats the rice.
She talks while we eat. I've come to understand this is her natural state, the way silence is mine, and somewhere in the last day and a bit I've stopped bracing against it.
She tells me about the kitchen. Not the house, the kitchen, because as far as I can tell the Orlov estate is a kitchen with some architecture attached.
She tells me about her brother Aidan, who once waited three weeks to deal with a boy who bullied her at school and never admitted it was him.
About Killian trying to set his own shoulder with a doorframe, a story I gather I've heard a piece of already, on a hillside, with a bullet in me.
About a baby named Mila who is learning how to eat solid foods by mashing them up with her hands and smearing them all over herself.
A sister-in-law who was in hospital giving birth when Iris was taken, and a mother who is currently, Iris is certain, terrorizing five grown men into eating breakfast.
I listen. That's the strange part. I’m usually the one extracting information from human speech, sorting signal from noise, discarding the noise.
There's no signal here. Nothing operational.
Nothing I can use. It's noise all the way down, warm and specific and completely useless, but I keep listening anyway, and when she trails off to eat, I catch myself waiting for it to start again.
"There are five of them," she says at one point, "they’re all married now, and the babies are arriving in shifts, and the whole thing just, orbits. Everyone circling everyone." She shrugs with one shoulder, a gesture too small for her. "And then there's me."
"You're the one they orbit," I say.
"Ha." No humor in it. She looks into her bowl. "I'm the one who keeps them from colliding. It's not the same thing."
I make a note of it, the way she sees herself in the universe of her life, place it right next to a photograph of a woman at a dinner table with an entire family leaning toward her like she's the sun, and I don't push.
I know what it looks like when someone sets something down next to the truth instead of on top of it.
I also know she'd have followed the thought further if she weren't swaying.
Because she is. Swaying. Minutely, in the chair, the bowl tilting in her hands, a week of captivity and two nights of no sleep finally presenting their invoice all at once.
"Iris."
"Hm."
"Take the cot."
That wakes her up. "Absolutely not. You have two holes in you."
"Both of which are stitched and dressed, clean and dry.
" I'm already moving, slowly, testing each stage of it, sitting up fully for the first time and letting her see that I can.
It costs me. I keep the cost off my face, which is the one skill I have left that's fully intact.
"I've had a night's sleep and half a fever's worth more.
You've had a wooden chair. The dressing needs changing tonight, and I need the person changing it to be able to see straight. "
"That's manipulative."
"Absolutely, but it’s also accurate."
She glares at me, and I watch her exhaustion argue with her stubbornness, two dogs fighting somewhere behind those stained-glass-green eyes. "You'll wake me if anything changes. Anything. If you so much as feel too-warm."
"Yes."
"Swear it. You said you don't lie, so swear it."
"I swear it."
She holds my gaze a moment longer, hunting for the loophole, and then the tiredness wins and she surrenders in the most Iris way possible, which is completely and all at once. She puts her bowl down, helps me shift to the chair despite my objection, and drops onto the cot face-first.
"Ten minutes," she says into the space between her arm and the canvas.
She's under in less than a minute. Her breathing goes long and even, one hand curled near her face, and the room settles around her the way rooms seem to do, arranging itself so that she's the center of it.
I sit in the chair she kept vigil in and I do what I'm built for. I watch. The door. The window. The track beyond it that goes to the harbor. The rise and fall of her back.
Guarding a sleeping principal is the oldest work I know.
I've done it in stairwells and safe rooms and the backs of cargo planes, and it has always been a function, a paid state of alertness with a body attached.
This is the function with something extra threaded through it that I don't have a word for, a low fierce settledness at the sight of her sleeping in my T-shirt and boxer shorts, safe because I'm between her and the door.
She never has to know about that. It changes nothing. I’ll heal, I’ll move her when it's safe, I’ll deliver her to her kitchen full of family, and I go back to being what I am.
Somewhere in the third hour, without noticing I've started, I find I'm turning her song over in my head, the one from the fever, the rise and fall of it, trying to fit the fragmented pieces of tune back together.