Chapter 2 #2
Her left side was wrapped, layers of it, a great pad of moss and cloth bound around her ribs.
Her eyes were shut.
"Chloe," Liam said.
Nothing.
"Chloe." He went down on his knees beside the cot and he took her hand out from under the blankets and it was hot, it was much too hot, and he held it in both of his. "Chloe, it's Liam. It's me. We came. We found you."
Isaiah crowded in behind him and made a sound like a man being punched.
"Oh," Isaiah said. "Oh, Chloe."
Her eyelids moved.
They moved, and they opened, a slit, and the eyes behind them were glassy and unfocused and Liam watched them try to find him and fail and try again.
"Liam," she said.
It came out cracked and dry and almost nothing.
"Yeah." He could not see her properly. His eyes had gone hot and blurred and he did not care in the slightest. "Yeah. It's me. I'm here. Isaiah's here."
"I let go of the line." Her fingers moved weakly in his. "The line was fouled. I got it. Did I get it?"
"You got it."
"Did the boat get off the dock."
"The boat got off the dock." His voice broke in the middle of it. "You got us off the dock, Chloe. You saved us. You saved both of us and then you went in the water and we couldn't find you and I have been looking for you for two days."
"Cold," Chloe said.
Her eyes drifted shut.
"Chloe."
"So cold, Liam. The water was so cold. I kept, I kept trying to swim and my arm wouldn't."
"Chloe, stay with me."
But she was gone again, back down into wherever the fever kept her, and her hand went slack in his, and Liam knelt there on a dirt floor at the edge of the world and held on to it anyway.
Nell Rook let them have twenty minutes.
Then she came in, and stood over the cot, and looked down at Chloe with the practiced flat gaze of somebody who had looked down at a lot of people on a lot of cots.
"The wound's clean," she said. "It went through her. It didn't hit anything that would have finished her in the first hour, so it won't finish her at all if the fever breaks. The fever's the whole question."
"How long," Liam said.
"Tonight. Tomorrow." Nell shrugged, and it was not a callous shrug, it was the shrug of a woman who had run out of ways to soften things. "She's young. That helps. She was in that water a good while, and that doesn't."
Isaiah was staring at her.
"Why did you pull her out," he said.
Nell looked at him.
"You had no reason to," Isaiah said. "You didn't know her. She washed up in your cove full of bullet holes, which means whoever put them there might come looking, and you pulled her out of the water anyway and you carried her half a mile and you gave her a bed and moss for her wound. Why."
Nell Rook was quiet for a moment.
"Because we're the kind of people who do that," she said. "It's about the only thing we've got left that's ours."
Then she jerked her chin at the doorway.
"Now come outside. Both of you. It's an hour to dark and we have to move her, and I need you to understand what we're doing and why, because if you don't understand it, you'll do something stupid, and stupid gets people killed here."
"Move her." Liam stood. "She's got a fever of a hundred and four and you want to move her."
"Yes."
"Why."
"Because nobody sleeps at the Landing," Nell Rook said. "We haven't slept at the Landing since October."
They carried Chloe on a door.
That was what they had, an old interior door off one of the sunken trailers, and they laid her on it and tied her down with cord across the chest and thighs so she would not roll if she thrashed, and four of them took the corners.
Liam took the front left. Isaiah took the front right.
And they went back into the willows, in the last hour of the light, with the fog rising, and the chimes clicking, and the whole party moving fast and saying nothing at all.
It was worse than the walk in.
Everything was worse now, because the light was going, and the willows in the failing light were not gray anymore, they were the color of dishwater and old bone, and the fog had come up over the roots and swallowed the path so that they were walking on white.
The chimes were louder. The wind had come up somewhere far above the trees, and it did not reach down to them, but it moved the tops of the willows, and the whole forest shifted and creaked and rattled and clicked.
The escort had doubled. Eight of them now.
Nobody spoke. Not a word. When one of the carriers stumbled, the others simply took his weight and kept moving, and the man got his feet back under him and kept moving, and nobody said a thing.
"Isaiah," Liam said, low.
"Yeah."
"They're scared."
"I know." Isaiah's face was slick with sweat and it was thirty-five degrees. "I know, Liam. Look at their hands."
Liam looked.
Every one of the escort had a hand on the thing around their neck. The bone, the shell, the bent spoon. They walked with their free hand closed around it and they did not seem to know they were doing it.
The path curved.
And Chloe, on the door between them, began to talk.
It was fever talk. It was nonsense. Her head rolled and her eyes stayed shut and she said something about the ice, about the ice being thin at the point, and then she said her brother's name, and then she said, very clearly, in a voice that was not a sick voice at all,
in a voice that was perfectly calm and awake, "Liam, don't look at it."
Liam's blood stopped.
"Chloe."
"Don't look at it," Chloe said, eyes closed. "It's right there and it's looking at you."
And Liam looked.