Chapter 65
Theren is sitting with his back against the wall the next morning when Arias comes in to relieve him.
Elegy’s sleeping, the heat of the Fever having passed and the chills only just beginning.
It went against his instincts to give her a blanket, knowing it would only make her body hotter, but they’re all waiting for her to die, including Elegy herself.
So when she asked for a blanket, he got her one.
Arias steps into the room, holding a cup of coffee. He looks down at Theren with a frown.
“Have you slept at all since we boarded?” he says.
Theren shakes his head. “I’ll sleep when she’s gone.”
“No, you’ll spend three days worrying she won’t come back,” Arias says. “Come on, man. Get some rest. I’ve got the next few hours.”
Theren sighs, and pushes against the fabric wall to get to his feet. Arias has a point. Elegy’s death, which will come sometime later today if his own Fever timeline is accurate, doesn’t offer any relief. Even the augurs weren’t sure if she would survive this.
He can’t quite meet Arias’s eyes when he moves toward the door. Arias holds out a hand, touches it to Theren’s chest to keep him from leaving just yet. He wears his trademark expression of deep concern. Theren doesn’t think he can bear the sight of it for more than a few seconds.
“You ever going to be able to look at me again?” Arias says.
Theren meets his gaze. “I don’t blame you. Kesia was about to kill Hela. I’m glad you didn’t let that happen.”
“Sure.” Arias takes his hand away, but the look of concern remains. “She was still your mom, though.”
“Not really. Not by the end.”
The worst part was watching Isre cry over her body in the back of the Sparrow, after they linked up with the Sundial.
Theren couldn’t watch for long. He was too busy making sure Orda was being cared for.
He left his brother alone to grieve as he argued about the necessity of hazmat suits with some of the paramedics, and then pestered one of the aides General Thompson sent about providing Orda with a pardon. Elegy helped with that, in the end.
It was hours before she told him she was infected.
I had to get some things in order first, she said. We don’t have much time.
There was never any goddamn time.
“I’m sorry,” Arias says, and he’s sincere, and that’s worse.
“I’m not,” Theren snaps, and he leaves the room in pursuit of a few hours of sleep.
He falls asleep on a hospital bed in med bay, waiting for an update on Orda’s condition.
He wakes an hour later to a cleared throat.
A nurse stands above him, her surgical mask tucked under her chin, still wearing the full--body smock they all put on as a precaution when they learned Orda was Fevered. It floats around her like gossamer.
“We’re putting your friend in the healing tank to make his recovery less painful,” she says to him. “Thought you might want to say goodnight before we sedate him.”
Theren nods, and gets up. The nurse looks alarmed.
“Careful there,” she says. “You don’t look so good yourself.”
He blinks at her, still half--asleep. He’s bruised, and he has some gashes that are now glued shut, but he’s otherwise unharmed. Nothing like Orda, beaten bloody, or Elegy, dying of Fever.
She leads him down a short hallway to a room that almost looks like a boiler room.
He’s used to the hospital nearest him on Cedre Station, stark and white and clean, but this one’s all pipes and ductwork and wire, less inviting than the imitation stone walls in the rest of the ship.
There are three healing tanks in the room, each one a glass coffin.
Two are dark now, empty, but the one on the end is glowing like an aquarium, ready to be filled with solution.
Orda is lying down on a metal tray extending from the foot of the tank, wearing skintight shorts, an IV in his arm.
His body is mottled with bruises and streaked with cuts.
The nurse loops a plastic tube over her elbow; at the end of it is a mask that she’ll attach to his face, so they can pump oxygen into the tank. They’ll sedate him first, though.
Orda sees him, and flips his hand over, reaching. Just that small movement makes him stifle a moan of pain. Theren hooks his fingers around Orda’s, and stands over him.
“I hear you get to dream through your recovery,” he says.
“Lucky me,” Orda replies weakly. “How is she?”
Dying, Theren thinks, but he can’t bear to say it out loud. “You know how she is. But it can’t be helped.”
“She’ll make it.” Orda squeezes his hand. “When she wakes up, tell her thank you for the pardon, okay?”
“A pardon’s just paper; you should thank her for sneaking you on this ship like an adolescent hookup.” Theren grins.
“Not enough climbing the drainpipe for that. So we’re going to the great beyond?”
Theren nods.
“You should say the prayer,” Orda says.
“I’m not going to pray for you like you’re dying, Selio.”
“Not for me.” His fingers squeeze again. “For your mother.”
“She was Rava’s, in the end,” Theren spits, before he can stop himself. “Just as she probably was the entire time.”
“Come on, Theren. She only ever served herself, and you know it.” Orda closes his eyes. “Put her to rest anyway.”
Theren is quiet just long enough for Orda to look at him again.
“Do as I say,” he says.
“Yes, Teacher.”
Orda’s lips quirk into a smile. The nurse holds up the syringe she’ll use to inject the sedative, like she’s not sure either of them can understand English. Theren releases Orda’s hand.
He steps back as the nurse injects Orda, staying in the other man’s eyeline until he drifts off.
Then he steps back again, giving her space as she attaches the mask to Orda’s face, secures it, and slides the metal tray back into the healing tank.
She seals that, too, and flips the switch to start the flow of solution.
“It’ll take a half hour to fill up,” she says to him. “You should go lie down. You look dead on your feet.”
“I can spare a half hour,” he says.
He stays until the tank is full, watching Orda’s now--weightless body drift in the blueish fluid like a child in a swimming pool, practicing a dead float.
Later, when Hela is finished telling stories to an imaginary Shir Alexios, and Elegy has fallen asleep again, Theren returns to Elegy’s room. He lies on his side in front of the big screen at the back of the room, face--to--face with her, the same way Kesia did when he was dying at the monastery.
Elegy surfaces, blinking at him slowly. Their hands are centimeters apart on the cushion. She kicked off the blanket at some point in the last hour, and her feet are bare. She puts one foot over another, letting her toes knit together.
He was worried, when they first boarded the Sundial, that there was nothing they could do to help her with the pain of the elixir in her blood coming into contact with the Fever.
But Isre went to a friend, who raided the hospital’s supply of elixir purge—-used for allergic reactions to Imbuing—-and they gave Elegy a dose right away, before the Fever could boil her from the inside out.
It was a small mercy, but he’s grateful for it now, that she doesn’t have to spend her last hours screaming in agony or drugged into a stupor.
“Do you remember it?” she says to him, in a whisper. “Dying?”
He wonders if she recognizes him. The last time he was here, she didn’t.
“Sort of,” he says.
“What was it like?”
“Did you ever go swimming as a kid?” he says. “And sit at the bottom of the pool to see how long you could hold your breath?”
She nods.
“It’s like that,” he says.
“That doesn’t sound so bad.”
He brushes her hair behind her ear. “It’s not.”
She curls her arm beneath her head, and leans in close to him. “Oh, you shouldn’t do that. I don’t think my husband likes you very much.”
Her eyes skip over to a space somewhere behind him, where the specter of Shir Alexios no doubt waits. Theren smiles at her.
“Sorry,” he says. “I keep forgetting you’re married.”
“He’s just jealous because you’re sort of devastating.”
His smile turns into a grin. “If I recall correctly, he’s not so bad himself.”
She gives him a sleepy wink.
“Tell him I mean no disrespect,” he says.
“Tell him yourself.”
“We’re speaking Talusar,” he says. “Does he speak Talusar?”
“He knows the dirty words.”
She reaches out and presses her palm to his forehead, like she’s checking his temperature. Her perpetually frowning mouth frowns, if possible, even further.
“You don’t feel so hot,” she says. “I thought Talusar were supposed to run hot.”
“I don’t feel hot to you because you have a high fever.”
“Do I?” She yawns. “I think I’d like to sleep now.”
He leans in, and touches his forehead to hers. From here, all he can see is her freckles.
“Good night, Elegy.”
He’s not sure how long he stays there, breathing the same air as her, before her heart stops beating. But he doesn’t move until her skin cools.
The Sundial is in motion.
There are no windows on board. They would only be points of vulnerability in a craft that can’t afford any. But there’s a screen in the navigation deck that shows Earth and Cedre Station behind them, so that’s where the crowd gathers to watch their planet shrink by fractions of fractions.
He stands near the back of the room with Isre at his left. Isre is still glassy--eyed with grief, wearing the red jumpsuit that signals his work as a technician. They crane their necks to look through the crowd at the space station that was, at one time, the only home they’d ever known.
“How long do we wait?” Isre says to Theren. “Before she wakes up?”
“No more than three days.”
His fingers are still pruned from caring for Elegy’s body.
Hela helped him with the ritual, once he explained its purpose.
To clean the dirt from her skin, from between her teeth, from her scalp—-so that when she wakes up, it’s with less horror at the state of her own body.
After, they dressed her in clean clothes, and covered her with a blanket, as if she was just sleeping.
Even he was surprised by how obvious it was that she wasn’t just sleeping, though he’d been through it himself. There was no mistaking her stiffness, her coldness. She was gone. It seemed impossible that her hollow lungs could ever draw air again, that her quiet heart could ever beat again.
He’s spent a lifetime not understanding why the Talusar worship the Fever. But for something to bring life back to that empty body does seem . . . otherworldly.
Isre puts an arm around him. Theren drapes his arm across Isre’s shoulders, in turn.
“So we sail for a doorway,” Isre says to Theren, and though he doesn’t ask it like it’s a question, Theren can feel that it is.
Theren nods.
“Do we . . . know where it is?” Isre says.
He’s not sure how to answer that question.
The coordinates are buried in the past, and only Rava Vidar—-an epocha just like Fenn, no matter what she claims—-can access them.
He has no idea how to get her to do that, or how to pry the information out of her mind once she does.
He doesn’t want to admit how little he knows.
But this is Isre. He has to be honest with his brother.
“No,” Theren admits. “But Rava can find out. So I just have to get her to tell us.”
Isre’s response is hesitant: “Not to be a pessimist, here, but . . .”
“But why would she ever do that?” Theren supplies. He looks at Cedre Station, now noticeably smaller than the last time he focused on it, and his jaw tightens.
“I’m going to make her,” he says.