Chapter 11 Cora #2
The boiler room was the basement of the dormitory east of the safehouse.
The dormitory's structural frame was intact.
The basement had not flooded in the supercell.
The boiler room was a concrete-walled twenty-by-thirty with a working drain and a small wood stove that Jet had been keeping lit for three days to maintain temperature for the kids.
Jet was at the door.
Jet was twenty-eight and looked forty. The fever was on him.
His skin was the color of old paper. He was on his feet because the boiler-room operation required at least one adult on their feet, and Patrick was gone and Mara was dead and Nina was the one running the operation overall and that left Jet.
I hugged him.
He hugged me back, briefly, then pulled away.
"Sick," he said. "Don't catch."
"I'll catch what I catch. Jet. The kids."
"Eleven. Seven down with the fever. Four up. Saul is up but rough. Deedee is."
"Where."
"East corner. The cot near the stove. The fever is at a hundred and four."
I went to the cot.
Deedee was on it.
She was sleeping. The kind of sleeping that was the fever-sleep, the broken kind, where her breathing was fast and shallow and her cheeks were flushed red and her hair was wet at the temples.
She was wearing a t-shirt I did not recognize and the boiler room had a small pile of folded clothes next to the cot and the clothes were the size of a six-year-old, which Deedee was.
She had grown. The photograph in my chest pocket was a five-year-old.
I knelt next to the cot.
I did not touch her.
I waited for Sylvia.
Drew came in behind me. He had the field kit.
Sylvia was with him; she had been at the lead truck and she had come at a run.
She knelt at the cot. She had her hands on Deedee in under three seconds.
Temperature, pulse, breathing, the medic-fast-sweep.
And then she had the antibiotic packet open and the antiviral packet open and she was talking to Jet about whether he could swallow a pill.
I sat back on my heels.
I looked at Deedee.
She was Crystal's. She had her mother's straight black hair.
She had her mother's high ponytail-shape even in the fever-sleep, though the hair was loose and matted.
She had her father's gentle hands. Even in fever, her hand was the open-palmed half-fist that Mark made when he was sleeping.
The half-Vampyren gold-fleck in her eye, I would not see until she woke.
She was Mark and Crystal at the same time.
She was alive.
I did not cry. I had already cried two days ago. The crying-quota had been used up at the bridge.
Drew was beside me.
He said quietly:
"Cora."
"Yes."
"She is going to live."
"Yes."
"Sylvia's antibiotic will hit in six hours. The fever will break by morning. She will be awake by tomorrow afternoon. She will be in the lead truck by tomorrow night. She will be at Mojave in nine days."
"Yes."
"You did it."
"Drew."
"Cora. You did it. You came for her. You said you would. You did. The count is not yet the count. Mara is in the gap, Patrick is gone, we have not yet engaged Hess. But the part of the count that was Deedee is at six years old in a boiler room and she is going to live. You did it."
I did not say anything.
I sat at the cot.
I looked at Deedee.
After a while I took the Polaroid out of my chest pocket. The five-year-old in the picture was unchanged. The girl in the cot was older. I held the Polaroid next to her face.
The yellow dog was the same dog. The braids were the same braids. The smile in the picture would be the same smile when Deedee woke up.
I put the Polaroid on the cot next to her.
I left it there.
I stood up.
I went to find Mara.
* * *
The gap was the worst thing I had seen since the Drake raid.
Drew came with me. We walked together through the rubble.
The Hess-cell bodies were in a rough semicircle around the gap-position where Mara had held.
Five bodies. Two Vampyren, three humans.
The Vampyren had been killed with Lucian-style cuts.
Mara had been using a Lucian blade Rael had given to the Urbana enclave four years ago, a gift that had stayed in the safehouse.
And the humans had been killed with the rifle she had kept at the wall position.
The semicircle was the formation that meant they had tried to flank her at the gap and she had pivoted faster than they had been ready for.
Mara was in the center.
She was on her side. Her left arm was under her, broken at the elbow from the fall she had taken at the end. Her right hand was on the hilt of the Lucian blade. The blade was still in a Vampyren body. She had not let go.
I knelt.
I did not say anything for a long time.
Drew did not say anything either.
After a long time I said: "Mara."
The wind moved through the gap.
I said: "You held the wall. You killed five.
You bought Nina an hour. You bought the kids the boiler room.
You did your job. I am taking you home. Crystal is going to bury you under the rosemary by the kitchen tent.
Auriel will know your name. Sebastian will know your name.
Drew will know your name. The count will be the count. The count will hold."
I sat back on my heels.
The rubble-dust was on my hands. Gray-white.
The color concrete-and-corrugated-steel made when the wall came down.
It was on my palms in the shape of the gap I had put my hands in to brace myself when I had knelt.
It did not come off when I rubbed my hands together.
A thin film. It would be on my skin until I washed it off tonight.
Mara had been running the second floor for three years.
The second floor had thirteen kids. Mara's count had been thirteen.
Mara had been holding the wall at the gap because thirteen was the count she had been keeping and the gap was the only way out and the gap was a count problem before it was a tactical problem.
She had killed five of Hess's cell to keep her thirteen intact.
The count had failed her in the same way mine had failed me.
Eleven of the thirteen were in the boiler room.
Two were not. The two who were not were the ones with the fever who had not made it.
Mara had been working with a count of thirteen and had ended with a count of eleven, and the two who had not made it were not in the gap, and were not on the wall, and were not under a tarp; they were in the rubble of the safehouse, somewhere I had not yet been.
Two children. The count had not held for Mara either.
The count had not held for me at fifteen-of-sixteen and the count had not held for her at eleven-of-thirteen.
We had been counting in the same direction for eleven years and we had both lost the count by the same shape of margin.
I stopped breathing for a long moment.
I had not known. I had not known Mara was a counter. I had known she ran the safehouse. I had not known the running was a count. It was a count. Mara had been my mirror at the other end of the road since the year-three Drake raid and I had not known.
I let my breath out through my teeth.
Drew was quiet beside me.
I looked at him.
"Drew."
"Yes."
"Help me get her out."
"Yes."
We got her out.
It took an hour. Drew did the lifting. I did the support. The broken arm, the blade, the unhooking of the blade from the Vampyren body's clavicle where it had lodged. I cleaned the blade. I wrapped it in a piece of canvas from Cruz's salvage pack. I put it next to Mara.
We wrapped Mara in the army-surplus tarp.
We carried her to the second truck.
We put her in the bed.
We covered her.
Veron was at the second truck. He had been watching from the highway approach for the last two hours.
He had walked up at the half-hour mark and had been standing at the truck for the entire body-recovery without speaking.
He had been waiting. He nodded at me. He nodded at Drew.
He said in his doubled-tonal voice the Lucian-equivalent of the dead-warrior's blade-hand courtesy. The throat-line bow.
Drew returned the bow.
Veron stepped back.
I closed the tailgate.
* * *
Hess hit the southwest gap at six in the evening.
We had been at the boiler room for three hours by then.
Sylvia had treated the kids. Deedee's fever had broken at five-fifteen.
She had been awake at five-forty. She had said Cora once, looking at me, the way kids said names when they were not yet awake enough to be surprised.
She had gone back to sleep. The Polaroid was on the pillow next to her.
The radio came alive at five-fifty.
Cruz, from the highway approach.
"Cora. Hess is at the highway. Two vehicles, mounted. He's coming up the bulldozed approach. ETA ten minutes."
"How many."
"Hess plus four. Two Vampyren, two humans. Smaller than the relay said. He has split his force. Rest of the cell must be doing the perimeter."
"Copy. Renn?"
"Cora."
"This is the engagement. You and Drew at the gap. I cover the boiler room with the carbine. Sylvia stays with the kids and Nina and Jet. Cruz holds the highway approach with the SAW. Veron. Veron, can you fight."
A pause on the radio.
Veron's doubled-tonal voice: "Yes."
"Veron, north flank. Cover the dormitory roofline. If a Hess-cell scout comes over the east wall, you take them. If they come over the north wall, you take them. Stay out of the gap. The gap is Renn and Drew."
"Yes."
I went to the boiler room.
I sat with my back to the door.
I had the carbine in my hand.
The kids were behind me. Sylvia at the wood stove. Nina at Deedee's cot. Jet at the door, on his feet, the fever and the rifle and the working-on-fumes face.
The radio was open.
The first crack came at six-zero-two.
It was the SAW. Cruz. Three short bursts. The bursts cleared something on the highway approach. Then a second sequence of bursts. Then a long pause. Then the radio: "Two humans down. They were trying to flank. Cruz holds."
The next crack came at six-zero-five.