In ecumenical parlance, it was now called reconciliation. Their hunger for it astonished her. At times, she felt trapped by their autobiographies. They wanted her to protect them from their own monsters.
Ali first noticed Molly's condition during an afternoon poker game. It was just the two of them in a small raft. Molly showed a pair of aces. That was when Ali saw her hands.
'You're bleeding,' she said.
Molly's smile wavered. 'No big deal. It comes and goes.'
'Since when?'
'I don't know.' She was evasive. 'A month ago.'
'What happened? This looks terrible.'
There was a hole scraped in the flesh of each palm. Some of the meat looked cored out. It wasn't an incision, but it wasn't an ulcer, either. It looked eaten by acid, except acid would have cauterized the wound.
'Blisters,' said Molly. Her eyes had developed dark circles. She kept her scalp shaved short out of habit, but it no longer suggested bountiful good health.
'Maybe one of the docs should take a look,' Ali said. Molly closed her fists. 'There's nothing wrong with me.'
'I was just concerned,' said Ali. 'We don't have to talk about it.'
'You were implying something's wrong.' Molly's eyes began to bleed.
Taking no chances, the team's physicians quarantined the two women in a raft tugged a hundred yards behind the rest.
Ali understood. The possibility of some exotic disease had the expedition in a state of terror. But she resented Walker's soldiers watching them with sniperscopes. She was not allowed a walkie-talkie to communicate with the group because Shoat said they would only use it to beg and wheedle. By the morning of the fourth day, Ali was exhausted.
A quarter-mile to the front, a dinghy detached from the flotilla and started back toward her. Time for the daily house call. The doctors were wearing respirators and paper scrubs and latex gloves. Ali had called them cowards yesterday, and was sorry now. They were doing their best.
They drifted close and nodded to Ali. One flashed his light on Molly. Her beautiful lips were cracked. Her lush body was withering. The ulcerations had spread over her body. She turned her head from their light.
One of the physicians came into Ali's boat. She got into theirs, and the other doctor
paddled her a short distance away to talk.
'We can't make sense of it,' he said. His voice was muffled by the respirator. 'We did the blood test again. It could still turn out to be an insect venom, or an allergic reaction. Whatever it is, you don't have it. You don't have to be out here with her.'
Ali ignored the temptation. No one else would volunteer, they were too frightened. And Molly could not be alone. 'Another transfusion,' Ali said. 'She needs more blood.'
'We've given her five pints already. She's like a sieve. We may as well pour it into the water.'
'You've given up?'
'Of course not,' the doctor said. 'We'll all keep fighting for her.'
The doctor paddled her back to the quarantine raft. Ali felt cold and wooden. Molly was going to die.
As they paddled away, the physicians discarded their protective garments. They tore the paper suits from their limbs, stripped away their latex gloves, and left them like skins floating on the current.
Molly's wounds deepened. She began to sweat a rank grease through her pores. They put her on antibiotics, but that didn't help. A fever set in. Ali could feel its heat just by leaning across her.
Another time, Ali opened her eyes and Ike was sitting in his gray and black kayak alongside the quarantine raft, for all the world a killer whale bobbing on slow currents. He was not wearing the requisite scrubs and respirator, and his disregard was a small miracle to Ali. He tied his kayak to them and slipped from it onto the raft.
'I came to see you,' he said to her. Molly lay asleep between Ali's legs.
'It's in her lungs,' Ali reported. 'She's suffocating on fungus.'
Ike slipped one hand beneath Molly's cropped head and raised it gently and bent down. Ali thought he meant to kiss her. Instead, he sniffed at her open mouth. Her teeth were stained red. 'It won't be long,' he said, as if that were a mercy. 'You should say prayers for her.'
'Oh, Ike,' sighed Ali. Suddenly she wanted to be held, but could not bring herself to ask for it. 'She's too young. And this isn't the right place. She asked me what will happen to her body.'
'I know what to do,' he said, and did not elaborate. 'Has she told you how this happened?'
'No one knows,' said Ali.
'She does,' he said.
Later, Molly confessed. There was none of that Sister, Sister for her. At first it seemed like a joke. 'Hey, Al,' she opened. 'Wanna hear something off the wall?'
Small spasms clenched and unclenched the woman's long body. She strained to get control, at least from the neck up.
'Only if it's good,' Ali kidded. You had to be like that with Molly. They were holding hands.
'Well,' said Molly, and her small grin flickered on, then off. 'About a month ago, I
guess, I started this thing.'
'Thing?' said Ali.
'Yeah. You know, what do they call it? Sex.'
'I'm listening.' Ali waited for a punchline. But Molly's eyes were desperate.
'Yes,' whispered Molly. Now Ali understood.
'I thought he was a soldier,' Molly said. 'That first time.'
Ali let Molly orchestrate the tale. Sin was burial. Salvation was excavation. If Molly needed help with the shovel work, Ali would step in.
'He was in the shadows,' said Molly. 'You know the colonel's rules against soldiers fraternizing with us infidels. I had no idea which one he was. I don't know what came
over me. Pity, I guess. I pitied him. So I gave him darkness, I let him be anonymous. I
let him have me.'
Ali was not at all shocked. Taking a nameless soldier seemed perfectly Molly-like. Her bravado was legend. 'You made love,' said Ali.
'We fucked,' Molly corrected. 'Hard. Okay?' Ali waited. Where was the guilt?
'It wasn't the only time,' said Molly. 'Night after night, I went out into the darkness, and he was always there, waiting for me.'
'I understand,' said Ali, but did not. She saw no sin here. Nothing to reconcile.
'Finally it was like curiosity killed the cat. Who's Prince Charming, right? I had to know.' Molly paused. 'So one night I turned on my light.'
'Yes?'
'I shouldn't have done that.' Ali frowned.
'He wasn't one of Walker's soldiers.'
'One of the scientists,' said Ali.
'No.'
'Well?' Whom did that leave?
Molly's jaw tightened with the fever. She began shivering.
After a minute, Molly opened her eyes. 'I don't know,' she said. 'I've never seen him before.'
Ali accepted that at the level of denial. If Molly was hiding from her lover's secret identity, then it seemed to be part of Ali's task as confessor, in this case, to ferret out the incubus. 'You know, that's impossible,' she said. 'There are no strangers in this group. Not after four months.'
'I know. That's what I'm saying.' She was, Ali saw, horrified.
