“Leeni. Warm water in a bowl and the softest sponge you can find. We need to get him cleaned up so I can see if he has any other injuries.” She nodded and ran off, but Adam looked at me strangely.
“Lila, we need to call . . . ”
“No!” I rounded on him so quickly that he stepped back. “No one can know! His own kind did this to him because he helped us!” My eyes burned, but I was too furious to cry anymore. I dropped to my knees beside Sal. Stupid, alien idiot! What did they do to him?!
“Li . . . la?” Sal’s lips barely moved, and I gently took his hand in mine. He still hadn’t opened his eyes.
“I’m here, Sal . . . I’m here. Eileen’s here, too. She’s getting . . . ” I gulped and tried again. “We’re going to help you. Tell me what I can do, okay?”
“Fff . . . fine . . . be fine . . . ” His wriggling mud-coated skin was a gruesome contrast to the small smile he tried to give me.
“You don’t look fine! You look like hell! You know that, don’t you?”
His breath hitched, and I anxiously skimmed his body looking for a new source of pain. His perfect limbs looked considerably scratched and filthy, but I couldn’t see any massive bleeding wounds.
“What do you need? What can I—”
“Don . . . laugh. Hurts.”
“Laugh?!”
His lips stretched, revealing teeth that were disturbingly white against the rippling blackish-gray mud and bloody spittle.
“Look . . . like? Missed . . . laughing.”
My stress dissolved into a whimper as I sank to the floor beside him. “Oh, Sal. I’ve been so mad at you.”
His grin widened, even as he moaned again. “I know.”
When You Care Too Much . . .
“Thank you. For taking care of Eileen and me. I should’ve told you before.” I whispered the words into the billowing dawn, but I knew he could hear me.
He’d been awake since I’d crept back in from checking on Eileen after my last nightmare. I could tell because he’d stopped groaning. I’d eased myself down onto my makeshift pallet by the bed, and he had lowered his hand to me—but I’d pretended I hadn’t known it was there. Neither of us had slept again.
“You did tell me.” His voice was still hoarse, but low enough for my ears only. In the half-light I watched his arm swing over me, bending back until his fingers touched the little tuft of golden hair peeking from the book on my nightstand.
My gasp was equally quiet. “You can see.” I sat up to peer at him in the grayness.
His beautiful torso still looked like hell, with smeared streaks of mud where I’d tried to sponge him clean, but his face . . .
“They’re gone?”
“Yes. They self-terminate once they have performed their function.” His irises were different somehow. Warm, even in the shadows.
“But where did they go?”
“My modulators break them down . . . assimilate what can be repurposed . . . and then my body flushes the remainders through its waste systems.”
Modulators? “They were . . . bugs? Alive?”
“No. Machines.”
Machines. It was horrific and marvelous at the same time, and I couldn’t help but trace my fingers wonderingly from his brow to his jawline. So smooth. Nothing. Even the nicks and scratches from the marsh grass were healed.
I pushed a dirty lock of hair off his forehead and watched closely. No movement other than a throbbing pulse point. His hair was shorter than it had been, and I was about to ask him if his modu-whatsits were what caused him to vanish, when I realized the look in his eyes wasn’t just warm anymore.
“Ah . . . sorry.” I pulled my hand back to myself. “Just curious.”
I settled on the floor again, with my back to the bed. It was easier to talk to him if I couldn’t see him. I was awake, wasn’t I? This wasn’t some new twist on my nightmares? I ran through the hours from the last time I’d gone to Eileen’s room, reminding myself of smoothing her hair and adjusting her sheet, of sneaking back to my room so I wouldn’t wake Adam on the couch. My chest constricted and tears burned behind my lids. Yep. I’m awake.
“You have to tell us everything.”
“I know.”
“Can you?”
“Yes. My . . . they decided to allow a provisional exception. My research was inconclusive, but of interest to them. To us.”
“Provisional?”
“It means . . . ”
“I know what it means.”
“Oh. Yes. That was the best I could do, but I am here now. I will not leave. Unless you want me to. You could choose to forget everything, if you want to.”
“Eileen—”
“Is exceptional. Like her mother.” His hand touched my hair lightly and then was gone.
“Your research . . . ?”
“I know everything about you. Do not be afraid. You made the right choices, even the ones you do not remember.”
Don’t remember? I twisted to look at him, but a creak in the living room told me that Adam was awake.
“You have to bring Cara back.”
“But she—”
“You have to!” I hissed. My legs were shaky, but once I got to my feet, I stood erect. “And you have to tell him everything!” I turned my back on him to gather a change of clothes. I was disgusting. A sweaty, dirty mess inside and out. I looked worse than Sal and didn’t have the excuse of burrowing nanobots and excruciating pain. Of course, I didn’t have the luxury of super-genes either. “I’m going to get a shower, and after, I’ll help you . . . if you need it?” He hadn’t even tried to
