My hands move to cover my belly. “Yes.”
“Come here.”
“No.”
“You don’t trust?”
“Almost never. Not now.”
She nods. “Why did you come up here?”
“To find Irini.”
“And what would you have done had she been in danger? Would you have risked your life and that of your unborn child to save her?”
“My child has been at risk since the beginning.”
“Irini tells me you are looking for your husband.”
I don’t correct her. “Yes.”
“You have traveled across the world, all the way from America, to find this man?”
“Yes.”
“How many women would do such a thing? If our world was not dead, they would write poetry about you— long, gamboling stories filled with half-truths, all of them predicated on one solid fact: you are a hero.”
“Heroes die.”
“We all die. Heroes die gloriously, for things bigger than themselves.” She glances at Irini. “Water, please.”
Irini lifts a bottle to the woman’s lips and tips slowly. They’ve done this before, perfected the art.
“What happened?” I ask. “Can we get you out of there? There have to be tools somewhere near.”
Her laugh is more wheeze than mirth. “It is not rock. It is bone.”
Shock steals my words. My cheeks pinken with embarrassment.
“I was sick before with a disease that was turning my body to stone, as they say. The tissues, the bones, all of them stiff and fused. But it was slow. Then the disease came and my own skeleton began to consume me.” Another wheeze. “My sister became Medusa and I became part of the landscape.”
“Why here? Why not stay closer to the shelter?”
“I like the view. It makes me believe I am free.”
The whole world has become a house of horrors. Women made of snakes and bone, men with tails, primordial beings who feed on human flesh. Those of us who survived are clinging to the edge of the soup bowl, trying to find a spoon to ride to safety.
“I have to keep moving,” I tell them. “I have to find Nick if he’s still alive.”
“He lives,” says the rock woman.
“How—”
Irini bows her head. “My sister has the sight. She knows many things. She is the sibyl, the oracle of Delphi where there hasn’t been such a thing for centuries.”
“Hush, Sister. The gods have been cruel enough. Do not give them reason to take more from you.”
“What more can they take?” she asks simply.
“You still live, do you not?”
“This is not a life,” Irini snaps. Immediately she dips her head in contrition. “I’m sorry. I did not think.”
The woman of the rock looks straight at me. “Take her with you. I implore you.”
Irini’s head jerks up. “No.”
“Go with her.”
“I have to stay with you, Sister. Who will feed you, bring you water?”
“My time is short. You will go with the American, deliver the child into this broken world. Maybe some good will come of her birth. Everyone needs a purpose. This is yours.”
The screaming wakes me on the third morning. Holding my belly, I race up to where Irini is standing, her face melted in horror. My brain processes the scene like an investigator, in explicit, full-color snapshots. The rock woman’s head dangles at an unnatural angle, her useless limbs hacked off and used to form the letters
My mind flips through the searing photographs with gathering speed.
“We have to go. Now.”
Irini doesn’t argue. With methodical detachment, she gathers her things and stacks them neatly in a sleepover bag. It’s high-quality leather, the kind that improves as it is passed down through the generations. Within minutes we’re moving on with Esmeralda in tow.
There’s a hole in my soul and it’s filled with the dead.
“Not a ghost.”
“No.”
“Who, then?”
I know what she wants: some explanation so she can make sense of her sister’s death. But all I have is an improbable story that sounds like a lie. I give her the bones, then the story’s meat. My tongue lifts my mind’s petticoat and skirts and displays my regret: that I didn’t double-, triple-check that the Swiss was dead.
“Why?” she asks.
“Why what?”
“Why you?”
“I don’t know.”
“You must.”
“I don’t.”
“Then why chase?”
Why do crazy people do anything? Why did I sprint across the world to find one man?
“I don’t know.”
I leave a note in the box, place it outside the front door. When Morris comes, she reads it moving her lips.
“Crackers and Twinkies?”
“Everything else makes me sick,” I mouth through the glass door.
She shrugs, scratches her nose. “Okay.” She disappears across the street with the box. We’ve been doing this for a week now: I leave the box out front, she returns with supplies within minutes.
Only, this time the minutes drag by slow enough that I have to run to the ground-floor bathroom twice to throw up. She comes back empty-handed.
“Where’s my box?”
“C’mon. Doctor wants to see you.”
“I’m in quarantine.”
“He doesn’t care.”
“Fine.”
“Fine.”
Reluctantly, I open the door, step out onto the sidewalk, maintaining a distance between us. Our boots echo down the hall once we enter the old school. Hers clip along cheerfully while mine drag all my baggage behind them.
Joe is in the infirmary waiting on us, blowing into a latex glove. He holds it to his head and grins. “I’m a rooster. How long has Nick been gone?”
Morris glances at me. “Six weeks.”
“Six weeks, two days, six hours. Give or take.”
She raises an eyebrow, scratches her nose.
He pulls open a drawer, rifles around, tosses a box to me. I stare unblinking at the packaging.
