“Theresa, wake up, it’s just a dream. You screamed, you’ve been asleep for hours…”
Her body was burning up. The shapes had set her on fire. Her head ached. “I don’t… don’t feel so good.”
Vicki, standing beside her bed with one hand on Theresa’s shoulder, went suddenly still. Theresa turned her head and vomited onto the pillow.
Vicki waited until she was finished. “Come on, Tessie, slide out the other way… no, you won’t fall, I’ve got you, we’re going into the bathroom… There. Theresa, listen, this is very important. Where’s the nursing ’bot?”
“I… left it.” She let Vicki wipe her face with a cool cloth. So cool. She was burning up, the sharp-toothed shapes had set her arms and legs on fire and now flames danced along them, dry and hot.
“Left it where? Where, Tess?”
“The… camp.”
“A camp? A Liver camp? You gave the nursing ’bot to a Liver camp?”
“I was… the beggar.” Her stomach heaved and she vomited again.
“At the camp. Theresa, was there any Liver there who was unChanged? Did you touch anyone who was sick?”
“The baby. His nose…”
“What about his nose? How sick was he?”
But she couldn’t answer. The bathroom jumped and swirled, and she vomited again, thin black bile in ropy gobs.
Then she was back in bed, but the bed was clean. Vicki held a pan under her mouth whenever the dry heaves came. Theresa’s head pounded from the inside, so hard she could only see in flashes, and the flashes sent hot lances through her eyes. She saw that the room was a mess. Holes in the walls, furniture knocked over… Had Vicki done that? Why had Vicki done that?
“Where is it, Tess? Think, darling. It’s important Where is it?”
“What?” Theresa said, because Vicki’s face looked so urgent and intense. Like Cazie’s face. No one could stand against Cazie. Not even Jackson. Only Theresa couldn’t be Cazie because she was too weak, too hot, she hurt too much—
“Where’s the safe, Tess? Your father’s private safe. I know he had one because I once heard Jackson say so—come on, Tessie, stay with me. Where’s the safe?”
Safe. She wanted to be safe. All her life she’d wanted to be safe, and she never had been… Take a neuropharm, Tess. But that wouldn’t make her safe, she’d always known that, she’d needed something more, something bigger—
“Where is your father’s private safe?”
“I think… master bathroom?… the wall behind the toilet…” Vicki ran off. Only then did Tess realize that the torn-apart room wasn’t hers but Jackson’s, she lay in Jackson’s bed and not her own. Jackson’s room that had once been her parents’.
From the bathroom came a tremendous crash. Jones immediately said, “Ms. Aranow, there’s a plumbing problem in the master bath. Would you like me to summon a building maintenance ’bot?”
“Yes… No…”
More crashes. Something heavy hit something else, hard. Theresa cowered in Jackson’s bed. Vicki came back in, covered with water.
“All right, it’s an old-fashioned mechanical lock. Completely undetectable by any electronics. You open it with numbers. What’s the code, Theresa?… Three numbers… Theresa! Stay with me!”
“Don’t know… call Jackson…”
“I can’t get through. Kelvin-Castner has cut him off electronically, and he probably doesn’t even know it. I can’t get through to Lizzie, I don’t know enough about systems… wait a minute. Systems.”
“I’m… am I… dying?”
“Not if I can help it,” Vicki said grimly. “And not if your brother is as sentimental and naive as I think. Jones, calendar information!”
Theresa winced. Vicki sounded exactly like Cazie. But how could that be, Theresa was Cazie…
Jones said, “What dates would you like, Ms. Turner?”
Vicki ran into the bathroom, yelling to Jones, “Jackson’s birthday. Theresa’s birthday…”
Theresa was dying. But she couldn’t die, she had to sing vespers with Sister Anne. Vespers and matins and… what came next? Something else. The unChanged Liver baby with the snotty nose was going to sing with her. She’d promised him…
“The date Jackson graduated from medical school,” Vicki yelled.
If Theresa died, the little boy with the runny nose would die, too. You can’t, Jackson, she argued with him, ghostly by her bedside. You can’t stop me. I can show them how… Don’t you see, it’s a gift? It’s always been my only gift. Need. You needed me, to take care of.
Vicki stood beside her, with something in her hand. She’d stopped yelling. In fact, Theresa could barely hear her. Vicki’s voice came from someplace very far away, still sounding like Cazie. “The code was his wedding date, damn him for futile tenacity. His wedding date to that narcissistic succubus. Theresa, listen—”
The thing in Vicki’s hand was a Change syringe.
“Listen, Tess. Jackson told me he had this put away in his safe for you. For when you someday reversed your decision about Changing. You’ve picked up some disease from that unChanged kid in the Liver camp; it must be a fast-mutating virus—there’s all sorts of microbes coming out of the woods now that the host population is without vaccines. Tess, I gave you antivirals from Jackson’s supply but it doesn’t look like any of them are working. I don’t know what I’m doing with medicine, the nursing ’bot is gone, I can’t reach Jackson. It has to be the Change syringe—”
Theresa shook her head. Tears burned her eyes.
“Tessie, you’d have had to have it sooner or later anyway, because of the radiation you took in New Mexico. The cancer curves… I’m going to inject you, Theresa. I have to.”
“G-g-g…” She couldn’t get the word out. Gift. Her gift. It would be gone if she Changed, you had to struggle to gain your soul… they said so… all the great historical people that Thomas had quoted for her…
“I’m sorry, Tess.” Vicki gripped Theresa’s arm and raised the syringe.
“Beggar,” Theresa gasped. “Gift…” She closed her eyes, and fever danced along her body and burned her soul. Gone.
She felt nothing. When she opened her eyes again, Vicki still held the syringe above Theresa’s arm.
“Tessie—” Vicki whispered. “Do you really want to die instead? I can’t make you do this… yes, I can make you. But I shouldn’t, it should be your choice… damn you to hell, Jackson! This should be your problem!”
Tess said, “My… problem.”
Vicki stared at her. “Yes. Your problem. Your choice, your life… God, Tess, how can I not… all right. Your choice. Should I inject you? If I don’t, you might die—but I don’t know that you’ll die. If I do inject you, you might or might not have your brain chemistry altered in some ways… I don’t know, I’m not a doctor!”
Her brain chemistry altered. But Theresa could already do that! She could be Cazie, could be the beggar, could make herself control her own brain… at least a little.
Enough to be Theresa.
Even if her body was Changed. She was more than her body. But hadn’t she always known that? Wasn’t that what she’d argued about so hard with Jackson?
“Tess? You’re smiling like… God, honey, your forehead is burning up… I don’t know what to do!”
“Inject me,” Theresa said, and thought, at the moment that the needle plunged in, and through the bright hot whirl of fever, that Vicki was different from Cazie after alclass="underline" Cazie would never have said she didn’t know what to do.