The rest of the floor went by very quickly, for all that each fix seemed to go on forever; when Jemma was touching a child, she felt like she had always been burning them, and like she would always be burning them. But really each one took less time, perhaps because Jemma was getting better at what she did, and her imagination, become lithe in the fire, was quick to construct paradigms of healing individual to each illness. A little Russell-Silver dwarf, eight months old but only as big as a duck-pin bowling ball, was the last on the sixth floor. Jemma played a game, tossing her back and forth from hand to hand, and with each toss she got a little bigger, until it was a great chore to heave her the short distance from hand to hand, and then she was merely holding her in one hand, then the other, and finally her hand was trapped under the plump new bottom.
On the fifth floor the doors of the PICU were closed against her. At the head of a big crowd now, she kicked clumsily at them.
“Who’s there?” someone asked.
“The fucking candyman,” said Emma, who was bearing Jemma up now. “Who do you think?”
“We’ve decided not to let her in.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“These kids are really sick. You can’t just come in here and mess with them. You can’t just…” The muted noise of a scuffle came through the doors, and then they parted, revealing Rob Dickens.
“Sorry,” he said. He took Jemma from Emma, and led her into the unit. Through gaps in the curtain blowing in her head she could see nurses and doctors and parents restraining each other. Janie was holding Maggie by her arms. Maggie didn’t struggle, but she scowled and said, “You’re all going to be very sorry!”
“Take me to Jarvis,” she whispered to Rob.
“He’s pretty stable,” he said. “There’s…”
“Him first!” she said, so he took her. The boy’s feet were sticking out from beneath his sheet, covered with fuzzy hospital socks. Jemma removed them and took his big toes in either hand. Except for the ventilator-driven movement of his chest, he was totally still. It seemed like a crude operation, what she did, stuffing with fire-fingers the portions of his herniated brain back up into his skull, no more elegant than pushing the stuffing back into a broken pillow. But it worked, and when she stroked his hot swollen brain it shrank down. She perceived the lost neurons popping back into life as lights coming on in a city seen from a distance. An exhortation to his pancreas, a stoking of its nostalgia for the lost beta cells, called them so vividly into memory that it required only a nudge of flame to make them real. They released such a triumphant chorus of insulin that Jemma found herself groping after his plummeting blood sugar, grasping and raising it just in time to spare him a seizure. He began to wake, bucking against the ventilator until Rob pulled the tube. Jemma considered his perfectly healthy body and was unsatisfied, because there was still a wrong thing in him, a shadow on his brain cast by a past horror. It mocked her when she tried to touch it and lift it, and when she sought to know what it was she could only see it as an obscure shape, like a monster under a blanket. She could not burn it out, or undo the past, but she imagined that she straightened out some of the places in the boy’s brain that went crooked under the shadow. It all failed to make him more friendly. He sat up, drew his fist across his mouth, looked around at the crowd around the bed, and launched a right hook at Jemma’s face. The punch was wide. When he tried again, Emma sat on him. Jemma left the two of them bucking on his bed and turned away, hooking herself to Rob’s arm again.
She was feeling more and more tired now, but mightier and mightier. Here in the sicker regions of the hospital, her power seemed to grow. To the murmur and thrill of primary pulmonary hypertension she said hush, and they grew still. The mushy brains of the meningitic grew firm and springy at the touch of her mind. Every species of shock, cardiogenic, neurogenic, septic, anaphylactic, she calmed. It got so she did not even have to touch them to make them well. Flame bridged the distance between her fingers and their skin, and it was over in moments. She held her hand over Marcus Guzman’s face. He had been stable on the LVAD since she touched him. In her imagination he was a big piece of rotten meat, but she called a boy out of it. He came clawing up, tearing with his teeth at the back rot and the gray gristle, squirming free, maggot-boy, a fire lit in the center of the next bloody flower to rise from his mouth. I’m back! he shouted in her head, whole and alive in her mind and in the world.
The few adults who were still struggling against their captors had barely broken free before she had finished. “Take me downstairs,” she said to Rob. They slipped away in the confusion generated by the waking children, who would not stay in bed, upsetting IV poles and tugging on wires.
She leaned heavily on Rob as they passed into the NICU, recalling the night of the storm, when she and he had passed hand in hand through the same doors into the drama of a universal desaturation. The bays were similarly chaotic now, partly because the babies were upset and misbehaving again, and partly in anticipation of Jemma’s arrival. They went to the nearest baby before anybody marked them, a former twenty-four-weeker born the night before the storm. He was still small at thirty-three weeks, and missing most of his gut from a bout of NEC, and possessed of a bad brain on account of a head bleed, and his lungs were ruined from prolonged intubation. Jemma fixed his head and his lungs and his gut, spinning it out in her mind like a little thread of yarn. Then she picked him up, unsticking his monitors and setting off the klaxons. That got everybody’s attention. Every adult in the bay turned to look at her just as she was holding the baby up, and they all saw it ripen and swell in her hands to the size of a proper three-month-old. It shrieked in pain, and then, as the fire passed, in hunger.
She inflated other preemies, enough to decorate a birthday party, it seemed, and she imagined them strung together in a squirming, drooling arch. She moved through the NICU, leaving fat three-, four-, and five-month-olds in her wake, babies whose shoulders squeaked against the side of their plasticine bassinets as she lay them back down. She noticed now, and wondered how it could have escaped her before, that the sicker and more complicated babies were gathered around the King’s Daughter, as if she had called them to her, or complicated their illnesses by proximity. So in the far bays, at her outermost periphery, were the feeders and growers, the former preemies who had escaped brain damage and sepsis and even intubation. Closer in were the babies with an isolated event, one bad night, a little head bleed, a plunge in and out of sepsis, a lung that collapsed and reopened as if it were trying to wink. In the next circle: two or three small events, or one big one — a bigger bleed, a chest tube, another NEC. Still, these babies had made better recoveries than those who were one step closer to Brenda, babies missing gut, or with lungs jackhammered into shoe leather by the pounding of the ventilators, or bleeds that wiped out the whole brain.
Jemma went back and forth among these rings of acuteness, passing closer to Brenda and then farther from her. She could hear the murmurs of the spectators as clearly and remotely as the buzzing of a mosquito; they asked each other what she was doing when she shuffled with Rob into one bay to lay hands on one or two patients before leaving for another bay, then coming back a few moments later. Jemma did not know herself what she was doing, or who was declaring this order, but she understood that she must touch Brenda last, and she perceived her as the greatest wrong, the densest wrong; it did not surprise her that all the lesser wrongness should be drawn to her in imperfect circles. It seemed to Jemma a form of praise, how they submitted themselves to her in orbit.