His Melisa.
Alive.
67
Gabriel woke slowly, as though rising up through thick, warm liquid.
He became aware of the sounds of the room, the blip of the monitors, the chink of glass on glass, the shuffle of booted feet across the stone floor. He lay still for a while, feeling as if he were gradually materializing in the room, atom by atom. He opened his eyes and saw a bluish-green light washing over the arched ceiling of the cave. He turned his head and saw the peacock window, the low evening sun lighting it up from behind.
“Ah, welcome back.” Athanasius moved across his field of vision, blocking the light from the window. Gabriel tried to sit up but found that he could not. “I’m afraid the doctor thought it best to restrain you again, for your own protection. That’s the bad news. The good news is—” He carefully held up the smart phone Gabriel had left him. There were two wires sticking out of the bottom, stripped from the end of a USB cable that wound down to the laptop that was resting on a table by Gabriel’s bed. Athanasius touched the screen of the phone and it lit up.
Gabriel smiled. “You did that?”
“I did.” Another man stepped into view from the end of the bed. He was clean shaven beneath his surgical mask, and wore the dark surplice of a priest.
“This is Father Thomas,” Athanasius explained, “chief architect of all the modern improvements within the mountain and someone who knows more about electronics than I could ever hope to.”
“It was quite simple really,” Thomas said, taking the phone from Athanasius. “Just a question of reverse-engineering the phone and working out which of the contacts in the docking slot connected to the battery. It’s been on charge for almost an hour now.”
“How long have I been out?”
“About three hours,” Athanasius replied. “Dr. Kaplan said it was a natural reaction after what your body’s been through. They got enough blood though, so they’ve been running tests all the while you’ve been asleep.”
“Great. Do you want to loosen my bindings so I can send a message?”
Athanasius and Father Thomas exchanged a look. “I’m afraid Dr. Kaplan advised that you remain restrained, just for the time being. You are obviously still at risk from fits, which might be a danger both to you and others. If you tell me, or rather, Father Thomas, what to do then we can send the message for you.”
Gabriel closed his eyes and felt tears of frustration pricking the backs of them. He hated feeling like this, so powerless and weak.
“Find the menu,” he said, “then scroll through the call log until you find one from an Inspector Arkadian.”
“Got it,” Thomas said.
“Okay, create a new message and then put—” He paused as he considered what to say. So much time had passed since he’d last seen Arkadian at the base of the Citadel, so much had happened it was hard to know where to start.
“Just put ‘Surprise! I’m not dead. I need the photos I sent you of the Starmap. Hope to see you very soon. Gabriel.’” Thomas typed it then read it back. “You have a signal?”
“Yes.”
“Then press send and let’s hope to God he’s got his phone with him.”
68
The phone buzzed in Arkadian’s pocket but he barely noticed it. He was walking fast, the effort of it making him hot inside his contamination suit. St. Mark’s was up ahead, the quarantine signs fixed on the outside of the windows, the suited armed guards outside. The churches were being used as general clearinghouses for the infected in all four quarters. Any new cases were brought here to be transported into the Old Town and ultimately the Citadel but they were mainly being used as isolation areas for the observation of high-risk individuals, people whose jobs had brought them into contact with others — which was why Madalina had been brought here.
He pointed to his badge as he reached the main door and the guard stepped aside. He had prayed on the way over that his sudden summons would prove to be nothing, just a scare or a misunderstanding. But now that he was here he knew it was as bad as he had feared. He could hear the noise already coming from inside the building: the sound of suffering, the howl of the lamentation.
He pulled on the heavy door and the noise spilled out onto the street like a physical thing. It was inhuman, terrifying, and all the more so because he knew his wife was in here somewhere. He looked for her in the crowd of frightened faces that turned his way as he entered but she was not among them. There was a separate area to one side of the altar, a private chapel with a lock on its door. This was where the noise was coming from. He moved through the parting crowd and through the door — and there she was.
She looked like she was sleeping but he knew she would have been sedated. Her skin shone with fever and her eyes moved behind lids that were already showing the first blisters. And she was tied fast to the bed. He could see her hands moving rhythmically, despite her drugged state, her fingernails scratching at the one piece of flesh they could reach.
A doctor turned to him, his eyes dropping to the ID badge affixed to the front of his suit. He stepped back from the bed, realizing who he was, and Arkadian took his place by his wife’s bed. He laid his hand on hers but the mechanical scratching carried on.
“We’re just preparing them for transfer to the Citadel,” the doctor said.
“I can look after her,” he said, “I can take her home.” He had spoken to her only a few hours ago. This couldn’t be happening.
“All new cases have to move to the Citadel,” the doctor said, “you know that.”
Arkadian had had so many of these conversations with husbands, wives, sons and daughters that it was odd being on the other end of one. It all felt wrong. He had always felt great sympathy for the people he’d had to comfort, but now that he had become one of them he realized he hadn’t understood at all how they’d felt. All words about how they would be better cared for in the mountain meant nothing when you were saying good-bye. And that’s what this was. No one had come out of the mountain yet — people only ever went in. And now his wife was about to become one of them.
The next half hour unfolded in a nightmarish blur. First they moved her to one of the ambulances parked outside the church and he sat by her side, holding her hand and talking softly to her as they bumped along the cobbled, serpentine streets of the Old Town and up to the embankment where the ascension platform waited. Usually the relatives had to say their good-byes at the Old Town wall, but a combination of his rank and his calm demeanor convinced the orderlies to let him travel with her right to the foot of the Citadel, where he helped them move her stretchered bed out onto the platform and fix it in place next to the others ready to be hoisted into the mountain. But then his nerve gave out. In the end it took three men to pull him off the platform and they held him fast until the platform had risen up too far for him to reach it.
He sat on the floor and wept as he watched it rise higher, carrying his love away from him while in his pocket the phone continued to buzz. It occurred to him that the messages he had ignored all morning because of the difficulty of extracting the phone from the suit might contain one from her. He slid his finger under the sealed flap in the seam of the suit and unzipped the side opening. His phone was warm from its long confinement and he felt like someone had ripped his heart out when he read the first message.