“So what do we do now?” I asked. Lewis crossed his arms.
“What we were going to do before she showed up,” he said. “David and I scouted the route this morning. We hike to the rendezvous, make contact with Wardens we can trust, and find a place to hole up until David can lay his hands on Ashan and find out how to solve this thing.”
“Well, we can’t just leave her!” I said. “And I don’t think she’s strong enough to hike it right now. Not in this weather.” Wasn’t too sure I was, either.
“I’m sorry, but we can’t wait. Kevin’s still out there somewhere, and I have no reason to believe he can’t find her. Or worse, he might know where she is already. We have to leave her. We can get David to lead a rescue party back for her. We’ll leave her the tent, food, water, a supply of heat packs.”
“You think she’ll last long enough to be rescued? Even with all the supplies?”
Silence. Lewis rocked back and forth, restless and weary, and shook his head.
“Then no,” I said. “I’m not leaving her here to die alone.” Not because she was supposed to be my friend; it’s hard to have friends when you don’t remember the good times, not to mention the bad. But because it was just plain wrong.
Lewis looked like he wanted to argue with me, but I saw the torment in his face.
And the guilt.
“All right.” He sighed. “We’ll see how she is in the morning. But I still think it’s a mistake.”
Cherise looked better when we went back in the tent, but one glance at Lewis told me that was deceptive; he wouldn’t be that grim if her condition had improved. At least she didn’t seem to be in pain. Certainly she was giving off no on-the-verge-of-death vibes. The only thing strange about her was the haunted, empty look in her eyes, and the fact that she seemed to have a longer and longer lag in responding to anything around her.
I tried to ignore it. The rest of the day was consumed with small talk, nothing very deep or probing. I didn’t ask her much about my own life; I wasn’t sure I was ready to hear how close we’d been. She volunteered details, though, mentioned people and places that I didn’t and couldn’t recognize. I was grateful when she fell asleep, finally, and zipped myself into my own sleeping bag next to her. Lewis sat cross-legged, crammed in the corner of the tiny shelter, lost in what looked like meditation but could have been a sitting-up nap for all I knew.
I was about to drift off to sleep when Cherise said dreamily, “Jo?”
I sat up and did some unnecessary adjustments to her burrito-style wrapping. Her eyes seemed to take ages to focus on me, and she smiled slightly.
“You don’t have to pretend. I know something’s wrong,” she said. Her voice was soft. “Look, if I did anything…said anything, you know, earlier…I didn’t mean it. You know that, right? I didn’t mean it. Don’t be mad, okay?”
I didn’t even know her, not really, but that hurt. I tried not to let it show. “I’m not mad,” I said. My voice actually stayed mostly steady. “You should sleep for a while. Rest.”
Another one of those eerie lags, like talking to someone in space. While she was waiting to get the message, she seemed to be just…vacant. Then she excavated a hand from the foil wrapping around her and took mine. She had a tattoo around the ring finger of her right hand, some kind of Celtic knot work. I figured, given the alien gray tat on her back, she probably had more body art, probably in places that only her boyfriends knew about. A normalish girl, one who loved her looks and devoted a lot of time to their enhancement. A girl who probably had the guys buzzing back home.
A girl who’d been my friend. Who still was, in ways that counted.
She said, “Don’t leave me here. Not by myself.”
“I wouldn’t. I won’t.”
“I’m scared.” She didn’t seem to be hearing me, although her huge blue eyes were locked on mine. “I can’t just die, Jo. I didn’t even do anything heroic yet. Not like you.”
I looked over at Lewis, whose eyes opened as soon as I focused on him. Serene as the Buddha. I took in a trembling breath. “Isn’t there anything you can do?” I snapped. I was displacing anger, I knew that, but it felt good to let a little of it out.
He sighed. “I can try, but it won’t be enough, and it will only prolong things. It can’t stop the process.”
Cherise was visibly fading away now, panic in those huge blue eyes. She tried to move but her arm barely twitched.
Trapped inside her own body.
“Help.” Her lips formed the word, but there was no breath behind it.
I was watching her die.
Sudden fury spiked through me. Not at Lewis-at everything. At the unfairness of the world. At losing someone I’d barely begun to know and like. “No!” I said sharply. “No, I’m not just going to sit here…”
I reached out and put my hands on her head. I had no idea at all what I was doing, but the frustration and fury inside left me no choice. I had to act. I had to try. It seemed like instinct, to put my hands where I did, but then I remembered David had used the same kind of placement when he’d healed Lewis.
“What the hell are you doing?” Lewis barked, scrambling up, but I wasn’t listening to him. If this was magic, then I could do it, right? David had shown me how to reach for power…except that I had no idea what to do with it. I could grab the power and hold it, but handing a child a scalpel didn’t make her a surgeon.
Show me, I begged. Come on, somebody, show me what to do. SHOW ME!
I felt a slow, warm, syrupy pulse come up through my body, flowing through my legs, up through my body’s core, spilling out of my hands. Cherise dissolved into a sparkling network of tiny bright points of light, millions of them, layer upon layer upon layer, like a city at night. Some of the lights were bright white, some blue, some shading toward yellow and red.
And, ominously, a substantial part of her head was simply black. No lights at all.
And the black was spreading.
I heard Lewis shouting something at me, but I ignored him. I was expecting him to physically try to drag me away, but he must have had more sense than that.
Cherise’s nervous system was an incredible design, mesmerizing and intensely beautiful, and I found myself mapping the lines of color and light in a kind of trace, my hands moving above her body just inches from skin.
I paused over the dead areas, both hands hovering uncertainly, and then I reached inside and touched one of the dead nodes.
Cherise screamed, both in my ears and-chillingly-inside my head.
“Stop!” Lewis was yelling in my ear now, but he wasn’t touching me. I was radioactive, and he knew it. “Jo, you’re not an Earth Warden. Jesus, you’re not meant to do this. Stop!”
I was hurting her, but I knew, somehow, that it had to hurt. There wasn’t any choice, if I wanted to save her. The blackness was spreading across that network of lights, slowly consuming her, and if I didn’t do something she’d be gone, this beautiful creation would be gone, and I couldn’t let it happen.
I just couldn’t.
Smells and sounds and chaos rolled over me, a huge vista of things I couldn’t comprehend, a presence that guided my hands and my powers to touch here and there and there, a tiny spark of pure white power jumping from one burned-out node to another, jump-starting and dying.
It’s not working!
The presence inside wordlessly soothed me, and showed me again. And again. I was no longer seeing or hearing anything in the outside world; the world was what was under my hands and in my head.