“I’m guessing there’re a few hours left till morning,” she said. “We’re going to pull the heaters together. Bedrolls and tents and blankets. We’re going to get a hot meal in us and then we’re packing our gear, so we can be ready. At first light, we’re evacuating the ark. We’ll take it as slowly as we must, but we’ve got to get out of this cave and down the mountain.”
“If the blizzard’s still raging, we could die out there,” Errick argued.
Meryam stared at him, and Walker knew what she had to be thinking. With that wound in his shoulder, Errick was in no shape to make a descent. But whatever disease had been eating at her, neither was Meryam. The difference between them was that one had already realized that they had no other choice.
“You could die out there,” she said. “Chances are that some of us will. The difference is in the guarantee. You could die if we go. But you’ll most certainly die if we stay.”
Meryam stands in the front room of the third-story flat in Mayfair where she and Adam have made their little nest. The view from the window is quintessential London, off-white row houses lining a road so narrow it can barely accommodate a taxi and a bicycle at the same time. Gray morning light creates a peculiar aura, a surreal quality that makes it seem like Faerie might be only steps away. In small flower boxes, vivid colors blossom amid the gray. This is spring in London.
The window is open just a few inches, the morning still a bit chilly, and she can hear the distant laughter of children. She imagines them playing some sort of game and steps to the window, craning her neck for a better view. A laughing boy careens into view, kicking a football into the road, careless of whatever traffic might wend its way along the narrow road. Morning dew glistens on the curb and the street, and shines on the windows of the flats opposite Meryam’s.
A young woman rides by on a bicycle. Her hair is a vibrant, cobalt blue. Years ago, Meryam spent the better part of a year with her hair that color, and she wonders why she ever changed it. Then she spots the little girl in pursuit of the boy with the football. She runs with ferocity, arms pumping at her sides, face scrunched intensely, and it’s clear to Meryam that the football belongs to her. The little boy has stolen it, perhaps for amusement, but stolen it nevertheless. The young woman on the bike calls out a warning and swerves, barely able to avoid the little girl.
Meryam wants to shout, her heart pounding. They don’t need her warning, this young woman and little girl who each look something like Meryam herself. Other Meryams, from other times. Her face flushes even as she shivers with the chilly spring air snaking in through the gap in the window. The accident’s been avoided, but her gaze tracks the running girl.
“Mother,” a voice says, just over her shoulder.
Icy fingers touch her arm and Meryam flinches. Where is Adam? Not here. Not where he ought to be. And where is her cancer? Not here. Not where it ought to be.
“Mother.”
Her eyes track the running girl as she catches up to the little thief, the boy who took her football. She is fierce.
Those fingers clutch at her forearm, cold enough to sear her. Again, that young voice whispers her name. Meryam forces herself to tear her gaze from the window, and she turns.
What is it, Jo? she asks.
Jo smiles back. JoJo, her little Josephine. “Don’t be sad, Mother,” her little girl says. “You were never meant to have me. They only let me live so they could take me away. If you’re sad, you’re only giving them what they want.”
Confused—but you’re not confused, are you—Meryam crouches in front of her girl. Jo has the loveliest eyes, a bright copper that gleams and offsets the soft brown of her skin. Her hair falls in natural ringlets, such a beautiful little girl. One day she will make people catch their breath from the mere sight of her. One day.
But why is Jo up here in the flat? How can she be here and down there on the street, chasing the boy who stole her football, all at the same time?
Have you caught the boy? Meryam asks her.
Jo takes her hand and clutches it tightly, staring into her eyes. “Don’t look out the window again, Mother.”
Meryam hears the laughter of the little boy, the little thief, carried on the breeze and it seems to grow louder. The room around her is cast in the same gray, fairy light as the view out the window, but in here with her, among the meticulously arranged furnishings and the mementos from the adventures she and Adam had before Jo came along… in here the only color is the gleaming copper of her daughter’s eyes.
“Don’t turn around,” Jo warns, but now her bright, new-penny eyes are more vivid than ever and the rest of her is fading. Those ringlet curls are little more than smoke.
No, she says, and reaches out for her little girl. Her JoJo. But Jo vanishes as her hands pass through the place where she’d been only a moment before, as if it’s the very act of trying to touch her, trying to hold on to the love that fills Meryam’s heart, that makes her daughter turn to smoke and fade away. Those copper eyes are the last to fade, followed by the echo of her voice.
Don’t look. Mother, don’t look. Mother, don’t…
Meryam turns to look out the window. It’s as if not a moment has passed since she felt Jo’s fingers on her arm. The touch of the little girl she and Adam brought into the world, the daughter she was never supposed to have.
Out on the street, fierce, determined Josephine catches up to the little thief and grabs him by the arm. The moment her fingers touch the boy’s flesh, all of the flowers on their narrow little street in Mayfair wither and die.
The little boy leaves the football in the street. He turns to face Jo.
Meryam hadn’t noticed the horns before.
Meryam is screaming.
And she wakes.
Meryam woke crying. She rolled onto her side, curled into a fetal ball before she could be completely sure that she had truly escaped the dream. Her body rigid, breath hitching as she shuddered and gasped, she held her eyes tightly shut, afraid of what she might see when she opened them. Her chest ached, heart drumming hard. Her whole body felt cold, icy breeze caressing the exposed skin of her hands and face and throat, and she wanted to scream.
To scream and scream and scream.
The echoes of her ragged-voice shrieking still lingered in her ears, but all she could feel was loss. Loss unlike she had ever imagined might be possible. Every dream she’d ever held in her secret heart, every hope of love and contentment, had been buried down deep the moment she’d learned she had cancer. Now they had been dug up and exposed, the flesh of her dreams flayed down to nothing but raw nerves.
“Meryam.”
It sounded a little bit like Mother.
Cold fingers touched her hand and she leaped up, dragging the blankets with her as she threw herself off the cot and huddled against the hard plastic wall. Blinking, she realized she’d opened her eyes. The lights were dim but still seemed harsh and as the figure above her reached out for her again she batted his hands away.
“You’re okay,” he said. “Meryam, you were dreaming. It was a nightmare.”
Lowering her hands, she stared at him. Walker, she thought. Pulse still pounding, she tried to steady her breath. Awareness finally bled back into her thoughts and she took in the room around them. They were in the infirmary. She’d been asleep on one of the cots, trapped in what felt not like a nightmare but like hell itself. The terror and screaming sorrow still raced around inside of her, searching for some way out, some way to expend itself before it destroyed her.