Walker had his hands out. “You’re okay,” he said again. “Why don’t you get back onto the cot. Take a little time, let the dream fade. It will fade, no matter what it was… no matter how the nightmare’s wormed its way inside you. Just breathe and let yourself wake up from it.”
Exhaling, forcing herself to catch her breath, Meryam crawled back to the cot. The weariness of her disease had grown worse. The extreme nature of this project had taken its toll on her. Walker offered his hand but she ignored him, pulling herself up to the cot. She dragged the blankets over her shoulders and sat on the edge, looking around, feeling as if she were returning to the fabric of the real world for the first time.
Only slightly less hellish than my dreams.
She wiped at her tears. The pace had slowed, but they kept coming. The name Josephine kept circling around inside her head, like a snatch of song that could not be driven out. Josephine. Jo.
A baby she would never have.
The kind of daughter she would have been proud to raise. A girl who would never be born.
On the next cot over, a figure stirred beneath blankets. Meryam saw the mop of his thick, black hair and heard a groan as familiar to her as her own voice. Adam turned over and opened his eyes, squinting against the light. Scruffy and unwashed, angry and unfaithful, hurt and confused, he remained the man she loved. Josephine would never be, but this was the father she would have deserved. Human, and full of love.
“Meryam?” Adam said.
Walker stood back as Meryam climbed off her cot and lay down with Adam. She slid beneath the blankets with him, draped herself over him so that they could fit on the narrow cot. Memories of the night began to float up inside her head and though they were terrible, ugly things—full of horror and blood—still she preferred them to the endless despair of her dream, and so she embraced them.
“You want me to give you some time?” Walker asked, sitting on the edge of the cot Meryam had just abandoned.
Adam studied Meryam’s face. She knew he was searching for an explanation, an answer to the question of how the tension between them had evaporated so instantly, but now was not the time for that conversation. She loved him. For now, that would have to be answer enough. Cancer had stolen her dreams long before this demon had insinuated itself into their hearts. But Adam could still dream. He might have a little Josephine someday, with someone else—someone who might be kinder to him. Death awaited Meryam just around the corner, at some time it had already chosen, or so she believed. But until the moment of that assignation, she would fight for Adam to live and dream, no matter his sins. She was certainly not without her own.
“You’ve been looking after us,” she said, studying Walker from the cot.
“If we’re going to make the climb down, you both needed time to recover,” Walker said. He frowned as he studied them. “Truthfully, I’m not sure any of us will make it. The blizzard’s still blowing like hell out there, and neither of you is strong enough for this. But the sun’s rising in about twenty minutes.”
“Not as if we’ll see much sun,” Adam said.
“It’ll be light enough to see,” Meryam said. “If not for the snow.”
Walker rubbed at his eyes, dark circles beneath them. “It’s the best we’re gonna get, unless you want to wait this out.”
Meryam dragged the blankets off of herself and Adam. His clothes were musky and stale, but the scent belonged to him. It meant he was alive.
SEVENTEEN
Adam allowed Meryam to sit him up on the edge of the cot. He forced a smile as she drew the blankets up over his shoulders and kissed his hand and held it tightly. Her gentle kindness—a side of her that he’d scarcely seen these past few weeks—helped him, but only a little. A spark in the darkness. No amount of loving attention could have burned off the taint he felt inside. If they’d had access to a hot shower, he might have scrubbed the ammonia-stinking film of sweat from his skin, but it would take time for the infection to leave his body. The demon might be gone, but his system still needed to purge the poison it had left behind.
“Hey,” Meryam said, nudging him. “You with us?”
Again, he managed a smile. Weak as he knew it was, Meryam and Walker both seemed relieved.
“I’m here,” Adam said. “Just… you know how it feels when you’ve had a bad flu, or you’ve had some kind of stomach bug. You feel shaky and… tentative… like it’s still lingering—”
Walker stiffened. “You think the demon’s still in you?”
Adam saw the way the other man’s right fist clenched and wondered what Walker might do if he said yes.
“No. I think it’s been pulling our strings for a while, but when it really moves in and takes over, that’s something you know. It wants you to know.”
Meryam’s eyes filled with reflected pain and sympathy and he hated it. They had to act now, not let anguish and regret get in the way. There would be time for recriminations and doubts later.
If Meryam has any time at all.
Adam knew one thing—if her days on this earth would be as short as her doctor had predicted, he didn’t want to spend those days negotiating truth and love. He just wanted to live it.
“I need to talk to you,” he said. About Calliope. About what I thought must be going on, and the role I think the demon might have played.
He didn’t say the rest of it, not with Walker standing right there, but Meryam seemed to understand. She ran the back of her hand across the scruff on his cheek.
“Later,” she said.
Adam wanted to protest. To insist. A gulf had opened up between them and he wanted to know if that dead space could be bridged, if they could really find their way back to each other. They sat side by side, hand in hand, but that was only flesh and bone. The space between them couldn’t be measured in physical inches.
“We have a lot to do,” Walker said, leaning forward on the creaking cot. “I need to know if you can hold your own, or if you’re going to need someone looking after you.”
His hands were on his knees like some grandpa in a rocking chair, and it occurred to Adam that with so many dead and the rest of their lives in danger, Walker was in charge. The Karga-Holzer Ark Project was over. It was just about survival now.
“If I need help, I’ll send up a flare.”
“See you do,” Meryam whispered to him.
Adam opened up the blankets she’d draped him with and put his arm around her, drawing her inside the warmth with him. The set of her jaw and the cast of her eyes revealed that there were words unspoken, but that was hardly a secret. The taint of the demon remained in more ways than one.
A shadow passed across the floor and Adam looked up to see Feyiz standing in the doorway, backlit by the garish glow of the industrial light out in the passage.
“I’m pleased to see you both sitting upright,” Feyiz said.
Under the blanket, Adam felt Meryam stiffen. For a moment it was as if Walker had vanished from the infirmary and it was just the three of them and the tension of the past twenty-four hours churning in the space between them.
“Listen,” Adam began. “You know it wasn’t me.”
Feyiz cocked his head. “Which part do you mean? The raving lunatic who attacked me? The jealous man who thought I was having an affair with his fiancée?”