Silva murmured in her sleep. Mendenhall watched the flutter of lashes, followed the black curve, the lift at the end reflecting the lift of the brow. When she fixed her gaze, she found that Silva’s eyes had opened. She was awake.
Mendenhall released the lock of hair. Silva blinked, focused, appeared only slightly perplexed. She lifted her head, raised herself to one elbow, her lab coat falling away.
“Dr. Mendenhall.” Silva checked her watch. “I overslept.”
She started to hurry. Mendenhall touched her shoulder. “You’re fine. Everything’s fine.”
Silva blinked some more, let her stare go blank. “No.” She made an mm sound. “No. It’s not.”
Mendenhall pressed her palm to Silva’s forehead, then drew a pulse. The tech’s eyes appeared clear, remarkably clear. “You feel something? Something off?”
Silva stared straight ahead. “The only time I think clearly is just before waking. Dreams, you know? What they seem to do?”
Mendenhall nodded.
“I’m not off.” Silva finally looked at Mendenhall. “You’re the one. You.”
“I’ve been scanned. You have my blood. I’m good.”
“Still. Something.” Silva gathered herself into sitting position, opened a space on the edge of the bed for Mendenhall. “You. You’re not the same.”
The same? Mendenhall almost felt she was the one trying to wake.
“Not the same as what?”
“The person you were before all this started. Before you called containment.”
“You didn’t know me then.”
“I did. Dr. Claiborne spoke of you often, your work, your charts. He sent me up there often, usually to gather data, sometimes just to observe, to maintain connection.”
Mendenhall didn’t know why this bothered her. She fought her temper, sat on the edge. “Look. I’m ER. We change for each arrival. We move on. We turn it over to the specialists and move on. Trauma. Think about it. Everything can cause trauma. We can think ourselves into it, dream ourselves into it. I surmise and tend wounds.”
“While I slept, what did you do?”
“I sutured a wound, reset a shoulder, stole some milk from caf. I told off Mullich and made nice with your boss.”
“You shouldn’t have done those.” Silva swung herself off the other side of the bed, gathered her hair into a ponytail. “Those last two. Those. I could see it in your face.”
“You didn’t even look at my face.”
“I saw it before I woke up.”
They faced each other across the bed. Silva fastened her hair, slipped on her lab coat, and pushed sleep from just below her eyes.
“I saw you faking.” She bowed her head and gave Mendenhall an apologetic glance. “It’s not a virus. I do everything I’m supposed to do. Everything I’m told. But it’s not a virus. You’re the one who’s right.”
Mendenhall shook her head. “Saying it’s not a virus is saying nothing. Saying it is a virus is nothing. In ten years we won’t even use the term anymore. Not in medicine.”
Silva appeared confused.
“We have to operate under a theory. Or we can just go along blind like most, not see the theory.”
“Or you can form your own.” Silva’s arms hung straight.
Mendenhall shook her head again. “It doesn’t work that way.
Science can’t work that way. You have to work off the existing premise, the dominant one, the one that’s saving lives. Virus theory.
Thorpe’s. Claiborne’s. DC’s. Yours.” She opened her hands toward Silva. “Mine.”
“I don’t see that. I don’t see that at all. I see that I must do what Dr. Claiborne says because he knows more than I, has seen much more than I. I’m just an instrument, nothing more—and that’s how it should be. But I don’t have to believe. In fact, I work better believing you. You and your gel blocks and your ability to see inside without scans.”
Mendenhall leaned forward and placed her hands on the bed.
“Then maybe understand this. We used to believe in miasma. That disease wafted over our bodies, was born in swamps and bogs.
Before that, it was the four humors. We can smirk, but those kind of worked. Humoral theory, miasmal theory. They’re not wrong.
They’re just incomplete. We push their definitions and we find our way.”
Silva moved her arms. “Unless the working theory obscures. Regresses. Damages. Tells us to bleed the anemic.”
Mendenhall pressed her thumb to her forehead, fending off a headache.
“What do you want from me?”
Silva raised her chin. “I want you to take me with you when you go.”
Mendenhall smiled. “Even if I wanted to go, there’s no way. Mullich’s built this place for containment. Even the windows don’t break. Outside, there are white trucks and helicopters. Inside, there are goons who won’t even let me snitch a bottle of water.”
“Then you’ve considered it.”
Mendenhall shook her head. But wondered.
Silva moved to the foot of the bed, fiddled with the empty clipboard dangling from the frame. “I saw Dr. Claiborne taking notes—paper notes—after he looked at Cabral’s amygdala. He saw something. He even sketched something.”
Mendenhall rested her gaze on the green glow of the exit sign. Silva motioned with her arm for Mendenhall to lie down.
She pressed her eyes with the heels of her palms, pictured the gray-and-black strokes of Claiborne’s sketches, the almond shape of amygdalae, their graceful connection to the hippocampus, a connection too ephemeral-looking to accept its charge.
Then she was lying down. Silva removed Mendenhall’s shoes and fitted a pillow beneath her Achilles. She grasped both feet and drove her thumbs along the arches, firm enough to ply the longus tendons. The strength of Silva’s hands surprised her, but the warmth did not. Mendenhall relaxed her neck and closed her eyes partway, let the green light of the exit sign blur around Silva’s silhouette.
Silva hooked her fingers between the toes, spread them, a delicate force. As she pulled her fingers free, she pinched the web between each one.
“Take better care of your feet, Doctor.” She blew a cooling breath then, using both hands for one foot, twisted the left metatarsals together, close to pain, holding there for three long seconds, which she counted in a whisper. Then she did the same to the right.
“They’re farthest from our minds, the plantar nerves, all the way out here.” Silva ran a fingernail along the oblique arch of each foot.
“Firing from here, traveling the length of the body.”
She hooked her thumbs over the navicular and dug her fingertips between each metatarsal, counting three for each palpation. All the while Silva pressed the base of her rib cage to Mendenhall’s toes, stretching them back.
“From down here,” she said, “I could stop your heart.”
Mendenhall let her eyes finish closing. She thought of her dog, Cortez, the last time she had taken him to the observatory, let him rest in her lap, placed her palm between his ears, called him “Killer. Hey, Killer.”
“Take me with you when you go.”
36.
Mendenhall crouched in the boiler relic where Meeks had fallen. The heat bubble created by the metal bowl felt soft, something about the copper, the stilled drip of the weld lines.
With a laser pen stolen from Mullich’s desk, she fired the red beam.
The air inside the relic was humid enough to illuminate the line, pink in the mist, almost not there. She positioned herself as Meeks before collapse, given his final pose. She held the pen to her left shoulder, just above the upper lobe of the lung. She imagined the shattered fluorescent above the copper lid, aimed there. Retraced the line.