“He was wrong about love, I mean. Love is stronger. Love is why we don’t give up. Love is the reason we’re alive at all.”
“We?”
“People, I mean.”
She wants to tell him to quit it already — she wants to drop her hands and plop back on the bed — but she doesn’t.
He chatters on, saying, “There’s a lot of love out there. There’s the love a mother feels for her son, which is different than the love a son feels for a mother. There’s the love for a dog. There’s the love for a painting. There’s the love for a warm rain. There’s the love for a song like this one.”
She doesn’t realize she’s going to talk until she does. “There’s love as infatuation and love that lasts into old age. There’s angry love and pitying love.”
He nods and shuffles his footing before finding his way again.
She says, “What do you think is the best kind of love?”
He thinks for a time and then says, when he was a child, he woke in the night and came out of his room to see his parents dancing with their eyes closed, turning in small circles. They looked like one person. “That seems like the best kind, I guess.”
He clears his throat and she smiles and they continue to twirl around the room until the needle scratches off the record.
Chapter 46
LEWIS DREAMS ABOUT the ocean. The waves roll over black and foam red and rattle with bones. The seaweed is made of scalps and the hermit crabs have embedded themselves in skulls that scuttle across dunes. Burr’s voice beckons him — but to what? To this? Is this the end that awaits him?
He wakes to the smell of woodsmoke. His eyes snap open, but they might as well remain closed, as it takes him a moment to make sense of what he sees, the ceiling of stone, veined with shadow and firelight, not so different from the underlids of his eyes. His head still pounds with fever. Every thought burns. Then he understands — he is in a cave. He can feel at once the coldness of the air and the heat of the fire beside him, but for the moment, he remains where he lies, dazed and studying the orange light playing across stone.
The cave wall is crowded with faces. Sketched with charcoal and painted with pigment. There are faces that smile and faces that frown. Faces with their mouths rounded in fear or surprise. They seem to move in the firelight. They are crude enough to be anyone and for a few minutes he imagines them as the faces left behind. His mother. Thomas. Clark. His world keeps shrinking, the company he keeps ever fewer. And where would his own face fit on this wall?
It is then he notices another face, bigger than the rest, with horns and pointed ears and forked beard and swirling eyes and a snake’s tongue. A face the other faces feared or worshipped, a stranger or a monster to all.
He escapes his fever daze and recalls his circumstances, his last memory of collapsing in the snow, and rolls over.
Colter and Gawea sit huddled beside the fire. She is watching him. He feels unsettled by her gaze, owned by it. The darkness of it darker than he remembers, as if her eyes were black holes, matter with such force, such powerful gravity, not even light can escape them.
“You saved us?” he says.
“That’s one way of looking at it.”
“What’s the other?”
She shrugs.
Colter leans into the fire, his prosthetic arm extended. Its claw grips a cut of meat that cooks near the flames, the fat dripping into the coals with a sizzle.
Lewis feels a sudden hunger and wonders aloud how long he has been asleep.
“Can’t say,” Colter says. “Been in and out myself.”
“Gawea? How long?”
“Days,” she says, her voice monotone. “Weeks. I don’t know. Does it even matter?”
Lewis shares a look with Colter, who says, “Don’t take it personally. She’s being a real shit to me, too. I told her she should have left us to freeze and she gave me a look that didn’t exactly reassure me.”
Gawea tosses Lewis a canteen, tells him to drink, and he does, deeply. She offers him meat next — a venison chop — and he thanks her.
There is a lidless, frightless intensity to her eyes. “Don’t thank me.”
He doesn’t know what to say to this, so he asks where the meat came from, and Colter tells the story about how, a few hours ago, a deer wanders into the cave, stands before her, then kneels and lays aside its neck for her to slit. He makes a knife of his hand, cuts the air. He pulls his own meat out of the fire, blows on it, says, “Why couldn’t you stop those bears from attacking us, huh?”
Her voice is surprisingly sharp, almost a yell, beyond the emotional range they’ve seen in her for some time. “You think I didn’t try? You think I wanted that to happen?”
They flinch as her voice echoes around the cave.
“I can only ask,” she says through her teeth. Her face grows still again, impassive. Her eyes, glossy black pools, reflect the fire. “I asked the deer. It answered.”
“You asked,” Lewis says. “And it trusted you. It followed you to slaughter.”
She gives him an almost imperceptible nod and then whispers, “Yes.”
* * *
It is soon after this — as they push farther through the mountains and the air begins to warm and the snow thins to gray tatters and green shoots spring from the muddy ground — that Lewis discovers the coffin-shaped box. Reed had the larger backpack, and after he shot himself, Lewis crushed together their supplies into one. There is a zippered interior pocket he has not noticed until this day, when he digs around for a needle and thread to sew a tear in the armpit of his long-sleeve.
The box is the length of his hand. He recognizes it as belonging to Reed. Something he held often, almost like a charm. His thumb flips the lock. The lid swings open. He leans closer to see what waits inside it. Nothing but a shadow, it first appears, but then he tips it toward the sun and sees the vial. A long glass tube. There is a black powdery substance inside, and when he tips it one way, then the other, the shadow comes to life. The label across it reads Specimen: Live Virus: H3L1. He understands. The rest of the world blurs and the box seems suddenly to gain weight, to bend his arm.
He imagines the vial opened, the shadow within it escaping, its shape the shape of the wind, ribboning and clouding outward, filling the air around him like a thousand spores of rotten thistledown.
He claps shut the lid. His first impulse is to bury it, erase it. But something stills his hand. His role as a curator — one who preserves the past, both the awful and the regular — and the memory of the burned-down villages. The heads on sticks, the blackened bones unpuzzled in the snow. Whatever and whoever awaits him at the end of the trail. The lingering worry that humanity isn’t worth saving after all and would be better off extinguished.
“What’s the matter with you?” Colter says. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“Nothing,” Lewis says and hurries the box back into its secret pocket.
Chapter 47
FITTED WITH BACKPACKS and armed with compasses and clocks and lanterns, Simon and Ella work their way through the sewers. His goal has always been to escape the city as quickly as possible, so he has never gone this way before, down a branching series of tunnels with centuries-old muck scalloping their bottom. They are looking for the basement entry to the Dome, the one Danica told them about. “It was left open as an escape route,” she said.
Every minute or so they pause to listen. He wears a belt knife. Ella carries her baseball bat and keeps it constantly raised. Whenever a rat scuttles by or a spider drops on her shoulder, she swallows a scream. And because this is his opportunity to prove himself, to show Ella that he is capable and good on his word as a thief, he pretends himself unafraid, puffing his chest and crushing spiders with his palm and telling her not to worry.