Bringing Melanie back had not saved him. All that I could do was not enough.
The hall outside our room was crowded. Jared, Kyle, and Ian were back from their desperate raid, empty-handed. A cooler of ice—that was all they had to show for three days of risking their lives. Trudy was making compresses and laying them across Jamie’s forehead, the back of his neck, his chest.
Even if the ice cooled the fever, raging out of control, how long until it was all melted? An hour? More? Less? How long until he was dying again?
I would have been the one to put the ice on him, but I couldn’t move. If I moved, I would fall into microscopic pieces.
“Nothing?” Doc murmured. “Did you check —”
“Every spot we could think of,” Kyle interrupted. “It’s not like painkillers, drugs—lots of people had reason to keep those hidden. The antibiotics were always kept in the open. They’re gone, Doc.”
Jared just stared down at the red-faced child on the bed, not speaking.
Ian stood beside me. “Don’t look like that,” he whispered. “He’ll pull through. He’s tough.”
I couldn’t respond. Couldn’t even hear the words, really.
Doc knelt beside Trudy and pulled Jamie’s chin down. With a bowl he scooped up some of the ice water from the cooler and let it trickle into Jamie’s mouth. We all heard the thick, painful sound of Jamie’s swallowing. But his eyes didn’t open.
I felt as though I would never be able to move again. That I would turn into part of the stone wall. I wanted to be stone.
If they dug a hole for Jamie in the empty desert, they would have to put me in it, too.
Not good enough, Melanie growled.
I was despairing, but she was filled with fury.
They tried.
Trying solves nothing. Jamie will not die. They have to go back out.
For what purpose? Even if they did find your old antibiotics, what are the chances they would still be any good? They only worked half the time anyway. Inferior. He doesn’t need your medicine. He needs more than that. Something that really works…
My breathing sped up, deepened as I saw it.
He needs mine, I realized.
Mel and I were both awestruck by the obviousness of this idea. The simplicity of it.
My stone lips cracked apart. “Jamie needs real medicines. The ones the souls have. We need to get him those.”
Doc frowned at me. “We don’t even know what those things do, how they work.”
“Does it matter?” Some of Melanie’s anger was seeping into my voice. “They do work. They can save him.”
Jared stared at me. I could feel Ian’s eyes on me, too, and Kyle’s, and all the rest in the room. But I saw only Jared.
“We can’t get ’em, Wanda,” Jeb said, his tone already one of defeat. Giving up. “We can only get into deserted places. There’s always a bunch of your kind in a hospital. Twenty-four hours a day. Too many eyes. We won’t do Jamie any good if we get caught.”
“Sure,” Kyle said in a hard voice. “The centipedes will be only too happy to heal his body when they find us here. And make him one of them. Is that what you’re after?”
I turned to glare at the big, sneering man. My body tensed and leaned forward. Ian put his hand on my shoulder as if he were holding me back. I didn’t think I would have made any aggressive move toward Kyle, but maybe I was wrong. I was so far from my normal self.
When I spoke, my voice was dead even, no inflection. “There has to be a way.”
Jared was nodding. “Maybe someplace small. The gun would make too much noise, but if there were enough of us to overwhelm them, we could use knives.”
“No.” My arms came unfolded, my hands falling open in shock. “No. That’s not what I meant. Not killing —”
No one even listened to me. Jeb was arguing with Jared.
“There’s no way, kid. Somebody’d get a call off to the Seekers. Even if we were in and out, something like that would bring ’em down on us in force. We’d be hard-pressed to make it out at all. And they’d follow.”
“Wait. Can’t you —”
They still weren’t listening to me.
“I don’t want the boy to die, either, but we can’t risk everyone’s lives for one person,” Kyle said. “People die here; it happens. We can’t get crazy to save one boy.”
I wanted to choke him, to cut off his air in order to stop his calm words. Me, not Melanie. I was the one who wanted to turn his face purple. Melanie felt the same way, but I could tell how much of the violence came directly from me.
“We have to save him,” I said, louder now.
Jeb looked at me. “Hon, we can’t just walk in there and ask.”
Right then, another very simple and obvious truth occurred to me.
“You can’t. But I can.”
The room fell dead silent.
I was caught up in the beauty of the plan forming in my head. The perfection of it. I spoke mostly to myself, and to Melanie. She was impressed. This would work. We could save Jamie.
“They aren’t suspicious. Not at all. Even if I’m a horrible liar, they would never suspect me of anything. They wouldn’t be listening for lies. Of course not. I’m one of them. They would do anything to help me. I’d say I got hurt hiking or something… and then I’d find a way to be alone and I’d take as much as I could hide. Think of it! I could get enough to heal everyone here. To last for years. And Jamie would be fine! Why didn’t I think of this before? Maybe it wouldn’t have been too late even for Walter.”