"Why couldn't she talk before, when you were trying to let her?"
"I don't know, Jared. There really isn't enough room for both of us. I can't seem to get myself out of the way completely. It's like... not like holding your breath. Like trying to pause your heartbeats. I can't make myself not exist. I don't know how."
He didn't answer, and my chest throbbed with pain. How joyful he would be if I could figure out how to erase myself!
Melanie wanted to... not to contradict me, but to make me feel better; she struggled to find words to soften my agony. She couldn't come up with the right ones.
But Ian would be devastated. And Jamie. Jeb would miss you. You have so many friends here.
Thanks.
I was glad that we were back to our room now. I needed to think about something else before I started crying. Now wasn't the time for self-pity. There were more important issues at hand than my heart, breaking yet again.
Chapter 43: Frenzied
I imagined that from the outside, I looked as still as a statue. My hands were folded in front of me, my face was without expression, my breathing was too shallow to move my chest.
Inside, I was spinning apart, as if the pieces of my atoms were reversing polarity and blowing away from one another.
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