I feel different. Lighter. As if a weight, both physical and mental, has been lifted from me.
I sit up. I am still in the tent, but alone. The flap moves softly in the breeze.
Again, I wonder whether I’m dreaming. But the bed beneath me, hard and slightly bowed in the centre, feels solid. The air smells good, laden with the scents of cooking. I have a burning thirst and a sore throat. That’s where they put the tube in.
“Jade!” I can hear nothing from outside. Inside I feel changed. I suddenly realise what is different.
I lift the rough cloth shirt I am wearing and look at my chest. The growths are crusted black with leaked blood, looking like shrivelled mushrooms sprouting from dead flesh. But I am not dead. It is the Sickness that is no more, stumped in its tracks, driven from within to shows itself as a crispy, rotten mess on the outside. Displaying its true nature.
Tentatively I lift my hand, suddenly desperate to touch myself there but aware of the pain which will inevitably come with the contact.
“Go on,” Jade says from the entrance. “It’s all right. Touch it. See what happens.”
I look up, all wide eyed and scared. Jade is smiling and the expression suits her. I touch one of the growths with my fingertips, barely brushing it. It feels hard and dry, like an over-cooked sausage. There is no pain, no sensation of contact at all. I touch it again and jump as it falls off and tumbles to the ground. Lying in the dust, it looks like nothing.
Beneath the old growth there is a flash of bright pink skin. New skin.
“It’ll fade to white,” Jade says, moving towards me, tears in her eyes. “What did I tell you? Isn’t he something?”
“I feel different,” I say.
“You’re better. I remember the feeling. You’re just not used to being healthy. It’s cleaned your blood, driven out all the bad stuff. You’re cured, Gabe.” She runs her hand across my chest and the growths come off, sprinkling into my lap and onto the floor like a shower of black hailstones. All I feel is a slight resistance, a tugging at my chest. “You’re beautiful.”
I reach out for her and hold her close, crying, feeling happy and sad and scared all at the same time. “Jade, I saw something terrible.”
She pulls away. “The bodies?”
I nod, struck dumb with surprise.
“Gabe …” Jade looks away, avoiding my eyes, and I terrify myself by laughing. It reminds me of the soft laugh of Tiarnan’s partner as he dropped the body, but that only makes it harder to stop. I want to hate myself but find I can’t.
“Is this really the last thing, Jade?” I ask through tears of mixed emotion. “Is there anything else after this? Whatever it is I’m going to be told, or see, now?”
She looks at me nervously, shaking her head. “This is just about the biggest, Gabe.”
We stay silent for a while, me waiting for her to talk, Jade sniffing and wiping tears away from her cheeks. She cannot meet my gaze, her hands will not touch me. We are islands separated by a deep sea of knowledge. I am waiting for her to let me take the plunge.
“Right,” she says, standing back and preparing herself. She looks into my eyes. Suddenly, I don’t want to hear what she is going to say. Out of everything possible, any words, that is the last thing I want to hear. Because it is something terrible. “Right,” she says again, wringing her hands. I swing my legs from the bed in readiness to flee the tent, steal the moat-boat and make my escape before she can say any more. But String is standing in the doorway. I pause, my heart thumping inextricably clean blood around my body, but find myself too scared to enjoy the sensation.
“Shall I tell him, Jade?”
She shakes her head. “It’s about time I levelled with him, I think.” I sit back down. Jade steps closer until we are almost touching.
“Gabe, the cure that String gave you is distilled in the presence of the tomb, under the mountain, in the realm of the flight of birds, from the brain fluid of the dead.” She turns away and looks pleadingly at String.
I feel empty, emotionless, a void. I should feel sick, I suppose, but I’ve had far too much of that already. I’m shocked, but somehow not as surprised as perhaps I should be. I feel disgust, but second-hand, as if this is all happening to someone else. “Oh,” is all I can say.
“All things must be made use of, Gabe,” String says, a note of desperation in his voice as if he’s trying to persuade himself as well as me. “It’s a new world. If humanity wants to go and slaughter itself, then at least I can bring some small measure of good from it.”
“Did you kill them?” I ask. It seems the most important question to me, the pivotal factor that will enable me to handle what has happened, or not.
“What?” String seems surprised. He could just be buying time.
“Did you kill them? All the dead people I saw last night. Being taken into the mountain. Did you kill them?”
“No.” He looks me in the eye, his gaze unwavering. He smiles grimly, tilts his head to the side. “No. You heard them killed, so Jade tells me. You saw them dying out there, alone, in the heat. We just use the raw material.”
“Brain fluid?” I am filled with a grotesque fascination in what has happened to me, abhorrence countered with a perverse fascination. I wonder briefly how he knows of the cure — how he discovered it — but shove it from my mind like an unwanted guilt.
String nods. “Yes. I won’t tell you the details.”
“Good,” Jade murmurs. “Gabe, come here. Come here.” She throws her arms around me, hugs me to her. I can feel her tears as they drip onto my shoulders, run down my chest. It feels good.
“Are you leaving?” String says.
“Damn right!” I don’t believe I could stay here.
He smiles, and this one touches his eyes. “Good.” He turns away.
“String.” He glances back, squinting either at the sun or in preparation for whatever else I’m going to say. “Thank you.” He nods as he walks away.
Later, Jade and I leave. The moat-boat takes us across the broken glass. I realise that I have never considered what the moat is intended as protection against; now, I do not want to know. I try to avoid standing on the darker patches in the wood, but they are everywhere, and it is almost impossible.
String is nowhere to be seen. Perhaps he is beneath the mountain, beyond the place of books in the cavern that the birds know all about. Brewing.
Tiarnan has had the trike oiled and serviced. This time, on the way back down the mountain, we take it in turns.