Chapter 108: You Promised
*/Nikki’s First Person POV/*
The wind hit us the moment we stepped out onto the balcony.
It came off the dead city in one long cold pull, carrying rain that hadn’t fallen yet, and it pushed the infinity pool into rows of black shivering water while the clouds sat low enough to seal the sky shut from end to end.
Not one light burned below the rail.
Behind us, the taped panes glowed in thin gold seams. Ahead lay hundreds of meters of darkness and a city with hardly anybody left in it that was human.
Far out in that dark, an infected shrieked at nothing and went quiet again.
I pulled the helmet off and held it against my hip, because the man deserved my face for this.
Nia’s father stood at the rail with the wind flattening the white coat against him, glasses catching the seam-light in two pale lines, and for a long moment he only looked at me, down the rig, down the rifle, down to the boots and back up.
Then he looked me straight in the eyes and spoke.
"Nia’s bitten... isn’t she?"
It wasn’t exactly a question. It was a diagnosis, and my face must have confirmed it on its own, because I never got a single word out before the man’s shoulders sagged.
A raspy chuckle came out of him, and it came out wrong, snagging halfway and folding into a sound that had no laughter left in it, and he had to put one hand on the rail to stay standing.
Because he knew exactly what a bite meant just as well as I did.
He had watched one from six inches, with his hands on her back in that police compound.
"I..." I started.
And his arm was already moving.
I saw the whole swing leave his shoulder. But I couldn’t bring myself to move. My body simply locked up.
-SLAP-!
The crack bounced off the pool and the glass and rolled out over the rail into the city, and my head went with it, the two loose teeth on the left lit up all the way down to their roots.
Tikki’s claws braced through the pocket, but he made no sound.
And after a long beat of silence, I slowly brought my face back around, copper spreading over my tongue, and found him exactly where he’d been, chest heaving, breath ragged through his nose, eyes red-rimmed behind the crooked glasses.
"You. Promised." It came through gritted teeth, one word at a time. "The day you handed me that shotgun... I asked you for one thing. One. And you looked me in the eye and gave me your word."
[He asked for three words... ’Bring her back.’ That’s all he asked.]
I didn’t defend it. There was frankly no defending it, and we both knew that, so I stood there with his handprint burning on my cheek and took the only thing the man had left to give while I forced the lump in my throat back down.
"I have a way to cure her."
He went absolutely still.
"...Don’t." His voice came out low and shaking. "Whatever you are about to say... do not put that in me unless it is real. I am just an old man... I will believe you. And if you are wrong, it will kill me faster than anything downstairs ever could."
"It’s real."
He stared at me.
"There is no cure." He said it slowly, to himself as much as to me. "That woman in the station... Reyna. They had me treating her for two days. I cleaned that bite every morning and every night, I gave her every drug in that building worth giving... and she turned with my hands still on her arm."
His voice cracked through the middle of it, but his words never muddled as he continued, "There is nothing on this earth that treats a bite. I looked... God knows I looked."
"Not on this earth, no." I held his eyes. "But I have the System. And it sells the Second Strain Suppressant... one dose, full clearance. The same System that built the ward she’s sleeping in... The same one that rebuilt her arm. Everything it has ever sold me has done exactly what the label said... Every gun, every stim, everything..."
His hands found the rail. Both of them, gripping it so tight that his knuckles went white around it.
"How far along is she?" The doctor arrived in his voice, thin but working. "The truth."
"Fifty percent. It becomes irreversible at eighty."
His eyes closed.
"And there is no predictable timeline of progression," he whispered. "You don’t have to tell me that part. I’ve read your notes..."
"Then you should know..." I said, softly, "The second strain can progress from fifty to a hundred in five minutes or stay right where it is for a week straight."
"Then buy it. T-that suppressant!" His eyes came open. "Whatever it costs, take everything, take-"
He stopped himself mid-word, because he already knew.
If I could afford it, it would already be in her arm.
"...You can’t. Can you?"
"It costs a hundred and fifty million Credits." I gave it to him straight. "I have seventy-two."
I watched the number land on a man who had watched me pull the impossible out of thin air, and watched him understand that even the impossible kept books.
"Then how?" he rasped. "How will you handle the rest?"
"Infected pay Credits when they die. And there’s a horde on the big lake north of the city... tens of thousands of them, packed onto one shore. I’ve seen it myself." I rolled my jaw once against the ache. "I’m flying out there now... And I’m not coming back until the number is full."
"Alone?!"
"Mea," came the correction from my shoulder.
"...We’ll manage." I let out a small smile.
The man looked at the small calico head poking out of my pocket, then back at me, and his mouth opened.
"Take me with-"
It died half a word in, because he heard it himself.
An old man with a shotgun he’d owned for two days, on a shoreline with tens of thousands of them.
He wouldn’t last the first minute, and he’d cost me the war.
His mouth closed before his hands slowly came off the rail and hung by his sides in the air, empty.
"...Then what do I do?" he asked, so quietly the wind nearly took it. "Give me my part... Any part. I will do anything you say."
And I had to give him the truth, because he’d earned that much, and it was all I had left to give.
"There isn’t one." My voice came out low. "She’s sedated through tomorrow and the day after. The monitors will read her closer than any human hand could... and the dressings won’t need changing before I’m back."
Every sentence closed one more door, and I stood there and watched every single one of them close on his face.
"I have spent thirty years being the man they carry people to," he said, and his voice had gone thin and far away. "Car crashes... Shootings... Factory accidents. They bring them in, and I put my hands in, and I win, or I lose, but my hands are IN it. That is the whole of what I am."
He looked toward the glowing seams of the living room, toward the ward behind them.
"And that’s my daughter in there. Mine... And there is not one thing on this planet for these hands to do."
He looked down at them.
"...She won’t even wake, will she?"
"Not for two more days."
He nodded, slow, and took that last door too.
"Then I’ll sit where she’d see me. If she did... And in the event she turns... I-"
-Chk-!
There was nothing left to say or hear, so I didn’t try. I seated the helmet and ran the strap home before stepping up onto the rail with the whole black city hanging under my boots.
His voice came after me one last time, rough and small against the wind.
"I won’t ask you to promise... I’m done with promises..." he said. "Just come back. Both of you."
"Mea," Tikki answered for both of us, before I stepped off the rail into the darkness ahead.