Page 86 of Property of Prophet

Ruth is seventy-one, and her face is ruined. The grace burn has left fine cracks from her eyes to her jaw. The ember-light died out of the cracks when the seal closed. What remains looks decades old, scarred with no wound behind it, and she reads my expression while I clean it the way older women read everything.

“It’s bad,” she says. Not a question.

“It’s healed, which is different from bad. The marks are stable. They won’t spread.” Antiseptic, ointment, my penlight checking her pupils. “Any burning now? Any pain?”

“No.” She stays quiet through the whole exam, hands folded in her lap with terrible politeness. Then, at the end, very softly, she says, “I have four grandchildren, Doctor. In Wasilla. They think Grandma has been at a church retreat.” Her folded hands tighten. “What do I tell them happened to my face?”

The clearing goes on around us, blankets, steam, and low voices. There is no chart for this.

“Tell them you got too close to something you believed in,” I say finally. “It has the advantage of being true.”

Ruth studies me for a long moment. Under the cracks, her eyes are ferociously sane, and I wonder how long they have been sane, and what it cost her to march up a mountain anyway.

“He knew my husband’s voice,” she whispers. “Forty years widowed, and he could do Harold’s voice, right down to the cough.” Her chin lifts, shame and grief holding each other up. “You get lonely enough, Doctor, you’ll follow a cough anywhere.”

Five years on this ridge taught me exactly how true a sentence can be. My hand covers her folded ones, blue gloves over paper skin, and neither of us says anything else. Some wounds only want a witness.

Dana is the one I have been avoiding, and she knows it.

No hair under her borrowed wool cap. The hospital bracelet is still on her wrist, thawed now, the plastic our oncology ward used. Late thirties at most. She watches me work my way down the row toward her all morning, and when I finally kneel at her side, she gets her question in before my stethoscope lands.

“It’s still in me, isn’t it?”

Everything in medicine trains you for this moment, and none of it helps. Her lymph nodes tell me under my fingers what her chart will confirm. Whatever Calix promised her, he never touched the disease. He only touched the fear of it and fed there.

“I can’t stage anything on a mountainside,” I say. “But yes. Nothing was healed.”

Dana nods slowly, eyes on the tree line, and the calm on her face frightens me more than weeping would.

“He described the morning it would leave me,” she says. “In the new world, after his ascension. He said my hair would come back the same summer his kingdom did. He described the exact weight of it on my neck.” Her jaw works. “I stopped treatment in October. My sister begged me on her knees in a hospital parking lot, and I told her she lacked faith.”

“Then the first call you make from town is to your sister.” My hand closes around her wrist, above the bracelet, on the pulse. “And the second is to your oncologist. October is a setback. It is not a verdict. You are not done, and I will write the referral myself on the back of a ration carton if I have to.”

“Why would you do anything for m-me?” It comes out cracked. “I stood on your ridge with these people. I sang while they shot at your family.”

“Because I’m a doctor, and you’re sick.” Simple truths deserve simple delivery. A wet laugh breaks out of her, and I let a small, dangerous piece of my own history follow it out. “And because I know what it costs to believe a confident man in an expensive coat. Mine only took my career. Let’s get you down this mountain and worry about the rest from there.”

She holds onto my hand for a while, her grip surprisingly strong. Good. Let Calix be wrong about that too.

They bring the last one to me, bound.

Scout carries her into the clearing, zip-tied at the wrists, apologetic about it, and one look explains him. She is younger than most, colorless with cold, and the emptiness the others wear has filled up in her with something else. Her eyes fix on me the moment she is set down, and she never moves through the exam, the frostbite check, or the warming.

“You’re the anchor,” she says. Her voice is scraped and pleasant. “He showed us your face in the fire, weeks ago. The doctor on the mountain.” A smile arrives with nothing behind it. “You touched the working. It touched you back.”

“Extend your fingers.”

She extends her fingers, obedient as a Sunday child, smiling the whole time. “He isn’t gone,” she says softly. “You know it. Not destroyed. Sealed. He is beneath your floor and beneath your feet, and he is very patient, and every night you sleep in your little bed above him...” The smile widens by one degree. “Forty-two of us said yes. Do you believe we were the last yes in the whole hungry world?”

Rotor noise rolls up from the lower ridge. Someone is crying. Bear is barking at all of it. Still, her words send cold shivers down my spine.

“Flex,” I tell her, level. She flexes. “Good news. You’ll keep all ten fingers.”

“Will you keep everything of yours?” she asks sweetly and leans in. “He sees through the cracks. Even sealed, especially sealed. He is already learning what you love.”

Vex is beside me without appearing to have crossed the intervening space. He does not touch her. He looks patient, pale, and ancient, until her sweet smile falters against a predator with no floor of his own. Scout carries her toward the convoy. My hands go back to work because the alternative is thinking.

Prophet finds me between patients, and says nothing about my face. His arm comes around my shoulders from the side, one beat of warmth in the ruined morning, and against his coat my breath comes back to level.