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There are abrasions around the neck -- rope burns, no doubt. The gash on the left leg is what's festering. Toby's as gentle as she can be, but Ren winces and yelps. "That fucking hurts!" she says. Then she throws up the salt-and-sugar water.
After she's wiped away the filth, Toby starts washing the leg wound. "How did you get this?" she asks.
"I don't know." Ren is whispering. "I fell down."
Toby cleans out the gash and puts some honey on it. Antibiotics in it, Pilar used to say. There ought to be a first-aid kit, somewhere in the Spa. "Hold still. You don't want gangrene," she says to Ren.
Ren giggles. "Knock, knock," she says, "Gang grene."
The dirty covering's all stripped away, and Ren has been sponged. "I'll give you some Willow and Chamomile," Toby says. And Poppy, she thinks. "You need to sleep." Ren will be safer on the floor than on the table: she makes a nest of pink towels, eases her down onto it, adds extra padding because Ren can't make it to the bathroom, she's too weak. She's hot as an ember.
Toby brings the Willow mixture in a small glass. Ren swallows, her throat moving like a bird's. Nothing comes up.
There's no use trying the maggots yet. Ren needs to be coherent for that, able to obey instructions: no scratching, for instance. The first thing is to get the temperature down.
While Ren sleeps, Toby sorts through her store of dried mushrooms. She chooses the immune-system boosters: reishi, maitake, shitake, birch polypore, zhu ling, lion's mane, coryceps, ice man. She puts them in boiled water to soak. Then in the afternoon she prepares a mushroom elixir -- the simmering, the straining, the cooling -- and gives Ren thirty drops of it.
The cubicle stinks. Toby lifts Ren up, rolls her to the side, pulls out the soiled towels, wipes Ren off. She's put on rubber gloves for the purpose: if dysentery's going around she has no wish to catch it. She smoothes down clean towels, rolls Ren back. Her arms flop, her head wilts; she's muttering.
This is going to be a lot of work, thinks Toby. And when Ren recovers -- if she recovers -- there will be two people eating instead of one. So the food stash will be gone twice as quickly. What's left of it. Which isn't much.
Maybe the fever will get the better of Ren. Maybe she'll die in her sleep.
Toby considers the powdered Death Angels. It wouldn't take much. Just a little, in Ren's weakened condition. Put her out of her misery. Help her to fly away on white, white wings. Maybe it would be kinder. A blessing.
I am an unworthy person, Toby thinks. Merely to have such an idea. You've known this girl since she was a child, she's come to you for help, she has every right to trust you. Adam One would say that Ren is a precious gift that has been given to Toby so that Toby may demonstrate unselfishness and sharing and those higher qualities the Gardeners had been so eager to bring out in her. Toby can't quite see it that way, not at the moment. But she'll have to keep trying.
Ren sighs and groans and flails. She's having a bad dream.
When it's dark, Toby lights a candle and sits beside her, listening to her breathe. In out, in out. Pause. In. Then out. Raggedy. At intervals she feels Ren's forehead. Cooler? There must be a thermometer in the building; in the morning she'll look for it. She takes her pulse: rapid, irregular.
Then she nods off in her chair, and the next thing she knows she wakes up in the dark with a smell of singeing. She winds up her flashlight: the candle has fallen over, and a corner of Ren's pink sheet is smouldering. Luckily it's damp.
That was terminally stupid, Toby tells herself. No more candles unless I'm fully awake.
65
TOBY. SAINT MAHATMA GANDHI DAY
YEAR TWENTY-FIVE
In the morning Ren feels cooler. Her pulse is stronger, and she can even hold the cup of warm water in her own two trembling hands. Toby's put mint in it this morning, as well as the honey and salt.
Once Ren has gone to sleep again, Toby hauls the dirty sheets and towels up to the roof to wash them. She's brought her binoculars, and while the sheets and towels are soaking she scans the Spa grounds.
Pigs far away, over in the southwest corner of the meadow. Two Mo'Hairs, a blue one and a silver one, grazing quietly together. No liobams. Dogs barking somewhere. Vultures flapping around the pig funeral site.
"Get away from there, you archeologists," says Toby. She's feeling light-headed, almost giddy -- in the mood to tell herself jokes. Three huge pink butterflies circle her head, alight on the damp sheets. Maybe they think they've found the biggest pink butterfly of all. Maybe it's a love affair. Now they have their thin tongues unrolled, licking. Not love, then: salt.
Some will tell you Love is merely chemical, my Friends, said Adam One. Of course it is chemical: where would any of us be without chemistry? But Science is merely one way of describing the world. Another way of describing it would be to say: where would any of us be without Love?
Dear Adam One, thinks Toby. He must be dead. And Zeb -- dead also, despite wishful thinking. Though maybe not; because if I'm alive -- more to the point, if Ren's alive -- then anyone at all could be alive too.
She stopped listening on her wind-up radio months ago because the silence was so discouraging. But just because she's heard no one doesn't mean no one's there. Which had been among Adam One's hypothetical proofs for the existence of God.
Toby washes Ren's infected leg, applies more honey. Ren eats a little, drinks a little. More mushroom elixir, more Willow. After much rummaging, Toby locates a Spa first-aid kit; there's a tube of antibiotic cream, but it's stale-dated. No thermometer. Who ordered this crap? she thinks. Oh yes. I did.
Anyway maggots are better.
