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That was when she realized it. The virus was gone.
Not transmuted into some new state, as it had been in Fanning and Amy, restoring their human appearance while leaving other traits intact. The virus was nowhere inside her at all. Somehow the water had killed it, and then returned her to life.
How was this possible? Had Fanning lied to her? But when she searched her memory she realized he had never told her, in so many words, that the water would kill her, she who was neither wholly viral nor wholly human but poised between the two. Perhaps he had sensed the truth; perhaps he simply hadn’t known. What irony! She had hurled herself off the fantail of the Bergensfjord intending to die, yet it was the water that had been her salvation in the end.
But to be alive. To smell and hear and taste the world in proper proportion. To be alone in one’s mind at last. She inhaled the sensation like the purest air. How amazing, how wondrous and unexpected. To be purely and simply a person again.
Fanning was dead. The wreckage of the city told her so first, then the bodies, curled and crumbling to ash. She took shelter in a ruined bodega. Perhaps the others were searching for her; perhaps they weren’t, believing her dead. On the morning of the second day she heard someone calling. It was Michael. “Hello!” His voice ricocheted through the becalmed streets. “Hello! Is anybody there?” Michael! she answered. Find me! I’m here! But then she realized that she had not, in fact, spoken these words aloud.
It was very puzzling. Why would she not call out to him? What was this impulse to be silent? Why could she not tell him where she was? His calls faded, then were gone.
She waited for the meaning of this to become clear, so that a plan might emerge. The days moved by. When it rained, she set pots outside the store to catch the drops, and in that manner she slaked her thirst, though she had neither food nor the means to locate it, a fact that seemed oddly unimportant; she wasn’t hungry at all. She slept a great deal: whole nights, many days as well. Long, deep states of unconsciousness in which she dreamed with fascinating emotional and sensory vividness. Sometimes she was a little girl, sitting outside the wall of the Colony. At others, a young woman, standing the Watch with cross and blades. She dreamed of Peter. She dreamed of Amy. She dreamed of Michael. She dreamed of Sara and Hollis and Greer and, quite often, of her magnificent Soldier. Whole days, whole episodes of her life replayed before her eyes.
But the greatest of these dreams was the dream of Rose.
It began in a forest—misty, dark, like something from a childhood tale. She was hunting. On cautious, nearly floating steps she progressed beneath the trees’ dense canopy, bow at the ready. From all around came the small noises and movements of game in the brush, yet her targets remained elusive. No sooner would she identify the location of a particular sound—a cracking twig, the rustle of dry leaves—than it would swing behind her or shift to the side, as if the woodland’s inhabitants were toying with her.
She emerged into an area of rolling fields of open grassland. The sun had set, but darkness was yet to fall. As she walked, the grass grew taller. It rose to her waist, then to her chest. The light—soft, faintly glowing—remained uniform and appeared to have no source. From somewhere ahead she heard a new sound. It was laughter. A bright, bubbly, little-girl laughter. Rose! she cried, for she knew instinctively that the voice was her daughter’s. Rose, where are you! She tore forward. The grass whipped her face and eyes. Desperation gripped her heart. Rose, I can’t see you! Help me find you!
—Here I am, Mama!
—Where?
Alicia caught a flicker of movement, ahead and to the right. A flash of red hair.
—Over here! the girl teased. She was laughing, playing a game. Can’t you see me? I’m right here!
Alicia plunged toward her. But like the animals in the forest, her daughter seemed to be everywhere and nowhere, her calls coming from all directions.
—Here I am! Rose sang. Try to find me!
—Wait for me!
—Come find me, Mama!
Suddenly the grass was gone. She found herself standing on a dusty road sloping upward toward the crest of a small hill.
—Rose!
No answer.
—Rose!
The road beckoned her forward. As she walked, she began to have a sense of her environment, or at least the kind of place it was. It was beyond the world she knew while also a part of it, a hidden reality that could be glimpsed as if from the corner of the eye but never wholly entered into in this life. With each step, her anxiety softened. It was as if an invisible power, purely benevolent, was guiding her. As she mounted the hill, she heard, once again, the bright, distant music of her daughter’s laughter.
