Chương 26: Fragment 26
Chris replied truthfully, "Not today."
The look the girl gave him was both angry and miserable. Normally he wouldn't reach out to help a random stranger, but her angry words had been like an echo of his own fear: dying alone, without ever meeting another of his kind.
"Don't worry, I can't catch anything from a human," he assured her.
The girl in his arms stopped breathing for a moment, as his brain caught up with his mouth. Shit. Spending twenty hours speaking with complete honesty, to a dragon, while isolated in the middle of a national forest, had broken down his usual guard on his own tongue. Not that there was any reason that Amaru couldn't be lying to him, but he wanted to believe the feeling that told him that the older dragon was honorable.
"Ah, I didn't mean that literally," he lied quickly. "Sometimes I just feel like I'm not the same as everyone else. I've never caught a cold." Truths could lend lies their strength, an old lesson, an old caution.
She drew a wheezing breath, and asked doubtfully, "Never?"
"No… but I have been poisoned, and I'm told that many of the symptoms are the same?" he explained.
"Someone poisoned you? Or, like food poisoning?" she asked as she shivered in his arms. She was so cold. He politely ignored the snot that she was dripping on his shirt, it was pretty much ruined anyway.
"It wasn't intentional," he prevaricated.
She started to cry. At least, he hoped she was crying and not having convulsions. He needed to get her to somewhere warm. After a moment he lifted her into his arms. She was heavier than he expected, but he was stronger than he looked.
She gasped and stared at him like he'd just transformed. He actually checked his features in the glass of one of the dark shop windows as he passed. He hadn't changed, it was still the same face he'd chosen before falling asleep in his small, but ridiculously expensive, crypt five years ago. It was such a cliche 'vampire' move, but it was really a very safe tactic, and he'd been using it for two centuries now.
"They say this virus is different," she warned him worriedly. She was obviously a very kind person. "They say that even all kinds of animals can catch it. Even if you've got an amazing immune system that makes you feel like you're not human, you might still catch it."
She was definitely weeping now, and he tried to reassure her, "You don't have the new virus."
--
The strange man's confident sounding words shocked Anne so much that her tears stopped like a faucet had been shut off. If only her nose would follow their example.
"You can't know that!" she protested angrily. It wasn't like she wanted to have caught it, but what else would strike so suddenly? And she really didn't want to infect anyone else. Everyone knew that you were supposed to keep a 6 foot distance, wash your hands every chance you got, and never touch your face, but this guy had walked right up to her, and now he was carrying her off like a princess or something. He was going to die, and it was going to be her…
"If what I read about the symptoms is true, you don't have it," he interrupted her sorrowful thoughts with calm logic. "One of the reasons it is appearing to spread so fast, is that it is apparently one of those horrible silent diseases that is already killing you before you notice it. You, on the other hand, are obviously dreadfully ill."
Anne stared at his face, searching for… something, truth maybe, through the ripples that were obscuring her vision even with her eyes open. She ought to tell him to put her down. She ought to at least be trying to walk on her own. But she was so tired.
She let her eyes close for a moment, and listened to his even breathing. He was walking so quickly while carrying her, but he wasn't even breathing hard. The rippling water was so clear in her vision right now that she could almost see the texture of the branches that reflected in it, and the leaves.
But the rippling of the water that no one else could see wasn't letting her focus on any branch in particular for more than a second. It was strange, it wasn't just the rippling of the water, it was like the branches themselves were moving too. Like she was running beside the stream, like… she was being carried along beside the stream.
Anne's eyes popped open and she stared at the man whose body heat was slowly warming one side of her so much that she could almost sleep. The clear water still rippled across his face, but she thought that it was sort of average looking.
His hair was gold though. You just didn't see that color of blonde on an adult without dye. Young children sometimes. Maybe he colored it. He was obviously in really good shape, even if his build had seemed average at a glance. The feel of his shirt was like silk. Maybe he was rich, and she was being rescued from the hell her life had become, like some fairytale come true.
He was probably gay. She was a disgusting mess. She immediately resolved not to hold his preferences against him. Her snot was a cold river that was making a cold and wet stain on his shirt. She scrubbed at her face and throat with the sodden scrap of sleeve, and cleared her throat.
"Sorry," she apologized inadequately.
"I am sure that you did not choose to fall ill," he assured her immediately, without breaking stride.
"No," she agreed uncertainly. The way he talked was like a rich person too. Who phrased things like that anymore? 'Did not choose.' It wasn't that the words were unusual, there was just something about the, what was that fancy word… cadence?
"How long have you been coming down with this dreadful cold?" he asked gently.
Maybe it was the adjectives he was using. Her grandmother had often described illness as horrible or dreadful instead of sucky or nasty.
--
Chris was rather afraid that the girl in his arms had caught one of the old fevers that had plagued mankind for centuries. Nothing he'd read while standing beside the library had indicated that the new pandemic was accompanied by outbreaks of older illnesses, but they always seemed to be lurking at the edges, waiting for a time of weakness and vulnerability.
He was using a technique that he'd learned from a knight who had learned from a monk who had learned from some sort of priest in the mountains of another continent's west, to let his blood warm his skin. Modern science belittled the ability to consciously control the tightness of your own veins and the beat of your heart, but some humans could do it, and for him… it was easy.
It wasn't enough though. The girl needed more heat than he could provide this way, shelter, nutrition, clean water… it was very foolish of him to try to take responsibility for another when he lacked the resources to fulfill his own needs. But she was human, so there was no dishonor in asking other humans for aid on her behalf.
Honor, and dishonor, they were known as concepts of battle. But he had fought beside those who were not like him in many different battles over the years. Sometimes simply because if someone had asked him then, 'Do you want to die?' He could have answered, 'Yes, I am ready to die today.' But there had been other battles where he had fought for life.
Before he had come west, to stand on the opposite coast from what his homeland had known as the far east, and stare at the setting sun with nothing but the curve of the Earth itself to stand between… he had worn a woman's shape for a while. And he had walked in a field full of the dying, and those so sick that they simply wished they were dying.
For weeks he had walked without stopping. His fellow nurses had been too exhausted, too worn, and pushing themselves too far beyond their own limits, to notice that the woman beside them had never stopped to sleep or to eat. He had fought the invisible foe, and sometimes, he had won.
He had also lost so much that he had left that fight to others for a full century. He glanced down at the nearly unconscious girl in his arms. So dirty, so miserable, so alone.
'Gregory Vincent' had contributed to charities. He had helped out his few friends whenever he could. And he had isolated himself behind comfortable walls, and enjoyed every new technology he found, with the selfish enthusiasm of a child.
'Chris T'andy' had asked 'Amaru Drakon' the wrong things. He had wasted precious time. He should have asked if dragons could cure diseases. He should have asked if he could learn to give others his own apparent immunity to them.
He came to a halt, and stood for a moment where he had stood before. At the entry to the place. The place that existed somewhere in every large city, where the water met the shore. With another human child cradled in his arms.
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