Outside the tower I can see him properly: dark hair, brown, melancholy eyes. He’s wearing an old donkey jacket, the kind used by labourers, bunched at the sleeves and unbuttoned down the front. Blood on the collar now, thanks to me.
“Tell me your name.”
He rubs a knuckle against his eyebrow. “Names,” he says. “Right. Bryan Taite.”
“I’m Sophie,” I offer warily.
“And her?” That classic English awkwardness has taken over.
“Kira.”
“I don’t know if it matters.” He sits down slowly on a large concrete block. I stay where I am, close to the door to the chimney. “Her name, that is. But it’s good to know.”
“It does matter. She was my sister. She isn’t just some…thing.”
“Sorry,” he says, not quite meeting my eyes. “That was an idiot thing to say.” He takes off his jacket even though a chilly breeze has begun to lace its way through the wreckage of the cement works. Grimacing, he stretches his arms, rubs at the spot between his shoulders where I hit him. “What was in that bag?”
“A couple of Cokes.”
“Any of them still going?”
Inside my satchel, the bottles are still intact. I hand him one, then back away a pace to open my own. Coke fizzes over my hands. I catch him grinning at me. “Let me look at your arm,” he says. A peace offering?
“Are you a doctor then?” I snipe.
“I saw the accident. I saw the blood. I…” He pauses. “Wasn’t sure if you were going to make it, to be honest.”
“Yeah.”
“But I’m pleased you did. Make it. Anyway, my mum’s a nurse. So let’s have a look.” Reluctantly, I peel back my sleeve and he lifts the gauze. The stitches are still holding, but the skin looks raw and ragged. He doesn’t say anything about my medical ID bracelet. “Hold on a mo.” He pulls a sealed package the size of a teabag out of his back pocket and presses it into my hand. An alcohol prep pad. “Clean your hands first.” I tear it open with my teeth.
“Do you think they are…”I don’t know how to say this. “Infectious? Is that how it spreads?”
That half-shrug again. “Whatever is happening to your sister, you can bet you oughtn’t to be mucking about with it.”
“What do you know about them?” I ask him. “The ones like Kira?”
“I don’t. Know very much, that is. I’ve only seen pictures before and even then it’s not the same. It’s just…” He shakes his head. “That smell, yeah? Acetone. Anorexics have the same smell. It’s called starvation ketosis. The body breaks down fats and turns them into acids that can be used for energy. That’s what’s happening to her—or at least I think it is. You can feel how light she is.”
“You touched her?”
“No, I just…” He puts up his hands defensively. “I wanted to make sure she was all right. But her bones? Soon they’ll be like the bones in tinned salmon. Soft like that. I didn’t know if she would…” He runs his hand through his hair.
“If she would what?”
“Survive the night,” he spits out. “So I came back. To see how she was and maybe help.” He leads me to his truck, which he has parked out of sight behind one of the gutted buildings. There’s a blue plastic tarpaulin hanging over the back. “I thought maybe I’d try to rig up some sort of shelter, keep the elements off her. Who knows what might affect the nymphs?”
“Nymphs?”
“That’s what they call them at the Centre.”
“Like from the Greek myths? The ones who were always being chased by fauns?” I try to make sense of this.
“Not exactly. It’s more technical than that. A nymph is a stage in the process of metamorphosis, I guess. Something that changes into something else.”
I shake my head. “The doctors at the Centre know this? And they still insist on cremating them?”
“Think about it. It’s nightmare stuff, yeah? They don’t know what’s happening, only that people with JI2 are dying—but when they do, biologically, the bodies keep going, they keep—”
“Changing.”
He grimaces unhappily. “What does that remind you of?”
All those horror films I watched with Jaina, giggling while the undead lurched their way out of their coffins and onto the streets. It doesn’t seem so funny now.
“Cremation’s the best way of stopping it while they figure things out. Clean, efficient—and people don’t ask too many questions.” He takes a swig of his Coke and when he’s finished his expression has settled again. “I thought you must’ve known this. If you didn’t know then why’d you bring her here in the first place?”
I’m still trying to work through the implications of what he’s said, what it means for Kira. “I didn’t know all this. Some of it, maybe, I guess.” I tell him how Kira died and what Dr. Varghese said to us in the hospital. “I saw the look in Kira’s eyes. Something was driving her toward the river. But if what you’re saying is true, maybe there’s more to it. Maybe some part of me knew already that I was infected and wanted to understand how it happened.” He keeps quiet throughout, studying me with a steady gaze. “I didn’t think about what would happen next.”
I turn away. The stark shape of the chimney draws my eye: dense concrete, pitted by time, the pale blue of the door frame, spotted by rust. The remnants of a metal ladder climb the left-hand side, broken and twisted in places. The light refracts from the sheared metal. The sky above is reddening, the clouds textured like herringbone in peach and gold as the sun begins its descent behind the treeline.
“What you did was really brave,” he says after a while. “I never would have had the guts.”
“How do you know all this stuff about them? The—nymphs.”
“I’ve been volunteering at the hospital. My mum, right? She thought it would be a good idea. For me to feel useful.” He glances away from me, doesn’t meet my eyes. “It’s mostly been cleaning duty, easy stuff I can’t mess up. When I saw you pushing that stretcher, I knew that you shouldn’t be there. I wondered what you were doing. Maybe that’s why I followed you out here. I was—”
“What?”
“Jealous.”
I laugh. I can’t help it.
“You aren’t the only one who wants to know what’s happening,” he says roughly. “I lost someone. Her name was Astrid. We were going to get married.” Then he shakes his head, clamps it down. “And so when I saw you…”
“What?”
“I suppose there was a part of me that wished I’d known enough back then to get her out. They cremated her body.”
“Did she have JI2?”
“Yeah, she did. I know that now.” He startles me with how close he is, close enough he could touch me if he wanted to. The expression in his eyes is too complicated for me to parse. “I won’t tell anyone,” he says.
Warmth rises in my cheeks. “Thank you,” I tell him. “For last night. For your help. You might have saved my life.”
He shrugs.
“And thank you for coming back. For Kira.” After a moment: “What’s going to happen to her?”
“I only know a little,” he says, “not enough. At the beginning, the hospitals were still performing autopsies. My mum is an autopsy nurse. She was involved in some of the early ones, when the doctors thought JI2 was caused by a parasite. When the Centre was officially set up specialists were brought in so she hasn’t had much contact since. But I’ve been looking into what she learned. In tropical forests, there’s this type of fungus. A zombie fungus, called cordyceps. It infects ants. I found an old nature documentary about it. You can see the fungus taking control until eventually it bursts from the ant’s head like a radio antenna. So these doctors thought it might be like that: a foreign body had invaded the host and was hijacking its nervous system.”
“Which caused the tremors,” I say.
“That was their theory. But they haven’t been able to find any foreign elements in the bodies. No parasites, no bacteria. Not at the earliest stages. Or later, even, after they realized the hosts weren’t entirely dead. The host suffers brain death but something happens after. First the tremors, then they sink into a sort of stasis.”
“Then what?”
“Most places cremate the bodies. But there are other options. You can donate your body to science. They say it’ll help people.” His body has begun to shake, deep shivers at the level of muscle. But he doesn’t stop talking. I don’t know if he recognizes that it’s even happening.
“What if you’re still alive? What if some part of you can sense what’s happening?”
“It’s what I’ve done,” he shoots back. “That way if I die at least I can still do some good. Mum and I talked it over. She said I wouldn’t feel anything, they’d make sure of that. If it even is me inside, which no one seems to know for sure.”
“You’re sick too?”
He holds up his right hand and pulls the cuff of his shirt back. I can see the metal tag with his patient ID number on it. “It’s why I’m on cleaning duty. They don’t want me working with patients. You?”
“I was just diagnosed.”
His eyes widen a fraction of inch. “Welcome to the monster club.”