“I don’t know, Cyn.” Willow patted her hand. “But I will ask him. Sometimes you don’t know, what you don’t know.”
“I’ll go with you to talk.” Again that was Vargr.
She was feeling left out and needed to contributesomething. Cyn caught her lip in her teeth and thought. “What aboutMaura? If this is the nanites misbehaving, might she know something?”
“Yes. That’s also a good idea.” From the sounds Willow had moved away. “I want to make it clear that you are very important to me, and to us. To all of us. And I may not have any training, but there have been too many problems. To me, you seem ill, even if I don’t know why or how.”
“And yet Cyn can heal anything?” Vincent was here. He sounded puzzled, which didn’t surprise her.
She raised her head, trying to track where he was. “I had thought so, yes.” Wrong, however.
“Okay. I’m going to talk this through with Vincent and whoever comes forward, see if there is anyone else with ideas. We will camp here and start looking for a car to put Maura in. Rutger, you can take care of Cyn?”
So this was Ground Floor? She’d not realized with all the fuss.
And there was Willow doing her organizing, only this time she, herself, was a cog in the wheel and could do nothing. She stood and waited for Rutger to find her and guide her.
She must get better. Had to.
Blessedly, she did improve. By the time camp was set up and a car had been pulled in from a roadway, she could see light and movement. An hour later she was even better.
She stayed awake while others slept, with Rutger and Vargr to either side among the sleeping bags they’d laid out. By dusk her vision was perfect.
The relief was such that she’d cried lying there, staring up at the stairwell they’d descended, watching the dust materialize and float down through the muted sunlight. Light that’d dared to find a way in through the punctured walls.
“I can see,” she told Vargr when he stirred, and he smiled and hugged her.
Rutger woke and joined him, slapping both her and Vargr on the back. “Hell, yeah.”
“Now we just have to figure out why it happened.” Vargr wriggled out from the embrace and stood. “I know Willow has been racking her brains. She’s like a terrier.”
“For me?”
“Of course for you.” Rutger edged her top higher up her shoulders, readjusted the fall of the long shirt where it reached her butt. “You’re the star of this show. Don’t you know?”
She grimaced. Her? She’d brought them reasons to come here, to seek out the Big Daddy vehicle butthe starwas a stretch.
They were all stars, she decided later, while watching everyone who’d been called by Willow gather around, after they broke their fast. This first meal at dusk should not get the breakfast label. It irked her and needed a new name like brupper or dinfast.
Willow clapped her hands together. “Time for a small meeting. Sit please, my chosen ones.” They laughed at that. She waited until everyone found a chair and sat. This area must have been a waiting area of sorts, as there were innumerable soft sofas and pretty wrought iron chairs, though all of them suffered from layers of dirt and mold. There was even hair on one sofa. Long fair, zigzag hair that she saw Vincent brush away. As it fell, she saw that it was clearly over a foot long. Nanodogs? What else.
This wide thoroughfare had once been a sheltered arcade. Shops to one side, these seats, bus stops. Past the kerb was a roadway bare of vehicles, spotted with chunks of concrete that’d dropped from above, long ago when the buildings shook. A few desiccated bodies. Nothing dangerous, though any Safety and Health organization would be frowning and writing out citations by the dozens.
Nothing dangerous, yet.
Nanodogs were possible here.
Oops.Everyone waited for her. She plonked her butt between Rutger and Vargr on a blue floral couch, completing the circle.
“I aim to get to the bottom of this, Cyn.” Their leader leaned forward with her hands clasped between her knees while she eyed each of them, one after the other, before circling back to Cyn. “Imagine this as an episode ofHouseand that you have the most unimaginable disease.”
She squinted at Willow. A joke? House would discover she had an allergy to the apocalypse or something and prescribe ten ccs of mouse bites, or werewolf blood, or something equally bizarre.
“Me? My sight returned. I am well.”
“I know. But you were not for a while. You’ve been lame, had headaches, all sorts of odd things, then you recover. Vincent was the one who came up with the best theory.”
Vincent opened his mouth to speak.
