Stay back, I mouthed toward Cammie.
She nodded, pressing further back into the doorway.
I reached out with my gloved hand and brushed Stella’s hair back over her shoulders. Her head swiveled, twisting fast, feral. Her eyes wide and bloodshot—all at once distant and fixed on me. “You…need to…leave.”
The words came out as a growl, a voice unrecognizably deep. She drew in a series of quick breaths through her mouth, then hid her face again in her knees. Pulled her knees against her tighter still.
I leaned in closer. I was getting soaked, the hot water turning my skin red. I didn’t care. “You’ve got to fight it, Stella. You’re stronger than whatever this is. You can beat it.”
“Go!” Stella shouted. “Get away from me!”
“No.”
Her gloveless right hand shot out and gripped my arm just below the elbow.
I was wearing a sweatshirt. Her skin didn’t contact mine, but when she realized what she had done, she released me and squirmed back into the corner of the shower. She got as far from me as she could, pressing tight against the tile. She looked childlike, frail. Frightened and broken.
Without looking up, I said to Cammie, “There’s a basket of fruit on the table out there. I saw it when we came in. Can you get it for me?”
“Are you serious?”
“Please.”
Cammie rolled her eyes, shrugged, and went back to the bunk room. She returned a moment later with the basket. “I don’t think she’s hungry.”
I sat the basket down on the floor beside me and took a large, red apple from the top of the pile. I held it out to Stella. “Take this.”
Stella looked out from behind her arm. She reached out tentatively with her right hand, her quivering fingers wrapping around the apple. Her thumb and index finger passed right through the plump fruit and met as if it weren’t even there—the red skin and yellow flesh beneath turned black and crumbled away, the core withered and her fist closed in the space where the apple had been seconds earlier, the entire thing dropping to the tile floor in a pulpy mess.
“Holy shit,” Cammie breathed.
I handed Stella a banana. It also crumbled away with her touch—drying, rotting, all life leaving the fruit in an instant.
I gave her an orange after that.
Another apple.
Half the bowl was gone before Stella’s erratic breathing began to slow and even out. When I handed her what was probably the sixth or seventh apple, the fruit still died, but it took nearly twenty seconds.
“Better,” Stella said softly.
I glanced at Cammie, still hovering over my shoulder. “Can you give us a minute?”
“We need to tie her up. Like Hobson.”
“We’re not tying her up. Not her.”
Cammie sighed and stomped out of the bathroom.
I turned off the shower, helped Stella stand, and wrapped a fluffy, white towel around her.
“Thank you, Pip. Thank you for being you.”
I lowered my voice. “Somebody back at my father’s house called Charter.” We hadn’t been alone. This was the first chance I had to tell her. The first time in days she was coherent enough to understand.
“What?”
“That’s not the worst of it.” I told her how Fogel had dialed back, what she said. How I had been in the woodshed with my father and had no idea who placed the call to Charter. “It could be any of them.”
