He stills. Gradually, the way weather changes, the restlessness draining out of him verse by verse until his breathing goes long and even again, and his hand, which had been working against the sheet, opens and goes quiet.
I finish the song anyway. Both verses, and the sad little end where the tide comes in. Then I sit back and I watch him sleep, this stranger, this weapon, this man who took a bullet for a woman he'd never met, and I make him a promise to go with all the ones I made myself in that cell.
"I see you," I whisper. "Whoever you were then. Whoever you are now. I see you, Yakob, and I’ll keep you."
The window over the bed goes from black to gray to a thin, hard silver. Somewhere outside, a bird starts chirping, as if the world didn't nearly end in the last thirty-six hours, as if it's just another morning on an island where nothing ever happens.
His pulse under my two fingers is slower now. Stronger. I count it twice to be sure.
I should sleep. Every cell in my body is filing formal complaints. But someone has to be here when he surfaces. Someone has to be the first thing he sees, so that the first thing he learns about this new day is that he wasn't left alone in the night.
So I pull my knees up into the chair, and I keep my eyes on his face, and I stay.
Yakob
I wake to sunlight and the certainty that someone is watching me.
Twenty years of conditioning fire at once. Assess. Orient. Locate the threat before it locates you. My hand is moving toward a weapon that isn't there before my brain finishes remembering the room. Stone walls. Shutters open to a hard blue morning. Lamp oil, iodine, and underneath both of them, faintly, soap.
The watcher is asleep.
Iris is folded into the chair beside the cot, knees drawn up to her chest, cheek pressed against her own shoulder at an angle that's going to cost her when she wakes. One hand has slipped off her knee and hangs in the air between us, palm open toward me, like even unconscious she's keeping it available in case I need it.
My pulse is steady. The last dregs of fever leaving my body. The dressing at my side is fresh, taped, clean, no blood. There's a cup of water on the floor within reach of the cot and a damp cloth folded over the rim of a bowl, and a second bowl beside it holding the old dressings, packed away neatly instead of scattered, because apparently, she cleans a sickroom the way she does everything else. Thoroughly and without being asked.
She was up all night. The evidence is everywhere and I know she'd still deny all of it.
Fragments come back to me from the dark. Cold on my forehead. A hand under my skull, lifting, careful, the way you'd hold something that might spill. And a song. Low, worn in at the edges, a tune that rose and fell like water against a hull. I don't know the words. I know that somewhere in the worst of it, the heat and the noise inside my own head, the song was the thing I steered by.
I know something else too, and it sits in my chest like a stone. I was talking. My throat is hoarse with it. I don't know what I said. I don't know how much. Years of silence, of controlled sentences, and a fever undid it in one night in front of the one person I can't seem to keep my walls standing around.
I need to move. Get upright, get functional, restore the balance before the imbalance becomes a habit. I get an elbow under myself and start the slow negotiation with my own body, and I've made it halfway to sitting when the wound states its objection and the breath leaves me in a hiss I can’t hold back.
Her eyes open instantly. No transition, no confusion. Asleep, then fully awake, the way soldiers wake. The way I wake. It's unsettling to see it on her.
"And where," she says, "do you think you're going?"
"Toilet. Water. Food."
"The water is directly beside your hand." She unfolds from the chair, wincing as her neck gives her trouble, and she's already got two fingers against my wrist, counting, her eyes on the small face of my watch while she does it like she's done this a hundred times. She has now, I realize. A hundred times, all night, while I was somewhere else. "Better," she announces. "You're allowed to live. I've decided."
"You didn't sleep."
"I slept. You just watched me do it."
"In a chair. For minutes." I look at the bowl, the cloth, the neat stack of spent dressings. "You've been up all night."
"You were busy having a fever. Somebody had to supervise." She takes the cup, puts it in my hand, closes my fingers around it like I'm a child, and stands there until I drink. "All of it."
I drink all of it. It's easier than arguing, which is a sentence I've never once had cause to think before this woman.
"You should rest," I tell her. "I'm stable. The dressing will hold. There's nothing here that needs you standing over it."
"Mm." She's not listening. She's peeling the tape back at the corner of the dressing, checking underneath with a frown of concentration that belongs on a surgeon, and her hands are steady and impersonal and gentle all at once, and I don't know where to put any of that so I stare at the ceiling instead.
"Iris."
"Yakob."
