"Hm."
"Take the cot."
That wakes her up. "Absolutely not. You have two holes in you."
"Both of which are stitched and dressed, clean and dry." I'm already moving, slowly, testing each stage of it, sitting up fully for the first time and letting her see that I can. It costs me. I keep the cost off my face, which is the one skill I have left that's fully intact. "I've had a night's sleep and half a fever's worth more. You've had a wooden chair. The dressing needs changing tonight, and I need the person changing it to be able to see straight."
"That's manipulative."
"Absolutely, but it’s also accurate."
She glares at me, and I watch her exhaustion argue with her stubbornness, two dogs fighting somewhere behind those stained-glass-green eyes. "You'll wake me if anything changes. Anything. If you so much as feeltoo-warm."
"Yes."
"Swear it. You said you don't lie, so swear it."
"I swear it."
She holds my gaze a moment longer, hunting for the loophole, and then the tiredness wins and she surrenders in the most Iris way possible, which is completely and all at once. She puts her bowl down, helps me shift to the chair despite my objection, and drops onto the cot face-first.
"Ten minutes," she says into the space between her arm and the canvas.
She's under in less than a minute. Her breathing goes long and even, one hand curled near her face, and the room settles around her the way rooms seem to do, arranging itself so that she's the center of it.
I sit in the chair she kept vigil in and I do what I'm built for. I watch. The door. The window. The track beyond it that goes to the harbor. The rise and fall of her back.
Guarding a sleeping principal is the oldest work I know. I've done it in stairwells and safe rooms and the backs of cargo planes, and it has always been a function, a paid state of alertness with a body attached. This is the function with something extra threaded through it that I don't have a word for, a low fierce settledness at the sight of her sleeping in my T-shirt and boxer shorts, safe because I'm between her and the door.
She never has to know about that. It changes nothing. I’ll heal, I’ll move her when it's safe, I’ll deliver her to her kitchen full of family, and I go back to being what I am.
Somewhere in the third hour, without noticing I've started, I find I'm turning her song over in my head, the one from the fever, the rise and fall of it, trying to fit the fragmented pieces of tune back together.
Iris
By the second morning I have learned the house's whole vocabulary, and I have decided that getting Yakob to talk is going to be the hardest thing I do on this island, including the part where I stitched together a bullet hole.
The house says plenty. The shutters have a creak for wind and a different creak for me. The cistern pump complains in two syllables. The camping stove, whose name is Dmitri now whether he likes it or not, hisses and pops at me every time I light him, which I take personally. Even the olive trees outside have opinions, all that silvery whispering every time the breeze comes up the terrace.
Yakob says four words before noon. One of them is "no."
I'm changing his dressing when I decide to make it a project. He's sitting up on the cot under his own power today while watching to make sure I noticed. His color is better. His pulse under my fingers this morning was slow and strong and somehow smug about it. He's mending at a speed that isn't reasonable, as if his body got the same training the rest of him did and knows better than to waste time.
Which means I get to stop being terrified for him, and start being curious about him, and I have a week of enforced silence to burn through and nowhere to spend it but here.
"This one." I touch the edge of tape at his side, then nod at the old scar a hand's width above it, a pale rope of tissue that curves along his ribs like a parenthesis. "What's the story?"
"Knife."
"That's not a story."
"Bratislava." A pause while I peel the tape, but he doesn't flinch. "Two thousand nine."
"Better. Setting, and a date." I check the wound. Clean. Dry at the edges, no heat coming off it, knitting itself shut like it has somewhere to be. I reach for the fresh gauze. "Now we need a plot. A knife doesn't just happen to a person. There's a whole event attached to that."
"There was a man. He had a knife. Then he didn't."
I look up at him. His face is giving me nothing, but I've had two days to study nothing and I'm starting to read the dialects of it. There's the nothing that means he's gone somewhere behind his own eyes, and the nothing that means pain, and then there's this one, the one with the almost invisible longitude of tension at the corner of his mouth, which I am nearly certain is what happens to a joke when it dies in customs.
