He tilted his head. His lips were compressed and grim. “We each have a job to do, Fiona. Yours is to live, and I can promise you that something extraordinary awaits you if you’ll but try.”
Her gaze fell to the pigeons. She shook her head. “Do you know what I’ve endured?”
“No, because I’ve never had to suffer as you’re suffering. I’ve had my own trials, of course. Every human, ascended or otherwise, has trials to endure, some worse than others. But I beseech you to hold on just a little longer. You must live. Think of the young pregnant woman who came in three days ago.”
“She will lose her baby,” Fiona said. Her voice sounded flat. “The baby never survives the mother’s first death and resurrection.”
He nodded. “I understand that’s how it must be.”
“Then why should I return?”
“There is a chance she and the baby will survive if you return.”
She shook her head. “No, I’ve lost the will to go back.” She felt a tremor flow through her, a deep ache in the center of her chest. She pressed a fist between her br**sts. She could hardly breathe. “It’s begun. They’re using the defibrillator now.”
The man rose to his feet. He wasn’t very tall, maybe five foot seven to her five-ten. She tried to take a step back but couldn’t move. She glanced down and laughed. She didn’t have any feet. She must be just in spirit form right now. How strange. Maybe she was having one of those near-death experiences.
Another tremor slammed through her. She cried out. She was in pain now. Terrible pain.
The man moved quickly and stood beside her. He held her arm and looked deeply into her eyes. “I am begging you with all my heart to go back, Fiona, to live just one more time. Please. It is imperative. You must live. You must try. Do it for the young pregnant woman. She and the others will not survive without your presence. You know what you mean to them. You know how many you kept alive.”
“But they all died anyway throughout the years. I’m the only one who’s lived this long.”
“You can stop the death and resurrection process, Fiona, but only if you live. Live, Fiona. Live.” His words seemed fainter, his presence less distinct.
She took a deep breath and another. A third tremor seized her. The pain felt infinite. She doubled over. She recalled the young woman’s eyes, the latest of Rith’s acquisitions, her fear, her hand pressed to her swollen belly. Could she save her?
Will you try? She couldn’t see the man anymore, or the pigeons. She could only hear his voice, and even then it was as though he’d spoken inside her head.
Fiona’s stubbornness sank into the well of her usual guilt. She had to try. She could do nothing less.
When the fourth shock pummeled her heart, she began to claw her way back from death.
When the walls have fallen down,
Open your voice and let your cries be heard.
Heaven will answer the faint of heart.
—Collected Proverbs, Beatrice of Fourth
Chapter 6
Parisa sat up in bed. Something was wrong, so very wrong.
Help me.
Fiona. She could hear her. The woman was in trouble somewhere in this horrible house.
Parisa couldn’t leave her room or the women would wake. They would tell Rith, and he would hurt her. She rarely traveled voyeuristically through the rooms, searching, but she did so now. She had to find Fiona.
She opened her voyeur’s window and traveled into the hall. The women were lined up in a row on the floor, all asleep, each head aimed in the direction of her doorway. Better to hear her if she awoke.
She moved her window past them until she came to Rith’s office. She paused outside the doorway to listen. She heard a soft rasping sound. She moved her window into place and saw Rith in the corner, his back to the doorway. His right elbow was moving rhythmically, his head bowed, his body tense. At first she thought sex, but then he lifted something into the air that glinted in the lamplight of the room.
A blade. He’d been sharpening a blade. He tested the chiseled edge with his thumb and smiled.
She backed her window out of the room and realized she was breathing hard, her heart pounding in her chest. Was he coming for her? She had no way of knowing except that her instincts were screaming.
Whatever. Right now she needed to find Fiona.
She moved past the doorway to the end of the hall. She hadn’t been beyond this doorway in life and for some reason, she couldn’t move past doors like this. She couldn’t explore a place she had never been.
So she focused instead on Fiona. Having seen her, having been with her in the garden, there was a good possibility she’d be able to find Fiona through the special window.
She closed her eyes and concentrated. She relaxed her mind and focused on the beautiful woman with the chestnut hair and silver-blue eyes.
The window opened again, but in a completely unknown space. She seemed to be at the far end of a long stone hallway lit by three large overhead round globes. Parisa moved slowly down the hall and panned left and right. Women of all nationalities were held in the cells, all curled in the fetal position, all asleep. There were six in all, but a seventh bed was empty.
The space expanded to include a large glass-enclosed area, maybe fourteen feet by fourteen, large enough to hold a table upon which a woman was strapped down, several carts of what looked like medical equipment flanking the stone wall, and a man and a woman both in medical scrubs standing nearby.
Her heart pounded again as she brought her window closer and closer to the room. She became focused on the woman on the table, whose hair was a lovely flowing chestnut. Fiona … who stared up at the ceiling, her eyes glassy, her skin terribly white. She looked … dead.
No, no, no.
Beside the bed were bags of … blood. Fiona’s blood.
A faint alarm went off. The technician standing to the right of the bed, a man, held the familiar paddles of a defibrillator. Another sweep of the room and Parisa saw that a bag of blood was now flowing into Fiona’s arm, apparently to replenish what had been taken from her. The technician to the left of the bed capped off the drained blood. They were quiet as they worked.
Two more technicians, also wearing scrubs, arrived by an adjoining hallway. They loaded up Fiona’s blood into two separate large Igloo containers. Within a minute they were gone.
Talk about an efficient process.
She panned back to Fiona. The remaining two technicians, a man and a woman, performed basic CPR and occasionally jolted Fiona’s bared white chest with the defibrillator. There was such an air of boredom surrounding the woman that for her it must have been the same-old, same-old. The man was sweating. Not so indifferent.