Chapter 23: The Cure Is a Choice

The woman at the gate looked at her own hand.

She turned it over. She flexed the bruised fingers, one at a time, and then she began to cry.

"It's cold," she said. "Why is it so cold out here?"

Nobody moved. The whole yard had stopped breathing around me.

"What's your name?" I said.

She told me.

It was a plain, ordinary name, and I will keep it to myself.

I took my hand away from her bruise and stared at my palm.

It was not glowing. It was warm, the way a hand is warm when it has been held.

"It wasn't the fire," I said.

"What?" Nolan said at my back.

"It wasn't the fire that did it. I was angry every other time. I was afraid with Amos."

I looked at the three hundred in the lane.

"This time I wasn't either."

"You were tired," Nolan said.

"I was calm."

I laid both palms against the bars, and I breathed in slowly, and I thought about nothing at all.

The heat came, thin and steady. It ran into the iron.

The man behind the woman shuddered. The grey film cleared from his eyes.

He sat down in the ash and put his face in his hands.

A cry went up from somewhere behind me, and it was the mechanic's.

"My wife," he said.

He was pushing through the crowd toward the bars, with the axe still in his hand. He dropped it.

In the third rank of the herd stood a woman in a green coat.

I had only a split second to make my choice.

I could pour out everything I had and cure as many as I could reach before I went dark.

I would save forty, maybe. Then I would drop in the dirt, and the rest would walk over me.

Or I could do it slowly.

"Listen to me," I said, loudly, to the whole yard.