She opened her eyes. Her head still hurt. The light in the room was dim. It was night. The soldier was sitting beside her. It wasn't Reuben after all. It was Cole. And behind him stood Mingo.
"Cole," she said. "Mingo."
"Thank God," said Cole.
"She knows us again," said Mingo. "That's a good sign."
"She's going to be fine," said Cole.
I'm never going to be fine again, she wanted to say. I'm just going to be alive, going through the motions, doing my duty. But I will never, never, never be fine.
"Which of you was yelling at me?" she asked.
They looked at each other. "When?" asked Cole.
"While I was sick," she said. "I thought one of you must have—it was a soldier—I thought it was Reuben but it must have been one of you."
"I don't know," said Cole. "We were watching over you in shifts. Well, I came to it late because I had troubles of my own. We're all still walking around like old men, shuffling. It's a slow recovery. But we took turns watching you because—it was our assignment."
"Assignment?" she asked.
"From Rube," said Mingo. "Long before he died. A pact."
"Plus we all care about you for your own sake," said Cole. "And for the children back home."
"Mark's dead, isn't he?" she asked through parched lips.
"He is, Cecily," said Cole. "I'm so sorry."
"I knew he was. But I had such strange dreams. I thought maybe."
"It wasn't a dream. He was really your son, and he finished the job the rest of us tried to do—keeping everybody safe. I'm sorry we couldn't save him. It's hardest on Benny and Arty, because they were there, so weak and feverish they couldn't do anything to help him. But nothing like what you've lost. Nothing. I'm sorry. I'm talking too much. But you had us so scared."
"Why," she murmured.
"Well, besides the matter of your dying? You bled, Cecily. Out of your eyes and nose. It was a death sentence, and we couldn't bear it. When you started bleeding, all the caregivers who weren't too sick to join us prayed for you. It was all we could do."
"And someone yelled at me," said Cecily.
Then she fell back to sleep.
Each time she woke the headache was a little less. She began to eat again. They took her off the IV. They removed her from her room in the hospital and put her in the Mirage hotel, where the rooms were full of recovering caregivers. The government was paying the bill for them, she was told, and all the employees in the hotel were nictovirus survivors, so everyone was immune. The recovering caregivers were treated like royalty by the Nigerian staff.
No, the Deltaland staff, she was told. Nigeria was now a country to the north, a drier place, a Muslim country that spoke another language and had nothing to do with them.
Gradually she began to take notice of the world again. Someone brought her a summary of all that had happened while she was sick. The relatively peaceful division of Nigeria into lands with borders that finally made sense. The short, savage war with Sudan which ended with the dissolution of that country, though how the country would be divided was still being negotiated.
The nictovirus had now spread throughout sub-Saharan Africa. It was like a fire that burned slowly where the population was more sparse, so it seemed to slow, perhaps to stop, then flare up when it reached dense population again. Wherever it went, there were massive efforts to educate people in how to cope with it, what treatments worked. Medicines were made available free of charge and in such quantities that there was no incentive to blackmarket them.
And still President Torrent's quarantine held. And still thousands of American volunteers took their life into their hands and came to Africa, to every country that would allow them in. What Cecily had helped start in Nigeria was now happening in Rwanda and Kenya and Liberia and Senegal and, last of all, in South Africa, though there the volunteers were English and Dutch, and in other countries they were French, Portuguese, Brazilian.
For wherever there was a reasonable hope that their language could be understood, people from outside the quarantine zone volunteered. Most of them were Christians, and many of them were new-fledged, people who had once been cynical, Catholic or Protestant in name only. But the nictovirus and the dangerous work of nursing those sick with it had, oddly enough, rekindled faith that had long been reported as dead. Christianity was a credible religion again in countries that had once stopped caring.
Cecily talked about that with Drew, when he came to visit her. "Is it possible that God sent this terrible disease so that Christianity would matter again?" she asked.
"Anything's possible," he answered, "but personally I don't think so."
"Why not?"