“Marlowe,” she gasped. “Marlowe—？”
But something was different. She felt it at once. The shine was still fading from the edges of her vision. She peered down at her leg and shifted her knee and turned it side to side. It had healed.
She stared in amazement. Her heart was beating very fast.
“Don’t be mad,” he whispered.
He looked pale. He was cradling his wrists gingerly now against his little chest and she saw how swollen they looked.
“It’ll be okay,” he said. His little face was clouded with pain. “I took your hurt away. I have it now. It goes away fast when I have it.”
She was trying to understand what the boy had told her but she could not. She thought of Coulton, she thought of Charlie Ovid with the blade hidden in his smooth flesh. “It isn’t possible,” she said. Getting gingerly to her feet as she spoke, testing her leg, staring at him.
“She said you wouldn’t believe me,” the boy whispered.
“Who said?”
He didn’t answer, he didn’t need to. Of course Alice did believe. Her knee was proof enough. She thought of her mother, unbidden, the green fire in her eyes when her faith used to take over in her, that madness, and she thought of what her mother would believe, glimpsing the miracle of it all, and she closed her eyes in sudden grief. Her mom.
Within the hour he held out his arms and rotated his wrists and showed her. The swelling was gone. It was already beginning to get light. The city felt emptied, still.
“It doesn’t take long,” he said. “Little hurts like this.”
She felt something then, a kind of disgust, which surprised her and shamed her. She didn’t want to touch him. He’d trusted her with something important and helped her and her disgust felt like a kind of betrayal. She lowered her voice when she said, “Have you done this a lot, Marlowe?”
“Yes,” he said simply.
“How did it start?”
He shrugged, uncomfortable. “I can’t always control it. I didn’t used to be able to.”
“They’ll help you with that. At Cairndale.” She moved then and got stiffly to her feet and stamped the warmth back into her legs and then she said, “Your friend, Brynt. She knew?”
He was putting back on his coat and he didn’t look up. “We didn’t talk about it.”
She nodded. She looked around at the empty square, the graying silhouettes of the buildings against the sky. Somewhere out there was a man, a creature, made out of smoke, a thing that was following them. It was madness and yet she knew the truth of it. She’d seen it herself.
“We should find you something to eat,” she said. “We’ll get down to the docks.”
She picked up the little traveling cases and blew out her cheeks. Marlowe was peering up at her.
“Alice?”
“Mm?”
“Is it all right if I’m scared?”
“Everyone gets scared,” she said. “I get scared.”
“Like at the hotel?”
She nodded. “And other times too. Scared is just your head telling your heart to be careful. It’s not a bad thing. It’s what you do with it that matters.”
He seemed to think about this. “The thing at the hotel scared me.”
She gave him a long careful look. “We’ll be on the ship in an hour. And we’ll not see him again after that.”
“Yes, we will,” he said.
The boy had a way of doing that, of speaking with certainty about things that had not happened yet, and Alice found it unnerving. What she saw when she looked at him was a small, defenseless child, and her heart, which had never much cared for babies or love or human connection, was struck afresh and left singing with pain. But she felt at the same time a new kind of disgust, nervous at what he could do. She was not a religious person and did not ascribe spiritual causes to the gift of his healing, for she could not conceive of a god who would create a world so full of suffering. There were naturalists in Washington that believed all creatures were a part of a pattern of development, that people were once like the apes, gradually changing their characteristics. When she looked at Marlowe she saw the mystery of it all. Alice remembered how her mother had used to say there were wonders in the world and that most people were afraid to see them. Look with your heart, not with your eyes, she would murmur, running her cold fingers through Alice’s hair. She said all that was needed was a little faith and the marvelous could be found. Do you believe? And Alice would say, very solemnly: I believe, Mama, I believe it, I do.