Chapter Ten

“Stay away from the edge,” Marisol said, never taking the field glasses from her eyes.

Sarah danced backwards, away from the crumbling bricks at the top of the six-story dormitory building. Not the safest place on the island but it had the best view of the skeletal city across the channel. The building had been officer’s quarters once but now it was about to fall down. The thick coating of white mildew like a coating of frost on the side of a leaky refrigerator was taking its toll, eating into the bricks on one side, chemically dissolving the mortar between them.

“I can’t recognize half the buildings over there. Have you ever seen anything like this? No, nobody has. The Battery’s turned green again. The dead ate every growing thing there was over there but now... Jesus, look at those shrubs—they must be fifteen feet high.” Marisol pivoted in place and adjusted her focus.

Not just Battery Park, Sarah saw, but the entire tip of lower Manhattan had transformed overnight into a deep and dark forest. Trees crowded the broad streets, their roots overturning the rusted soft shapes of abandoned cars. The sides of buildings were verdant with moss or dark with fungal growth. Flowers in a dozen different colors sprouted from broken windows and vines dangled from straining balconies.

Behind them, curled in a folding deck chair, little Jackie hacked up another lungful of spores. It was dangerous on top of the dormitory building but Marisol wouldn’t let him out of her sight. She lowered the binoculars and looked at her son for a moment, perhaps assessing his condition. He wasn’t getting any better.

Half of Governors Island was complaining of respiratory distress. One woman, a forty-year-old grandmother, had died in the night. Those who weren’t coughing up bloody goo were complaining of skin irritations, weird rashes, discolored nails and hair and teeth.

Twenty-three people—nearly a third of the Island’s inhabitants—were bed-ridden. Half of them weren’t expected to survive another day. It was as if the natural world, the vegetative world, had rebelled against them. As if it wanted them dead.

Mold had spread across the wooden docks and piers of Governors Island, green, slimy mold, algae growing faster and thicker than it had a right to. Mushrooms had popped up all over Nolan Park. Poisonous and ugly, they exuded horrible clouds of choking spores when they were stepped on. Even the grass between the houses, even the thin weeds that popped up between the flagstones of Fort Jay, had turned thick and coarse as if they were reaching for the survivors’ ankles, wanting to trip them, to bring them down. Hidden in the shadier parts of the island deadly nightshade had emerged and poison ivy was spreading into the carefully tended gardens.

The worst part was that it wasn’t even over. It was still spreading. Since dawn the acidic mildew that threatened the dormitory building had spread to three more brick towers. Who knew what would still be standing by nightfall.

Marisol fiddled with the vinyl strap of her binoculars. “People are asking me questions I can’t answer. They don’t understand this, Sarah. They don’t know why it’s happening. They need a reason, any reason. Maybe they sinned before God. Or maybe this is just Mother Nature getting her own back. That kind of mushy-minded stuff won’t hold them for long, though. They’re going to want a scapegoat. Someone to blame.”

Sarah nodded absently. She was as confused as anybody and she could admit to herself it would be nice to blame this horror on somebody. Hating a scapegoat would help her choke down her fear.

“Obviously,” Marisol continued, “I’m going to say it’s your fault.”

Sarah stopped nodding. “What?” she demanded.

“Well, think about it. You’re an outsider. I don’t want to string up one of my own people like some kind of pagan sacrifice. I’d much rather hang a near stranger. Secondly, it’s true, isn’t it? You brought this here. You were after that Tsarevich asshole and in the process you gave away our location. Sound familiar?”

“No, no,” Sarah said, “we were really careful, we kept our distance—”

Marisol shrugged. “Okay. Maybe the fact that nothing like this has happened for twelve years, and then all of a sudden you show up, and the next day we’re overrun by evil plants, okay, maybe, just maybe, that’s a coincidence.” She raised her hands to the heavens. “Still.”

Sarah’s mind raced. If the survivors on Governors Island believed it, if they truly thought she was the cause of the biological attack—they wouldn’t wait for a lynching. They would tear her to pieces with their bare hands. They had just enough to lose to make them desperate.

Fear rippled her guts.

She reached for something—anything—to fight back with. “Yeah,” she said, “well, you just go ahead and try it, lady. You go ahead.”

“Alright.”

“And then—and then, when they’re going to, to burn me at the stake, whatever, when I have their attention, then I’ll explain to them exactly who it was who taught you how to make a ghoul into a slack.”

Marisol’s mouth twitched. It could have been the precursor of a grin. “Coming from the daughter of a lich that might sound a bit hard to believe.”

Blood flowed out of Sarah’s face. She was fighting for her life. “Not when—not if I tell them what Gary got, in exchange! Not when I tell them how he used you like a living sex toy!”

Marisol didn’t rise to it, however. “That would sound bad,” she admitted. “The thing of it is, though, that in the morning, I might have a lot of explaining to do, but you’ll still be dead.”

Damn.

She had a point, Sarah had to admit.

Desperate, completely unable to think clearly, Sarah tore the Makarov out of her sweatshirt pocket and swung her arm in Marisol’s direction—only to find herself looking down the barrel of a .357 revolver.

“Ayaan taught you about firearms, right? You’re pretty good,” Marisol told her. She was breathing a little heavy. Sarah was nearly gasping. “Jack taught me.”

Slowly, with a caution based on extensive paranoia, both women lowered their weapons. No safeties had been released, there had been no real danger, but Sarah knew she had been a moment away from death.

“We do what we have to do to keep going,” Marisol told her. “You know that. So don’t you dare judge me.”

“Killing me won’t solve your problem,” Sarah demanded.

“No. But it will keep my people from rioting and making things a whole lot worse. You have a better idea?”

Sarah swallowed all the spit in her mouth and turned her head to look at the towers of Manhattan. They looked like the kind of impregnable fortresses you only read about in fairy tales. “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe I go over there, and find out what’s doing this. And maybe I can make it stop.”

Marisol snorted. “Yeah, and maybe you can grow dragonfly wings and fly back under your own power. Come on.”

“It’s worth a shot,” Sarah said. Truthfully she didn’t believe it. She just thought it would be a way to escape. “Look—you can throw me to the wolves and maybe that will give you time to evacuate. Or I can go over there and maybe I can actually achieve something.”

Marisol stared at her, twin beams of judgment emerging from her eyes to pin Sarah to the spot, probing her, studying her. Sarah squirmed like a laboratory specimen under hot lights. Then something weird happened. Jackie coughed, a sputtering sound like a stalled engine. Marisol blinked. She seemed to lose about an inch of height and the tight muscles of her shoulders and arms drooped. “Okay,” she said.

Sarah shook her head, not comprehending. “Seriously?” She thought maybe Gary was taking over Marisol’s body, or maybe the Tsarevich could control the Mayor’s body remotely but no, there was no dark energy anywhere nearby. Sarah would have known if there were magic at work. Marisol, she realized, was just bereft of other options. She needed help that badly.

“Yeah. I’ll give you a boat and whatever weapons you want. You go over there alone. You do what you can, then you come back. I know you won’t try to run away.”

Sarah said, “Of course,” meaning, “of course I’ll run, as fast as my little legs can carry me.” She didn’t say that.

“I know it,” Marisol told her, “because if you do, you’ll never see your father again. I’ll pull him out of that tower and I’ll make him my example.”

Hope fell inside Sarah like cold liquid draining to her toes.

She had just talked herself into a nasty little corner.