All Poppy could think of was the pretty bald girl inthe gift shop.
Cancer.
"But-but they can do something about it, can'tthey?" she said, and even to her own ears her voice sounded very young. "I mean-if they had to, theycould take my pancreasout...."
"Oh, sweetheart, of course. "Poppy's mother took Poppy in her arms. "I promise you; if there's some thing wrong, we'll do anything and everything to fix it. I'd go to the ends of the earth to make you well. You knowthat. And at this point we aren't even sure that there issomething wrong. Dr. Franklin said that it's extremely rare for teenagers to get a tumor in the pancreas. Extremely rare. So let's not worry about things until we have to."
Poppy felt herself relax; the pit was covered again. But somewhere near her core she still felt cold.
"I haveto call James."
Her mother nodded. "Just make it quick."
Poppy kept her fingers crossed as she dialedJames's apartment. Please be there, please be there, she thought. And for once, he was. He answered laconically, but as soon as he heard her voice, he said, "What's wrong?"
"Nothing-well, everything. Maybe." Poppy heardherself give a wild sort of laugh. It wasn't exactly alaugh.
"What happened?" James said sharply. "Did youhave a fight with Cliff?"
"No. Cliff's at the office. And I'm going into thehospital."
"Why?"
"They think I might have cancer."
It was a tremendous relief to say it, a sort of emo
tional release. Poppy laughed again. Silence on the other end of the line. "Hello?"
"I'm here," James said. Then he said, "I'm coming over."
"No, there's no point. I've got to leave in a minute." She waited for him to say that he'd come and see her in the hospital, but he didn't.
"James, would you do something for me? Wouldyou find out whatever you can about cancer in the pancreas? Just in case."
"Is that what they think you have?"
"They don't know for sure. They're giving me some tests. I just hope they don't have to use any needles."
Another laugh, but inside she was reeling.
She wished James would say something comforting."I'll see what I can find on the Net." His voice was unemotional, almost expressionless.
"And then you can tell me later-they'll probablylet you call me at the hospital."
"Yeah."
"Okay, I have to go. My mom's waitin""Take care of yourself."
Poppy hung up, feeling empty. Her mother wasstanding in the doorway."Come on, Poppet. Let's go." James sat very still, looking at the phone withoutseeing it.
She was scared, and he couldn't help her. He'dnever been very good at inspirational small talk. It wasn't, he thought grimly, in his nature.
To give comfort you had to have a comfortableview of the world. And James had seen too much of the world to have any illusions.
He could deal with cold facts, though. Pushingaside a pile of assorted clutter, he turned on his lap top and dialed up the Internet.
Within minutes he was using Gopher to search theNational Cancer Institute's CancerNet. The first file he found was listed as "Pancreatic cancer-Patient."He scanned it. Stuff about what the pancreas did,stages of thedisease, treatments.Nothingtoo gruesome.
Thenhewentinto "PancreaticcancerPhysician--a file meant for doctors. The first lineheld him paralyzed. Cancer of the exocrine pancreas is rarely curable.
His eyes skimmed down the lines. Overall survival rate ... metastasis ... poor response to chemotherapy, ra diation therapy and surgery ... pain ...
Pain. Poppy was brave, but facing constant painwould crush anyone. Especially when the outlook for the future was so bleak.
He looked at the top of the article again. Overallsurvival rate less than three percent. If the cancer had spread, less than one percent.
There must be more information. James wentsearching again and came up with several articles from newspapers and medical journals. They wereeven worse than the NCI file.
The overwhelming majority of patients will die, and dieswiftly, experts say.... Pancreatic cancer is usually inoperable, rapid, and debilitatingly painful.... The averagesurvival if the cancer has spread can be three weeks tothree months....
Three weeks to three months.
James stared at the laptop's screen. His chest andthroat felt tight; his vision was blurry. He tried to control it, telling himself that nothing was certain yet. Poppy was being tested, that didn't mean she had cancer.
But the words rang hollow in his mind. He had known for some time that something was wrong with Poppy. Something was-disturbed-inside her.He'd sensed that the rhythms of her body wereslightly off; he could tell she was losing sleep. Andthe pain-he always knew when the pain was there.He just hadn't realized how serious it was.
Poppy knows, too, he thought. Deep down, she knows that something very bad is going on, or she wouldn't have asked me to find this out. But whatdoes she expect me to do, walk in and tell her she's going to die in a few months?
And am I supposed to stand around and watch it?
His lips pulled back from his teeth slightly. Not anice smile, more of a savage grimace. He'd seen a lot of death in seventeen years. He knew the stages ofdying, knew the difference between the moment breathing stopped and the moment the brain turnedoff; knew the unmistakable ghostlike pallor of a freshcorpse.
The way the eyeballs flattened out about five minutes after expiration. Now, that was a detail most people weren't familiar with. Five minutes after you die, your eyes go flat and filmy gray. And then your body starts to shrink. You actually get smaller.
Poppy was so small already.
He'd always been afraid of hurting her. She lookedso fragile, and he could hurt somebody much stronger if he wasn't careful. That was one reason hekept a certain distance between them.
One reason. Not the main one.
The other was something he couldn't put intowords, not even to himself. It brought him right up to the edge of the forbidden. To face rules that had been ingrained in him since birth.
None of the Night People could fall in love with ahuman. The sentence for breaking the law was death. It didn't matter. He knew what he hadto do now.Where he had to go.
Cold and precise, James loggedoff the Net. Hestood, picked up his sunglasses, slid them into place. Went out into the merciless June sunlight, slamminghis apartment door behind him.
Poppy looked around the hospital room unhappily.There was nothing so awful about it, except that it was too cold, but ...it was a hospital. That was thetruth behind thepretty pink-and-blue curtains and the dosed-circuit TV and the dinner menu decoratedwith cartoon characters. It was a place you didn't come unless you were Pretty Darn Sick.
Oh, come on, she told herself. Cheerup a little.What happened to the power of Poppytive thinking? Where's Poppyanna when you need her? Where'sMary Poppy-ins?
God, I'm even making myself gag, she thought.
But she found herselfsmilingfaintly, with selfdeprecating humor if nothing else. And the nurses were nice here, and the bed wasextremely cool.Ithad a remote control on theside that bent it intoevery imaginable position.