The rabbit was a delicacy.
Roscoe thanked Edilio for being decent.
Edilio closed the door. Then he turned the key in the deadbolt.
Quinn’s fishermen had had a good day. The boats were reasonably full of fish, squid, octopi, and the weird things they called blue bats. Those they fed to the zekes—the worms in the fields—to buy safe passage for the vegetable pickers.
The prize of the morning’s work was a five-foot-long shark. Quinn’s boat was actually cramped because of the thing. He was sitting on the tail as he rowed, which was awkward and would give him a backache later. But no one in the boat was complaining. A shark was a twofer: not only was it great eating, it was a competitor for the limited supply of fish.
“Here’s what we ought to do,” Cigar was saying as he pulled at his oar. “We ought to sell the teeth at the mall. I mean, did you see all those teeth? Kids would pay a ’Berto for, like, a necklace of teeth.”
“Or they might, like, glue them onto a stick and make a gnarly weapon,” Elise suggested.
“What do you think it weighs?” Ben wondered.
“Ah, not much,” Quinn said.
That got a laugh. It had taken eight kids just to haul the fish over the side into Quinn’s boat, and then they’d practically swamped the boat.
“Weighs more than Cigar,” Ben said.
Cigar plucked at his ragged T-shirt and revealed a hard, almost concave, stomach. “Everything weighs more than me nowadays. When this all ends and we get out, I’m writing a diet book. The FAYZ diet. First, you eat all the junk food you can. Then you starve. Then you eat artichokes. Then you starve a little more. Then you eat someone’s hamster. Then you go on the all-fish diet.”
“You left out the part where you fry up some ants,” Elise said.
“Ants? I ate beetles,” Ben bragged.
They went on like this for a while, rowing their heavy-laden boat and bragging about the awful things they had eaten.
Quinn noticed something he hadn’t seen in a long time.
“Hold up,” he said.
“Aw, is Captain Ahab tired of rowing?”
“You’ve got good eyes, Elise, look over there.” Quinn pointed toward the barrier across a half mile of water.
“What? It’s still there.”
“Not the barrier. The water. Look at the water.”
The four of them shielded their eyes from the sun and stared. “Huh,” Quinn said at last. “Does that or does that not look like there’s a breeze blowing over there? It’s a little choppy.”
“Yeah,” Cigar agreed. “Weird, huh?”
Quinn nodded thoughtfully. It was something new. Something very strange. He would tell Albert about it when they got into town.
“Okay, enough with that. Let’s get back on those oars.” The other boats were catching up to them. Quinn could see each of them in turn stop and stare at the clear evidence of wind.
“What’s it mean?” Ben asked.
Quinn shrugged. “That’s above my pay grade, as my dad used to say. I’ll let Albert and Astrid figure that out. Me, I’m just a dumb fisherman,” he said.
“Oh, look,” Elise teased. “I see an oar with no one pulling it.”
Quinn laughed. He seated himself properly, braced his feet, and grabbed the available oar. His back, like those of all the fishing fleet, was thick with muscle.
He was happy. This life made him happy. The sun, the salt water, the smell of fish. The backbreaking work. It all made him happy.
It was simple. It was important.
Quinn thought about the breeze blowing across the water. There was nothing sinister about a nice breeze. And yet he had the feeling it spelled trouble.
Dahra Baidoo had seven new cases of flu. That made thirteen in all. The so-called hospital rang with the percussion of coughing.
No one had died in the night.
But no one had gotten well yet, either. Lana’s touch did not heal this illness. Which meant Dahra was no longer in the business of keeping kids comfortable until Lana came around and made everything better: she was now in the business of trying to understand this sickness.
She took temperatures. She kept more-or-less careful charts showing the progression of the sickness.
She tried not to think about Jennifer’s story. Jennifer wasn’t backing off her tale: she had seen the other Jennifer cough herself to death.
Dahra also tried not to think about what it meant if illness could develop an immunity to Lana.
A kid named Pookie was her worst case right at the moment. She stared at the thermometer in her hand, not quite believing it—106 degrees. She had never seen a number that high.
Pookie was shaking like he was freezing. He was no longer able to answer questions sensibly. He had started talking to someone who was not exactly there, talking about how he didn’t want to go to school because he hadn’t finished his report.
And his cough was getting louder and more violent.
The flu had laughed at the Tylenol she gave Pookie. His fever had burned right through it. Whether or not he developed some kind of killing cough, he would die of fever if it rose much higher. She had to bring it down.
The book suggested an ice bath. The odds of that were precisely zero. No water, let alone ice. If Albert didn’t arrange a water delivery soon, kids would be falling out from thirst, not even waiting to die of fever or cough.
Dahra made a decision. Ellen was there helping out, along with one of the new kids from the island, Virtue. She wished she had time to talk to Virtue: Dahra’s parents were from Africa. And so was Virtue himself.