Did it? She supposed so. The red line curving across her palm looked wider than it had the night before, the skin around it shiny and puffy. She tried to close her fingers over it. “It’s fine.”
“It probably needed stitches. Did you clean it?” He didn’t let go, clasping her wrist tight in his warm fingers.
“Of course I cleaned it. I’m not an idiot.”
“Why don’t you let me try?”
She yanked her hand back. “I’m perfectly capable of cleaning myself, Doyle.”
“You had it wrapped too tightly, and it looks like there’s a few speckles of dirt or something on the edge. I’m serious, Chess. Let me do this for you. Go get all your supplies and stuff. Cotton balls and bandages and ointments. And get me a knife or something, too.”
“Oh, no. No knives.”
“It’s healing over the infection.”
“Why don’t I just go to the hospital tomorrow?”
He folded his arms across his chest. “My dad is a doctor, and I watched him help my friends dozens of times. Go get the stuff.”
Her palm felt stiff when she flipped the light switch in her bathroom. Maybe Doyle was right. Maybe it was even sort of nice, to have someone take care of her. No one ever had before. She should stop being so cranky and suspicious, and relax. Isn’t this what normal people did, help one another?
She laid a towel over the toilet lid and started gathering all of her medical supplies. Debunkers often found themselves in attics and crawl spaces, or climbing through air-shafts. Injuries were common. A few years ago Atticus Collins even got bit by a rat.
Odd, then, that this cut got infected, when she usually took such good care of her wounds. But then, being locked in a dungeon for almost twenty-four hours and being bathed in raw sewage wasn’t exactly conducive to healing.
Her knives were in the kitchen, but she decided to grab a razor blade instead. The sharper the edge, the less it would hurt. She ran the flats of the blade over her tongue, just to make sure there wasn’t any residue left on it. There was. The muscles in her cheeks tightened.
Finally she guessed she had everything. Antiseptic, cotton balls, gauze, antibiotic ointment, the razor blade, a straightpin. She chomped another Cept—this was probably going to hurt—and headed back out into the living room, carrying the little towel bundle in her left hand.
Doyle knelt on the floor in front of the bookcase, flipping through her copy of On the Road. “You have a lot of stuff from BT,” he said. “I didn’t know you were into that.”
“I like history. I like to read.”
“But this is, like, all BT.”
“It just interests me. It’s not a big deal or anything, they’re not forbidden books. They’re great literature.”
“I know, I just … you seem so live-for-the-moment.” He placed the book back in its slot on the shelf. “I always thought of you as someone who didn’t have a past, so wasn’t interested in the past.”
“So because I’m an orphan and don’t know my ancestry I’m not allowed to read?”
“No, no, I … It’s cool, that’s all. I think it’s cool.”
She thought about pressing the point, but decided against it. Someone who could trace his family back two hundred years wouldn’t be able to understand how it felt when even your real name was a mystery, and she didn’t particularly want to explain anyway. He’d already seen her naked. He didn’t need to see her emotionally exposed as well.
So she held up the towel. “I have everything.”
“Actually, I was thinking we probably should do this in the bathroom. Better light, right?”
What ever. His show. They trooped back into the bathroom, where she sat on the toilet and held her hand over the sink.
He did know what he was doing. His fingers were quick and sure but gentle as he cleaned her palm with antiseptic and cotton balls, then picked up the razor blade and wiped it, too.
“Okay, get ready.”
“I’m ready.” Chess sat up straighter. She trusted him, sure, but if he was messing around with a razor blade on her skin, she wanted to supervise.
He slid the blade along the very edge of the wound, drawing a thin line of blood from her flushed palm. Halfway down the color paled as clear fluid oozed out.
“Yuck,” she said.
“Yeah, it is kind of, isn’t it?” He flashed her a quick smile. “But at least it’s coming out, right? Imagine if it just built up under the skin and went nec …”
“Necrotic? Would that really happen?”
“Do you have tweezers?” He sounded strangled, like he’d just seen something that frightened him.
“On the shelf. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“No, clearly something is. What is it?”
His grip on her hand tightened as he grabbed the tweezers. “Don’t move.”
“What’s—ow! Fuck! What are you …”
The words died in her throat as he lifted the tweezers from the wound. Caught between the sharp metal pincers was a small, fat worm.
Chess had to fight not to throw up as it wriggled and twisted like a fish out of water. Blood—her blood—dripped from its obscene tubular body. Even as she watched it shriveled, balling itself up like a creature in agony.
Doyle opened the tweezers. The worm fell into the sink, unmoving.
“Doyle, what is that? What the fuck is that?” Her voice rose to almost a squeal at the end, unnaturally high and loud in the small room.
“I … I don’t know. Shit, Chess. Hold still.”
“Is it a …” She swallowed. “A maggot?”
“I don’t think so.”
He pulled four more of them from the wound before they were done.
“Know that where you find isolation, where you find emptiness, so you may also find the displaced soul.”
—The Book of Truth, Veraxis, Article 178
“Chess, baby. Guess Terrible don’t kill you after all.” Edsel smiled and leaned back in his rickety chair. Weak sunlight glinted off the silver talismans and tokens dangling from a rack in the corner of his booth and cast bright spots on the tattered burgundy curtains behind him. The city clock hadn’t even chimed noon yet, and Edsel’s booth was still in disarray.
“You sound disappointed.”
“Ain’t never disappointed seeing you, you know that. What you need today? You try that Hand yet? I gots some new sleep potions, you interested.”
“Sleep potions?”
He shrugged. “Lookin tired, baby.”
Damn it. She should have bumped up before she left the house.
After Doyle finally left the night before, she’d tossed and turned for hours. She didn’t imagine many people would be able to slide between the sheets with a blissful smile after watching bloody worms being yanked from their flesh.
That image—and several other ones even more unpleasant—chased her into her sleep, and