When he went back inside, the woman slept with one hand locked around the iron sphere, and Marcus sat in the chair across from her, listening to the storm tear at his unfinished roof.
Chapter 3 — The Cord
By morning the rain had stopped, but the woman's fever had not.
Marcus woke in the chair with his neck stiff and the gray light coming through the front windows. For a moment he didn't know why he was there. Then she made a sound, and memory returned all at once: the gate, the blood, the thermometer, the iron ball clutched against her throat.
She was worse.
Her skin had gone from flushed to blotchy. Sweat soaked the blanket. Every few minutes she shifted and muttered, sometimes in English, sometimes in a language he didn't know. Once she said "Babka" clearly enough that he leaned closer, but the word led nowhere.
Her cut looked no worse. The fever seemed to come from the whole of her: exhaustion, exposure, infection moving through a body that had been pushed too far.
It was the swelling in her neck that frightened him.
Lymph glands, he supposed. Her throat and jaw were puffy, the skin tight. The old leather cord lay across the swollen flesh like a wire across risen dough. When she thrashed, it pulled into the crease of her neck. Twice he tried to ease it loose with his fingertips. The knot had hardened with age, and her fingers still guarded the sphere even in sleep.
"No," she muttered when he touched it. "No, no."
"I'm not taking it. I'm trying to move it."
She didn't hear him. She was somewhere behind the fever, fighting a battle he couldn't see.
He called the county clinic and got a recording. He called the sheriff's nonemergency line and listened to it ring until the call failed. The storm had taken out a repeater or a line somewhere; his phone showed NO SERVICE in accusing capital letters.
Marcus wet a cloth and laid it across her forehead. She turned into the coolness, then began to thrash harder than before.
It happened quickly.
Her shoulders twisted. The blanket tangled around one arm. Her chin dropped, her neck bent against the cord, and suddenly she was choking—not coughing, but making a thin, terrible, obstructed sound. The cord had wedged beneath her jaw and across her swollen throat. Her face darkened. Her free hand clawed at the couch while the other remained trapped in the blanket.
Marcus grabbed her shoulders. "Hold still. Hold still—damn it, look at me."
She couldn't.
He tried the knot again. It was wet, shrunken, and slick. He tried to slip the cord over her chin, but her jaw was clenched and every movement pulled it tighter. Her heels beat against the couch cushions. The sound coming from her throat narrowed to a whistle.
The scissors were still in the first-aid box.
He snatched them up, forced the blunt tip beneath the cord at the side of her neck, and cut.
The leather parted with a snap.
She dragged in a breath so violent it became a sob. Then another. Marcus pulled the cord away and tossed it onto the coffee table. The sphere swung from the severed ends and struck the wood with a dull iron tick.
For a moment he only knelt there, scissors in hand, listening to her breathe.
"You're all right," he said. "You're breathing. You're all right."
Her eyes were still closed, but the panic had gone out of her body. The red mark around her neck made him sick to look at. He had promised not to take the thing from her. He had also kept her from strangling in front of him. If she hated him for it when she woke, she would at least be alive to do it.
Marcus picked up the sphere. It was heavier than its size suggested and cold in a way that seemed out of proportion to the warm room. The crack across it caught his thumbnail. When he rolled it between his fingers, he thought he heard the faintest ring, like a bell heard from another valley, though that might have been the scissors settling in the plastic box.
He didn't want it on the table where she might knock it to the floor in another fever fit.
In the kitchen he opened the cabinet, took down the blue coffee tin, and checked that it was empty except for a few grounds stuck to the seam. He set the sphere and both pieces of the cut cord inside, put the lid on, and placed the tin on the counter beside the stove.
There. Safe, clean, and within reach.
He made coffee he didn't drink. He changed her damp blanket. Around noon her temperature dropped half a degree, and by late afternoon she was sleeping in a way that looked less like surrender and more like rest.
Marcus was washing the basin at the kitchen sink when she screamed.
It wasn't a cry of pain. It was pure terror.
He ran into the front room with wet hands. She was sitting upright on the couch, hair wild, blanket around her waist, staring at her own empty hands.
Then she saw her throat in the dark window glass.
Her fingers flew to her neck. She found the red mark, the bare skin, the absence.
Her face changed in a way he would not forget. It wasn't anger first. It was horror, the look of someone who has turned around and seen a child missing from an empty road.
She seized his wrist with a strength her fever should not have allowed.
"What," she demanded, "have you done?"
Chapter 4 — Three Knocks
Marcus explained it three times before she would let go of his wrist.
"I cut it because it was choking you."
"You put it where?"
"In the kitchen. In the coffee tin. It's safe."