Tom's advice was sound; Jess knew that once he saw Morgan, he'd want to stay with her. So he went to the command tent and found Khalila and Dario arguing.
Or rather, Dario was arguing and Khalila was ignoring him when Jess pushed open the flap of the command tent, and all of that skidded to a halt as Khalila rushed to Jess and examined him with intense, toe-to-head scrutiny. "Does it hurt?" she asked. Under stress, her accent grew stronger. "The burns?"
"Not as much as it ought," he said. He was out of breath and, yes, aching all over, but determined not to show it.
"Good." She embraced him then. Gently. When she drew back, he saw his damp hair had left little dark patches on the sky blue cloth of her hijab. Her eyes were very bright with tears, but she blinked them away. "We made Thomas go back to bed. He looked terrible, and he was coughing constantly."
Which, of course, made Jess's throat tickle uncomfortably. When he swallowed, he could still taste bittersweet ashes. Imaginary, most likely, but very real to him. He blinked and saw a flash of green flames, falling buildings, screaming faces trapped and helpless. Pressure formed in his chest, dangerous and sickening, and he felt a terrible urge to run. But there was no running away from what he'd left behind. It would be with him, always. And he had to learn to stand it.
"Are you all right?" she asked him quietly, and he nodded. "When you didn't follow us through at first, I was so afraid-but you came through; of course you did. I knew we couldn't lose you. You, of all of us, are a survivor."
She underestimated herself, he thought, and almost said it, but he knew she wouldn't like to have it pointed out. He and Khalila sat down on camp chairs a little distance away from the others in the tent, with the whispering, billowing fabric at their backs. Dario watched, arms folded, but didn't try to join them; Jess was dimly glad of that.
Khalila looked exactly right once again, perfectly elegant in a long dress of thick, nubby silk that some other Muslim woman in the High Garda must have unearthed from a chest. She had the matching head scarf, and a full, black Scholar's robe over the dress. The only jarring detail was her hands-treated with a Medica's skill, but still showing signs of burns. She'd cleaned her nails with scrupulous care, but the rest gave her away.
Jess nodded at them, where they were folded in her lap. "What happened there?"
Khalila looked as if she had the impulse to hide her hands in the folds of her gown, but she didn't. She looked down to consider the scratched, burned fingers, and then said, "After you collapsed, there was-there was another young man, alone. A survivor. He crawled out the gap. He was-he was on fire."
Jess's whole body registered the meaning of that in a horrific rush. "You pulled him out."
She nodded. Her eyes were dark and distant, and he hoped never to see that look in her again. "Dario and I, yes. We tried to-to help him. But he died." She smiled, but it looked forced, and painful. "We had to try." The smile faded, and her eyes suddenly filled with tears. "Oh, Jess. There were so many-so many-"
"I know," he said, and held her hand while she wept almost silently, but painfully. He had the same grief, but it seemed to be trapped behind a wall, seething and angry and bitter, and he didn't know how to let it out.
But he was glad she did.
Dario had turned his head away, but Jess couldn't miss the stiff line of his shoulders. He wanted to be the one Khalila turned to. And most of the time, Jess thought, he would get his wish. But not now.
The storm passed within half a minute, and she carefully dried her eyes and gave Jess a small, apologetic smile as she pulled away. When she started to speak, he shook his head. "No apologies," he said. "Not for being more human than the rest of us."
"We all deal with things in our own way," Scholar Wolfe said as he took a seat on Jess's other side. "No shame in any of it. Even despair." He almost sounded . . . kind. Surely that couldn't be right.
Jess preferred a safe, solid world where Scholar Wolfe didn't have a kind bone in his body, and to preserve that, he moved back to watching Santi and Zara, who stood together at a long table, with maps.
Zara reached down and took a book from her pack. She opened it and flipped pages, and as Jess watched, she picked up a stylus and wrote in it.
A Codex. She's writing in a Codex? He felt a chill, then a rush of heat, and fear. Easy for Zara to betray them doing that, and when he stood up, he meant to put a stop to it. But Wolfe grabbed his sleeve and said, "Sit down before you fall, boy. You look wretched and you shouldn't be upright."
"I heard the captain wanted me to come here, and why are they writing in a Codex?"