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My shoulders shake. Every time that I try to hold back the trembling, the tension sets off another round of hacking coughs. The room’s freezing, I’m on fire, and poor Lauren’s face tells me that there’s everything wrong.
“Don’t you dare call my mother,” I rasp between wheezes. She gets a funny expression on her face, but she deems this demand worthy to listen to. Her hand around mine is tight, reassuring. I can’t even tell that she’s sweating through her shirt from worry.
Of course she’s panicked. Of course she’s torn up. The infirmary’s been out of antibiotics for weeks now. We all know. We’ve been in the meetings, the cage fights in place of Leadership.
There’s an ice cold towel on my forehead and around my shoulders that’s only really managing to leave a twin reflection of wet spots on the sheets where it soaks in. “Don’t call her,” I repeat a few hours later when the shaking subsides. She’s told me it’s because I need to eat something.
I can’t get past the third bite without my stomach ejecting the scraps that were coaxed down to start. Delirium has set in, hasn’t it? It can’t be this bad. The city’s past hell in a handbasket. Whatever’s deeper than hell, that’s Chicago. Nothing we can’t overcome, though. That’s what the Amity drum along in the news feeds. We always overcome.
Past self-immolation, faction sabotage, and a good old fashioned plague - we’ll manage yet again.
It wasn’t just Lauren at my side before. I struggle through the mix of memory and fever dream, scrabbling to remember how Eric first comforted me through the initial runny nose and sore throat with good natured vigor. Perhaps that should have been my first cue that they really were worried I’d caught the Bug. Eric was a sweetheart when he deigned to be, but never when it had to do with phlegm or sponge baths.
He hadn’t been here in days, though. “He left us,” I growl. My hands wring the damp towel around my neck, wishing it was my own inflamed throat instead. “Coward.”
“Shh,” Lauren soothes. She fights with me to get the towel back - a horrendously one-sided battle that will have none singing of my valor - but I sigh when it comes back freshly chilled.
“When I pull through, I’m keeping bed privileges.” It’s difficult to speak, but it’s the only thing that I can do besides close my eyes and watch the fires. Lauren should agree to everything. The guilt that she’s one of the few naturally immune should be on my side in this case.
The sun that filters through the threadbare curtains - blue, with hand-embroidered ducks for the early spring rains - makes the nausea worse. The dark, though, I can’t stand either. Every few minutes my hands flex and scramble to find where Lauren’s gone to. She has to sleep sometime, and the awkward angle between the bed and the armchair makes it too hard to keep her palm in mine.
“Don’t,” I demand, and she already knows what I mean.
“Tris, I know,” she soothes in familiar refrain. I keep telling her, hour after hour, how scared it would make everyone.
She stirs, a dark mound that refuses to meet my mindless gaze. I can see the reflection of stars in the wet of her eyes. Her hand has refused to meet mine in firm grip, and terror races along in veins that seem built for fear now. The lump raises, looms overhead.
“I’m sorry, hun,” she whispers through my dark nightmares and our deathbed bedroom. Her body is hot as she plucks me effortlessly from the sheets. I push and writhe and sob tearlessly as I recognize her destination. “The fever’s got to break. It has to.”
Our bathroom tub was my favorite place after a tiresome, unending day in Dauntless. Hot water, a capful of sudsy bath mix, and the sound of my partners’ unruly chatter in the next room made all the chaos worthwhile. I shriek this time as Lauren dumps me bodily into the water that’s been sitting all day.
The shivering takes root again, but I am too tired to do anything about it. The thin cotton garments on my frame drag me down, down while Lauren relocates a towel across my forehead. She promises it will all be worth it, brushing hair out of my face and bundling a worn sweatshirt behind me to keep my head from resting on the hard porcelain.
I hate her.
No, I don’t. I loathe the cold, the fire, the nails that fill my lungs, tumbling over and over with each rasp of air.
“I’m going to die,” I tell her when the water doesn’t feel like ice any longer. Nothing feels like much at all, to be honest. There’s no difference between the soft cotton under my head or the pinpricks of air on my knees that peek out over the water.
Lauren chucks the remaining ice cubes into the water. I don’t even blink at the splash. “You’re not going to die,” she snarls, her patience worn thin. Perhaps she hates me now as much as I do.
“Sure I am.”
Just like that, the fight drains from Lauren’s shoulders. Her head rests on the porcelain tub’s edge. The silence unnerves me, and I pull one arm loosely around my knees. “I’m going to die from the Bug, and that’ll be it. Me and mom and dad, back together again. You and Eric will have to move on, figure out how to help the others move past, too.”
It’s cruel, perhaps, to talk about how they need to get over it all just for the sake of this damned city. But it’s the only thing that feels clear after hours and days of fire. Lauren’s head slowly rises. Her hand touches my cheek, and it’s warm. Comfortable, even. I sigh as I lean into it.
“I’ll miss this,” I murmur.
“Tris,” Lauren warbles. A second hand cups my other cheek before flipping to press back to forehead. “Tris you’re making sense. Well, you’re being bleaker than fuck, but you’re present. You’re here.”
I can see the blue-grey light from the dawn outside filter over the pane of her face. There’s the sound of the front door slamming open, boots stomping in a harried rush through the dark rooms.
Eric slams half into the bathroom door as he finally finds us. Lauren turns to him, something new lifting her voice. “Meds?”
“Close enough,” he replies, jutting his chin towards the tub before asking his own question. “How is she?”
“The fever’s breaking. The delirium’s fading. She remembered about her parents.”
The conversation would have faded to the background a day ago. Now it’s too loud, too much. I sink into the lukewarm water’s grasp, pulling my knees tight to my chest to get every spare inch out of the ice cold apartment air.
“Took you long enough,” I toss in Eric’s direction, reveling in the knife’s edge grin that greets me in response.