2. Fever

They had fed him to the fire. He remembered cold faces and jabbing steel. He remembered a flame that started in his side, but now had raced to consume his whole body. When he closed his eyes, he saw redness, and knew that he was burning away to ash. When he opened his eyes…

Faces. Faces, floating before him like a full moon in a dark sky, with eyes like glowing lumps of coal. They moved, never in the same place for more than a second. He tried to tell them to stay still, forcing words out of his flame-ravaged throat.

"He's delirious," one of the faces said.

"It is only to be expected."

Not the moon, but the sun – burning, hurting his eyes. He tried to roll away from them, but flames reached out and clawed at his shoulders, and something gripped his wrists with bands of steel. "Lie still," the sun and moon told him. "You have to lie still. You are very sick."

"Sick," he echoed.

"First coherent word we've gotten out of him, and it's that."

"Help is on the way."

"I killed the people who did this to you."

There were too many words. They crackled like flame, and he closed his eyes, but the fires were worse there. Something was touching his side, and it swelled to a peak, and the flames boiled over and erupted from his throat in a scream.

"I am sorry. This must be hurting you very much, but–"

"Oh God, it's disgusting."

"Killing was too good for them."

He remembered the shocking wrongness of the steel in his side. Cold. It had been cold at first – coldness hitting him before the pain. Fire came after. He remembered nights and days flickering like someone turning a light on and off. He saw bars and a tilted grey sky. He saw feet walking past him, and a hand – perhaps his own. He heard screaming, and his throat was raw with it. He saw hands twist a dirty rag and felt water fall onto his lips, but only a few drops, and you needed an ocean to douse this fire.

"John," said the sun and moon. John. John.

He remembered crawling, trying to escape the flames, not knowing then that he carried the fire with him. He tasted dirt in his mouth. He heard laughter. He fumbled at his side, pulling at makeshift bandages torn from his clothes in the days before the fire had spread. There was blood behind his nails.

"He's not going to make it."

"Don't talk like that!"

"John. You have to let us care for you, John."

John. The others hadn't called him anything; they'd just laughed and spat. He opened his eyes. The silver moon, round and pale and anxious. The setting sun, blazing with fury and fire. The rising sun, constant and burning.

"No. No." He tried to bat them away. "Go away. They… they'll take you, too – feed you to the fire." He tried to tell them about them: men with spears; the overseer with the whip; the guards with nails in the soles of their boots, going click click click, chittering like bugs; the crowds – "even children. They paid for tickets" – and worse. There were monsters with white hair who sucked life from your chest, and creatures who lived in flames, and things with two heads, and, "go away," he begged them. "Don't let them take you. I… I couldn't bear it."

But they still surrounded him, hands on his shoulder, on his wrist, on his side. "Stop babbling, and listen! We killed them, and now we've run far, far away. We're not in any danger. At least, not from the plausible parts of your babbling. The two-headed monsters were just delirium talking, right?"

"And even if we were in danger, we would not be leaving you."

He tried to push them away. Sick. They'd told him he was sick. "Catching," he forced out. "Go away. Don't… You might not…" He remembered people shying away. "Jail fever," someone said. "He won't last long." Water pushed through bars with the toe of a boot. "Don't get too close, darling." He remembered opening cracked eyes and lurching forward, and people screaming. "Don't want you to get sick."

"We won't get sick, will we? I thought it was an infected wound – and what did they stab him with; a flag pole? We won't…"

"We will not."

"Wouldn't make any difference if we did."

A hand closed in his own, the cool fingers like heaven in the baking heat. It was an oasis in the desert. The flames still blazed, but they had withdrawn, just for a little bit.

He tried to smile. "Thanks, guys, but you've got to go. You can't…"

The smell had been sickening – the smell of his own rotting flesh. The flames had long since burnt that away, but he knew that others could still smell it. "He stinks, ma!" Days in a stinking cell, unable to stand. "This one smells like a corpse already."

"I smell," he said. "Look disgusting. Go away." Leave me to the flames. Flames burnt to ashes. Ashes were pure, and floated on the wind, forever free.

"Which is the stupidest thing I've ever heard, even from you. We haven't fought our way through fire and blood just to give up because of a little disgustingness. Though it really does look disgusting, you know."

"You are safe, John, and we are not leaving, no matter what you say."

"Course we aren't."

He gave up the fight, but it didn't feel like giving up at all. When he closed his eyes, the flames were barely there at all. When he opened them, he saw neither sun nor moon, but the faces of his team, gathered around him in a wall that no fires could break through.

"I love you guys," he told them, his voice cracking. "All of you."

Rodney cleared his throat. "We're telling ourselves that was the delirium talking."

And it was, perhaps, but only a little bit.

end of part two