Doctor Who_ Left-Handed Hummingbird - Kate Orman [41]
He jerked awake, pulse pounding, and forced himself to breathe slowly while his heart went through its early‐morning aerobics. ‘Señor Alvarez,’ said the nurse standing over him, ‘you can’t just lie about on the floor like this.’
Cristián wriggled his arms out of the sleeping bag, looking up at Professor Summerfield’s bed. ‘How is she?’ he asked.
‘She’s sleeping,’ said the nurse. ‘Her EEG’s almost back to normal. Now, what about getting up off the hospital’s nice clean floor?’
Cristián struggled out of the blue bag, scratching at his face and scalp. He didn’t think the floor was that clean.
He gripped his top lip with his bottom teeth and blew out a sigh through his nose. Professor Summerfield looked very peaceful. In the morning light, the whole room seemed different, back in the real world. Her EEG’s almost back to normal… was she going to be all right? Was everything going to be all right?
He stumbled into the green hallways of the hospital and bought plastic‐flavoured coffee and a dry pastry from a vending machine. He stumbled back into the hospital room. Had she moved? He watched her while he ate, the coffee searing the roof of his mouth.
‘Who am I?’ she said.
He nearly choked on the pastry.
‘Just kidding,’ said Bernice, as Cristián spat crumbs into the waste‐paper bin.
‘I can’t think of many things worse,’ she was saying, glancing around the room, ‘than waking up in hospital without knowing why.’ She looked him up and down. ‘You’re not really holding up your end of this conversation, you know.’
‘¿Como esta?,’ he managed at last.
She shrugged, shoulders moving against the pillows piled up under her head. ‘Much too healthy to be in here.’
‘What is the last thing you remember?’
She stared at the air for a few seconds. ‘It’s a bit of a blur, really. Nightmares. Lots of nightmares. Before that… you went to get the pizzas, didn’t you? Don’t tell me I’m allergic to pizza.’
‘What were your nightmares about?’
Bernice shook her head. ‘Cristián, what happened to me?’
‘I, um, I don’t know. But the nurse says you’re all right now. We’ll ask the Doctor about it, when he gets back.’
‘The Doctor.’ Bernice’s forehead creased in the tiniest of frowns. ‘Cristián,’ she said, ‘something’s happened to the Doctor.’
They exchanged glances, and what frightened Professor Summerfield even more than her sudden premonition was the fact that Cristián believed her.
* * *
Tenochtitlan, 1487
Ace sat cross‐legged on the floor of a room in Ce Xochitl’s house. She felt nothing at all.
They had laid the Doctor out on one of the sleeping mats, gently arranging his hands by his sides. She had wiped the red streaks away from his face, soaked his burning forehead in cool water from the canal. His blood‐spattered jacket and tie were rolled up in her duffle bag. There was nothing she could do now but wait and watch.
A curing woman and a soldier with nothing better to do had carried his limp body through the streets to the judge’s house. The curer had fussed over the shallow wound in Ace’s side, left behind some herbs for the Doctor’s fever, and beetled off without asking any questions.
Ace waited through the afternoon and into the long shadows of the evening, listening to the mayfly flutter of his breath.
Iccauhtli was dead. He had drowned in a canal after a warrior had split his ribcage open. Achtli was dead. His eyes had bled all over the floor. The Doctor was dying. His forehead was so hot that Ace could feel the fever in her fingertips from half an inch away.
Yeah, if this were a plan, it was a right cock‐up.
She gently levered open one of his eyelids. The pupil was shrunk to a pinprick of black. The blue of his iris glittered unnaturally, too bright. She let the lid close again.
Had he expected her to leave him? She had mucked up his smooth‐running plans more than once, going off when she should have stayed put, staying put when she should have gone away. Telling people things they weren’t supposed to know.
Whatever had happened to him, she would have tried to stop it. She might have mucked up his plan. So maybe she was