The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell [215]
When they were alone, Sandoz began again to pace and talk, the soft awful words pouring out as he moved sightlessly from place to place in the room.
"After a while, the novelty wore off and it was mostly the guards who came. By that time they were keeping me in a little stone-walled room without lights. I was alone and it was very quiet, and all I could hear was my own breathing and the blood ringing in my ears. Then the door would open and I would see a flare of light beyond it." He paused then, seeing it, no longer able to tell how much was real and how much was dream turned nightmare. "I never knew if they were bringing food or if—if... They kept me isolated because the screaming disturbed the others. My colleagues. The ones in the drawing you saw, back in Rome, do you remember? Someone from the harem must have drawn it. I found it in with my food one day. You can’t imagine what that meant to me. God left me, but someone remembered where I was."
He stopped then and looked directly at John Candotti, who stood paralyzed, a bird caught by the cobra’s gaze.
"I decided finally that I would kill the next person to come through the door, the next one who ... touched me." And then he was pacing again, the hands rising and falling as he tried to explain, to make John understand. "I— There was nowhere to escape to. But I thought, If I’m too dangerous, they’ll leave me alone. They’ll kill me. I thought, The next time someone comes in here, one of us is going to die, I don’t care which. But that was a lie. Because I did care. They used me hard, John. They used me hard. I wanted to die."
He stopped again and looked helplessly at Candotti. "I wanted to die, but God took her instead. Why, John?"
John wasn’t following this. But it was a question he’d had to answer before, asked so often by survivors, and he was able to say, "Because, I suppose, souls are not interchangeable. You can’t tell God: Take me instead."
Sandoz wasn’t listening. "I didn’t sleep, for a long time. I waited for the door to open and I thought about how I could kill someone without my hands ..." He was still standing, but he was no longer seeing John Candotti. "So I waited. And sometimes I would fall asleep for a few minutes, I think. But it was so dark. It was hard to tell when my eyes were open. And then I could hear footsteps outside my cell, and I got up and stood in the far corner, so I could use the momentum, and the door opened, and I saw a silhouette, and it was so strange. My eyes already knew but my body was so primed. It was like—the nerves fired without my telling them to. I crashed into her so hard ... I could hear the bones in her chest snap, John."
HE TRIED DESPERATELY to take the force against his ruined hands, to cushion the shock, but before he could make his arms come up, they’d both cannoned into the stone wall and Askama was crushed by the impact.
He found himself on the floor, supporting his weight on his knees and his forearms, with Askama crumpled beneath him, her face so close to his that he could hear her whisper. She smiled at him, blood bubbling in the corner of her mouth and seeping from a nostril. "You see, Meelo? Your family came for you. I found you for them."
He heard the voices then, human voices, and looked up from Askama’s corpse half-blinded by the brilliant light of second dawn pouring through the door. Saw their eyes, single-irised, as frightening to him now as his own eyes must have been to Askama when she first met him. Recognized the look of blank shock and then of revulsion.
"My God, you killed her," the older man said. And then he fell silent, taking in the jeweled necklace, the naked body decorated with scented ribbons, the dried and bloody evidence of the priest’s most recent employment. "My God," he repeated.
The younger man was coughing and holding his sleeve over his nose, to filter the stench of blood and sweat and perfumes. "I am Wu Xing-Ren, and this is my colleague, Trevor Isley. United Nations, External Affairs Committee," he said at