Page 156 of Stars

The hand he held, the one he’d slid his ring onto, twitched.

Sergey opened his eyes.

Sasha’s own eyes flickered open, his eyelids rising slowly. He blinked, pupils focusing, lazily tracking across the suite, traveling from his IV to the EKG and then, finally, to Kilaqqi and Sergey.

Sergey gasped. He squeezed Sasha’s hand until Sasha flinched.

But his eyes were clear.

Sergey screamed for the doctor, shouted at the top of his lungs to the glass and the ceiling and the walls, roaring for everyone tocome now,tohurry. Alarms blared, and a dozen doctors hurried to the airlock, clambering into their isolation suits.

Sergey cupped his hand around Sasha’s cheek and pressed his plastic-hooded forehead to his love’s. “Sashunya.”

Sasha squeezed his hand and tried to smile.

* * *

49

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Inner Mongolia

Time spun forward,charted in slivers of the moon that grew larger every night, and in Ilya’s slowly growing strength, and in Jack and Ethan’s daily visits.

And in Sasha’s recovery.

Twenty-four hours after Sasha opened his eyes, Mark fluttered back to consciousness. His eyes were clear, and when the blood was wiped from his ears and nose, they stayed clean. He, like Sasha, had stopped hemorrhaging.

Lindsey dressed in an isolation suit and joined her husband, sitting on his bed and holding his hand as Mark’s intubation line was removed. The first word he croaked out was her name, followed by “I love you.”

She lay beside him until her oxygen tanks emptied. Mark kissed her face shield, and she kissed the inside of her hood.

They burned Sergey’s and Lindsey’s isolation suits after every visit and made them take showers in hot water and bleach, scrubbing their skin until it was raw.

Day by day, Sasha and Mark improved. Infusions of Kilaqqi’s antibodies continued. With every blood test, their viral loads dropped.

They climbed out of bed. They shuffled across the room, rebuilding their strength. They ate rice and yogurt and kept it down.

The morning Mark walked on his own, he went straight to Sasha and embraced him. And then he collapsed, falling to the floor as he howled, clinging to Sasha’s T-shirt and burying his face in his chest. Sasha went with him, holding Mark tight, his face pressed to Mark’s neck. “Thank you,” Mark whispered between his wracking sobs. “Thank you for not giving up. Thank you for saving my life.”

They slept hours and hours every day. Sergey watched over Sasha, bracketing his bed with Kilaqqi, and held his hand. Kilaqqi sang soft songs in a language Sergey didn’t know, drew shapes on Sasha’s forehead and the inside of his palm, and smoothed his wrinkled fingers through Sasha’s short hair. Lindsey sat her own vigil beside Mark. Sometimes Sergey would fall asleep with Lindsey in his arms, both of them leaning against the glass wall as they watched the loves of their life recover.

One morning, Kilaqqi woke up and his eyes were filled with blood.

He was moved to his own isolation room down the hall.

The same day Kilaqqi coughed up blood, Sasha’s and Mark’s viral loads came back negative, completely clear of the virus. “We will observe them for another ten days,” Song said. “We do not know how long the infectious period lasts. So far, it seems to burn out quickly and die. But we will be cautious.”

As Sasha slept, Sergey sat at Kilaqqi’s bedside. He took the old man’s hand in his gloved one.

Kilaqqi smiled at him. “Take care of our Sasha?”

Sergey shook his head. “You are not dying. You cannot.”

“I have lived a long and full life. I have seen the sun rise and set over twenty thousand times. I have seen the wheel of life turn and turn again. When I was a young man, Igor Sevastyanov took my brother for his experiments. And when I was an old man, myhutechiclimbed the sky and fought the evil Igor and Lazarus unleashed.”

“And you saved Sasha.” If they could develop a treatment or a cure based on Kilaqqi’s immunity, he could save the world. He could erase Lazarus’s madness, put an end to whatever horrors he’d cooked up. “You may have saved everyone on Earth.”