Boyer was back on the aircraft. This time alone. Her heart still raced, pounded in her throat as she thought about what had transpired. Her mind raced too.
The doctor and her medidroids had rushed into the room. They had tried to stabilize Father Diez, but couldn’t.
“The power to the equipment, it’s pulsing, I can’t get a steady charge in order to shock him,” the doctor had said to the Governor, her calm demeanour frazzled. A medidroid touched buttons on a flat screen trying to coax the medical device to work.
“It’s her,” the Governor had said. His hand up in the space between him and Boyer again, this time a finger pointing at her. He was still pale, afraid. “There’s a power going out of her. I just saw it.”
“Well get her out of here, I need this machine,” the doctor replied. “His life depends on it.”
“No.” Boyer had said it with such firmness, such quiet authority, that everyone in the room stopped, even the droids, and looked at her. “Step away from him.” They didn’t even look to the Governor for permission, they just did. Boyer had an unction and she responded to it. She stepped toward the Father and put her hand on his chest. She closed her eyes and prayed.
She whispered the prayer at first, the words in her mouth and in the air before she could think them. “Your will, your way,” she whispered. “Your heart, your hands,” she prayed.
First the words were in English. Boyer’s eyes were closed and she had the impression that her hand and the arm attached to it had both doubled in size, as though she had a wide jumbo hand and thick, bionic biceps. She quieted her heart and mind as she prayed, there were sounds around her, but they seemed far in the background, as though she had slipped into a pocket in the room that was between where she stood in the space and the space itself.
She heard herself muttering a prayer, a mix of Spanish, English, Cree. And words she couldn’t understand. They burned in her, as though her tongue were a generator, propelling her spirit, somehow connected to the environment around her, stirring it like a baker would stir thick batter. Like an angel would stir a healing pool.
Then she had felt heat on her hand, radiating from her fingertips all the way up to her shoulder. Her feet burned too, but not with heat, with cold, like she’d dipped her feet into the glacially fed waters of the Athabasca river. She was fully submersed.
Then a heart beat. She could feel it through the blanket on the Father’s chest. A pounding, strong heart beat. She opened her eyes and saw that he cupped both of his hands around her hand, as though he was pulling her fingers into his chest. If he didn’t have a strong sternum, her hand would be through his chest cavity and ribcage, against the cushioned hospital cot, seeped in blood.
All the power had cut out in the room completely. No monitors beeped, none of the flatscreens registered images or made sounds. The droids were no longer animated and the Governor and the doctor were heaps on the floor.
“Lucia,” Father Diez said. Her mother’s name for her.
“Father,” she said. She was overwhelmed. Overjoyed. “You’re alive.”
“You prayed for me.” He sat up, but he was too weak. Boyer helped him and he looked around the room. Hunched in his bed, but present. He was in a fog. From the drugs, from the glory. He saw the medical droids first. He looked up at the roof of the canvas tent. Scanned the surroundings. He saw the doctor.
“We’re near the 49th. You were on the island.” Then, instead of trying to explain, she moved around to the other side of the bed, because her body was blocking the other body on the ground. It took a moment, but the sight of the Governor finally registered. Diez’s eyes widened at the sight of him.
“The Gov?”
“He brought me here. They found you, out on the ocean. You were injured, unconscious.”
Father Diez laid back in the bed. He continued to hold her hand tightly. A current, like electricity, seemed to pass between them. It wasn’t painful, but it was charged. Images flashed in her mind. Transmission. Transmutation.
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