Page 44 of Soul on Fire
He woke with Ikolo in his arms, their arms and legs entangled. The village was already up, women singing as they stoked the fires, children laughing, their feet padding on the dirt as they ran.
“We have to go,” Ikolo breathed.
The mission has priority.Elliot closed his eyes and pushed his forehead against Ikolo’s. He kissed him, hard.
They pulled apart and dressed quickly. Their clothes were wrinkled from being carelessly dropped in the dirt in the frenzy of their lovemaking. They smothered their smiles as they brushed the dirt off.
“Doctor?” A voice called from outside. “Are you awake?”
“Yes.” Elliot pulled back their door. Keise waited, his face pinched, eyes drawn, mouth closed in a thin line. “What’s wrong?”
“One of the children isn’t feeling well. Please, come see.”
* * *
The child’seyes were bloodred and she stared beyond her mother. “She said her head hurt yesterday.” Her voice wavered, wobbled. “And I found her like this when I woke up.”
Ikolo pulled Keise aside. “It’s the sickness. It’s Ebola.”
Keise sagged, sighing with an exhale that came out of his soul like he’d dreaded this moment for his whole life. He probably had. Elliot hung back, watching.
“You must keep the child isolated. No one can touch her. No one can go near her. The virus spreads through body fluids. Blood. Vomit. Diarrhea. There will plenty of all of that soon.”
“What can we do?”
“Give her lots of fluids, water, meat or bone broth if you have it. And you have to make sure no one else gets infected. Keep her isolated. Keep the children she’d played with isolated—”
“I cannot take children from their mothers and fathers.”
“If you don’t control the spread, the sickness will burn through this entire village. It could kill everyone.”
“Can you stay, Doctor? You know how to fight this. You know how to save people from Ebola.” Keise took Ikolo’s hand in both of his leathery palms. “Please stay. Help us survive.”
Ikolo’s gaze slid to Elliot. His face fell as his eyes closed, anguish falling from him like the rain running down the vines. “I cannot,” he said. Pain sliced his words, and regret made them crash to the ground and shatter. “I’m sorry. I cannot stay.”
“Then we will die,” Keise said. It was a proclamation, a declaration. “When you return down this track, we will no longer be here.”
“Keep the child isolated,” Ikolo begged. “Wash everything. Boil everything. Burn her sleeping mat. Burn her clothes. If she dies… burn her body.”
“Her mother will never leave her side.”
Ikolo nodded. “The same applies to her, then. To stop the sickness you must stop the spread.”
“We will try, Doctor. We will try.” Keise’s eyes filled with sorrow and a hard-earned futility as he left them and headed for the little girl’s family hut.
Elliot’s stomach wrenched, bile threatening to erupt from him. He forced his stomach to harden. “There’s nothing we can do?”
“I promised you I’d stay with you until we find Majambu. I can’t stay and help them and do what I promised you.”
The mission has priority.Elliot closed his eyes. He walked away, striding past the huts and into the brush toward the cassava and taro plots. He stopped in the foliage, surrounded by elephant fern and strangler fig vines that wreathed around a wenge trunk. Branches over his head sagged with moss, water dripping like rain on his head.
Trading lives. He was trading lives again, and now, making Ikolo trade lives for him. Chase Majambu, stop the attack, an attack that was targeting the West, targetingAmericanlives, at least according to the CIA.
The mission has priority. Let these people suffer and die.
In the calculus of human life, a life should be equal to another life. One person’s existencewasworth the same as another’s. He’d seen and he’d felt the opposite in his life, fuck, he had. He’d always come out on the losing end before: being black, being disregarded, being ignored and unwanted and cast aside. He knew in his bones that the human calculus didn’t add up the right way, but he’d never been on this side of that equation, on the heavy-handed side.
He wasn’t just black here. He was American, too. He and Keise and Ikolo shared the same color, but the world put Elliot’s life, and his country’s lives, above theirs. Now he was forced to tip the scales, forced to choose the worth of lives, assign value to who lived and died for no other reason than the privilege of their nation.
