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game.
    He started forward, hands then knees
on the foot of her bed. She pulled her legs up underneath her to make room for
him. He sat, knees touching hers, and looked her in the eye.
    He didn’t look right, she thought.
Didn’t look like Sonam. Something was wrong…although that should be fairly
obvious, by then. If something wasn’t wrong , he wouldn’t be acting like
this.
    “ He’s going
to be dead in the morning,” he said. He didn’t look or gesture toward Tenzin.
He didn’t need to. “And so will the rest of this city. But we’re not sick. We
need to go somewhere safe.”
    “ We can’t
leave him. Sometimes people get better—”
    “ One in a
billion.”
    This was an invented statistic and
Pema knew it, but it was probably close enough that it didn’t matter. So all
she said was, “Nowhere is safe.”
    He closed his eyes, shook his head.
    She reached out, pushing his hair
out of his eyes, her fingers brushing his forehead. Her heart stopped. He was
burning up. Even with that smallest touch, she could tell. “Oh my god,” she
said it in English, like they always did. “Sonam.”
    He opened his eyes. He didn’t look
like he understood.
    “ You’re…”
but she couldn’t make herself say it. Her thoughts were frozen, this new
revelation rattling around in her head uselessly.
    But it didn’t explain why he would
want to leave Tenzin. And, she suspected, why he’d been about to leave her,
too.
    He shook his head and swatted at her
hand, which hung in the air between them. One last look at her, and he was on
his feet, swooping down for the purse and backpack.
    “ Don’t leave
us,” she said, almost without thinking. It just came out, and her eyes started
to burn for what felt like the twentieth time today.
    He didn’t turn back though.
    “ Sonam,
don’t leave me.”
    But even before he walked out the
door, she knew there was no point. She thought about going after him, dragging
him back, hitting him and kicking him until he listened …but she didn’t.
    Her eyes overflowed, and she buried
her face in her hands.
     
    ****
     
    Tenzin’s frail figure convulsed
again; this time, he coughed something like blood onto the sheets. Something like blood because it was blacker and thicker than blood should’ve been.
    Pema wiped it up — first off his
graying lips, then from his chin, and finally the bed. He winced slightly at
her touch. There was no light behind his eyes when he opened them.
    It wouldn’t be long now.
    The coughing died out after that,
and Tenzin seemed to fall asleep, his shallow breaths growing further and
further apart, his body relaxing under the sheets. Pema laid a new cold cloth
on his head and peeked out the window.
    The rain had stopped for the moment.
Now was probably the last chance she’d get today — and there was nothing in the
flat but biscuits. She’d better save those for when it got really bad —
those things could survive a nuclear holocaust, let alone a plague.
    Another glance at her little
brother, to make sure he was asleep, and she grabbed a bottle of water and
slipped out the door, down the pale lime green hallway, into the cramped
stairwell, and out the door onto the stupa-circle.
    Silence. Not even the thin, frantic
gathering from yesterday. There were a few dead beggars against the stupa
walls, but all the brown, blue, and green doors were sealed against them.
Whether there was anyone inside to care, Pema didn’t know.
    She’d seen death before — it
happened a lot near the stupa. The sick and poor came to beg, and once in a
while they died there. Her mother had passed away in the flat upstairs, not
long after Thinley had gotten his visa to go to the US. Bodies were paraded
around the stupa in covered palanquins before being taken down to the ghats, in
normal circumstances. Bodies in the street and on the sides of the road were
almost common.
    That was what she told herself, as
she picked her silent way over gray cobblestones, the faded eyes of the