Simon rolls onto his back--too fast--and the world revolves around him. And not in a good way. The gritty foulness in his mouth and nostrils makes him choke and then retch. Another fast twist and he spews thin sooty bile into the gutter.
The gutter. That's where he's woken. He wishes it was the first. No, scratch that; he wishes it's the last. But probably not. Why is it that clandestine so often has to be filthy as well?
Sitting up, he pats his pockets, still numb and sickened. At least they seem to have left him with his ident card this time, whoever ithey/i are. Best not to ask, he's learned. He's always been a quick study. Though not, he reflects ruefully, quite quick enough.
Blood and other best-left-unnamed fluids drip from his straight, fine hair, black in the sulfur colored street light. Simon touches with ginger fingers and finds a gash in his scalp, tender to the touch, but not too worrisome. He looks at his chrono. Or really, the pale place where his chrono had been.
Damn it.
It had been a graduation present from his parents. Aside from any sentimental value, it was worth nearly four hundred cred to a even half-reputable dealer. Probably less half that, here in the black, but still. He needs that money. If it'll get River back, he'll hock every stick and fragment he owns.
But first things first.
LOC-unknown. In the black-out zone, there are few ways to mark time. Buried beneath the cities that spawned them like bastard children, the black overhead never changes to mark dawn or midday. The pirated electricity and neon never varies except during the brown-outs when current is rerouted just ahead of the city officials' cutting them off. So he might have been lying in this gutter for only moments or more than a day. Although if it had been that long, someone would inevitably rolled him for his ident card. So...not long.
"My name is Simon Tam," he murmurs aloud. He doesn't have to lower his voice; none of the whores, bully-boys, pimps, dealers, or skulking 'businessmen' that populate these dark streets is going to give him a second glance. Not now, his fine clothes marinated in who-knows-what and ruined, a thin trickle of blood running down his cold face. If he had money, it's surely gone now, and that means he's useless to them, expendable, a hundred like him waking in gutters and alleys all over the sector. He remembers Gemma telling him that some of the younger (read: stupider) rakes of well-to-do families come down to the black-out zones on a lark, to drink and gamble and whore in the lowest dives they can find.
He's been in some of those dives, following a slender thread of hope, rather than dissolution. The only conclusion he's come to is those boys are plain stupid or crazy, because from moment to moment, there's never a time he doesn't wish he's anywhere but here. He can't remember the last time he didn't feel cold, didn't feel afraid. Not just because he's thrown away a promising medical career and a comfortable life, not just because this world is nothing like the one he's come from and he's never been so utterly out of his depth, and not just because he's convinced that any one of these sordid, filthy brigands is going to kill him any second. No. In the larger scheme of things, these are trivial considerations, which is why he can keep pushing forward, reckless, his path lit by the light of the bridges burning brightly behind. But the possibility of failure...
They're hurting us. Get me out. That's what River's letters were trying to tell him, all that time. All that wasted time. All the gibberish that his parents had dismissed as another of River's flights of fancy. They're hurting us.
The thought of someone hurting her turns him sick and angry, an incoherent and towering rage like nothing in his cool, calm and ordered life. Next to it, even his passion for medicine is merely a candle flame, pallid and unconsuming. River. Brilliant, beautiful, occasionally exasperating, River.
His hands fist, and the spike of his pulse sends hammers of pain through his aching head. He carefully unmakes his fists and cups his face in his hands. He wonders if he's going to be sick again. Wonders if there's anything left in his stomach to throw up. He can't remember the last time he ate.
That worries him. The crack on his skull could mean that he's concussed. He repeats his name, the date, the names of the Alliance heads. It all comes, fast and sure. He looks around again, and amidst convincing himself that he's not seeing double, it occurs to him that maybe he should get out of the gutter.
He needs to figure out the time; now that he's opened the gates, all his memory comes flooding back, and he has a meeting. If it's real. If it's not too late.