Chapter 13
He was awake for a long time before he realized it. There seemed to be no difference between the sleeping and waking states – in both, he was in constant, if ill-defined, pain. And in both, he appeared to be trapped in a nightmare.
The dreams were the most familiar. For an interminable time, he thought that the dreams were real, because they took place in the Arena itself. In his early dreams, a youngling ran across bloody sands, screaming in terror.
He woke, and contemplated the bright lights above him before sliding back into the dream-Arena. This time, his mind dredged up better terms to apply to the youngling: human, female…though she still ran, shrieking, in front of her own impending death.
Waking gave him images of people Doing Things to him. He didn't know what they were doing, exactly. He only knew that it hurt. He grumbled and tried to pull away from the Things That Were Being Done.
Someone whispered soothing words. The voice caught at his mind – who was that? A brother?
Did he have a brother?
Still wondering, he went back to the familiar terrors. This time, he understood more of his own thoughts. The youngling was a "little girl", and her name was…was… he frowned in his sleep. She was important. She mattered, to him. He didn't know why.
There was time to figure it out. There was all the time in the world, in fact. He was in no hurry, couldn't imagine why he'd ever be in a hurry to do anything. He turned aside from the nightmares, all the nightmares, and fell into soothing darkness.
He swam up out of sleep again, to see that the lights were dimmed. For the first time, he was aware that his feet were held in something. It should have concerned him, it seemed. Moving his feet hurt, though, so he stopped.
He couldn't remember if "feet" were permanently attached, or if he could replace them with something else. He thought they must be detachable. Certainly there was a disconnect between one of them and the rest of his body, it seemed.
The lights were too far away. He frowned, and considered that.
He could move his arms…not that he wanted to. There were ugly tubes attached to them. That made him frown, too – it looked cluttered. Untidy. Someone should clean that up, he thought. His fingers slid across something slick and vaguely wet.
That hurt, too, so he stopped.
He went back to the Arena again.
The little girl had blond hair, he finally understood. Blond hair, like that of her mother. Not like that of her…what?
He knew he had to save her. He ran out onto the sands to put himself between her and whatever, whoever, was chasing her.
The sands tripped him up.
He fell, and the sand rushed up to claim him, to drag him under.
The little girl screamed one last time, high and horrible and hopeless, as she was captured. He'd failed, failed completely, been too caught up in the sands and in his own confused thoughts, to be able to save –
"Shadow!"
He wrenched himself out of the nightmare in the same moment that he recognized it for what it was.
Waking was only marginally better.
Everything hurt. His hands scrabbled for purchase in something thick, dense, and moist-feeling – it took another full minute to realize that he was actually imbedded in the gel. I've turned into a dessert, he thought in irritation.
His brain obligingly sparked off images of gem-colored gelatin molds with assorted fruits frozen in their centers.
Really, it was impossible to think past the ridiculous images! In his head, the green dessert started jiggling.
This struck him as hysterically funny. It hurt to laugh – it hurt to breathe! – but he was consumed with the image of himself as a piece of some kind of unlikely-colored gelatin mold, and couldn't shake it. Shake it! Hee! He wondered if he could jiggle, too –
The act of trying made the darkness come back and smother him. This time, he fell into sleep without nightmares.
…
A dark line appeared on the horizon. He wondered if it was land.
He wondered if he should care.
…
He knew he was in pain long before he woke up. It was a curious feeling, the pain – it meant he was still alive – but it was remote from him. Almost like it belonged to someone else.
Did it?
There was a nagging sense that he'd forgotten something very important. He turned that over in his mind when he could find room for it. The pain was sneaky – it crept into the gaps in his attention and his memory, pulling his focus back to it with every breath.
There seemed to be a lot of those gaps.
He didn't mean to open his eyes. He sighed with regret when they opened without any conscious effort on his part.
The lights were still there. How curious. He thought that it all must have been some kind of dream. The lights weren't what he expected to see, though he couldn't quite dredge up the memory of what he had expected. The pain coiled around his fuzzy thoughts, pulsing insistently at his attention, and he let it fill in the space where the memory should have been.
The lights, now…they held his eyes. A clustered ring of smaller lights, grouped in threes. He considered the dim lights for a long time. At least, it seemed like it was a long time. But time didn't mean anything anymore…did it?
Silver metal edged the lights. His fingers twitched, then, at the memory of holding metal. In his mind, the metal edge slid, warm from the light nearby, under his fingers as he traced it.
Warm…
His hand wavered, came up out of whatever imprisoned it. He was cold. He wanted to be warm, again. Had he ever been warm? Had he ever held metal, already warmed by something else, in his hands? He couldn't say.
An image flashed across his mind (heavy steel, warm and slick with blood) and was gone before his fractured attention could seize it.
His hand floated up, toward the lights. One shaking finger traced the outline of the cluster, even as his eyes were drawn to something else altogether: the crude tattoo on the back of his hand.
For one second, he remembered everything.
I've got to get out of here! Even while he thought it, the memories fell away, dropping in fragments into the vast swelling of pain that defined him. Only partial memories remained, tiny pieces of what he'd known. From those pieces, he was able to assemble only one clear idea: a sense of urgency.
Driven, suddenly, he felt for the edges of whatever imprisoned him. Some kind of firm gel, or goo, met his questing fingers. Tubes and wires snarled around his arms as he finally reached the edges of the yielding surface on either side, and found something more solid to take hold of. He took a deep breath, and pulled himself up.
Blackness flickered on the edges of his vision with the effort. The pain rushed in again, remorseless as the tide, and he almost sank back again.
He wanted to cry, to scream, with the pain.
He didn't think either one would help, so he didn't.
He closed his eyes and let his head fall forward. Breath rattled harshly in his throat as he tried to stave off the encroaching blackness.
After another timeless moment, he summoned the strength to open his eyes again. He blinked. That doesn't make any sense…
His legs were embedded several inches into the thick gel. The right knee was wrapped in some kind of brace. Tubes and wires went into the brace. The exposed flesh just on the outside edges of the brace looked swollen and painful, as far as he could tell through the gel. He couldn't be sure.
Come to think of it, I can't feel that, he realized. He let go of the right-hand rail of his bed with an effort, and prodded experimentally at the gel that lay over the knee.
Kaleidoscopic colors flashed behind his eyes. His mind seized up, convulsing at the pain, and shot nightmare images out in all directions. He jerked, gasping, and clung to the left-side rail to keep from falling.
Bad idea, bad idea, bad idea, he thought, once he could think again. He shivered. The pain had a locus-point, it seemed, and he'd found it.
The urgency wouldn't let him give up and pass out again, though every nerve screamed for it.
His scope expanded past the bed. For the first time, he realized that he was in a room he'd never seen before. The tubes and wires led to machines he'd never seen, either. The soft light showed him the outlines of another bed, not made of gel, and the faint shape of the sleeper it contained.
More important, it showed him the door.