Chapter 28 – Zwischenzug

Something sharp and prickly dug into Samsara's back; she could feel it through her shirt, but at the moment she did not have the energy to brush it off. She could not even tell if it was underneath her or above her, whether she was on her back or her stomach or her side or her feet or her head, or whether she was awake or it was day or night or whether she was hungry or not. Her throat itched slightly, and she could only breathe through one of her nostrils.

She decided to figure things out one thing at a time. First, she determined that she was on her side, her right side. She guessed this from the short, sharp pain that ran through her right leg and right shoulder when she tried to move them and the solid feel of the ground on her right. With her left hand, she attempted to brush away whatever was poking her back, but she could not reach all the way around over the top, and a solid, if dusty, floor prevented her from pulling her arm around her front and under her torso to reach that way.

She tried to stand, but her right arm would not cooperate, and she fell back into the dust.

She next tried opening her eyes to see if it was dark or light out or if she was indoors or out. Her first attempt met with failure—something hot about the area around her burned even hotter as soon as she tried to look at it, forcing her to clamp her eyes shut once again and to rub them as best she could with her left hand.

So much for the question of whether or not she was awake.

Listening told her nothing about where she was. All she could hear at the moment was a humming sound, very faint and almost not there at all, probably from a fluorescent light. Indoors or night, she told herself.

Her stomach rumbled. Indoors or night, and hungry, she told herself.

As her mind cleared itself, as she became more and more awake, Samsara tried again to open her eyes, and again she was met with resistance. Something about where she was would not let her see anything without taking a toll through a burning sensation in her eyes, her cheeks, and even her mouth, and even then, she could not see anything. For the time being, she decided to find other ways to learn about where she was.

It occurred to her that her entire right side was not working properly, so she brushed at the ground in front of her—dusty, it was, with rocks or gravel or somesuch covering it, and it was itself probably paved—with her free hand, and then she tried rolling over onto her other side. Pins and needles shot through her body as she did so, exposing the skin on her right arm and part of her right leg to the air for the first time in he knew not how long. Her joints ached, but they still seemed to work. Where a rock had been digging at her side, she now felt a stab as the open wound hit the air, but it felt like it was small enough she could deal with it later.

Feeing returned to her right hand, slowly and steadily, as she took some of the pressure off of her right shoulder. She brushed it against her left hand, feeling tiny rocks falling off from their spots embedded in her palm, dust spilling into the air and tickling her nose, and a sticky substance attaching itself to her clean hand.

Samsara groaned, partly out of soreness, partly out of relief, and partly out of confusion.

She kicked with her left leg. Aside from a mild creak from using a limb that had lain dormant for several hours, nothing was amiss about it. Her right leg seemed to work, too. When she found herself in enough command of her arms to brush them up and down her legs searching for scrapes, punctures, or worse, she did so. The flesh from below her shorts to the top of her boots had suffered a few minor scrapes, nothing more, but brushing her right hand along her back resulted in the hand being covered in more of the sticky substance, but thicker and more obviously liquid.

It took her a full minute, but she managed to swing herself around so that her back hovered an inch or two over the ground, supported by both arms and both legs, and then she pressed as hard as she could until she could shove herself into a squatting position. From there, she stood up.

Something hit her on the left side of her waist: her satchel. The man at the door had not taken it from her. Why had he not? Thinking back to the moment of her capture told her nothing except that she had been led away by the police, stunned by their weapons and falling into unconsciousness, shackled, trapped, beaten.

Shackled.

But there was nothing on her wrists now. No restraints. Although she could not see them, she could move her arms as freely as she wanted, separately. She could feel her head and her knee at the same time. Did the man remove her restraints before throwing her into a jail cell?

Throwing her into a cell for murder. Of her best friend. Samsara suddenly wished her thoughts had remained muddied and unclear, and she dropped down to her knees again. She tried to cry, but doing so only made her head hurt.

Standing up again, she felt her blood run hot with anger, suddenly and violently. She hated the man who had arrested her. She hated the man who killed Jinling. She hated that voice speaking over the police radio. She hated the reporter for EpicNews. Without thinking about what she was doing, she dug her hand into her satchel in search of her hammer, and to her surprise, she found it.

The surprise was enough to shake her back into control of her actions. Why would she be allowed to keep such a thing in prison? It made no sense. She had means of self defense, she had her bag of possessions, she had... she had her radio!

Fitting around her head and over her ear, she could feel her headset, the speaker, the operation switch and tuning dials, the battery pack... everything. She quickly turned it on, resulting in a wave of static bursting into her ear. Adjustments to the volume and tuning knobs improved this, and soon she found herself listening to a broadcast of a Ralph Vaughan Williams romance, The Lark Ascending, a soothing piece that made her feel as if she were floating. Almost immediately, she relaxed.

The violin solo line still running through her ears, feeling like a loving hand stroking her back and reassuring her about life, Samsara felt some of the tension drain away; the muscles in her legs loosened, the tightness just below her forehead subsided slightly but not completely, and her arms drooped naturally to her sides, her left arm settling into her satchel and onto her hammer.

It still bothered her that she could not see, and moreso, it bothered her that she did not know why she could not see. As far as she could tell, there was nothing in front of her face, and certainly no bright light to blind her if she tried to look at it. It was possible that there was something wrong with the air around her, and she needed some sort of protection for her eyes before she could look around freely. To this end, she retrieved her goggles from her bag and slipped them over her head.

She tried opening her eyes again. To her delight, this time she felt no pain. Still, she could see nothing. Nothing at all. No white light. No heat. No fluorescence. Nothing. Just black.

Samsara switched off her radio and listened once again to see if she could tell if there was anything else around her at all. Again, though, nothing she heard nothing but humming. No sounds of a police station. No sounds of other prisoners.

Something must have happened between the laboratory and the police station. Clearly, she had not been locked up, at least not in the local jail. She wished she could find some sign of where she was, but her her usual senses did not help her at all. She could see nothing, she could hear little, and she smelled only the usual smells of a city.

Her next idea was to walk around to see how far she could go and if she could find anything. Anything at all, helpful or not, though even something unhelpful would tell her something about where she was, so it would still be, in that sense, helpful. She took this project a step at a time, always feeling ahead of her with her feet, still covered in her heavy boots, lest she step on a broken glass container or off a ledge. For all she knew, she was on top of a building somewhere, and without the ability to see where she was going, lack of caution could cause her to fall.

After about ten steps, she heard something.

At first it was nothing but a light scraping noise, off in the distance behind her, but it came nearer and nearer. She could pick out what might have been feet hitting the pavement (she was sure it was pavement at this point) and scattering some of the gravel as they went. It could have been a light vehicle, though nothing machine powered. Whatever it was, it made no noises other than those necessary for movement as it approached.

Samara's heart beat faster, and she gripped her hammer with two sweaty hands.

When the sound was about twenty feet away, the scraping stopped, and a whooshing sound replaced it. Samsara's reflexes kicked in, and she swung her hammer in the direction of the noise, more slowly than she would have liked. With a sickening crack, the hammer made contact with something large; the impact changed its momentum just enough to knock it off of a collision course with Samara's upper torso and neck. The crack was followed by a loud growl like that of a dog.

A scraping and sliding noise indicated that her assailant had slid off to the side. Samsara took a step backwards and readied her hammer in case of another charge.

"Behind you," came a voice in her headset.

Samsara's body went stiff with fright for a second, but something inside of her told her to take the warning seriously. Spinning around again, she heard a second crack as her hammer hit another lunging animal, followed by another growl, softer this time, and then a pant and a whimper as the creature sulked away, deprived of its meal.

Only a moment passed before Samsara spoke into the darkness, addressing the voice.

Of all the questions she had in her mind, she chose to ask, "Where are you?"

No answer came.

"Please," she said. "I don't even know where I am, and something just tried to kill me. Can you tell me anything?"

"I will tell you what I can," said the same voice as before. Soft and feminine, medium pitch, solid, confident, like that of a voice giving instructions to passengers on a train. Trustworthy, Samsara was not so sure.

"Anything, thank you," said Samsara, her own voice raspy and tired but more optimistic than it would have been a minute earlier.

Samsara stood still for a minute, waiting. She adjusted her goggles. She tapped her headset with her finger.

Then, "Anything?" This time, the voice on her headset was different: slightly high for a masculine voice, tinny, dripping with an emotion somewhere between confidence and delight, threatening, just a bit hoarse.

"Do you want to hear how you are going to end up dead, just like your friend?" said the new voice. "I would know that better than anyone."

Samsara trembled and bit her lip. Around her, in all directions about fifteen feet away, she could hear the same scraping, stepping sounds made by the attacking animals, moving nearer and nearer, until all of them, at the same time, stopped.