CHAPTER EIGHT

AFTER THE AIRSHIP

Her next several days passed in a flurry of lights, yelling, and surgery.

Fluorescent white flooded her eyes.

She tasted her own blood mixed with chemicals in the air and salt in the wind.

Leather and iron bound her face-up on a rigid platform. Edges of her bondage cut into her wrists, elbows, and brow in a fashion to exhibit her. They had her upright with her toes a few inches off the ground and her arms overhead. Her outfit hung in cottony tatters, sheer enough to display all her bruises and scrapes.

Somebody spoke nearby in a reedy voice, but what they said went in one ear and out the other.

Her own weakness zoned her out of the encounter, so it only lingered in her mind as a half-remembered nightmare.

The next one bludgeoned her, though. She collided with stone, where she crumpled flat on the ground. Slate pressed her cheek, her whole front, in fact, in the place she had fallen. She inhaled stale stone and dirt, while she slid her fingers over anything to grasp. However, she formed empty grips as frail as a newborn's. Her legs failed her.

Somehow, someone got her onto bedding. She drooled over a paper mat.

Voices fought each other back and forth. The argument centered on her. She recognized her name, but she had no wits to weigh in.

She faded from consciousness as the previous encounter drifted out of thought.

Her rest didn't last long, because punctures in her spine lanced with the beginnings of a surgical operation. She clawed her bedding. Howls stripped out of her. Pain flayed her insides and summoned tears.

Howls became roars.

Roars shook the air, earth, flesh, and bone.

She fought to buck with wild abandon, but her spine was immobile and her legs merely flinched with the effort.

Pain made her naked as the operation plunged through her nerves. She never felt so bare. So exposed as how she felt then. Helpless. Prone. She was at mercy to the whims of her captors who wrought agony she never knew was possible. How they did it, she did not know, but at the time, she did not care.

She wanted to die, but they did not let her. They had their own designs about which she was the priority. She was their critical asset. They needed her.

So, she did not die. She would go on from that moment at their orders.

Thus, Tanya Sato's adventure truly began, where the vices of drink and craft and pleasure would not save her this far from home.