NOTE: Chapters for this work are a bit shorter, but I anticipate this being around 50-70k words, maybe? We'll see how it goes. Chapter titles will all be (hopefully accurately) translatable to 'sunlight' or a synonym thereof
Chapter Two: ضوء الشمس
Her legs hurt.
Emory wakes quickly, like someone in the recording studio has ramped all of her sliders at once, breathing, hearing, sight, sound, and pain. The cords for all of them are tangled, too, because the lights make a hum that hurts her ears, and the pain in her legs makes it hard to breathe.
She's lying against the wall on a cot, her left leg bent a little, right leg elevated on a blanket on top of some kind of hard surface. Both are bandaged, and she's wearing black, pin-striped men's dress pants that are rolled up to her knees. Emory pats at her chest, holds up one arm, and sees that she's wearing some oversized men's sweater, zipped in the front and rolled up to her wrists. The room around her is only visible in pools of light, but the walls are strangely lumpy. Emory only understands it must be a cave when she looks up and sees the material the ceiling is made of.
That's when the fear slider starts moving up.
The murmuring she'd been hearing becomes more distinct, coming from a cluster of people at the other end of the large cave space. What had initially sounded like a group of pleased people talking has now settled into a few concerned voices speaking in a language Emory doesn't understand, overlaid with a man's voice crying out in pain. Every so often, another man says something, quick commands, followed by a flurry of murmured speech. It's a little like hearing someone film a scene by watching from across the street, wondering what the script could possibly be about.
"Sleep," the man who has been issuing commands says.
Emory resists, knowing he's not speaking to her. She needs to know more about what's going on; she's certainly not safe, but she's been cared for, bandaged, laid a place soft enough to relax. The strangeness of the activity across the room combined with her fear is leading to a much higher heart rate, which means more pain. Emory closes her eyes, tries to regulate her breathing so she can calm down. When she opens them, a man with a bloody tan shirt is standing beside her mattress. He's stripping off a pair of surgical gloves which are smeared in blood.
She's afraid, but she wants to see what he'll do with the gloves. She'll know to really fear him if he throws them, drops them, or seeks to touch her with them.
"I'm sorry about the pain," he says. The man is past forty, maybe as old as sixty, she thinks. His hair is close-cropped and grey. It's hard for her to gauge his height, because she suspects the ground underneath their feet might not be level. His English is accented, but he speaks it easily, conversationally. He sounds fluent. As he talks to her, he pulls a folded brown paper bag from a pocket and starts to place his dirty gloves inside it. "Your injuries weren't as severe. We need the medicine to keep him asleep." He nods over his shoulder.
"Was I shot, or-?" Emory whispers. She remembers hearing the sound of something heavy landing near where Stark was. If a bomb had gone off, Stark would undoubtedly be dead, she thinks, but so would she. This is clearly a field hospital of some sort.
"Shrapnel," the doctor says. "Yours were not serious." He looks toward the collection of lamps across the cave. "Try to sleep. You can have water when you wake again."
A voice calls out, harsh, the words unintelligible to Emory. Though the doctor had appeared self-assured and in charge during their conversation, he scurries to obey whatever command was issued. A second figure passes the doctor, on their way toward her. Emory closes her eyes and tries to appear that she's fallen asleep or unconscious.
The pounding of her heart is at breakneck speed at this point, and she dives into the task of radically calming herself. She had to do this many times in her life, starting with her parents' fighting, next with the parties she had to attend with Rory- huddle up as best you can, tune everything out, and focus. More often than not she'll fall asleep, which seems like a useful thing when she's stuck in some bedouin clinic with rationed tylenol.
She reminds herself of the mantra. This is a problem for tomorrow.
When Emory next opens her eyes, there's far less light in the cave than before. She'd thought there was some sort of shaft through which the sun was shining, but it turns out that it's a very bright fluorescent bulb instead. The lamps are no longer clustered up, not so bright they obscure what they are illuminating. She can see that there's a bed with a prone figure on it, a table set up beside.
"Ah," a voice says. It's the doctor from before. Now he's dressed in a suit, the light grey material neat and well cared for. It seems so incongruous in the dim, naturally dusty space, like wearing a bow tie while mud wrestling. "Do you feel ready to sit up? I have food, but it's like to drip."
He's holding a shallow bowl and a large spoon. She takes a few seconds to figure out how her legs work. The doctor's look of patience without sympathy is actually encouraging. It implies, Emory supposes, that it shouldn't be a difficult task. When she's seated, her bare feet resting on the pebbly floor, he drags over the blanket her right leg had been resting on. Underneath it was a huge sack of rice.
The bowl is warm, even through the blanket. Being able to eat loosens some of the scab she'd been unconsciously growing over her sense of fear, letting the blood of uncertainty and fright leak out. Like a finger pressed to a wound, though, the bland taste of the food and its warmth replaces the scab, in a way. She's more scared than she was before she sat up and started eating, but it's still livable.
The doctor returns, dragging a chair and his own bowl. He sits far enough that his legs don't bump hers, and Emory is pretty sure it's on purpose.
"What's your name?" she asks.
"Call me Yinsen." He eats a few spoonfuls of the food, sets down his spoon in his half-full bowl, and looks at her thoughtfully. "You're the musician, yes?"
"Yes," she readily agrees. She is, after all, for all that it's not her profession. "You… you could call me Autumn?"
"Ah," he says, nodding. "Like Fall."
Immediately, Emory adjusts her mental assessment of the man by several orders of magnitude. She had left her purse and phone behind in the hum-vee, but it's possible he has her identification, and knows what she's saying. It's equally possible, though, that he'd caught the season synonym, obscure as it may be for a non-native speaker. If the former, he's providing cover, which she appreciates. If the latter, he's whip-smart and isn't to be underestimated.
"At first, I thought this was a field hospital," she tells Yinsen. He nods his head, a contemplative expression on his face. "But you're still here."
"That is a compliment, in some ways. But you are correct: this is more of a safe house than a hospital." He begins eating again, as if this isn't shocking news. "They want to trade you for a ransom," he adds, around his mouthful.
Emory drops the spoon, splashing the thick bean stew mixture in multiple places. "They?" she says, needing information to shade in the outline of her fear. It's no longer a blank page, but the thick black outlines of 'kidnapped' and 'ransom' and 'safe house' have joined 'cave' and 'injury' without any color or depth. Her understanding of what's happened to her isn't even worthy to be called an impressionist piece yet. She scratches away the stain of her food from the places she can see that it's landed.
"What should I say? A collection of angry businessmen. Terrorists. Murderers. Take your pick," Yinsen says, standing up. With those words, his politeness has slipped a bit into frustration or maybe even a touch of anger. Emory wonders how much he's repressing, whether he's a reluctant jailor. "Want the rest?" he offers.
She doesn't, but this man is clearly not perfectly aligned with whoever 'they' are, and she wants to live. So she nods, hoping it'll show him some level of trust that might matter sooner rather than later.
Emory eats it all.
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Yinsen encourages her to try to walk around a little, a few hours after the meal. She rests her hand on his solid arm and learns the parameters of her pain, swiftly hating the feel of the grit on the cave floor on her bare feet. He doesn't walk her near the other figure, but Emory nearly falls over when she realizes who it has to be.
"They have Stark, and they want a ransom for me?" she hisses, shocked. Yinsen stops still, and she nearly falls over as her momentum takes her past where his support extends.
He steps close to her, his voice urgent. "There are cameras. No problems if they see what they expect."
"I-"
"They expect to see me as a caretaker. Do they expect to see you taking food from a man such as me?" He faces her, carefully positioning his body, and though she's wobbling and scared she will fall, Emory still sees that the camera he'd nodded toward directly behind him. "Red hair, tight clothing, leather boots, yes? They saw what they expected to see. Slap me, wide. I'll support you."
Emory stares at him with wide eyes. Yinsen's face darkens. "I did not dig pieces of boot leather from your leg to end up cleaning your blood from the concrete floor here. Do it!"
She rests her hand on the arm he's hidden from the camera, swinging her right arm wide to slap his face. Yinsen grips her wrist and drags her the final four feet to her cot, his feigned stumble aiding her to return to stable seating. He points at the bed and stalks off, completely silently.
"Yinsen!" she calls out, fear and confusion clouding the things she thinks she understands about what's just happened.
"Hsssht!" It's more of a shushing sound than a word.
The leather binding the cloth to her legs has slipped from her exertions. Emory leans over her legs, vainly pressing her hands against the places that hurt, wishing just feeling pressure there would be enough to halt the pain. She remains curled up for the rest of the evening, long after the position itself is uncomfortable.
It's emotional shock, she thinks. Her sense of well-being has been gravely injured, and she's struggling not to lose her grip on her mental consciousness. If I get to define what 'emotional shock' is, I'm going to say the cure is sleep, Emory tells herself.
This is a problem for tomorrow.
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Emory wakes to Yinsen changing the bandages on her legs. She struggles, not fully awake, and he throws the leather straps at her, dramatic.
"Do it yourself, then!"
She wonders if he feels like he's carrying her deception all by himself, if he found it necessary to wake her up in hopes that she'd fight him.
"Never thought you'd have to instruct yourself to act more like Rory, did you?" she whispers to herself. In retrospect it's obvious. She took the food he offered with no complaints. She hasn't even tried to go near the door. She hasn't cried or had a hysterical fit even once so far.
"Try walking again," he says quietly, carrying a pot of water over to what she can scarcely believe is an actual fire, right there in their cave.
"I will," she says in a soft voice. With her hands, though, Emory makes a rude gesture in his direction, scrunching her face up as if she's furious and offended.
"Better."
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Emory spends over an hour going through various scales both to pass the time and to keep her voice as limber as she usually keeps it when she isn't trapped in a cave in Afghanistan. Right when she's about to hit a particularly high note as softly as she possibly can, she sees Yinsen's hand extend into her field of vision. On his palm are two pills.
"Pain medicine?" she clarifies, and he nods. "You seem like you have a conscience," she tells him as she takes his proffered metal cup with water in it. "So I'm sure you'd feel bad if you're lying about this."
"That depends on what prompts the action, doesn't it?" he asks in his overly friendly manner. "What if feeding you poison kills all of the terrorists?"
"Not sure if you'd do that. I'll need more data points," Emory says, swallowing both her worry and one of the pills.
This time he does actually laugh. "You'll get them." With a finger held to his lips and a nod over to where Stark is still lying, Yinsen walks away.
"What does that mean?" she calls out anyway.
Almost right away, Stark lets out a pained noise, but doesn't wake up. She feels chastened, which is enhanced by the way the doctor turns to raise his eyebrows at her.
Stark's been 'out' for quite a while, and the day before, Yinsen had said something about him needing all of the available pain medicine. She wonders just how badly he's injured. If she had shrapnel injuries, his would be worse, since he was closer to the blast.
He's an insufferable jerk, but she doesn't want to hamper his healing.
Emory's the most comfortable, annoyingly, when she can lay down on her cot with her legs elevated by the sack of rice, so she does that. She's very lightly humming through a melodic sequence in one of the songs Rory's considering doing for a single when she hears Stark stir. Lifting her head, she sees him pulling at some sort of thin white tube.
She sits up, noting that Yinsen's shaving with a straight razor in front of a tiny mirror. Both of them are startled when the billionaire knocks down one of the metal cups.
Emory doesn't know how to feel about him waking up. Yinsen's behavior has been like a frustrated father toward her, but every instinct she has tells her that's in jeopardy with Stark in the mix.
"I wouldn't do that if I were you," Yinsen says pleasantly.
She'd sat up and huddled in the blanket, quiet and hopefully practically invisible, so Emory had missed what had prompted Yinsen to speak. Stark's making sounds of severe distress, the kinds of noises that would bring any sympathetic human in proximity to find out what's going on. Emory senses it, there's something wrong, and it's strange and upsetting to see that Yinsen isn't reacting to it the way she is.
Stark's ripping something, groaning, coughing, practically lamenting. Emory's nearly in tears just listening to him.
Yinsen turns around, facing away from him, looking at her.
She shakes her head, suddenly desperate to stay hidden from their cave's third resident.
Still in his bizarrely good mood, the doctor heads over to where the grain is stored, gathering up materials to make more of the bean stew he'd fed her the day before.
"Can-" Stark's voice sounds gravelly and misused. "Can I move it?"
"Sure. It's got a handle."
Stark sits up. He's got white bandages criss crossing his chest, arms covered by an unzipped cardigan. Even from the distance of twenty feet or so between them, she can see that his expression is that of extreme shock. Emory has her blanket over her head, and she scoots her legs in so her toes fall under the umbrella of its drape. Don't notice me, she thinks in his direction.
He's focused on something else, a rectangular box on the table right beside his cot. It's only when he picks it up and sets it on his legs that she realizes she can follow the cables from the box to his chest- it's attached to him.
The existential dread of what she's seeing is exactly the sort of thing that would have prompted Stark's earlier noises. All Emory can do is stare.
Having finished pouring the bean and seasoning mixture into the boiling water, Yinsen walks over to Stark's cot. "Here, sit up, you can set it-" he says, cutting himself off as he pulls over a small table.
Stark glares at him, moving the box (it sounds heavy) onto the table before sliding his legs down from the cot into an upright position. Thankfully, he's angled a bit now, so she's not directly across from him where he could simply look straight ahead and catch that there's a woman hiding from him.
"This may help," Yinsen says, unhooking the mirror he'd used to shave with and handing it to Stark. The billionaire holds it at chest level and shakes his head, looking defeated and bewildered, yes, but mostly angry. She's not sure, but Emory thinks she can see something large revealed by the ripped bandages. The wires leading from his chest to the rectangular box aren't just wrapped in with the bandages. Horribly, they might be attached to the dark shape she can't see clearly from across the room.
Yinsen seems unfazed. He's even whistling, which strikes Emory as so obvious a coping mechanism that she's surprised he's comfortable employing it.
"What the hell did you do to me?" Stark whispers.
Emory isn't used to listening to a human being that upset without it being her responsibility to fix it.
"What I did?" Yinsen says, chuckling. "What I did is to save your life. I removed all the shrapnel I could, but there's a lot left," he continues, stirring the pot of food. "And it's heading into your atrial septum. Here, want to see?"
Stark's eyes are wild, catching the light from the fire. She feels a pang of sympathy. Thanks to the way Yinsen has treated her so far, protectively, intelligently, she doubts what she's seeing and hearing. As she watches silently, the doctor tosses something to Stark that clinks with the sound of metal on glass.
"I've seen many wounds like that in my village," Yinsen's saying now, smiling as he explains how the shrapnel from Stark's weapons kill its victims slowly. In my village, he said. This is personal, for him.
Emory shrinks even further back into her blanket.
Yinsen is angry, not genuinely jovial. He's masking it. He's resentful of Stark. That's the key to the difference in his behavior. That's why he seems so casual, so amused. It's deflection. A defense mechanism. And for as good as he seems to be at it, Yinsen must have practice employing this method of self-protection.
"What is this?" Stark asks, jaw set, eyes hard.
"That is an electromagnet. Hooked up to a car battery."
Oh my God, oh my God. Oh fuck, Emory chants in her head, completely and utterly horrified.
It's in his chest.
Embedded there.
For a heartstopping moment, Emory wonders if Yinsen placed it there as a punishment, but his continued explanation tells her that's not the case.
"-it's keeping the shrapnel from entering your heart, hmm?" Yinsen nods, grinning. It's almost nauseating to witness.
Stark zips up his cardigan and watches the doctor for a short time as he continues to cook. His eyes shift to the wall above her head, and Emory holds very, very still.
"That's right. Smile!" Yinsen says in a singsong voice, referring to the cameras.
Emory wants to fix this, but there's no fixing it. They're all stuck in this cave, somehow, she doesn't truly know why or by whom. She's obviously not allied with Stark, but is she allied with Yinsen?
'I did not dig pieces of boot leather from your leg to end up cleaning your blood from the concrete floor,' he'd told her. He hadn't said those words with a defensive laugh that made her want to cry.
She lifts her hands and covers her ears, desperate to stop herself from hearing the fake, miserable voice the doctor keeps using to speak to Stark.
There's a loud noise against the door at the far wall, and like he'd done before, Yinsen changes from being confident to nervous, hesitant, and worried. He gestures to Stark, telling him to stand up and do as he does.
For his part, Stark is obviously not used to being in any kind of situation where he needs to recognize the signs of danger, because he's slow to comply. The door opens and multiple men walk in, armed to the teeth. Even as Stark stands there, hands in the air, faced away from her, she can hear confusion, but not a trace of fear.
"Those are my guns, how did they get my guns?"
Emory pulls her legs against her chest so tightly she starts to cry by how much it hurts. For all she knows she's ripped the wounds open, but she can't, she just can't listen to the angry harsh voices and Yinsen's subservient explanations. She knows better than to vocalize but screams silently, hearing the 'crowd goes wild' sound her throat is making and focusing on that, instead.
There's a louder, more harsh sound, yelling, now, and Yinsen's speaking rapidly in another language. It sounds like begging.
After a flurry of movement through the door, silence reigns. Emory's just about to lift her head when she hears a sound from a far away room.
It's Stark.
He's screaming.