Nada's Escape: Fighters' lies

32.1 Wrecked

A heart-stopping blackness of conscious and unconscious. A waking dream of shattered lungs, meaningless blinks into the night.

Sound returns first, a huge, cheering, clattering mess of sound. I raise myself on my hands but I still can't see. I'm lying on something wet and furry. It smells of death and blood and chicken poo.

There's a warm hand at my forehead. "Are you alright?"

I blink into Finley's face shadowed by the canopy expanding above him. He drags me from the beast's belly and I cry out at the pain, sharp and everwhere at once.

"Sorry, sorry." He lays me carefully on the ground. "Where are you hurt?"

I shake my head. I don't know. All I can taste is the sweat of human bodies around us, pressing in and chattering.

"It's dead, its really dead."

"Where's the stab wound? Did she take out the eye?"

"She sure did," chimes in a younger voice. "But that's wasn't what killed it."

"A fall like that might just kill a beast."

Finley's doing something at my waist and I turn my head to the side, trying to find something outside the pain.

"Did anyone else see those feyflies?"

They're turning the dead creature over, stripes of feyfly torch beams revealing the tattered remains of its wings, the jagged edges of bone. I close my eyes against the gruesome sight.

"Someone get me a fucking light!" Finley roars and the inside of my eyelids shine with colour. There's more than one pair of hands on me then, they're no longer bandaging but lifting.

"Get her to the nursery. Now!"

I experience the journey in fits and starts, of pain and blackness each in turn, oscillating in an infinite spiral.

"You're gonna be alright," Finley whispers in my ear, arms tight around my torso.

I squeeze my eyes shut against the lights of the nursery and the new bolts of pain ravaging my side. My side is slashed open. Oh my side.

A nexus of pain feyflies feasts there, sending bolts of red electric pain out in a web. Not everything hurts, just the gaps between every cell. The pain threads through bone marrow, blood, the tattered rags of my muscles.

That's the hit of fey blood to my human bloodstream. I know because it's the same as shapeshifting had been. A pain that follows you into the dark, that won't let you escape to sleep, not even for a second. But this time I'm actually injured.

"Any more carry could kill her." I hear voices from far away, unable to move or respond.

"But her wounds not healing... Is she dying?"

"Not yet... we can't risk another dose for days maybe. There's no way to know without an apothecary."

"No apothecaries." Finley replies.

I try to hide away from all of that but my body might as well be shrinking and stretching for all the waves of shock and pain running through it.

"We'll have to wait until she recovers." Finley says, his apologetic tone telling me who he is talking to.

Wait? Wait to escape? No, you have to go! I think.

"We can't. We have to go now." Amy replies, stress threading her voice. Amy's got my back. She can do this.

"You need me." Finley declares with the voice of a mountain, unmoving. "And I'm telling you I won't leave without her." I fight to move, but it's as though I'm buried beneath a mountain of blankets, weighing me down. I grit my teeth, though, throwing them off for a moment.

"You-" Light assaults my eyes, sending me careening under the blankets to recover.

"Nada. You're awake," says a hopeful voice.

Barely I think, but I try again, ready for the light, keeping my eyes heavily lidded.

"Promised." My throat burns like it's been slashed with a knife. You promised to leave without me if I couldn't make it. A sliver of Finley has hold of my right hand and I divert all my energy to squeezing it as tightly as possible. If I could move more than that I'd be in that truck already. Finley squeezes back, strengthening the pain behind his next words.

"I know, I did," Finley breathes, "But this is too hard. Too much to ask." I rasp in a breath. There's not enough oxygen in it to move my limbs anymore, so I let go, collapsing back onto the bed. I can hear the ripples spreading out around me, feel the bed beneath me begin to soften.

"But you wouldn't have made me promise if it was easy, would you?" Finley sighs through a mouthful of regret. He didn't think he'd have to keep that promise.

I have no will to respond with as flickers of pain return, slashing up from my side. I see myself in dream form, lying in a dark pool, bolts of red electricity twitching through my body. The bed softens further beneath me. It's about to give way, I know, and steal me away into fitful, horrible sleep once more.

"She'll understand if you go," says Macie. I do, even though I balk at the thought. Trapped in Norgara. Trapped with the Huntsmen

There's a long, aching silence. Movement. Will they go?

Finally, I feel a hand brush hair off my forehead. A touch light as a hummingbird.

"Stay strong, hon," Macie whispers. Though her voice is soft I know what she means. Don't give up. Her footsteps recede and I sense the presence of Amy and Finley, still lingering above me.

So they are going leave me, trapped here in this black pool. I know it's the right thing but still I almost sob with despair.

"I'm sorry it turned out this way." Amy whispers, voice breaking on the apology. I hope she's not crying.

It's okay, I want to tell her, my dream state lips even forming the words, but my real body is much heavier, intermittently sending through reports of her patting my hand.

"But we promised each other. Boreas can only fly if one of us gets out." Amy finishes. How strange, I think, that our code word is also the name of a mysterious feyfly. I hear her sniffle and reach up from the dream pool to flex fingers laced with pain.

Boreas means she'll come back for me. Still as her hand lifts from mine, its leaves a worse pain stinging there.

I can hear Finley's breath in the silence left by Amy's footsteps. It's loud and slow.

"I'll be back for you. I promise you that as well." He uses that voice again, like the voice of a mountain.

There's a sweet pressure on my forehead; a kiss. My face aches from the twisting red electricity here in the pool. Two breaths caress my cheeks and I imagine Finley hovering there, terrible decisions colliding behind his eyes.

He must decide not to kiss me again, because the third breath I can no longer feel. My dream self is reaching for him, but she's in a black pool of red hurt and is only kidding herself that she can do anything. She can't. There's only enough energy left to stay conscious enough to listen.

His footsteps leave slowly, haltingly. I can imagine him looking back again and again. I manage to flick my eyelids back for one last snapshot; a bright-smeared polaroid of his white shirt.

Despite it he goes, door clicking closed behind. I gulp down the black water, sobbing in my dreams as a new type of pain stabs at me alongside the first. Grief, for a second family lost to me.

My mouth is wet, I've drooled or vomited. The same way all of me is wet, one way or another, from sweat or the great black pool my body founders in within my twitchy dream state.

I try to respond but the surface of the pool is sticky, viscosity holding back my weakened limbs. So tired. I try again and my face bursts through the dark meniscus. I gasp for breath through the water.