Storms of the Eye - A WolfWren fiction

Chapter 9: The right questions.

   Shin was alive.

And that felt curious to her. She had been very well placed to realize how impossible that should be because she did remember falling for several seconds at an unforgiving speed. But there she still was. Conscious.

Not complaining, but that's not normal, she thought.

She opened her eyes drowsily and, pain arose from her whole body. Now that wasn't much of a surprise. She took a deep breath and instantly regretted it, coughing and spitting blood in her helmet. Every gulp of air tore apart her chest, making her question if she still had any intact ribs.

She could barely see, though the stars dancing in her eyes were slowly dissipating, but her helmet visor was so cracked it was opaque. The inside HUD was blinking distorted information, and screaming weird intermittent alarms. No matter how hard she concentrated, she couldn't decipher any of them.

She sat slowly, groaning from the effort and pain, and got rid of the broken helmet. If I'm not dead now with cracks like that, I don't need it anyway, she thought, inhaling some surprisingly clean air.

Everything around was dark and silent, save for the faint hummings and creakings of the ship. She could breathe normally, confined but fresh oxygenated air filling her lungs with a taste of dust and humidity.

Feeling the ground around her, she felt the cold bite of the meshed durasteel flooring. Her gloves were in shambles, ripped and burned from the clasping and grasping at the walkway.

I should not be alive, she thought, feeling more puzzled than pained.

The darkness surrounded her, her eyes not adjusting to the total absence of light. She should be at the bottom of the engine room, crushed and buried. But the room around her felt more tight and too calm, and the meshed floor was more typical of those maintenance corridors she had been in.

She reached at her belt and felt the comforting shape of her lightsaber, still hanging from it. She grasped it and made the red-orange blade come alive, casting a dim velvet light around her.

The light did very little to help her know where she was. Shin was sitting in another barren and anonymous corridor of the ship, like the ones Sabine and she had been hiking in for hours before. Markings on the wall indicated she still was in the bottom ring sector. She looked at herself and was surprised to see how relatively unscathed she was. The explosion had burnt right through the pressurized fabric of her suit and sprayed her with shrapnel, making holes everywhere. Most had velvet stains around them from the cuts and wounds underneath. But as she looked at them, all seemed strangely superficial and benign.

She saw her utility bag lying beside her and fumbled in for her datapad. Switching it up with one hand, still lighting herself with her lightsaber from the other, she tried to look at the device's clock. But for some reason, the screen was fuzzy and full of statics and she could not make the hour on it. She felt like hours had passed.

The calm around her had become heavy and eerie. The light from her saber was dying a few meters left and right, swallowed by the total darkness of the corridor. There was no indication of where she should go.

Retrieving her comlink, she tuned to an open frequency.

"This is Shin Hati, do anybody copy, over?" she said with a hoarse voice.

Only static came back, across the deafening silence. She stood up, feeling a bit dizzy, but decided she was good enough to walk. Only she had no idea where to.