Cress

Chapter 27

Time passed in a base, dreams and reality blurring together. 

 Being pulled from her sleep forced to sit up and drink some water. 

 Snips of muddled conversations.

Shivering hot and sweating and kicking off the thin blankets. 

 Thorne beside her, tying a blindfold around his head hands 

holding the water bottle to her lips.

Drink. 

 Drink. 

 Drink.

 Eat this soup. 

 Drink some more.

 Unfamiliar laughter making her curl up into a ball and burrow

 beneath the blankets. 

 Thorne's silhouette in the moonlight, rubbing his eyes and cursing.

 Gasping for breath in the hot air, sure that she was going to suffocate

 beneath the blankets and that all the oxygen would be sucked up 

into the dark night sky. 

 Desperate for water. Itchy from the sand still in her clothes and hair.

Light.

 Darkness.

 Light again.

Finally Cress awoke, groggy but lucid. 

 Saliva was thick and sticky in her mouth and she was lying

 on a mat inside a small tent, alone.

 It was dark beyond the thin fabric walls and the moonlight

 spilled  over the pile of clothing at her

feet. 

 She felt for her hair, meaning to strangle her wrists with it, but 

 found it chopped beneath her ears.

The memories returned, lazy at first.

 Thorne in the satellite, 

 Sybil and her guard, the fall and the knife and the cruel desert

 stretching to the ends of the earth.

She could hear voices outside. 

 She wondered whether the night had just begun or was

 already ending. 

She wondered how long she'd slept. 

She seemed to recall arms around her, soft knuckles brushing sand 

 off her face. 

 Had it been a dream?

The tent's flap opened and a woman appeared with a tray, 

 the older woman from the fire.

 She beamed and set down the food—some sort of soup and

 a canteen of water.

"Finally," she said in that think, unfamiliar accent, crawling

 over the mounds of disheveled blankets.