A young man wakes up in the desert. The wreckage of an ambulance lies smashed against a boulder and charred to a crisp. By the stitches on his head and face, he assumes he was the patient. But why was an ambulance driving through a desert? Where wa...
Skyler sat against a wall in the grotto's threshold, half his body in the sunlight. The other half, the one engulfed in shade, he could not see. As if it wasn't there. As if nothing was there. And yet, the pitch black was the only thing that was real. The outside world seemed like a worn-out-reel film. He could even make out the burning on the edges.
The lack of any withdrawal meant he wasn't a smoker. He wished he was. Not because he wanted to smoke, but because he wanted to yearn for it. He wanted to miss something he could actually get.
The sand at his feet was wet. He was sure he had been sweating copiously. Even though it was October in Southern-Central Asia. Even though he could still feel the weight of his unopened canteen on his vest. He wiped up his cheeks, alkaline and tender. The spill of tears was drying up slowly. That was all that would be left of Nadim's memory. A bunch of salt on dead sand.
He sat there, staring, long after the light had faded. At some point, he caught in his peripheral vision two shapes approaching. He kept looking down. Maybe Siraj was holding on to Conan's shoulder. He wasn't sure. He didn't want to be. He stood up and headed inside before they caught up, no lantern lit. By then, he was well acquainted with the dark, as much as he was with the inside of his skull. He didn't need the echoes of the gravel scrubbing against his soles to lead him through. His shadow was ahead of him, opposite the entrance. He could tell its shape overlaid on the ground. A blackness inside a layer of darkness. It eventually fused itself with the void, and he with them both. He could now sense its presence guiding him calmly forth, its being as real as Nadim's. He wouldn't give himself deliverance. Nothing but utter agony would be his amnesty, and nowhere but utter darkness would be the best place to let the musings of pain tear him through until his guts became all but scar tissue. An atonement in blood. A rite of passage to hell.
"It is my fault. I should've been there instead," he thought he heard from Siraj behind him. Then there was the sound of a kiss. He knew Conan had kissed Siraj on the temple, in the way a man does to another when he is a kiss away from insanity. Skyler looked back at them. Siraj seemed a walking corpse, barely aware he was alive. Seiber was lighting their way with a dim Lucky Strike returning to his mouth. The tip, although held on untremulous lips, betrayed his ragged breathing through the brightness of its flame. A miniature heartbeat ablaze, a burning beacon of hope. Life lighting its way through the depths of despair.
He remembered Conan Seiber again, what he was capable of. What he was still pulling through. And then he felt saved. Entwined with grace and regret.
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