Someone was yelling, urgency and desperation lacing their voices but I couldn’t make out any words over the blinding-white, nerve-grinding noise in my skull. The dark chill of unconsciousness was creeping up the corners of my blurred indigo vision and I found myself wishing desperately for it to take over, for the pain to end. My limbs felt like rubber, like I’d just run an eternity and a half and I felt an oddly concentrated pain in my left shoulder. Someone must have lifted me off the ground because I was suddenly lightheaded and couldn’t keep my train of thought.
She fell, I heard the voice say as the pounding and the pain faded and complete darkness took over, she fell from the wall.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~'
“She hit her head pretty hard but she’s fine. Probably gonna have a little headache.”
The voice rung me from my sleep, light and high-pitched enough to be a female. I could see the bright lights even though my eyes were closed. My brain ached, a dull throb in its bone cage; my shoulder felt stiff but there was no pain.
Odd.
“What was she doing?” a second voice inquired, another female.
What was I doing?
“I don’t know,” was the surly reply, “One of your scouts found her along the wall; maybe she was climbing and lost her footing.”
Wall. What wall? Where am I?
“I patched her up as best as I could,” she continued, “She’s your problem when she wakes up.”
“Like hell she is,” the other girl bit back, “I don’t recognize her; she isn’t one of my people.”
I groaned, lifting a hand to cover my eyes. “You’re speaking too loudly.”
I kept my eyes squeezed shut and pressed my fingers against my temples in a feeble attempt to dull the growing pounding in my head. I sat up and regretted it immediately when the pounding swelled into a vicious drumming. My fingers brushed the bandages wrapped around my head. A string of words I knew were inappropriate rolled off my tongue.
Someone sighed, “Here.”
A thin pale hand was held out towards me with two round white pills in its palm.
Aspirin.
I choked them down without hesitation.
“Wanna tell us what you were doing climbing the walls? You know that’s against the rules right?”
I frowned and rubbed my eyes; there was something I needed to remember but couldn’t quite remember what it was. The lights in the room were still far too bright, “What rules? I wasn’t climbing any damn wall.”
The girl that offered me the pills sat by my bed seemingly exhausted. She was wearing a large white shirt-like jacket with pockets near the top over an old grey dress.
“What’s your name?”
I groaned, the drumming subsiding to pounding. “Alex, my name is Alex.”
It was my name, I was sure of it but even as I said it, it sounded completely foreign.
“Well Alex, my name is Ava. I patched you up. Can you remember anything from last night?”
Just as I began to rummage through my mental archives, the memory literally dissipated before my mind’s eye. I grabbed my head desperately trying to clutch onto even just a piece of it but it slipped away and found myself staring at a blurry white screen in my mind.
I shook my head.
“Can you remember anything at all?”
A slight panic overtook me at that and I was suddenly racking my brain for information, how could I forget everything, but just like the memories of the night before everything slipped away. It was as if I could see it, a tiny oasis in the distance but the closer I tried to get to it, the farther away it seemed. It was too far away to tell for sure, too far away to decipher.
