Daughter of Nox

Chapter Thirty

The medics took her to the infirmary after the match, transporting her via med-sled for knee repair. She spent nearly a week in a bed there, eating little and saying less even when Etta visited her between classes, her mind hyperfocused on the image of a bloodied body sprawled onto the ground before her.

There'd been no funeral for the Esque. The Caregivers had dragged his limp corpse from the ground before swinging it onto a cargo loader and pushing it from the gym. There'd been no ceremony. No effort to remember his life. He'd simply existed one moment, then the next he hadn't. Because to them he hadn't been a human. He'd been a machine. A tool.

But he hadn't been a machine to Freya. For her, he'd been a person. Alter Corporation had wiped his mind with the Change, but that hadn't made him stop living.

No, Freya thought as she laid awake through the small hours of the night, the place where her emotions had lived feeling empty and hollow. I did that, she told herself. I took that away from him. Me.

On the morning of her fifth day in the infirmary the physician declared her fit for duty, with the option of leaving class if she felt unwell. As she felt unwell even before she left the infirmary, she interpreted the order as permission to skip classes altogether and sleep away the rest of the day in her room.

Twilight filtered through the windows of her room when she woke. She blinked against the gritty sleep in her eyes, and pulled her comm from the nightstand beside her bed to check the time. A dozen unread messages blinked from the screen–all of them from Etta, and all of them written in increasingly irritated tones.

Freya let the comm clatter to the nightstand without replying and rolled over in bed. The effort of responding to any of the messages seemed too much to even attempt. She'd barely closed her eyes to go back to sleep, when the sound of a fist pounding on her door jolted them open.

"Fray!" Etta's voice called from the hall. "Fray, open up!"

Freya didn't move, but called back, "I'm sleeping!"

"I don't care!" Etta said, her voice angry. "Get yourself out of that bed and open the slagging door!"

Freya felt something like dull irritation bloom inside of her, but she stayed where she was. "I don't feel good," she said, which wasn't a total lie. "I'll just see you in class tomorrow, alright?"

"No, it's not flaming alright. Get out of bed and let me into this room."

Freya said nothing. She just laid there, eyes turned toward the wall beside her bed.

Silent moments passed before Etta let out a frustrated string of curses. The swearing persisted, stopping only a short second before Freya heard the click of her door's lock disengaging and the door sliding into its housing in the wall.

Freya sat up, scowling. "Did you seriously just slice into my door's lock code?"

"Freya Airm, Master of Observing the Obvious, everyone," Etta said as she stomped into the room.

"You can't just slice into someone's room when they don't want you to come in. This is my room," Freya said, "and I told you that I'm sleeping."

"And I told you," Etta said, walking over to Freya's bed, "that I don't care."

Freya's face burned. "What's wrong with you?"

"What wrong with me?" Etta said, as though this was the most ridiculous question she'd ever heard. "I could ask you the same question."

"I'm fine," Freya lied.

"Well, that's obviously not true." Etta folded her arms over her chest. "You missed the start of flight sims today. The Freya I know would never have done that."