Between

Chapter Twenty-One

MEDICAL BAY ABOARD THE OSV NIGHTJAR, MID-EASTERN PORT OF CORZIBAR

"I've never seen anything like it, Lennox."

Wren's first conscious thoughts were of pain.

So much pain.

It swelled through her, all at once, emanating from where she thought her legs must be. It was hard to tell, though. She wasn't entirely sure where any of her limbs actually were, and even if she had, they didn't seem to want to move correctly.

"Not in a human being, anyway."

Who was talking?

Did she know them?

Her. It was a her that was talking. A woman.

"Do you have any theories?"

This time it was a different voice. Another female.

Slowly, she became aware of a steady, repetitive beeping noise fading into existence.

She tried to speak, but it came out as a low, miserable groan that didn't quite sound like her voice. The sound of shuffling boots came thereafter, and Wren's exhausted eyes blinked open to see an unfamiliar woman's face staring down at her.

"It's good to see that you're awake, Miss!" said the face, a toothy grin adding to the enthusiasm of the words. It was bizarre, and more than a little unsettling. It seemed she was some kind of doctor. "Can you tell me your name?"

Wren gave a long blink and then tried to sit up.

A second individual, this one a younger woman with dirty blonde hair pulled into a tight bun, placed her hand against Wren's collar and pushed her back down. Confused and still groggy, Wren's eyes noted the left side of the woman's face was covered in a large bandage and there were a number of small scrapes and cuts around her eye. It looked like she'd had glass smashed into her face.

Suddenly, she remembered.

"No," she whispered, jolting upright again as her brown eyes went wide. "No! Get away from me!"

The beeping in the background increased to a rapid pace as Wren managed to rip the tubes and wires from her arms and roll from the cot on which she had lain.

The woman with the injured face practically leapt over the cot towards Wren, who skittered out of the way and tried to stand.

She threw the full weight of her body onto her right leg, only to wail in distress and collapse back to the floor, promptly leaning to one side and vomiting upon the tiled floor. Coughing and sputtering and sobbing, the twenty-one-year-old's fight had almost instantaneously deserted her as her every nerve zeroed in on the blistering torment of what was an obviously devastated ankle.

"Get her back in the bed!" cried the first woman Wren had seen upon waking. She hurried over to clean up the mess while the second woman lifted and deposited her back onto the cot. To Wren's dismay, she clasped her wrists to the frame of the bed with a set of thick metal straps.

"It took almost nine hours in surgery for me to get that wreck of an ankle and foot of yours back into some semblance of a functional appendage, young lady," snapped the first woman, jabbing the IVs back into Wren's arms. "You better hope to high heaven you didn't just undo all of that work, 'cause I'm not sure if I can work miracles a second time."

Still straining to catch her breath, Wren noticed the second woman now had a weapon trained on her. It didn't look ready to fire, but she doubted it would take long to make it so. She, also, was breathing hard.