Nada's Escape

85- Left.

Yes. Red.

Ouch. Taste of bile. Two black shoes. Stretching up to the roof. A blurry face. Josef.

A ring of malevolent faces joins him. Wide dark holes where eyes should be. Gaping mouths. A glimmer catches my eye. Is that a knife?

Fearful, I lift myself from the floor. Poison stabs through my guts and I keel over. What have I done? My periphery is full. I take a shaky step back, barely in control. What did he do to me?

I've got to get out of here. I run, blindly, away from Josef. Like frozen statues, Huntsmen are everywhere, human faces distorted by inconsistent light. I push past rows and rows of them but every step aches, as though I am swimming through glue, fumes sending me reeling. Still, I feel my hands pulling on fabric and flesh before me.

Why won't they move? I've got to get away from here. Away. Out of this mess of magic, bodies and cruelty. I'd sooner curl around my injuries and die than stay here a moment more. There it is! A doorway.

Relief is swallowed by a wave of dizzying weakness that has me falling through the dark archway. I stagger drunkenly to my feet, a high pitch moan escaping my trembling lips. A handful of steps and I'm leaning against the wall. I slide along it, away from the feyfly light, now burning even my closed eyelids.

The wall suddenly collapses beneath my touch and I almost hit the stone again. I plunge headlong into the passageway, just going. My breathe huffs raggedly in and out. My feet slap against stone even as my legs ache. My stomach is frothing, ready to leave its host completely.

I sink onto my knees against a wall, head throbbing like a wasp's nest. Darkness spins around me until it eats me whole, enfeebled, unable to even crawl.

Finley finds me in the darkness, his voice soft but rough with worry. I'm far away though, floating in a pool of black water, body seizing with sporadic flashes of red hurt, like nails dancing across glass. A horrible stench assaults me, like rotting gums and bile.

My mouth is wet, I've drooled or vomited. The same way all of me is wet, one way or another, from sweat or the great black pool my body founders in within my twitchy dream state.

I try to respond but the surface of the pool is sticky, viscosity holding back my weakened limbs. So tired. I try again and my face bursts through the dark meniscus. I gasp for breath through the water.

"What-" I start, but the weight of my body pulls me back below the surface of the pool, exhausted. I try to find refuge from the pain there but my body twists unnaturally with bursts of red electricity. Not everything hurts, just the gaps between every cell. The pain threads through bone marrow, blood, the tattered rags of my muscles.

I feel the warmth of a body surround me. Finley again? A hug? No I'm being carried... The thought drifts dreamily down through the water.

I squeeze my eyes shut against the bright light of a building and the new bolts of pain ravaging my head. The pool takes me under.

I become aware again with my back pressed against the bottom of the pool. The water's shallower here as I can feel the skin of surface holding down my limbs once again.

"Blooddrugs are a bad business. Whoever poisoned her wanted her out for days. We'll have to wait until she recovers." Finley says, his apologetic tone telling me who he is talking to.

Wait? Wait to escape? No, you have to go! I think.

"We can't. We have to go now." Amy replies, stress threading her voice. Amy's got my back. She can do this.

"You need me." Finley declares with the voice of a mountain, unmoving. "And I'm telling you I won't leave without her." I fight to get through the water's surface, but it's like twenty heavy blankets, weighing me down. I grit my teeth, though, surfacing for a moment.

"You-" Light assaults my eyes, sending me careening back into the dark lake to recover.

"Nada. You're awake," says a hopeful voice.

Barely I think, but I try again, ready for the light, keeping my eyes heavily lidded.

"Promised." My throat burns like it's been slashed with a knife. You promised to leave without me if I couldn't make it. A sliver of Finley has hold of my right hand and I divert all my energy to squeezing it as tightly as possible. If I could move more than that I'd be in that truck already. Finley squeezes back, strengthening the pain behind his next words.

"I know, I did," Finley breathes, "But this is too hard. Too much to ask." I rasp in a breath, speckled with drops of black water. There's not enough oxygen in it to move my limbs anymore, so I let go, collapsing back in the pool. I can hear the ripples spreading out around me, feel the bed of rock beneath me begin to soften.

"But you wouldn't have made me promise if it was easy, would you?" Finley sighs, regret clear from his tone. He regrets making a promise he didn't think he'd have to keep. I have no will to respond with as the flashes of pain return, making my dream-state form twitch and softening the lakebed further. It's about to give way, I know, and steal me away into fitful, horrible sleep once more.

"She'll understand if you go," says Macie. I do, even though I balk at the thought of an existence trapped in the Huntsmen's town.

There's a long, aching silence. Movement. Will they go?

Finally, I feel a hand brush hair off my forehead. A touch light as a hummingbird.

"Stay strong, hon," Macie whispers. Though her voice is soft I know what she means. Don't give up. Her footsteps recede and I sense the presence of Amy and Finley, still lingering above me.

So they are going leave me, trapped here in this black pool. I know it's the right thing but still I almost sob with despair.

"I'm sorry it turned out this way." Amy whispers, voice breaking on the apology. I hope she's not crying.

It's okay, I want to tell her, my dream state lips even forming the words, but my real body is much heavier, intermittently sending through reports of her patting my hand.

"But we promised each other. Boreas can only fly if one of us gets out." Amy finishes. How strange, I think, that our code word is also the name of a mysterious feyfly. I hear her sniffle and reach up from the dream pool to flex fingers laced with pain.

Boreas means she'll come back for me. Still as her hand lifts from mine, its leaves a worse pain stinging there.

I can hear Finley's breath in the silence left by Amy's footsteps. It's loud and slow.

"I'll be back for you. I promise you that as well." He uses that voice again, like the voice of a mountain.

There's a sweet pressure on my forehead; a kiss. My face aches from the twisting red electricity here in the pool. Two breaths caress my cheeks and I imagine Finley hovering there, terrible decisions colliding behind his eyes.

He must decide not to kiss me again, because the third breath I can no longer feel. My dream self is reaching for him, but she's in a black pool of red hurt and is only kidding herself that she can do anything. She can't. There's only enough energy left to stay conscious enough to listen.

His footsteps leave slowly, haltingly. I can imagine him looking back again and again. I manage to flick my eyelids back for one last snapshot; a bright-smeared polaroid of his white shirt.

Despite it he goes, door clicking closed behind. I gulp down the black water, sobbing in my dreams as a new type of pain stabs at me alongside the first. Grief, for a second family lost to me.