EIGHTEEN
Down in the training center’s clinic, Payne was doing her exercises, as she’d come to think of them.
Lying in the hospital bed with the pillows pushed to the side, she crossed her arms over her chest and tightened her stomach, pulling her torso upright on a slow rise. When she was perpendicular to the mattress, she extended her arms straight out and held them there while she eased back down. After even one round, her heart was pounding and her breath was short, but she gave herself only a brief recovery and repeated. And repeated. And repeated.
Each time the effort grew progressively more strenuous, until sweat beaded on her forehead and her stomach muscles strained into pain. Jane had shown her how to do this, and she supposed it was a benefit— although compared to what she had been capable of, it was a spark measured against a bonfire.
Indeed, Jane had tried to get her to do so much more . . . had even wheeled in a chair for her to sit in and ambulate, but Payne couldn’t bear the sight of the thing, or the idea of spending her life rolling from place to place.
In the past week, she had summarily closed off all avenues of accommodation in the hopes of a singular miracle . . . that had never materialized.
It felt like centuries since she’d fought with Wrath . . . since she had known the coordination and strength of her limbs. She had taken so much for granted, and now she missed who she had once been with a grief that she’d assumed one had only for the dead.
Then again, she supposed she had died. Her body just wasn’t smart enough to stop working.
With a curse in the Old Language, she collapsed back and left herself lying there. When she was able, she found the leather strap that she had cranked down over her thighs. The thing was so tight, she knew it was cutting off circulation, but she felt neither the constriction of the binding nor any sweet release as she sprang the clasp and the leather popped loose.
It had been thus since the night she had returned herein.
No change.
Closing her eyes, she reentered into an inner war whereupon her fears drew swords against her mind, and the results were e’er more tragic. After seven cycles of night and day, her army of rationality was suffering from a sorry lack of ammunition and deep fatigue amongst its troops. Thus, the tide was turning. First, she had been buoyed by optimism, but that had faded, and then there had been a period of resolved patience, which had not lasted long. Since then, she had tarried along this barren road of baseless hope.
Alone.
Verily, the loneliness was the worst part of the ordeal: For all the people who were free to come and go, in and out of her room, she was utterly separate even when they sat and talked to her or attended to her very basic needs. Confined to this bed, she was on another plane of reality from them, separated by a vast, invisible desert that she could see clearly o’er, but was unable to cross.
And it was strange. All that she had lost became most acute whenever she thought of her human healer— which was so often she could not count the times.
Oh, how she missed that man. Many were the hours she had spent remembering his voice and his face and that last moment between them . . . until her memories became a blanket with which to warm herself during the long, cold stretches of worry and concern.
Unfortunately, however, much like her rational side, that blanket was fraying from overuse, and there was no repairing it.
Her healer was not of her world and ne’er to return—nothing but a brief, vivid dream that had disintegrated into filaments and fragments now that she had awoken.
“Cease,” she said to herself out loud.
With the upper-body strength she was trying to maintain, she turned to the side for the two pillows, fighting against the deadweight of her lower body as she strained to—
Her balance failed in a flash, and sent her careening even in her prone position, her arm knocking the glass of water from the table next to her.
And alas, it was not an object well suited for impact.
As it shattered, Payne closed her mouth, which was the only way she knew to keep her screams in her lungs. Otherwise, they would breach the seal of her lips and ne’er stop.
When she thought she had enough self-control, she looked over the side of the bed at the mess on the floor. Ordinarily, it would be so simple—something spilled and one would clean it up.
Previously, all she would have done was bend over and mop it up.
Now? She had two choices: Lie here and call for help like an invalid. Or prethink and strategize and make an attempt to be independent.
It took her some time to figure out the bracing points for her hands and then judge the distance to the floor. Fortunately, she was unplugged from all the tubing that had been running into her arm, but a catheter remained . . . so mayhap trying to do this herself was a bad idea.
Yet she could not bear the indignity of just lying here. No soldier was she; now she was a child incapable of caring for herself.
It was no longer supportable.
Snapping out squares of “Kleenex,” as people called them, she lowered the railing on the bed, gripped the top of it, and curled herself over onto her side. The torsion caused her legs to flop around like those of a puppet, all motion without grace, but at least she could reach downward to the smooth floor with the white fluff on her palm.
As she stretched whilst trying to maintain a precarious balance on the ledge of the bed, she was tired of being done for, tended to, washed and wrapped like a young newly born unto the world—
Her body went the way of the glass.
Without warning, her grip slipped off the smooth rail, and with her hips so far off the mattress, she fell headfirst toward the floor, the grab of gravity too strong for her to overcome. Throwing out her hands, she caught herself on the wet flooring, but both palms shot from under her and she took the force of impact on the side of the face, breath exploding out of her lungs.
And then there was no movement.
She was trapped, the bed buttressing her useless limbs so that they remained directly over her head and torso, cramming her into the floor.
Dragging air down her throat, she called out, “Help . . .
With her face squeezed, her arms starting to go numb, and her lungs burning from suffocation, rage lit up within her until her body trembled—
It started as a squeak. Then the noise turned into movement as her cheek began to skid on the tile, the skin stretching so thin, she felt like it was being peeled off her skull. And then pressure grew on the nape of her neck, her thick braid pulling her head in one direction at the same time her strange position drove her forward.
Summoning all her strength, she focused her rage and maneuvered her arms so that her palms were back flat to the floor. After a tremendous inhale, she shoved hard, pushing herself up and flipping herself on her back—
Her rope of hair fell in and among the railing’s supports and locked in tight, the thick length keeping her in place, whilst wrenching her neck to her shoulder. Trapped and going nowhere, she could see only her legs from her vantage point, her long, slender legs that she had never before given any particular thought to.
As the blood gradually pooled into her torso, she watched the skin on her calves get paper white.
Fists curling, she willed her toes to move.
“Damn you . . .
It did not.
It had not.
And she was coming to realize . . . it would not.
