Approximately the 18th of Arrestre

Lights... bright lights, piercing through my eyelids to slice open the darkness inside my head... The smell of rubber and ether is in every breath I take... All of me hurts. Even my hair. I want to get away, but I can't... Large yellow-grey fingers move over my skin like bloated grubs, their joints folding and puckering...There is a pinch and tug on my arm. Then another. Then a yank in my chest. My insides... They are cutting me apart, taking one piece at a time... I want them to stop, but they don't, and now the darkness is coming to take me away —

I woke with a strangled gasp, my hands curled into claws as I came up lashing out at phantom faces leering down at me. But there were no faces, and for a disorienting second everything tilted sideways before I hit the floor with a bone-jarring thump. My blanket followed, fluttering down around me.

Breathing hard, I lay staring at the flooring tiles, gathering my wits like scattered peas on a plate. After a few seconds, I flopped over onto my back and stared up at the ceiling instead. The same pale blue light filtered in through the window, just like every other time I had opened my eyes lately. The same featureless white walls rose on every side.

Abruptly, I shoved up onto my elbows, fumbling madly at the togs on the front of my jumpsuit, wrenching the front open over my belly.

Nothing. My searching hand found only unbroken skin. No sutures, no sore places, not even a scratch.

I scrubbed my fingers through my hair. Nothing different on my head.

My teeth felt the same as before, too.

I let out a breath, deflating with it.

So far, I hadn't found any actual evidence that I was being taken out of my cell while I was unconscious, but for the past few days it had gone the same way. Kenoa came, gave me food, we talked as I ate, then I passed out on the floor and woke up on the bed, with the cobwebs of freakish nightmares clinging to me, and the strangest feeling that I wasn't quite... whole.

"It happened again, didn't it." NaVarre said.

I glanced at the tray gap in the luxglass and smiled. Kenoa must have left the sliding cover open. Just a little, barely an inch, but it was enough for sound to escape. With a grunt, I scooted myself across the smoothness of the floor until my head was next to the gap. But I didn't want to talk about the nightmares, or the creeping sensation that I had been taken apart and reassembled in my sleep. If I thought about that too long I would start going crazy. There were more important things to talk about, anyway. "How are you?"

There was a pause. Then, all matter of fact from down the hall, "I'm doing well."

I closed my eyes, hoping this meant he was going to have a decent morning. I had been awake for exactly two conversations with him so far, including this one, and the last one had ended with me calling for Kenoa because NaVarre had started having a seizure.

"I've been meaning to ask you," NaVarre said after a few seconds, his voice coming clearly, as if he were on the floor like me, now, speaking through the tray gap too. "What happened after Reixham's party? Where did you wind up?"

"I wound up in Vreis. With Orrelian and Marrin... " And Arramy... My mouth started forming the words, but my throat closed up, refusing to let me speak his name.

"Good. I'm glad. I was going to take you to meet Dazh, but I was... delayed. I hope you can forgive me."

It almost sounded like he was apologizing for missing a dinner engagement, as if he hadn't rigged the manor to blow up and essentially left me there to blow up with it when his plan went south. "It's alright. We um... we managed."

"You took the papers, though," he stated. "Kenoa calls you Miss Anderfield."

I picked up a corner of my blanket and plucked at the stitching along the hem. "Yes. I used the papers." You'll never guess who played Kaen. Or where we wound up.

NaVarre hummed an affirmative. Then, almost as an afterthought: "I wonder if the device is still there."

My brows cinched together as I wracked my brain for context.

He didn't wait for me to catch up. "If we could just get the device... I would bet everything I've got that no one knows it's on that airship. It wouldn't raise any alarms, not like breaking into the munitions cache."

As he rambled, a blurry memory of the garden behind Reixham's manor came flooding in: NaVarre crouching behind bushes, a glowing object in his hands; NaVarre racing toward the doorway that was opening up in the fountain, following the Coventry leaders down into the underground bunker.

Another memory eclipsed that one: Arramy tackling me to the ground, putting himself between me and the heat of the airship engines and the glass falling from the manor windows. I shook my head, trying to dispel the bone-deep ache of sadness that bit into me.

NaVarre wasn't aware that I had been in the garden. A harsh rebuke bubbled in the back of my head, the urge to remind him just what his actions had done sitting bitter on my tongue, but I didn't let it spill out. It wouldn't do any good to lay all the collateral damage from that night at his feet when he had been living with the consequences for over a year. It wasn't as if he had been away on holiday. I rubbed the center of my forehead for a moment, then found something else to talk about. "You left a bomb onboard the airship?"

"Yes! I did. It was made out of one of the bluesilver fuel cores they were bringing up from Carak... which I find ironic, in a deeply satisfying way... They caught me before I could set the detonation timer, but I hid it well, and they didn't find it. It's the biggest ship. The command ship, they called it. You have to use one of the outer maintenance hatches, and get up into the bulkhead space between the hull and the inner traveling compartment. The device is tucked underneath a converter box on the engine drive housing."

I frowned at the gap in the wall. His voice was low and intense. Urgent. "Why are you telling me this like you have a plan to go get it?"

"Oh, I do have a plan," NaVarre said. "I ah... I do, but I don't have the stamina to pull it off myself. "

I winced at the thread of dull, weary acceptance below his glib tone, but then something caught my attention. I narrowed my eyes at the gap. "You want me to go get it for you."

The silence in the hallway stretched into an answer.

"You do realize just how insane that is, right? How am I getting out of here, for one? For two, how do I get to the airships? They dock them at the top of a command tower on the mountain. I've been there. There's a whole platoon of soldiers up there."

"I know there are some obstacles —"

I snorted.

"— but if we have that explosive, we can get all the other prisoners out."

That made me go still. "What other prisoners?"

"You didn't think we were the only ones down here, did you?" NaVarre asked quietly. "They call this place the 'stable' for a reason. Karrodian's little pet projects, that's what we are." Then he switched tracks abruptly. "There's a servant's entrance to the command tower. Kenoa knows where it is. And getting out of here won't be so very hard... They still take you out every day."

There it was, the bald fact that Karrodian was doing something to me while I was drugged. It made me feel hollow as an egg shell. Broken and fragile and empty. I was pathetically weak. Bits of me were missing. I had lost everything, and had all but given up on having any sort of purpose, but now, in the raked-out ash heap I had become, a tiny spark of something was beginning to take hold, a faint, guttering glimmer in the void. 

It was insane. It had more holes than a wedge of Carrakian cheese. Yet, it was a plan. 

I dragged in a ragged breath. "So," I whispered. "What do I have to do?"

AN: 

A bit short, but I think this is a good spot to break things before the next chapter... *eyes outline* Things are about to get hairy, so... Prepare yourselves. 

Thanks as always for reading! 

Sincerely,

Anna