Page 42 of Prima
Pain slams into her again, vile, infernal. But it’s a lesser circle of hell. And when this torment splutters, the normal pain in the seconds that follow is so beautiful she might as well be rolling around in flower petals.
She opens her eyes. They float vertically in the water, she and the boy, his arm banded around her, his forehead against hers. Behind his tightly closed eyelids, the movement of his eyes is rapid and erratic.
Another wave of wretchedness roars through her. She closes her eyes and plummets back into hell.
* * *
When she opens her eyes again, it’s because something wet, cold, and possibly massive is nudging her in the foot, repeatedly, insistently. And it’s raining, raindrops as heavy as pebbles smacking her everywhere. She lies face-down on her raft—or most of her does. Below mid-thigh, her legs stick out over the edge, her toes dragging in the water.
That something wet, cold, and possibly massive nudges her again. She stays still. A vague yet powerful memory makes her think that she can’t move without causing grievous damage to herself, because—because?—
She scrambles to a sitting position. The nerve gun. The body servant sinking into the lagoon. The unearthly pain. Her lover holding her tight in the water.
She panics. Where is he?
His orca, which has never been closer than a kilometer away, turns her raft slightly. With the broken mast—when did that happen?—and the autocannon out of her line of sight, she spies him on the atoll, lying on wet sand in an odd way, his head near the water’s edge, not on the lagoon side but on theoceanside, as if he was pitched from the lagoon and landed just short of the Pacific.
She tries to stand up but collapses again. She’s no longer in pain—or at least no longer in any kind of pain that can’t be ignored—but now that the rush of adrenaline that brought her to a sitting position has dissipated, she’s almost as useless as a newborn.
“Hi,” she says to the orca, as loudly as her weakened vocal cords allow. “Can you push me closer to shore?”
She finds the remote in her pocket that detaches the raft from the understructure. Without the understructure, the raft rides disconcertingly low in the fore, due to the weight of the autocannon, but she can’t care about that now. The orca does as she suggested, prodding the raft gently. She feels around on her person—as they were hauling the autocannon out of the understructure, she also strapped on the usual battle-prep kit. She unwraps a nutrition bubble, sucks it dry, and jabs herself with a dose of stimulant—she doesn’t have time to wait for the effect of the nerve gun to wear away.
At the shore, she staggers off the raft face-first into knee-high waves, crawls onto the beach, and drags herself to his side.
At least he’s alive and breathing normally, thank goodness.
Now what?
Shit, how much time has passed? She consults her watch. It’s five in the afternoon on the same day. Which means she has right about forty-eight hours left for a forty-eight-hour journey home before she becomes disqualified for taking too long to complete her Grand Tour. And she can’t leave yet, not with him unconscious and—she glances to the east—a dead Prince Eleven in the seaplane.
She checks his pupils, his stimuli response, and his airway. Everything seems fine, except that the sky has poured water all over him and he’s still unconscious.
She struggles to her feet, returns to her raft, and paddles out to the understructure—her body seems to have responded rather well to the two-pronged approach of calories and stimulant. Somewhere in the understructure is a dose of experimental drug the young lieutenant who’d showed her around the war zone had given to her as a parting gift.
If you or a comrade absolutely have to get up and carry on, this is the thing. Fast-acting and not too many side effects.
What’s the catch?
The effect wears off in three or four hours, by which time you’d better have reached safety.
She finds it, returns to the beach, and pumps the full dose into his veins.
The rain is stopping. She brings the woven straw mat that earlier acted as a canopy on her raft to the beach, places him on top of it, strips off his wet clothes, and covers him with a blanket. After she changes out of her own wet clothes, she discovers, on the beach, his camping stove with the pot of rice porridge he made for her breakfast still sitting on top of it, as if there hadn’t been flying shells this day on this atoll and a murderous servant zipping around at superhuman speeds.
Tears fall from her eyes, shocking her. They haven’t even said goodbye yet. She’s worried, tired, aching all over, her mind far too active thanks to the stupid stimulant, but she isn’t sad. No, she isn’t.
“Are you okay?”
She whips around. He’s awake. She runs, still a little unsteadily, toward him.
He wraps the blanket around his middle, picks up her mat, and rolls it up. “What happened? You don’t look too good.”
She stops. “You don’t remember what happened?”
This is an odd question to ask a young man who forgets things as part of his concurrent ability, but she was expecting to be a stranger to him when he woke up, wasn’t she? That’s why she was crying.
He rubs his temple. “Eleven and I were shooting at each other, and you and the body servant were engaged in your own death struggle. I guess we won. But did I get knocked unconscious by something?”
