by Jada Fisher
“That’s incredible,” Bronn said, crossing over to pick me up again. I almost protested that I could walk myself, but then the sharp static of pain spiked up from the barrier the pain medicine usually kept it under, and I nipped that right in the bud. “Lead on then.”
She did just that, and our small party followed her down a certainly complex set of tunnels, wide pipes, and stone chamber rooms, and then a connecting thing into what looked like a modern sewer system.
Well, by modern, I meant something not made over a hundred years ago by dwarves, but definitely older than I was. If I had to guess, I would hazard that they had been meant to somehow be connected to the abandoned subway the city had poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into back in the eighties. Funny how I had never made the connection back when we were on Mal’s world. Startling, how our dimensions were so similar, separated by only a single turning point.
But did that mean what happened in her dimension, the one that I had sealed off, was bound to happen in ours? Were we just permanently doomed? Was our kind in general doomed, cursed by the existence of the rotted dragon and his greed?
Maybe that was part of it. Maybe wherever the descendants of that original dimension went was doomed to destruction. Corruption. Maybe there was a reason we’d gone extinct.
Not exactly comforting thoughts, that was for certain, and I found my mood significantly swinging downward as we traversed along. By the time we finally stopped, I felt somewhere between bursting into tears because I was frustrated and bursting into tears because I was scared.
And yet, as much as I wanted to, the tears didn’t do much bursting.
“Here, I’ve got some emergency blankets and spare clothing,” someone said, approaching Bronn. I blinked at her, woozily realizing that we were in a room that looked like a sparse version of that hideout that Mal had ferried us off to upon first arriving in her world. “I’ll make her a bed so you can lay her down.”
“Are there any of the medical staff in your party? I’m worried about her coming down off the meds too hard or going into withdrawal. They’ve been weaning her off, but this is a lot all at once.”
“I grabbed a few, but I’m just a second-year med student. I know some basics, enough to think I needed to stuff as much as I could into this backpack, but I don’t know about your friend’s dosages or anything like that.”
“That’s alright. I memorized most of them. I… Maybe after we rest, we can go back and see if we can find anything else.” Mickey paused and I almost told her that it wasn’t nice to discuss me like I wasn’t even there, but then she was already talking to Mal. Drat. Why was everyone always going so fast around me? “Mal, what time is it?”
“About four in the morning according to your phone. Here.” She tossed it back and I was surprised when my sister caught it. Not because she was particularly clutzy, but because the world was sort of gently undulating all around us.
Or was that just me?
“Okay, let’s see what you got there. I’ll set an alarm for six and administer what I can then. Davie, you just go to sleep, okay? We’re gonna keep you as comfortable as possible.”
I rolled my eyes. “I’m not a baby, you know. You don’t have to talk to me like I’m three.” I mean, I knew I had brain damage, but it wasn’t that much brain damage.
…was it?
That was a worrying thought, but then she and Bronn kissed my cheek one after the other and someone pulled a thin sheet over me. Apparently, that was all I needed, and I was out like a light.
4
Fall Further
“Davie, come now, little one, won’t you wake up for an old friend?”
I shivered, feeling like I was so cold that parts of me might snap off, but also drenched in sweat. I sat up with a jolt, my head spinning as I moved so quickly.
“There’s my girl. Where have you been? I’ve missed you terribly.”
It was like the world around me was a video game that was slowly loading. One moment, it was all just blank, then I blinked and suddenly, I was right back in that same ruined version of my city that I knew all too well.
And the rotted dragon was looking back at me.
It was far too much déjà vu to that moment when he had tried to eat Mallory’s corpse, that moment when he had grabbed my arm and lifted me from my feet. I threw myself back, but instead of landing hard on the ground, I fell into something soft, squishy, and far too warm.
Acrid air surrounded me, filling my nose and forcing its way down my lungs in a violent scourge. I coughed and tried to push myself up, but my hands sank into rotted, pustulant flesh.
Wait… Hands?
I blinked and raised my palms, blinking at them. They were covered in slime and pus, already sizzling in the liquid, but they were both there.
“What’s going on?” I asked, my head scrambling to put things together. I was in a vision? I hadn’t had one since that fateful day and I’d assumed that my brain was too busy healing myself for any magical shenanigans.
“As I said, I missed you, little one. I’ve been searching for you. How is it you’ve managed to stay so hidden from me?”
I felt a pressure at my back and realized the paw that I’d fallen onto had turned, lifting to pick me up and bring me closer to his face. My stomach practically fell out of me and the image of me being eaten flashed through my mind.
I couldn’t remember the last time that I had been so scared. Hell, I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d been coherent enough to feel scared. I flinched back and would have toppled out of his decrepit palm if his nails hadn’t bit into me to pin me in place.
Ow.
Pain flared into my mind like it hadn’t in weeks, and I gasped, writhing in his grip.
“This isn’t real,” I spat. “This is just a vision.”
“Perhaps when we were separated by dimension, there was a certain sort of protection for you, but that’s no longer the case, is it? We’re right here, in the same world, breathing the same air.”
His claws bit into me more deeply, and that was when I knew he had me. He had me and he was going to tear me to pieces. Either there was something about the tunnels that I had been in that had protected me, or all that rumbling was some sort of spell to find me, and he had succeeded. Either way, I was pinned. Stuck.
It was over.
I went limp and he practically purred at me. It was an awful sound, a grating sound, but what could I do? I’d lost so much trying to fight him and had ended up not back at square zero, but instead at something like negative one hundred.
“That’s it, my child. Don’t worry, there will be the peace that you crave soon, when we are joined.”
His mouth opened wide, the same image that was burned into my mind from before. His spittle formed long, putrid strands and bubbled over the side of his torn lips. I threw my arms up, as if that would help me.
But then, before he popped me into his mouth like some sort of bonbon, he dropped me, reeling back. Looking down at my body, I saw those same claw marks in me, but where they had pieced me was the same green, hazy sort of gas coming out of me. Just like the earth when he’d risen from the dirt.
“What are you doing, little one?” he asked, tone agitated as he recovered, his head twisting down to look in my face. “What little trick are you pulling out of your sleeve to expel me from you?”
“I don’t know,” I answered honestly, gaze stuck on my body. And then, barely a beat later, the green gas turned to black smoke and I popped right out of the vision into nothingness.
I sat up with a jolt, unsurprisingly covered in sweat. It was dark, so dark, that I was certain I was still in the vision.
“Hey! Hey, I’m here. You’re alright. You’re safe, Davie.”
At first, the voice didn’t click. I was too pumped up on adrenaline and fear. But then all of my senses seemed to come back online at once and I began to realize what was happening.
Bronn was holding me. I knew that voice and those arms anywhere.
He was pressing me against his solid, warm chest, my head turned so I could hear his steady and loud heartbeat. It was so dark around me that I couldn’t even see him, but I could hear my ragged breathing as well as several others waking up around me.
Finally, a light flashed, illuminating the space. I blinked, turning my head to the other side.
“Is everything okay?” That was Mickey. Right, she was fine. We were hiding in our world’s version of Mal’s sewer sanctuary. Life goes full circle and all that. My memories all rushed back to me with much more clarity than before.
“She was just having a nightmare.”
“I’m fine,” I breathed, and I realized I was more acutely aware of my body than I had been in weeks. I didn’t feel pressed down or buried under a layer of drugs. I didn’t feel like I had to work so hard to be myself or to think or eat or to even inhale.
“Here, it’s almost six. Lemme get you your next thing of medicine. They didn’t get Dilaudid, but I—”
“No, no drugs.”
“Davie, I know you’re not a huge fan of them, but you need to—”
“No, you don’t understand. Something’s happened.”
It was a testament to our sisterhood that she stopped what she was doing and crouched in front of me. Anyone else might have persisted, maybe asked Bronn to hold me down so they could do it for my own good. But Mickey always knew when to take me seriously and when she needed to be the big sis.
“Davie, what do you mean?”
“I… I’m not certain. But I feel different.” I took a deep breath and it was like I was connecting to parts of my body in a wave. “I think I want to stand. Can I stand?”
“I don’t know. Can you?” It wasn’t a correction of my grammar, but I could hear the bewilderment in her voice.
“Bronn, help me up.”
I heard an agreeing rumble from behind me, then his arms loosened from where they had been wrapped around my waist. I felt him shift, then those hands were settling right back on me, helping me rise to my feet.
I weebled, I wobbled, but I found myself able to hold myself up for the first time in weeks, my muscles remembering themselves and supporting me, Bronn only providing balance.
“Holy…” I heard Mickey whisper from behind me.
And I couldn’t blame her. We’d both had intense recoveries in the hospital before. We both knew that a single day of full bedrest was equal to about a week of muscle loss. I shouldn’t be able to stand. And even if I could, I should have been shaking like a leaf.
But I was fine.
A little trembly, sure—I definitely needed Bronn for balance—but I didn’t feel weak.
“What is going on?” I heard Mickey ask, tone stuck somewhere between reverent and bewildered.
“I… I don’t know.” I looked down at my hands, wondering if a miracle had happened, but then I saw just the one. Hand. Singular.
Alright, so I hadn’t miraculously been returned to my old body by some unknown force. But why was I relatively okay? Nothing was making sense!
I didn’t know. But I was certain that I wanted to move.
“Can we walk around the perimeter of this room? If there’s space?”
“Are you sure?” Bronn asked. It was the first that he had questioned me, and I could have blessed him for that.
“Yeah. Just keep a hold of me. You know, in case.”
I didn’t have to say what I meant in case of. He just knew. One arm wrapped around my waist, he moved to my side and guided me as best he could around the room.
There wasn’t exactly a lot of space, with people sprawled out across different surfaces, some sitting up against the walls, some curled together on the ground, some perched on piles of debris with emergency blankets under them. It reminded me of all those disaster aftermath pictures that would play on the news after a tornado or earthquake, which I supposed was apropos.
“Hey, you guys mind keeping it quiet— Whoa, is Davie walking?”
Mal’s voice drifted from somewhere close by, but I couldn’t quite make out exactly where. So, my sudden and miraculous healing didn’t suddenly give me night vision. Shame about that.
“I’m trying to walk,” I said, swinging my leg around and then planting my foot on the ground. Part of it felt disconnected from me, like I was relearning something I used to know like the back of my hand but had gotten foggy with time. “We’ll see if I can actually do it.”
“I’ll be right here the entire time,” Bronn assured, giving me a reassuring squeeze.
But if there was one thing I didn’t need to feel uncertain about, it was the dragon prince. Sure, I’d worried in the past. Maybe I’d even doubted him a few times. I also could admit that I had been unsure about our relationship, if we even had a relationship, and what someone like him could see in someone like me…
But going through an apocalypse together, losing everything together, seemed to have scooped all those worries out and dumped them wherever trash ideas went, because I knew, down to the core of my soul, that he would do whatever he could, whenever he could, to make sure he was there for me.
He loved me, and I loved him. The dragon shifter and the oracle. The rich, white-haired royal and the poor, Latina orphan. It almost sounded like one of the telenovelas that were my sister’s guilty pleasure, but it wasn’t anything like that.
If only because most telenovelas antagonists weren’t giant, decomposing dragons bent on world destruction.
“So, is this, like, magic?” Mal asked. I heard some shuffling and then she was walking into the narrow field of light from what I assumed was Mickey’s phone.
“It’s definitely magic,” I answered breathlessly, almost all my concentration on my feet. “Just not my magic.”
“Huh, well that’s something. Are we sure this isn’t like, um, some sort of sabotage? Don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled about the improvement and this is the clearest I’ve seen your eyes in weeks, but I’m at the point where I’m suspicious at just about everything.”
I couldn’t blame her. There was a worry, deep in my gut, that this was somehow a trick. “I don’t know. It’s hard to think about why someone would heal me for nefarious reasons, but I can’t help wondering too.”
“Glad we’re on the same page. I will continue to be cautiously happy for you.”
“Sounds good to me.”
It was slow going, and I progressively grew more and more trembly as we carefully picked our way around the other folks. I made it around two and a half times before my back started to shake and I felt sweat beginning to trickle down my brow.
“I think we should take a break,” Bronn said, his tone diplomatic. “You don’t want to strain yourself in case we have to run again.”
“Right,” I said, breathless once more, my chest rising and falling in quick pants. It was a bit embarrassing to be so winded from maybe fifteen minutes of walking, but it was more than I’d done in over a month, so I was still pretty proud of myself. Baby steps.
Ha, almost literally.
If I had the breath, I would have chuckled at my almost-pun. But I didn’t have the energy, so I mostly let the others help lower me back down onto my makeshift bed.
“Should we try to go back to sleep?” Mickey asked, chewing her lip as she looked me over.
I just shook my head. “I feel like I’ve had a lifetime’s worth of sleep. You all can rest, but I’ll stay up a bit.”
“I have an idea,” Mal said. “Why don’t we take her pile and the bedding the rest of us were on and make a little nest in one of the cubbies around here. We can use one of the emergency lanterns Thad snagged for light.”
“Cubbies?”
“Yeah. Can I see your phone again? I’ll scout out where they are, but if I remember correctly, there should be a couple in this area. Probably in much better condition than when I used them.”
“Why would they build cubbies into a sewer?”
“We’ll they’re not literally cubbies, but they’re small spots that can
still fit all of us together. Maybe they were like…emergency spots to get out of a flash flood, or old ports that were sealed off, but does it really matter what they were if right now they can be our little den and we can all curl up together without disturbing the other folk?”
“She has a point,” I said, the back of my mind noting that was probably the longest bit of dialogue I had been able to concentrate on in what felt like forever. “And should we get Sokhanya and Krisjian?”
“Sokhanya’s already up,” Bronn said, pointing into the darkness. It was amazing how the light from Mickey’s phone just seemed to drop off into nothing. We weren’t even in that large of a room. Barely big enough for the little over a dozen of us to find places to sleep or rest with some walking room between.
“Uh, I definitely can’t see her.”
“I’ll check if she wants to come. Hold on.”
Mal took Mickey’s phone and headed off. I watched her path and did eventually see Sokhanya tucked under what looked like a fallen slab of concrete, a little cranny that was stuffed with what looked like the blanket Bronn had taken from my ‘hospital’ room and some empty packs. I wasn’t quite sure how her and Mal communicated considering neither had notebooks or were using the rudimentary signs we all had learned, but the deaf oracle crawled out and began to gather her things before trundling over to join us.
Once she did, her eyebrows lifted, and she looked me up and down. I didn’t need a piece of paper to know what she was asking—how was I sitting up and functional?—but I just shrugged.
She nodded as if that was all the explanation she needed, and knowing the girl, it probably was. She wandered off into the dark after setting her items down at my feet.
I needn’t worry, of course, because she returned a few moments later with a very exhausted-looking Krisjian.
“Hey, guys, do any of you know why Sok— Whoa, why are you sitting up like that? How are you sitting up like that?”