Get up.
Her eyes blinked open, bleary, and it took a few seconds for her to find her bearings. It was dark, not unusual for the night shift, but something wasn’t right, something was different.
The strobe. A red light in the corridor blinked on and off, on and off, too slow to be an actual strobe light, but that was the term her sleep and drug-addled brain could come up with at the time. She pushed herself upright on the thin mattress, brow furrowing. There was something else.
The door. The door’s open and there’s no one there.
Her breath caught, eyes widening. The door to her cell was open and for once, no one stood there waiting for her to escort her out, down the hall to another room. The dark corridor was empty.
The corridor wasn’t just dark, she realized, it was pitch black, the only light coming from the intermittent light of the red emergency bulbs. There were five of those along the corridor, evenly spaced end to end.
This could be your only chance. Get up. Move.
She lurched out of bed, bare feet stumbling for a moment before she caught her balance. The world spun around her and she sucked in a few breaths as she tried to steady herself. There was little use trying, she realized after a moment, then started to move, fighting through pain and vertigo.
How long had it been since she’d been returned to her cell after the last round? How long had she been sleeping?
What was going on?
Something flashed ahead of her that wasn’t the red lights. Her foot hit something hard, sending her sprawling. She felt around near her feet, trying to figure out what it was. Fingers brushed against the muzzle of a carbine and she recoiled, bile rising in the back of her throat.
What’s happening here?
She remembered them telling her this place was the only place she’d ever be again. Even that memory, like so many others, was fuzzy, fading, often all but eluding her grasp. It had been like that for—she thought—weeks, but even gauging time was starting to get hard.
Scrabbling back to her feet, she left the fallen weapon behind her, reaching one arm out toward the wall to steady herself. The flashing of the red emergency lights was starting to make her head hurt, making the vertigo worse.
Just breathe and keep moving. Just breathe and keep moving.
The corridor felt so long. It wasn’t actually that long, was it?
A muffled cry, another flash—this time she was sure it was behind her.
You don’t want to know. You don’t want to know. You jut have to get out of here. Keep moving. Keep moving.
The next time she fell, a few steps later, it wasn’t because she’d tripped over anything. Her legs had just stopped working, numb at the knees, and the feeling was spreading. Panic seized her, mind screaming the word noover and over. This had happened before. This spreading numbness was familiar, though she couldn’t say how or why she knew.
An arm wrapped around her neck suddenly, pulled her up to her knees. The voice was that of one of her captors, barely more than a breath in her ear.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
A tremor went through her and she gathered the breath to answer, mouth sour even as cold and numbness gnawed its way up her body. “I—”
The light flickered strangely and suddenly she was falling, collapsing to the floor face-first. She thought she heard something, like voices in a tunnel, like distant thunder. The floor rushed up to greet her even as darkness even blacker than the corridor swallowed her whole.
——
The bed was unfamiliar.
That was the first realization that hit her as she clawed her way free of unconsciousness—the bed wasn’t the thin padding and barely adequate blanket of the cot in her cell. This was softer, smelled of woodsmoke and pine and wool and something else, the blankets piled over her a comforting weight.
Everything hurt, too. Every muscle was sore, as if she’d run two marathons without stretching or enough water. There was bone-deep pain in one knee and in her left wrist. What had happened? Trying to remember was like reaching for shadows in a thick, rolling fog, and every time, the shadows eluded her fingertips.
A floorboard creaked. It was enough to tell her instantly that she was somewhere very different from the last place she could remember being—the corridor and before that, her cell. The smell of strong tea and chicken soup hit her nose, even nestled as it was in a cocoon of blankets.
Slowly, she stared to claw her way free of the warm, safe pile—or at least, the pile that seemed to be both. Another board creaked, closer this time, and suddenly a face swam into view above hers. Reddish hair, too long to be by design, and at least three days’ growth of beard beyond what was clearly intended to be there. His eyes seemed to shift from gray to green and then on to blue as she stared up at him, brows knitting.
She didn’t know him, but felt like she should—somehow, he felt familiar, even though she couldn’t remember ever having met him, much less attach a name to his face. “Where am I?” she croaked. “Who are you?”
“Safe,” he said, gently reaching to help her free herself from her blankets. “You’ve been asleep for almost two days. I was starting to worry.”
“Two days?” She stared to try to push herself up on her elbows, wincing as muscles protested and pain shot up her arm. Instead of trying to stop her, he just cleared the blankets enough so she could sit up the rest of the way, reaching behind her to adjust the pillows against the wall behind her so she wouldn’t hurt herself if she fell back. “How could I have been out for two days?”
“My guess is that you somehow knew that you weren’t there anymore and you could afford to relax just a fraction.” He turned to get two mugs, one larger than the other with a spoon in it, the other a more normal size. Both steamed slightly, as if full of some kind of hot liquid.
Her stomach growled for the first time in as long as she could remember. It was strange to actually be hungry, and her mouth watered at the smell of the soup and the tea—another sensation that was almost beyond her ability to recall.
“I don’t remember how I got there,” she said as he came back with the mugs, setting the smaller on the bedside table and offering her the larger, that one full of soup. She took it from him with the hand that didn’t hurt, the other splinted and wrapped, as if she’d broken it somehow. Maybe she had. She couldn’t remember. “I don’t—I can’t remember a lot.”
His expression softened. Somehow, it made his otherwise rugged countenance seem kind. “It’s okay,” he murmured. “I wish I could say I was surprised.”
“What was that place?” She moved the soup around in the mug with the spoon for a few seconds before she dared to take a bite. Her stomach twisted, then settled, and she exhaled a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. Just an empty stomach. She took another bite. “I just remember waking up there one day. They kept asking me questions but I don’t even remember the questions anymore.”
“It’s all right,” he said. “You don’t have to worry about that anymore. It’s taken care of.”
“Taken care of,” she echoed, watching him as he glanced away. More of the room was coming into focus. It was a small bedroom, she realized, the walls white-washed, the floors wood with a faint, satiny sheen. There was a chair in the corner next to the door, a quilt half fallen onto the floor from its seat, and a rug covered the floor next to the bed where she sat. “My gut tells me that’s probably not good for the people that were holding me. What about other prisoners?”
“There weren’t any,” he said softly, gently. “You were the only one.”
“Just one?” Just me? She swallowed hard, slowly setting down the spoon. “What does that mean?”
“I don’t know,” he said quietly, then rose from his crouch alongside the bed. He walked to the chair, folded the quilt. “Finish eating. I got you some clean clothes and if you’re up to it, I can get you a bath ready.”
All of that sounded amazing, she realized as she watched him head for the door. She could see a wider room beyond it, but mostly just in snatches of color and texture. “Okay,” she said, watching him. “But you didn’t tell me your name. What should I call you?”
He glanced back over his shoulder and smiled faintly. “Start with figuring out what to call yourself before you worry about what to call me.”
He stepped out the bedroom door, leaving her with that new puzzle to consider over soup and tea.
