Pa—

Everything dissolved into excruciating pain.

Pay—

Searing pain enveloped me once more. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t scream. I couldn’t string two thoughts together. I just suffered.

Pay atten—

I tried to focus on the words, the only recourse I had, but in the face of such agony, my concentration kept fracturing.

Pay attention to—

All of me and none of me hurt. It was as if my whole body was dipped in acid. Dying shouldn’t feel this horrific. I had to be dying, right?

I tried to scream as another round of pain wracked me.

Pay attention to what—

I picked out more of the words as, for some reason, the last wave didn’t overwhelm me. Another wave approached. Unlike before, I could actually feel the heat and pressure building. It was no longer a blazing inferno. It had a pattern, a pulse. I braced for another eruption of pain, but only a fraction of what I expected came.

A temporary respite or something more?

Another fiery wave spread outward, but it too had none of the intensity from earlier.

What was going on?

I tried to move, but nothing happened. I gulped—or at least tried—when the realization struck. I couldn’t feel my arms, legs, or any part of my body. I tried to open my eyes, and nothing changed. A nightmare? Something in the back of my mind rejected that. I had made a choice. I had chosen this torture. But why?

As if to confirm, pay attention to what she does.

For once, I could. My world no longer a conflagration, I finally caught all the words. Except, what did they mean? And who was she?

Another wave started to swell, and I braced for the inevitable. Wave after wave struck, but with each pulse, they changed. The waves narrowed until only thick ribbons of fire spread outward, diffusing into smaller and smaller strands that shot out in random directions. Still, each inch they traveled left a trail of agony so intense that it stole every bit of my focus, but they also burned their paths into my memory.

The lines of fire varied, but some repeated. In the respite between each pulse, I pulled together my fragmented pieces of consciousness to study the paths along which the agony traveled. They repeated, inevitably flowing along fixed lines. Fixed paths with an organic pattern. Branches sprouting from a tree. A river forming a delta. Vessels and nerves. It couldn’t…

Another pulse came, nearly shattering my concentration. A pulse. Why? Why not constant agony? For the first time, I counted them. The frequency varied, but they bounced between two to three a second. One hundred twenty to one hundred eighty pulses per minute, or perhaps beats per minute? It would fit with pain’s patterns, and while not a typical resting rate, but well into expectations for some in pain.

Pay attention to what she does...

Or else I will die.

The voice didn’t need to say it. As before, I just knew it to be the truth. For some reason, I had chosen this hell, chosen to risk my life. I must have chosen this for a reason.

A wave as powerful as when I first came to rocked me. My thoughts blanked, and my consciousness almost slipped away. However, I still managed to follow it, and it provided the most complete picture of the paths. Even then, it was still just a fragment. If I could just compare—

Suddenly the picture became more complete as I managed to not only recall but also overlay every prior path the burning lines of agony took. Even as more pulses battered my mind, the image didn’t dissolve. It shuddered and faded, but each time it reformed, it grew more and more defined, as if each pulse added more data to a model. I marveled at my ability to view it as a 3-D model. With just a thought, I rotated it around to view it from all angles.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

Pay attention to what she does...

The voice put me back on track. My amazement about my ability to process this information would have to wait. I tried overlaying my mental model of human organs. Most had little effect, but if I placed the heart there…

I frowned, or at least tried to. This pattern was without a doubt related to the human body, but the heart was not the focus. It was close, but the majority of the painful energy formed a halo around it. My lungs?

Another burst exploded from the core. This one raced outward, racing towards my right arm. I braced myself, but it inflicted a below-average level of pain. However, another set followed, moving primarily towards my head. A large but slow wave led the pack. As it flowed upward, I could have sworn someone was scraping my insides with a razor. The smaller waves surged past it, but the torture they inflicted paled in comparison to the largest—except when they collided. Every time that happened, the smaller waves amplified the agony coming from the largest one.

I braced as a large wave moved closer to my head, but right as it was about to crash against the base of my brain, it died out. If I could, I would have breathed out a sigh of relief. However, more waves of various speeds and strengths raced upward after it. They too randomly lost strength as they approached my neck.

Through the spikes of pain, I tried to understand what was happening. Those that died out closer to my neck seemed to generate more pain, not less. I followed another large pulse. This one almost dampened out completely right at the base of my neck. However, a sense of dread started to overtake me as it regained strength as it moved over the short distance between my clavicles and the base of my skull. A few of the faster pulses caught up to it just as it approached my head, and my world went white.

***

I had no way to know how long I had been out. I mentally tensed as another set of fast pulses spread upward, trying to catch up to a slower, larger one. However, unlike last time, when they overlapped, they created just a sliver of the pain, rapidly fading somewhere in my neck.

Why? What had changed?

Even if the warning hadn’t echoed in my mind, I knew I needed to nail down the pattern underlying this hell. Because there had to be one. Otherwise, it would be more random.

Once again, I studied the phenomenon going on in my body, though this time I focused on my neck as pulse after pulse surged up from my chest. Sometimes, the waves overlapped, and other times, they didn’t. Pain always worsened when they overlapped—though not always to the same degree.

As they died out in the cervical region, I found more nuance in the pattern. Counter-intuitively, when the wave dampened closer to the bottom of my neck, I experienced more pain. If I put that together with the large surge, I could only come up with one reason for that: destructive interference.

Out of phase waves opposing each other. One pushed; the other pulled. Sine and Cosine. Fire and Ice. Yin and Yang.

I let my litany of comparisons fade. Something—or more likely someone—had to be actively dampening the agony.

I turned my attention to the opposing waves. One started in my chest and rolled out; the other, in my head and moved inward. However, the inward waves did not just come from my head. So distracted by the inferno in my head, I had missed it before. The pain also diminished as it reached my hands and feet, which meant counter waves also started in my extremities. The forces were more than just opposites, they also conformed to afferent and efferent flows of the body’s vessels and nerves. Fascinating, except…they didn’t make a true cycle. What the hell was going on?

The words echoed once more in my mind, pay attention to what she does.

“Why?” I screamed in reply, but nothing answered my question.

Fine. If I was stuck in this dream or, maybe more appropriately, nightmare, I would solve this puzzle. I started with the purpose. Assuming this was intentional, then it must have a reason for its design. With a bit of observation, it didn’t take long to suss out the aim.

Though subtle, the inferno in my chest diminished with each pulse. The system was losing energy. It would burn itself out given enough time—time I might not have.

Do I care?

The dark thought niggled away. I had dark ruminations before in some of the tougher times, but this one felt more grounded in reality. I tried to reach back, remembering why, but found only hazy thoughts. I had given up—thrown away?—so much.

Should I just give up?

Some of the counter surges began to falter. When they did, the red-hot pokers returned. Thankfully, the burst of pain didn’t wrack my whole body, just random parts of my body—my right lateral palm and fingers, my right shoulder, the soles of both my feet. Unfortunately, the failure rate of the counter surges continued to increase. Whatever—no, if I could believe the litany repeating in my mind, she—was helping me was flagging, failing. However, she was trying. I mattered to someone. And, I didn’t give up.

I found my resolve. I could help. I needed to help, but how?

I tried to mimic the soothing pulses, but I couldn’t recreate the complexity. The waves weren’t just a single pulse. Each contained harmonics and subharmonics. A slight shift would dampen the fire in one place but allow it to build in another. Some of my attempts actually diminished the effectiveness of the original counter-pulse.

Fire seared my right shoulder as I failed another attempt to match the complexity of the counter pulse. It was futile. At best, I could generate a singular pulse in support.

A stabbing tingling spread across my right hand. Actually, not the entire hand. The pain only involved part of the hand right by the pinky, ring finger, and the hand just below them. For such a small area, it packed a punch. Why the hell did it have to hit this place again…

It couldn’t be, but then the next streak of pain radiated from the center of my back, around my left flank, and then ended at my umbilicus. I played back all the places the waves broke through. They all fit patterns I was intimately familiar with: the sensory pattern of nerves and nerve roots. Right ulnar nerve, right C5 nerve root, bilateral S1 nerve roots, right superficial radial nerve, and left T10 nerve root. Sure, vessels played a role, but the pattern better mimicked the nervous system.

Heat started to build in two-thirds of my palm near my thumb. The counter-wave would fail. I couldn’t do complex waves, but I could do a quick burst. I went with my gut and targeted the median nerve as it traveled through the carpal tunnel. The line of fire sputtered for a fraction of a second before it returned to raging. Close. Another line of heat grew across my chest at my nipple line. The T4 sensory distribution. I tried generating a wave starting at my sternum. A coolness spread around my torso to my back, but it faded a few milliseconds later. Except, that was a few milliseconds more than the last time.

The fiery inferno in my chest spewed out wave after wave. With each one, I improved. As my savior continued to flag, my assistance improved, almost impossibly fast. My knowledge of anatomy had never been this good. I could see every pathway as if I was reading it directly from a book or computer model. A few times my attempt failed, but that was only because my body didn’t exactly match the textbook. It was close enough for me to shore up the points at which she failed to reach until the conflagration became dying coals, then ashes.

As the pulses of agony faded to background, a soft lub-dub began to fill the air. I kept count. Sixty beats a minute. Steady. Consistent.

I opened my eyes and found a pair of hands still covered my face. Long and delicate, but strong. Through the light that seeped through the cracks, I couldn’t mistake the subtle green tone. Alien, and yet familiar. Healer’s hands. Their work was done, and they pulled away. I found myself in the same ICU room with the doctor that gave my choice. He had remained standing at the door’s edge, watching me. His smile reflected the delight in his eyes, one black, one pale blue.

Did that mean I survived?

He nodded, answering my question without saying a word. As he walked away, I leaned back, sighed in relief, and closed my eyes.