Anya’s jaw ached and her every muscle was stiff with the displeasure of uncontrollably spasming for five minutes straight. It was therefore no surprise that when her hand went to unplug the nerve-tooth so carefully implanted in her arm that it was not with the delicacy and grace she had intended. The fingers cramped as they moved over such that it was less the fingers than the entire arm moving to dislodge the implanted connection to the base. The tooth came out with a sickening pop as her fingers caught themselves in the cord and continued sailing forwards with the force of an entire arm behind. It didn’t even come out straight, instead tearing the skin diagonally outward as though an indecisive person had decided to commit suicide with a very, very, very dull razorblade.
She cursed not so much at the pain as the inconvenience of bleeding on her uniform. Yet another thing to be scolded for by the others. Yet another trip to the laundry to fix a thing that didn’t have to happen. But it was a minor concern compared to the fact that now, more than anything and to the greatest impediment to her willpower since joining up here, now, she had to stand. The legs would be noodles, and the arms were already useless. And now she had to stand and run as fast as possible to join up with the others. Oh what misery! Oh what strife! Oh what torment. But she would move on because she must and because they were counting on her and because she needed their protection in this state. They were counting on her to recover, but this also meant they needed her to come to them for protection first.
Anya stood in a single bout of great triumph, and immediately face planted on the concrete floor, her knees having buckled. She made a second effort, but again to no avail. It seemed that despite her great and unending strength, the inability to control it brought about by nerve sickness induced by the overload of processing several hundred extraneous stimuli made it useless. Her choices thus became clear: sit and wait for the return of her strength, attempt to bring someone to her that could carry her temporarily useless living corpse to block 46, or take a second pill. There was no choice to be had, of course. The first option was awful— it would take at least an hour, and who knows what could happen by then? Option two was almost as bad. Someone could get to her position inside ten or fifteen minutes, but that would still burn twenty or thirty round-trip and didn’t account for any delays— such as for getting a hold of someone when they’re all on the move in a labyrinthine series of hallways.
Her hands trembled as they reached inside her coat’s innermost pocket for a second trip to the inviolable sanctum that held her thirteen remaining get-out-of-jail-free cards. They emerged with an already open bottle, shaking so badly the fingers could not reach inside to pull out an individual pill. Her left hand grasped the right in an effort to stabilize the container, but it didn’t help as much as she would have hoped. Her neck, at least, was cooperative in propping itself up against a wall to get in position to receive the solution to her total system instability, but despite being upright the overall problem remained— how to get one pill into her mouth. But she knew it wasn’t a solvable problem, so Anya did what any sensible person in a time of overbearing crisis would— tip the bottle over and hope one pill came out.
It did! But so did two more, and all three landed on her quivering tongue. She quickly replaced the bottle in its inviolable chamber, but the problem remained sour and burning on the flesh. If she waited for the pills to partially dissolve, there might be a chance to spit them out with only one or two pills worth of material consumed. Unfortunately, her tongue did not cooperate in this process. It spasmed at the wrong moment and sent all three pills careening backwards at Anya’s windpipe. Through sheer luck it was closed at the moment of impact, but by the time it reopened all hope for a stable and safe time was lost.
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It wasn’t that you couldn’t take more than one pill. They were tested and known to be generally safe for short-term consumption, but there were also known effects of taking too many for too long. Most were cautioned to only use them at times of absolute crisis, and vanishingly few were given more than one or two. It was Anya’s luck to have been graced with an enduring supply, but as with anything given to a soldier it wasn’t being done out of goodwill or grace or pity. When a soldier is given an object of any type, it was always for the single-minded purpose of combat. Whether an experiment or a known benefit to the soldier was ever a question, but as the pills’ effect was known in this instance, their purpose was clear.
But as Anya began to run something felt off in the pit of her stomach. She’d taken these pellets a hundred times before, but never more than one at once. Never more than one in a day, and scarcely ever more than two in a week. Melissa had warned her about the possible side effects and chided her reliance on them to push through the hardest days of training, but Raethor never cut off the supply. Why did they even give her fourteen pellets if four would cause such intense pain? It wasn’t like anything she’d felt before. Not a simple burning. As her legs moved beneath her and the concrete exploded into shrapnel her eyes tracked the pieces with regular ease. The rebar was blown apart, shattered to dust, and the metal chips blended in well with the smoke that totally obscured the path behind. And yet Anya could still see them glinting in the dull fluorescent light. They were red and shiny.
But in the pit of her stomach a dread grew hot, not as the sensation of her core being worked beyond its physiological limits, nor of any muscle in particular tearing or giving way to the ironclad reality of the world that you can’t extract energy from nothing, but more of a generalized malaise to the organs. As though their substance was on fire. As though she had eaten spoiled milk and it had radiated all throughout the digestive tract and absorbed in a moment to pass through the entire metabolism and set it all alight. But as painful as it was, it was also a strange pain almost like the muscles being torn apart and reconstructed from a particularly intense bout of training.
Was this what the saying meant that “With every passing harvest, the farmer’s brain rots and his muscles grow stronger?” It was strange, then, that Anya’s brain didn’t feel mushy and damp inside her skull, and that her ears remained totally dry despite the near-guarantee it should have been leaking in great torrents down the cheeks and hair. It was common knowledge that to take on farming work in this day and age was a death sentence. That even the best and most tolerant hands can only last six or seven seasons at best before they run out. Those rare few that lasted longer were always the dumbest rocks you could find going in; perhaps their brains having been so small and hard that they had a tolerance to being worn away. But the rare hand that made it fourteen or fifteen seasons was said to exist, and at least a handful who lasted longer than that, even if most had long-since been recycled. She knew this, and yet she took the pills anyway knowing the probable result. And yet she felt nothing but smarter, stronger, faster, and better in every way besides the internally-radiating intense pain in places other than her brain. Perhaps it was a quirk of her physiology, or perhaps hers was a secret, special formula. Whatever the case, five minutes had passed in thought and her feet had carried their body the way through desolated hallways to block forty-six and now she had arrived. It was time to greet the others and get down to business.