I’m not exactly sure what happens next, though I’m fairly certain that it takes place over the course of days. The traumatic fragments that I’m conscious for are as hallucinatory as they are disordered. They begin with my bloody left hand reaching up to touch Cal’s face while she runs. Feathers of light cocoon us. She really is an angel. I think I must mumble it out loud, because she glances down at me with the most worried expression I’ve ever seen her make. I try to smile and tell her I’m fine. But the world has already moved on.
Blurs of neon lights, acrid smells, tense voices and terse grunts. Cal hands hold me steady all the while, just as she did for my final attack. My whole body’s still buzzing like the battle only ended a moment prior. Blissfully painless ecstasy courses through me like the purest river on the planet. My head must loll to the side at some point. I see my arm, glowing warmly through a volcanic field of charred skin. Kaleidoscope reality smears around the limb in watercolor motion. A hand reaches out of the chaos to clutch my fingers tightly. A band of Lungracian silver around the wedded finger.
Then my head bounces. Cal’s hands no longer hold me. Metal, cold and unyielding, beneath my back. I’m still staring down the length of my arm, now a patchwork quilt of pink flesh and veinlike stitches that melts across the steel tabletop, writhing in serpentine shapes. Everything’s writhing faintly. The small room’s paper walls bend and twist weirdly when I’m not focusing on them. I’m back home. Sunrise peeking over the fields, orange light glowing brighter through the paper. The scent of sizzling bacon fills my nostrils. An alarm clock buzzes like a saw. Must’ve slept in. Thane will already be out there training and Dad’ll… he… I need to… I need to go find him.
I’m so sleepy, but helpful ki floods me with strength the moment I think to start moving. Warm summer wind stirs my hair across my pillow, casting away the mosquitos nipping at my legs. Pleasant voices shout oddly panicked words that carry on the breeze from somewhere far down the street. Shut her down, She’s waking up again, the like. Cobwebs stick to my arms and legs, snapping free as I start to sit up. Aunt Jolie rushes through the slid-open bedroom door. She gently takes me by the shoulders and starts lowering me back to the bed.
“I have to find Dad,” I croak at her. “I have to tell him it’s not in the rice.”
She makes quiet shushing noises and pulls the sheets back up, smiling despite the tears that suddenly form in her eyes. “It’s okay, honey. I’ll tell him for you. You’re tired. Go back to sleep.”
My fingers clutch powerlessly. “But…”
…But Jolie shouldn’t be here. She shouldn’t be home at all. She’s in the Imperial Complex, where Thane moved her. And Cal was supposed to get her. But Cal… where is she? I have to tell her something too…
The fragments continue skewing further from reality. Slipping in and out of my brain like needles pinned to hold sticky note thoughts, then plucked out one by one. The notes flutter away, and all that remains is the punctured corkboard of my consciousness. My mind chooses which pieces it remembers seemingly at random. Overwhelming itchiness, a neverending need to piss, a throat so dry I almost wish to drink my own blood just to whet it. Orange is the color I remember most. And it’s the one I see first as I finally stir awake on my first day of sanity since the ambush in the Shocks.
Orange. It colors the back of my eyelids while I lay there on that cold metal table, sorting out the tangles of my brain. I take in a shallow breath through my nose, noting the resistance in my chest. Cataloging the pains that form up and down my body, tracing them to the sources. There are so many. I try to twitch my fingers. Those work, albeit rustily. One, two, three, four and a thumb on the left. Nothing on the right. And nothing but vague sensations below a certain lump in the small of my back. When I try to wiggle my feet, my ankles feel they’re tied down with weights at the bottom of the ocean. I’m not even sure I am moving them. The thin sheet draped over me doesn’t shift much.
I don’t need my eyes open to know exactly how much of a wreck I must be. I remember every wound that put me on this table, even if Nabuna’s not-stims made sure I couldn’t feel them at the time. I'm paying the price now. I might be a cripple for life.
Climate control units gush quietly in the high corners of the room. Somewhere off in the distance, insulated behind paper walls, I hear the sounds of home. Rickshaws and shifting silk robes. But I can’t actually be home, can I? Might as well believe I was actually riding that sky dragon in my drug-induced delusions, too.
My ears perk up as wood creaks to my left. A paper quietly flaps. Real paper.
No, Cal didn’t somehow take me home. She brought a piece of it to me instead.
That piece sits coiled in a rustic chair beside the table I lay atop, glass spectacles perched on her nose, a sling around her arm, and a belovedly dogeared novel folding shut in her lap. Strands of rusty red hair drift over the woman's shoulders. That stern ponytail I always remember her with is let down, probably around the time she finished the fifth empty cup of caf stacked precisely beside her chair. Her sharp cheeks bear the hollow shadows of too many nights spent testing just how little sleep she can survive on. Perhaps she didn’t even sleep at all. I’d believe it. An impossible weight rests on the woman’s slumped shoulders. But her eyes tell me everything I really need to know.
Two pools of indigo blue, the same color as Dad’s eyes, look down at me through those old glasses with so much hesitant, motherly love that I can’t stop the tears that come. An entire soliloquy of emotion passes between us in that silent exchange. Three years of thinking everyone she loved was dead. Trapped in that tower beneath the foot of a tyrant. Regretting every choice she’d ever made. And then to be given another miraculous chance at hope, only to find me lying dead on this sanisteel table… it would break anyone else. But Aunt Jolie is even more resilient than I am.
She scoops me up in the gentlest hug. A heavy exhale shudders out of her. Red hair brushes my nose. I don’t say anything. Just let her hold me and submerge in the embrace. Nestle my head into her shoulder while the tears flow. I can’t return the hug; a handcuff clanks around my wrist when I try.
This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
Jolie doesn’t sob as she holds me- she’s survived too much for that. But she does cry. Silently, her relief falls from her cheeks to mine, then in droplets to the hospital sheet. Only after a long minute does she finally lean back, meticulously wipe the wetness from her face and mine, then sink back into her chair.
Jolie fiddles with her glasses. Awkward while she continues to watch me. Dad once said that human interaction was never her favorite. She preferred the distance of a keyboard and the separation of a screen. To be the one writing the speeches, not giving them. Still, she’s a politician. Setting her book on the edge of the metal slab I lay upon, Jolie clears her throat roughly and smears flat a final tear with her thumb.
“How do you feel?”
My lips part and close, a thousand things I want to say all crowding my throat at once. I lift my shoulders as much as I can and croak, “…Better.”
Her hand cups mine. “You had us all scared.”
“Was…” I have to pause to swallow. “…that bad?”
“Your heart having to be restarted four times was one of the lesser complications.”
I focus on the lack of feeling down low. “My legs… I can’t move them.”
“Your back was broken when Cal got to you. Fortunately for us all, your greaser knows some names in the Vents. And he’s unusually protective of you. He was able to find a very talented Biohancer.”
“Nabuna is here?”
Jolie makes a pointed glance at the slid-open door across the room. A thin, orange-lit hallway extends beyond it. Robed silhouettes move in the distance. Far closer, a cabal of aging Venters leans against the sides of the hallway, deep in conversation. Nabuna, cap off, down to a sweat-stained tank top. Some fighter wearing a bronze jackal helm leans beside him. Across from the two stand a grizzled, grey-haired man with a father’s powerful build and a dour older woman with pale, rainbow-hued hair. Some kind of needle and thread hang from her hip. The blood sheeting her forearms marks her as the Biohancer.
“They're still working on your spine. As hard as I know it will be, you’re on bedrest duty until she’s done and you’ve fully healed.” Jolie keys something with her JOY, closing the door. “Even with therapy, you may not walk again, Tetsuka.”
I grimace. “At least you’re here now. Wherever here is.”
“The Orange. Your greaser also has some… dubious connections.”
The Orange. I don’t know much more than hearsay from the Vents, and those rumors never painted the most morally upright picture. The sector is a spider’s web of brothels and electroclubs that slakes the worst of the capital’s thirsts. Not to mention it’s a parodical ripoff of my own home. The old-era brothels, paper walls, orange-hued lanterns, and silk-robed servants are just an illusion of a fantasy to cover the unsavory truth of this place’s indentured slaves. Not to mention, Thane once mentioned to me that the Orange is the last bastion the intersectional crime syndicate Dynasty has in the capital. Both he and Jolie played their part in kneecapping the syndicate’s presence in our Section.
Which means we’re shacked up with more enemies of enemies. Again.
“It’s not the best,” Jolie sighs, ignoring a distant moan that echoes from the corridor. “But it’s doable for now. Better than the alternatives.”
“You don’t like him. Nabuna.”
“That greaser?” Jolie scoffs under her breath. There’s a history behind the sound. “He plays enough poker with syndicated criminals to squeak us shelter behind lines that not even Gami would dare cross. Heavens know the kind of dirt he must have to pull a Biohancer of the caliber your reconstructive work needed- and for free, no less. If you’d asked me, I would have told you not to touch him with a ten-foot pole. He used to be one of the trainers we kept on retainer for the minor leaguers.” She leans back in the chair. “Used to be, being the operative term. Nabuna was fired for betting on his own fighter’s matches- I had to sign his pink slip myself. At least he’s cleaned up his act for you.” She looks past me at something I can’t see. “You’ve certainly found some unusual friends on your own.”
I already know who she’s looking at. A small, nervous smile tugs at the corner of my lips as I settle back in the bed. “They’re not all that bad.”
“I suppose not.” Her eyes drift up to trace the sanitized ceiling. “We have a lot to catch each other up on, and not a lot of time to do it. Things are still moving even if we’re not. But you’ve earned a stop, Tetsuka. Take it. Rest, focus on healing, and let others carry the weight for now.” She grips my hand tightly and stands. “Things are going our way.”
Jolie leans low and pecks me once on the brow, brushing an errant strand of hair away from my eyes before she goes. I call out after her.
“…Jolie?”
“Mhm?”
As she turns back, a shadow of my father’s mane swirls around her thinner shoulders. My throat tightens.
“I love you,” I say in that wary, tentative way it would when I didn’t know if Dad would still be around when I woke.
Her heart breaks for me. “Honey…” She strides back over, hugs me to her chest, and gently smooths out my hair. “I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I’m so sorry, Tetsuka.”
She does sob then. Just once, but it’s enough for her to remove her glasses so she can press her lips to my hair. We rock back and forth until the tears fade to sniffles, and the sniffles to soft looks of reassurance.
“I love you too,” Jolie says, ruffling my hair like Dad used to. It’s not perfect, but she doesn’t know what she could say to salve our shared grief, and neither do I. It’s selfish of me to I lean on her so heavily. Whatever I have felt since Dad died, she must suffer unimaginably worse behind her faultless composure. They were twins who lived within shouting distance of each other from first breath to forty five years of age.
Rather than let the awkwardness settle, Jolie sidesteps it by giving one last hair ruffle and starting to get up. I lift my handcuffed wrist and flash her a limp, apologetic smile. “Please? I promise I won’t run away.”
Jolie glances at the table beside mine, already making assumptions. The wrong ones, I’m sure. I just want to roll over and talk. Can’t do that with cuffs though. She opens the manacle with a tap of her JOY and a mother’s sigh. “Only because you’re my favorite.”
She rises and leaves me to my business.
“I suppose I can give you two some space. But no leaving your table.” Her glasses flash as she glances back, raising a finger in warning. “Rest, Tetsuka. Don’t forget. That’s an order.”