CHAPTER 33 - SABRA

Sabra’s stomach grumbled. Frowning, she picked up her plastic fork and poked again at the cup of green jelly set before her. It wobbled in a way that had to be a deliberate affront to her sensibilities—food wasn’t supposed to wobble. Even as hungry as she was, the gelatin was still less enticing than the faux-orange chemical taste of the rehydration fluid, and she’d gulped that down.

Unfortunately, once she’d done that, she’d been left with nothing but the jelly and her thoughts. Her body ached and throbbed in a distant way that wasn’t anything like a workout burn. For the first time in her life, the hospital stench didn’t seem so bad.

She knew she had to call someone. She knew she had to call her parents. But what would she say to them? ‘Sorry, mama, but you’re not going to believe this?’ She’d give her mother a heart attack. First her husband, then her daughter. But she’d won, hadn’t she? She wouldn’t be in a hospital ward if she had lost.

She’d be dead.

The door to the ward hissed open. A man in a deep blue uniform stepped into the room. The SOLAR hero who had popped in on her interrogation. Blueshift. He gave her a warm smile as he approached.

“Miss Kasembe,” he said, in that accent she couldn’t place. “You are back within the waking world—how are you feeling?”

“Tired,” she said. Then added, “Hungry.”

“Any pain?”

“No pain,” she lied.

“Excellent,” he said. “You’ve been out for some time. Your hand has regenerated perfectly, but I fear you’ll need to endure the remaing bruises, aches and abrasions on your own.” Blueshift peered at the monitors by her head, his dark eyes strikingly severe. He raised one hand, fingers splayed, and held it before her, his attention returning to her. He touched his thumb to his little finger.

“How many fingers am I holding up?”

Sabra counted—one, two, three. “That a serious question?”

Blueshift laughed. “SOLAR agents do not tend to be in the business of facetious questions, no.”

The warmth of his laugh reminded Sabra of her father. But his eyes were different. Calculating, searching. Or maybe that was just the painkillers. She’d find out.

“Four,” she said.

“Well, I see your sense of humor is undamaged.”

“We both know it’s three—what’s this supposed to prove?”

He moved right along. “Are you experiencing any negative optical symptoms? For example, blurry vision or painful photophobia?”

“I’m not scared of photos, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Blueshift chuckled, then raised a small flashlight and beamed it right into her eyes. She shut her eyes, turning her head away. “Christ and Allah! Give a girl some warning—your bedside manner sucks!”

“It wasn’t a required unit at the academy,” Blueshift replied. “It’s important to be thorough, Miss Kasembe. Given the severity of your fight with Taurine, and the fact that you were unconscious when we found you, I need to determine whether there’s any damage to your brain.”

My fight? Sabra thought, and the realization hit her like a gentle wave. Oh yeah, that happened. She’d raced up the stairs and started throwing punches in Sentinel’s office. Taurine stomped her through the floor. More punching. But—

“Do you really need the light?”

“Assessing the autonomic responses of the eyes to certain stimuli is one of the most efficient ways of determining any neurological damage,” he said, which meant yes, and maybe even fuck you. “Please, look at me and hold your eyes open.”

Sabra endured. After a few more seconds of glare and discomfort, Blueshift shut the flashlight off, then looked back at her monitors.

“Hey,” she said. “Thanks for helping me out with Great Barrier.”

“Don’t mention it,” he replied. “It’s so rare that I get to throw my weight around.”

“You like it when people listen to you, huh?”

He smiled again, but something in his manner had changed. It was like he was only paying half of his attention to her—hell, not even that, maybe a quarter of his attention. His mind was elsewhere.

“It’s more that I like that they don’t have a choice,” he said.

“Is that why you guys are here? To clean up their mess?”

“Unfortunately, I’m unable to share any operational details with you, Miss Kasembe, no matter your prowess.”

“You don’t need to talk down to me.”

“I’m not. Trust me, you would know if I was. I have some manner of respect for you, perhaps even interest: you allowed us to apprehend Taurine. No, actually, I am not giving you enough credit, am I? You defeated her. I’d very much like to know how you did it.”

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But there was still only that awareness that the fight had happened, and only because he had told her. Her brain buzzed with an odd sensation, and there was something on the tip of her tongue. Like she’d forgotten something important.

Blueshift was staring at her again. She hadn’t said anything.

“Mama said to knock her out,” Sabra said. "So, I knocked her out."

“Is that so?”

“I’m still trying to get my bearings, Blueshift—no offense.”

Blueshift chuckled. “None taken.” He slipped the flashlight away and withdrew a small card—the same blue of his uniform, emblazoned with the silver nsoromma-and-wreath of the IESA—and set it on the bedside counter. “When you’re ready to talk, Miss Kasembe, do give me a call.”

Then he was gone. The door sighed open and closed and then open again. Sabra glanced to the door and there was Pavel Fisher, coming through the door in that crumpled suit he always wore with something under his arm. He set it down by the foot of her bed, and said, “Hey.”

“Hey,” she said, for lack of anything else to say. “What’re you doing here?”

“I asked the nurses to call me when you woke up,” he replied. “Figured you didn’t want them to call your parents.”

Well, he was right. She had to give him that.

“Yeah," she said. "Thanks."

“Don’t mention it.”

“Blueshift said that, too.”

Fisher nodded. “So, SOLAR’s given you the third degree already?”

“Not really, but I think they want me to call ‘em as soon as I’m up to talk. You ever dealt with SOLAR before?”

“No,” he replied. “Which is a good thing. How’re you feeling?”

“Like shit, if we’re being honest,” she said, and forced a weak smile. “Got these wires on my head and a tube in my arm. Throat feels like sandpaper—was I intubated?”

Fisher blew his cheeks out and sighed. “Yeah.”

“Well, fuck me, I guess.”

“It was bad, Sabra.”

“What do you mean bad? How bad are we talking?”

He looked like a dog struggling to bring up a chicken bone. Fisher grabbed a chair and dragged it over to her bed, the legs squealing against the floor, and dropped into it.

“You were unconscious when we found you. Tried to fire the emergency bolts in your suit, but they didn’t respond. In the end, Revenant had to cut you out of it.”

“What?” The thought made her throat hitch. “You’re saying my baby’s...” All that work, all of those hopes...

Fisher nodded and reached down to collect whatever it was he had brought with him. It was her helmet. Dented in many places, visor shattered. Probably beyond repairing, even if she had the rest of her suit to go with it.

Even if she still had the rest—

Her chest constricted, and not in a way that had anything to do with her general soreness.

“Managed to save the helmet,” he said, as if that softened the blow. “But the rest of it? It’s just pieces. They’re holding the pieces for you, if you still want them. I’m sorry, Sabra.”

Sabra sniffed back tears, and didn’t quite do so successfully. She swiped at them with her fingers. “Why’re you apologizing?”

Through her blurry vision, Fisher still looked uncomfortable—like he had more to say. “Because I should apologize. I owe you an apology. I’m sorry, for all of it. For drawing you into this. For poking into your family life. I could’ve gotten you killed.”

“It’s fine,” she said, forcing another smile. She wasn’t sure if it was, but she had the feeling that he’d take a long time to stop blubbering if she didn’t cut it short. “I mean, we won, didn’t we? Blueshift said we got Taurine.”

Fisher squinted at her, then looked at the monitors. “Huh,” he said. “You’re not on anything strong enough to mess with your memory. No sign of any head trauma.”

“Yeah, Blueshift said the same thing—so what?”

“Weird.”

“What’s weird?”

“Sabra,” Fisher said, his voice more serious than usual. “Sabra. You went hand to hand with Taurine for ten straight minutes, and you’re telling me you don’t remember it? That’s putting you on a very short, very exclusive list. Come on, is that jogging your memory at all?”

Sabra frowned, concentrated, and sifted her thoughts and feelings through the haze of painkillers. It made sense. It explained the aches and pains she had, and the loss of her suit. But everything else was strange. She could remember Taurine knocking her to the ground, and she said get up, and Sabra...

She must have gotten up, if she was lying in the hospital bed. But there was nothing there in her mind’s eye but shadows. Impressions of her limbs moving, rippling impacts as her fists struck home. Knowing where she had to step in order to maneuver Taurine towards the window, like it was the only thing that mattered. Like something out of a dream, where the world was chanting her name.

There. A vision on the horizon, like an iridescent lighthouse across a vast, yawning abyss. But there was something else with the rainbow light, something within it and behind it. An impression of something as real as the movements of her limbs and the bruises on her knuckles. Something colossal, on a scale that gave her vertigo just thinking about it—like she was lying at the edge of a cliff and not a hospital bed. She didn’t have the words to describe the scale of it. Maybe no one ever had.

The answer was on the tip of her tongue. Sabra closed her eyes and tried to stretch her awareness out, like the meditative exercises her father had taught her, the ones she never used. The light had a voice or, perhaps, a song. Perhaps not even that—something more instinctual, a melody or a rhythm. A pattern woven into the galactic tapestry, unfolding like an origami tesseract, and there she was there she was there she was...

“Sabra, hey.”

Fisher’s voice dragged her mind back into the hospital ward. She shook her head and, not for the first time, wondered if she was losing her mind.

“You okay?”

“I think so.”

The more she thought about it, the less she could remember. The less she could remember, the less she could feel. And then, after a few more seconds, she wasn’t sure if she had felt anything at all.

“You beat her, Sabra,” Fisher said. “You beat her. I’d never seen anything like it. But here I was thinking you were more the get drunk and celebrate type.”

But Sabra could only shrug. She had wanted to win, to feel strong, powerful—to ride that adrenaline high until she leapt over Taurine and left her broken and defeated in her wake. She had, and yet she hadn’t.

She took a deep breath, in through her nose and out through her mouth, and over the hospital stench was something else, something that chilled her through her core: the telltale aroma of ash and fire.

“What’s to celebrate, Pavel?” Sabra replied. “I don’t remember any of it. I don’t remember any of it at all.”