Chapter Four

 

 

Hot. Hot. Hudson was burning, trapped under the bed as his house burned down around him. He couldn’t move. His arms were pinned to his sides. No wait, he could move, but something was wrong with his arms. They were so heavy and it took so much effort.

“Shh shh.” Someone took his hand and lowered it to his side. “Here. Drink.”

His head was lifted and cool water wetted his lips. He wanted more, but his head was lowered, and Hudson couldn’t summon the strength to lift it on his own.

Slowly awareness trickled in as if filtered through a dirty, glass pane. He was lying motionless, but somehow still moving. There was a bandage around his head. His ear felt as if a raccoon had gnawed it off. His body hollowed from the inside out.

Tired. He’d never been this tired in his life. All he wanted was to fall back into nothingness, but there was something he had to do. Something was driving at him like a whip on a slave’s back. He had to get up.

But first things first, he needed to open his eyes. He squinted, trying to make sense of the fuzzy black and white images that filtered in. He blinked a few times and the fuzziness went away, but not the black and white.

“You’re awake.”

A soft voice floated to his ears and a pretty face hovered above him. Her hair was a shade of dark gray, her face a pale white and lips a light black.

Panic sped up the beat of his heart, and the need to move had him flailing about.

“You’re all right. Calm down, you’ll hurt yourself,” said the woman hovering above him. Something or someone restrained his arms, but he didn’t feel like anyone was trying to hurt him.

“I...I...” It hurt to talk, but the pressure building in his chest was worse than the scratch at his throat. “I can’t see.”

No, that wasn’t quite right. Technically he could see, just not in any color. Everything was in black and white and various shades of grey. No blues, no reds, no browns. Wait, maybe there was brown, it was hard to tell.

He pushed himself to sitting, fear making him strong. “What happened? Where am I?”

“Can you see me?” the woman asked, her brow crinkled in concern. “Can you see this?”

She waved her hand in front of him. He swatted it out of the way, already annoyed. He didn’t want to explain—he could see her hand well enough, just not the way a hand was supposed to look.

“Oh,” she smiled. “You can see just fine. You had me scared. It took so much out of me just to get your ear reattached. I don’t think I could do anything more for you if you’d lost your sight.”

He reached up and touched his ear. The whole side of his head was wrapped in a bandage. He couldn’t tell if he had an ear or if his entire skull was even intact—it all just felt like one big mass of singed flesh.

“It’s there all right.” She made a gesture to her own ear. “I made sure before I wrapped you.”

It was hard looking at someone who was completely gray.

“How?” There were hardly any medical services available, and what remained came through the Elders and their limited supply of microbiotics—something he would never be privy to.

She wrung her fingers and gave him another white and grey smile. “Me. I am a healer. When I hum, I see rainbows and the colors help…well, it doesn’t matter.” She shook her head. “I’m just learning, but sometimes, if I really, really want to, I can heal obvious injuries. And yours was pretty obvious. It took me all night and most of the next day to heal you, but I didn’t mind.”

She blushed or at least she looked like she did since her cheeks darkened. A wave of blackness fell over his vision, and for a moment he thought he'd lost his sight altogether, but when he lay down flat, the black wave receded. His burst of anger had exhausted him, and he could barely keep his eyes open. “Where am I?”

“On my father’s wagon. We found you and the boy by the river. You both were in bad shape so my father loaded you up on the back, and I've been trying my best to heal you.”

Her voice seemed far away like it was coming from a deep pit or muffled underwater. There was a boy? But he didn’t want her to know he had no idea what she was talking about. “What about the boy?”

A cool hand touched his forehead. It felt like heaven. Soft and soothing. It was exactly what he needed to push him the last bit under, but not before he heard her answer. “He's safe. Don't worry.”

There was something else. Something he had to do. So important.

“Just sleep.”

But he couldn't remember, and so he fell back under and let the wave take him.