the open window, and the barrier between mountain forest and indoors blurred in the gray haze. The coolness swept over my skin, and for the first time in what seemed like an eternity, the pain ebbed enough for me to take a deep breath and pay attention to my surroundings.
Smooth stone under my bare feet. Beautiful carved pillars supporting the room in which I stood. Sparse furnishings: a bench, a table, scattered rugs, a giant vase.
I had the strangest memory of a really tall green woman, but as soon as I thought about her, revulsion seized my gut, and I doubled over with remembered agony. A light touch on my shoulder, a deep rumbling voice in my ear. Pleasant warmth at my back, like a soft blanket, but the ubiquitous mist cooling my face, and comfort surrounded me.
This was a safe place, even though the edges of it were wispy and dreamlike.
There was an odd chafing sensation all over my skin, and I wondered idly if it was father’s wool blanket, but then I remembered father was long gone.
As I watched the mist curl and eddy like wayward cotton candy, memories flooded me. Mama on the dais before her space flight. Trespassing on the military base in my teen years. Father getting sick. Freediving on Titan and Exterra. IGMC training. The neural network team. Meeting Joan. Her husband’s tragic death. Kerberos 90.
VELMA-X.
The Lucidity.
The klaxons.
The EEPs.
The orbiter.
The lake and the interminably long swim.
The handsome alien with the broken tooth.
The royal woman.
My... I swallowed and licked chapped lips. Burning thirst roared to life in my throat.
My insides…pooling into the sling designed for the purpose.
The cruel, confused expression on the royal woman’s face and her odd, tormented smile when she defiled me, waiting for God knew what.
Days, weeks, years.
Putting the final touches on my treatise about pain.
And finally, thankfully, peacefully, dying.
I must be dead. But Mama and my father weren’t here. And I was collapsed onto the cold floor and sobbing uncontrollably, and I couldn’t comprehend an afterlife that would subject me to painful memories and the startling sharp hunger in my gut and the incessant godawful itching all over my skin.
The mist swallowed my keening wail, and I resigned myself to cry forever.