A roaring wind blasted her ears. Scalding. She was trapped, cocooned in agony. She fought to free herself, struggling, thrashing to no avail. Iron shackles clamped her wrists, biting her skin, crushing her bones. A weight pressed down on her, smothering. Forcing the air from her lungs. Compressing her ribcage, preventing inhalation. Though blind, she felt the blackness returning. Closing in. Stalking. Overtaking.
Naked, under a night sky. Glimmers of light streaked, stars falling from heaven. Beautiful. Deadly. A storm of glassy shards plummeted, showered her, pierced her flesh like needle-point icicles. She screamed, but her voice sounded far away. She twisted to escape, but some steely trap encased her, held her tightly beneath the impaling rain. Too much to bear. Consciousness slipped out of reach, never fully grasped.
A gentle breeze soothed her skin, her forehead, her cheeks. A wetness brushed across her lips, and Cass opened her eyes. Asher loomed over her with his wolfish grin, a steel cup in his hand. Cass tried to pull away, but had no strength. He leaned down, pressed the cup to her lips. She fought, clenched her teeth, tried to shake it away. A viscous fluid flowed over her lips, down her throat, acrid, bitter. Her body tried to reject it, but the liquid seemed alive, crawled its way into her belly, nested in her gut. Asher stood, and smiled until his face ripped. Within the crimson wounds, something wet wriggled. Blackness swallowed her.
Something cold in her hand. Small, but soothing, life-giving. A beacon. Calling her. It pulsed, grew warmer, lent her strength. Blue light glowed, faintly electric, peaceful. She warmed slowly, steadily, and the light brightened. A shape appeared at the center of the light, and Cass smiled to herself. Wren. He was there with her, bringing her light in the darkness. His mouth moved in slow motion, as if saying her name, though he made no sound. She called to him, but the words felt foreign, or too big for her mouth. She heard herself moan, and in that moment, the light shattered. A thousand sparkles of blue-hued glass exploded and faded into the darkness, and once again she knew no more.
“Mama.”
Something moved in the darkness.
“Mama, please.”
A pressure on her forehead, a brush of flesh across her cheek. Eyelids fluttered. She saw.
Three’s face filled her view, his dark eyes piercing, his breath splashing hot over her lips. At her waking, he did not smile. Instead, he retreated.
In the next instant, Wren was upon her, arms around her neck, sobbing. Cass swung a weak arm across his shoulders, let it fall heavily over him. She felt like she should say something to him, anything, but her tongue was a lump of sandy rubber in her mouth. She tried to remember when she’d last had a drink. Hours? Days?
Asher.
She remembered the bitter fluid creeping into her belly, felt a surge of panic. Scanned her surroundings. The metal bed, the gray concrete walls. Asher couldn’t have gotten to her. A dream, a nightmare. Nothing more.
Three reappeared, a canister of fresh water in his hand. He knelt, gently pulled Wren off Cass and spoke something to him too softly for her to hear. Wren nodded and with a quiet but hopeful look to his mother, disappeared on the other side of the screen. Three returned to her side, slipped a hand under her head and carefully lifted her. As cool water splashed over her parched lips, Cass realized for the first time that she felt no pain. The water rushed cold through her throat straight into her veins, cathartic, washing away the fever, the chills, the black disease within. Her body demanded that she drink forever, but Three pulled the canister away, and laid her back. His fingers were strong; his hand seemed to linger on her neck after he pulled away.
“How do you feel?” he asked, in his usual direct, flat tone. He didn’t sound like a man who had just coaxed life back into a dying woman.
“I should be dead,” she answered.
He nodded.
“You would be, if it wasn’t for your boy.”
He held the water canister out to her: a simple test of her strength. Cass took it, surprised at the hollowness in her arms.
“Quint’s evil stuff,” he said. As she sipped, he got up from his knee and sat on the foot of the bed. “I wouldn’t have pegged you as one to run something like that.”
It was the first time she’d heard Three say anything that sounded even slightly judgmental. He raised a shoulder in a barely perceptible half-shrug.
“Good thing Wren knew.”
“Where’d you find more?”
“I didn’t. I made a synth.”
She waited for more. It took a raising of her eyebrows to prompt him.
“It won’t boost you like quint, but it should keep your cells from imploding. Probably have to drink it every few days though.”
In a flash, Cass remembered choking down the acrid ooze, and realized only part of her nightmare had been imagined.
“What’s in it?”
Three shook his head.
“You don’t wanna know, girl.”
Cass sipped more of the cool water, and already found herself feeling refreshed, more alert. On a whim, she rolled up to an elbow, started to sit up. Three shot a reflexive hand out to steady her. After a few wobbly moments, he let go, and they sat together in uncertain silence. Then he spoke, in even lower tones than normal.
“What’s your burn rate?”
Cass shrugged, bought herself some time with another swig of water. She didn’t want to lie, but she couldn’t tell him the truth.
“Fifty a day, I guess,” she slipped it out between drinks, hoping it sounded casual. “Maybe a little more.”
“That’s what, tab every eight days?”
“Depends on the grade, but yeah, that’s about right.”
In reality, Cass was burning at nearly twice that just to maintain; far more if she boosted. Three looked at her with the usual hardness, but if he suspected she was lying he didn’t show it. She paused, made herself take a breath before changing the subject, not wanting to seem eager.
“I, uh…” she paused, genuinely now, uncertain. “I don’t know what all you had to do to, uh…”
Cass wanted to be eloquent, felt that there should be much more to say than she could think of, but in the end, she just decided to keep it simple.
“Thank you.”
“Sure,” Three said, still with a hard look in his eye. “And since we’re all friends and neighbors now, you wanna tell me who’s after you?”
His directness surprised her, though she knew it shouldn’t. So far, she hadn’t seen him any other way. This just wasn’t the change of subject she’d been hoping for.
“Just some people from my past. Got involved with them when I was young, and they don’t want to let me get uninvolved.”
“How many?”
“Can we do this later? I’m pretty tired. I think I need to lie down again.”
“In a minute.”
There was an edge to Three’s voice now, like the soft, deep rumble of a dog that doesn’t want to bare its teeth, but wants you to know it’ll go there if you push it. The room seemed a lot smaller all of a sudden.
“How many?”
“Six,” she answered with a weary sigh, knowing there was no use in resisting. Then corrected herself. “Well, I guess it’s just five now.”
“What were you workin’?”
It was becoming an interrogation. And Three’s penetrating eyes made her fear how much she’d give away, no matter how little she actually said.
“What do you mean?”
“Fedor, Kostya, you, the kid.” Three held up a finger for each name as he said them. “Two genies, a chemic, and your boy. I’ve never seen anything like him before, but he’s some kind of something, for sure. That ain’t people from your past, that’s a crew. So what were you workin’?”