Chapter Four

Her feet ached, and fog wrapped the world in gauze. She was walking on wooden planks. Her arms were sore but her feet were just burning. She looked down and saw them huge, swollen, and dark.

Cicatrix wrapped a blanket around Ayaan’s shoulders. “Don’t look, will only upset you.” The Russian woman put an arm around Ayaan’s waist. “Is not much farther now.”

Ayaan nodded absently. She couldn’t muster much in the way of emotion. The fog on her skin felt good, it felt cool and soft and whisper smooth. That was about as deep as she went. She remembered everything—the engine compartment, the strap, the Tsarevich coming to her. His dark suggestions. The memories were flattened, though. Stretched out and made into mere visions, like something she had seen in a movie, with all the fear and pain carved away.

Her neck itched but she couldn’t lift her arms to scratch. She had a bandage wrapped around her throat anyway. She remembered them working there, the hornet dragging its sting across her skin. What that had been about she couldn’t have said. They were still walking, and then they weren’t.

“Almost... and we are here,” Cicatrix said. They stopped there on the boardwalk and Ayaan lifted her head to look up.

Stay alive, she thought. Or she remembered thinking. Time had done something funny, had turned on her.

In front of her stood the shell of a building, no more than half a brick wall remaining, painted a blue the color of a clear sky. A painted face floated against that backdrop laughing hysterically in perfect silence. Even the sound of Ayaan’s breathing was eaten up by the fog.

Ayaan thought of Sarah. She tried to think of Sarah. She tried to remember the girl’s face, her close-cropped hair. That filthy sweatshirt she always wore which she thought might have belonged to her father. Sarah.

“There will be none of this,” Cicactrix said, and waggled a finger in Ayaan’s face. She couldn’t remember what she had been doing to earn such disapproval. Then she looked down and saw she was naked. The blanket lay behind her, pooled on the boardwalk like liquid that had dripped down.

Ayaan’s hands were near her face. She had summoned up enough strength to lift her arms, to touch her face. No, wait. Her face hurt. It stung, in eight specific places. She could count them. She looked down at her fingers and saw bits of skin under the nails.

Had she... had she been trying to claw her own face off?

Time had turned on her. Time and... time and memory. They went inside. “Can I lie down?” Ayaan asked. Her feet hurt so badly. “Just for a while.”

“Oh yes,” Cicatrix told her. She led Ayaan into a little plastic tent set up inside the ruin of the building. There was a bed there... or not a bed but a place that looked like... well it looked a little like a bed, or maybe a long couch, a divan. But it was full of ice. “Here, let me to help,” Cicatrix said, and held Ayaan’s arm as she lay down on the cold, cold bed.

“It’s sticking to my back, to my skin,” Ayaan announced. There were a lot of people in the tent, suddenly. Her heart pounded fast and then it skipped a beat. Someone shoved a tube up her nose, its tip slick with lubricant. She tried to sneeze and cough and fight but they wouldn’t let her. They were so much stronger than she remembered. A woman in a nurse’s uniform, complete with a little peaked cap, leaned over her, throwing her into shadow, and jabbed a hypodermic in Ayaan’s neck.

“What—what was—what—was—that?” Ayaan demanded. Her arms were quivering, her body shaking. Was it the ice, was she shivering from the cold? She couldn’t really feel it any more. She was shaking too much. She was shaking a lot, she was she was convulsing convulsing. “What did you just give me?” she asked.

The nurse’s mouth was a flat line, a slot that ticker tape might come out of. “Cyanide,” she answered.

Darkness clanged shut across her vision like shutters closing with a sound of ringing, a tinnitus ring.

The sound squealed up to a howling, an echoing scream that might have come from her own throat except except except

time didn’t just turn on her it turned a wheel it turned like a wheel

(For a moment she was outside her own body, looking down, pointing at herself. Blood raced through tubes running down her throat, up her ass. A machine like a bagpipe bellowed up and down and breathed for her. There was a man next to her, a very hairy naked white man with blue tattoos curlicuing all over his body. He had a rope around his neck like a punk rock neck tie, or like a noose cut way too short. “That’s me,” she said, “they’re killing me,” and he smiled the way you might smile at a baby who suddenly, as its first words, announced it had filled its diaper. “I know you, don’t I?” she asked.)

a nurse came through the tent, and passed right through him, as if he were a ghost

(Yes, the man told her, without opening his mouth. Her vision went away and instead she saw a brain in a glass jar. I’ll be in touch, he told her, and then she was back in her body, in the dark, with that noise.)

the noise stopped

everything

stopped

.

She opened her eyes with a scream.

Ayaan sat up in bed, naked under silk sheets. She was in a small bedroom with a fireplace. A cheerful little blaze danced away at the corner of her vision. Her head felt as if it had been cracked open and stuffed full of scrap metal. She touched her face, felt a cold, rubbery mask there.

She wasn’t breathing. She sucked in a deep breath of air and felt no real need to exhale it again. She touched her wrist with two fingers and couldn’t find a pulse. She did find a black vein running underneath her grayish brown skin. It was as hard as a length of wire. The blood inside that vein wasn’t going anywhere.

She screamed and screamed, shouted and cursed and her throat never got sore. She sobbed, big wracking hard heaves but no tears came.

Nausea surged upward inside of her and she jumped out of the bed, looked around frantically for something to throw up into. Nothing presented itself so she clutched her hands over her mouth and just held on, held on until the need, the desire to vomit went away. It left her feeling drained, depleted and sore.

And then hungry. She could really use a snack, she told herself. She was going to need to keep up her energy reserves for what came next.

What came next? She couldn’t remember.

She stood up again. Looked around the room. A faded newspaper clipping was pasted to one wall, a picture of a building by a boardwalk, its windows broken, its paint faded or missing altogether. A place that died even before the world came to an end, according to the text.

She found a closet and inside the closet one single set of clothes. A black leather catsuit with lots of straps. A pair of black leather boots that came up to the middle of her calves. A black leather jacket stenciled all over in white spray paint with a motif of simplified skulls. She put the clothes on with fumbling fingers that felt twice as thick as they looked. The clothes fit her perfectly.

At the back of the closet she found a sliver of broken mirror. She picked it up and stared at her reflection. Ayaan had never been vain in life and she wasn’t about to become so now. Something leapt out at her, though, and required extensive examination. She had a tattoo on her throat and neck, running all the way around, bright silver ink inscribing cursive Russian characters. Like a choker she could never remove. She’d seen that kind of writing before, she thought. She’d seen it inscribed on a glass jar with a brain inside.

Don’t speak, she thought. Except it wasn’t her own thought. Someone had spoken into her head, his voice sounding just like her own inner monologue, but braying and too loud. It made her headache worse. Don’t react at all. Whatever they say to you, just nod and smile.

A knock came on the bedroom’s door.