Chapter 67: The Aftermath of Long Fights
CLACK—
Pain went across my cheek.
I opened my eyes. There was a face in front of mine, close, dirty beard, drawn features. The man from the cage next door. His mouth was moving, he was talking to me, he was talking fast, and I couldn’t hear a thing. Not a sound. Only a dull pressure in my ears and his mouth going on forming words for nobody.
My eyes went back into the black.
CLACK—
They came back. He was still there. He was holding something out to me, a thick cloth rolled up on itself, and he was bringing it toward my mouth.
What does he want.
He pressed it against my lips. It took me a while to understand, then I opened my mouth, with difficulty, and closed my teeth on it.
My mind swayed again. My eyelids came down on their own.
It wasn’t a slap that brought me back this time.
It was a sharp pain in my chest, so clean, so precise, that my eyes opened in surprise and landed straight on my own body.
My skin was black.
Out from the place where the fangs had gone in, everything had turned black, and out of that black ran purple lines that climbed toward my shoulder and went down toward my ribs, branching as they went, and they hadn’t been there when I collapsed on the sand.
The man was holding a flask above the wound. He’d just poured some onto it.
He did it again.
I clamped the cloth between my teeth with everything I had and I screamed anyway, and what came out stayed trapped in it.
"HMMMMMMHHHHHHHH."
He looked at me and said something I heard no better than the rest. Then four other men came into my field of vision and set themselves around me, one at each limb, and put their weight on them to hold them down against the floor.
Why.
I wasn’t understanding much anymore. There was the pain, there were those hands on my arms and on my legs, and there was that face above me. So I fought. I put everything I had into it, and what I had was slack, limp, without any strength at all, my arms didn’t come up a single centimeter and my legs did absolutely nothing. That body wasn’t mine anymore.
And that was when the panic started to rise.
Am I going to die?
At that thought, my head, which was falling to the side on its own, was lifted by a hand.
It was him. He was holding my chin so I’d look at him. In his other hand there was a blade.
He said two words. I heard them no better than the ones before, but I read them off his lips.
Good luck.
And he brought the blade down onto my chest and he opened it.
The pain, which was already horrible, became more horrible, and then more horrible again, without ever reaching a ceiling, and my mind went into the black.
Something cold brought me back.
I lifted my eyes and saw a bucket emptying above me, and the water found me everywhere at once.
Then the pain came back.
"HMMMMMMMMMMMM."
And my mind dropped again.
CLACK—
I barely had the strength to open my eyes. I looked down at my chest.
And I saw something that went through my whole body.
That chest, black and veined with purple, the one I’d been looking at a moment earlier, was open now. Open all the way across, held apart, cut, and there were hands inside it, and I was looking at my own insides.
The panic took me all at once.
I spat out the cloth and I threw up. On myself, off to the side, on the hands holding me. I threw up again, and again, and there was almost nothing left to bring up and it kept going anyway.
The cold came back. Another bucket.
A hand took my jaw and forced it open, put the cloth back in, and another one pinned my head against the floor and held it there.
From then on I could only see a stone ceiling.
Nothing else. Not my arms, not my chest, not what they were doing inside it, only grey stone right above my face and the weight of that hand on my forehead.
Then the pain.
"Hmmmmmmmmmmmm."
The black.
The cold.
CLACK—
The pain.
The black.
And in that loop, from passing out and throwing up and coming back, I eventually fell asleep without anybody waking me again.
~~
I woke up.
The first thing I felt wasn’t the pain, or my chest, or any of what had been keeping me company until then. It was the cold. A freezing, complete cold, settled into my arms, into my legs, under my skin, right into my teeth.
Then I opened my eyes.
The stone ceiling was still there. That same grey ceiling, with the same damp marks on it, the one that had kept me company through what had felt like whole days.
I tried to sit up and my chest didn’t move a millimeter. Something came up my throat, I turned my head to the side and I was sick.
Then I pushed myself up, with difficulty, onto one elbow.
I looked down at myself.
My body was wrapped in cloth. Bands crossed around my ribs, up over the shoulder, back down under the arm, pulled tight. Those bands must have been pale once. They weren’t anymore. They were red end to end, soaked through, crimson, and it was my blood.
My head went back down onto the stone.
I muttered, and the words scraped my throat on the way out.
"Aaaah... and to think Alice could have fixed all this in no time at all."
A voice answered on my right.
"I don’t know who Alice is, but she must be seriously good."
"She’s a saint. And possibly a lover."
"Ahahahaha! You don’t waste any time, kid! Spoken for already, at your age!"
He was laughing, and I couldn’t laugh with him.
Because it was coming back. All of it. What she’d done in that hall, the smile she’d given me right before she said that sentence. The apartment. The voice that wasn’t mine. The sand, the wolf, the stands, the fangs. The blade coming down on my chest. It all arrived at once and in no order, and on top of it there was the pain, and on top of the pain there was the cold.
My arm came up toward my eyes, and it cost me.
The tears came. Timidly at first, then more and more as the memories rose, and I stayed like that, my arm across my face, crying without a sound on a stone floor.
A hand came down on my shoulder.
It hurt, and it pulled me out of there.
I turned my head toward the man who was speaking to me and I looked at him properly for the first time.
It was him. Dirty beard, drawn features. The one who’d laughed at me, then given me the rule, then put a cloth between my teeth and opened my chest with a blade to go and find what was killing me. The one who had stayed there the whole time, waking me, holding me, lifting my head back up.
"I know it must be hard, kid. Take your time."
The tears didn’t stop, and I said to him the shortest and truest word I have ever spoken in my life.
"...Thank you."
He answered straight back.
"Don’t worry about it. Down here, between humans, we stick together, it’s all we’ve got left. Get yourself back on your feet, then go and thank the other lads too."
He had a smile at the corner of his mouth when he said it.
"Yes... thank you. Really. Thank you."
And he stood up and went off to join the others.
I stayed there, on my back, looking at that ceiling.
There was no message.
Since the beginning, there hasn’t been a single one. No window, no line, no instruction. Every stage had its own, every trial announced what it wanted, and this one says nothing at all.
So what does this floor want from me, exactly? What is it waiting for me to do? Why do I have to go through this, through the sand, through the fangs, through a blade in my chest with nothing for the pain?
And are there loops here?
That question came back several times and I couldn’t find any way to answer it. There had been loops in Arkathenzia, in the first trial, and the System and its messages had announced them. But here?
Without a message, without any direction given by a message, I can’t take the risk of a death that might turn out to have no going back from it.
My eyes fell on the other gladiators. On the men sitting against the wall, on the ones sleeping, on the ones who had held my arms and my legs against the stone while I was being opened.
And to think that without them I’d already be dead.
Strangers. Men locked up long enough to have given up on everything, who had absolutely nothing to gain from keeping me alive, and who had watched over me for days.
So my thoughts went back to the ones who weren’t there.
And her, what is she doing right now? Is she all right? Is she waiting for me somewhere? Does she even know where I am? Is she in the same kind of situation?
And the others. Gabriel, Leon, Evelyn, Yanshu. They weren’t in any of those cages. Are they all right, are they somewhere else, did they get something different.
Am I the only one.
And it was in there, in those theories I turned over and over without ever settling a single one of them, that I got back on my feet, a little, then a little more, over the days that followed.