Imaginer

63 - Where There is a Girl

63

      I fully expected the beeping, and it was there. I counted the noises from the cardiac monitor when I failed to find something to do. There wasn’t much at my disposal—just staring up at the blinding fluorescent lights. And when the lights dimmed, and someone came to check on the IV in my arm, I prepared myself for another night of insomnia.

      I kept track of how many days I was in that bed. My fingers, the only part of me I could really move without repercussion, curled and formed the numbers for each time the lights went off.

      When I began my game, I hoped I wouldn’t need more than my left hand to count the days. I was onto my right, with my thumb sticking out feebly from my curled fist.

      I remembered a feeling spreading across the length of my body. First it was fire, branching from some point in the centre then outwards, until the soles of my feet and my wrists were inflamed. I begged for it to stop. The reprieve came, a sensation of cool water, also starting from the centre, but much more slowly. It began as a drop, landed right against my chest. And as more droplets followed, it spread in rings and soothed all the places the fire had seared.

      It kept going. The rings decreased, in speed and in what I thought was temperature, got cooler and cooler until the water turned to ice, and I was begging, again, for it to stop.

      I lost track of how long I lay there—or was I standing? Sitting? All I knew was that the ice took an eternity to thaw.

      And when it did, I wished it hadn’t.

      Because all the images came flooding back. The screams. The sobs. The children being taken away. The Bolt Hole collapsing under the Guiders’ attack. Kludo. Beatrice. And Jacoby. I couldn’t, for the life of me, forget Jacoby.

      I was allowed to leave the hospital before I had to start over on my left hand.

      My mother stood to the side of the bed, hovering, unsure whether she should approach me, unsure whether my body was stable enough for even a pat on the shoulder. It didn’t annoy me to be treated like a snowflake, because I knew myself that I was too frail. A concussion, severely bruised ribs, a once-again cut open hand and having all the Reduine drained out of your body to be replaced by Demophide could do that to a person.

      I wanted to go home, but at the same time, I didn’t. I knew I would do nothing but lie in bed and have meals force-fed to me for weeks on end. It would be no different from the hospital, save for a wider selection of things to preoccupy myself with.

      I dragged it out until I was forced to leave. I was technically strong enough to function without what they provided at the hospital. My one condition was that they tell me of what had become of the Others. I rambled off a list of names of people I knew.

      Beatrice?

      She’s doing well. She recovered two days before you did.

      Dandy?

      I’m sorry, who?

      Lydia…I don’t know her last name.

      She’s not fully well yet. She suffered trauma to her head.

      Kludo?

      Silence.

      Kludo? I asked again.

      There were some that died during the raid. Mister O’Donnell and twenty or so others we found dead.

      I swallowed and an image of Kludo, followed quickly by one of Sam, flashed before my eyes.

      And…And Jacoby?

      I needed to know more.

      They made a few phone calls, and the day before I had to leave, Mrs. Campbell came to visit me.

      I winced at the sound of her chair scraping across the tiles. My room had mostly been devoid of visitors, thus mostly devoid of sound.

      “Jasslyn,” she said. “How are you?”

      I made an indifferent noise. The last time I talked to her didn't strike me as a very encouraging memory.

      “What would you like to know?” she said, changing tactic and jumping straight to the point.

      “The negotiation, what happened before the invasion until after I blacked out and ended up here.” My voice croaked from disuse, but her expression remained steady as she looked at me.

      “Jacoby agreed to it,” she said in a quiet voice.

      “I know.” I coughed, and my ribs ached from the feeling.

      “My husband was confident Jacoby wouldn’t be harmed in the process. He said the Guiders could take Jacoby and use his Demophide, see for themselves how well it worked.”

      “Like a piece of meat, right? Traded him off like an animal,” I snarled, tears springing to my eyes at the mention of Jacoby. “Was there even any Demophide left in him?”

      “He was weak.” She continued before I could do anything more than choke out a breath. “Tweed’s flowers couldn’t produce the same amount of Demophide as Jacoby’s. At least three quarters of it came from him."

      “So you siphoned all of it out of him while your husband skipped off into the sunset?”

      “Don’t be dramatic,” she said calmly. “Tweed did what he could, but a body of a seventy-year-old compared to a seventeen-year-old? Tweed couldn’t do even a fraction of what Jacoby could.”

      I wanted to tell her she and her husband should’ve been ashamed of themselves without sounding ridiculous. I wanted to do something. Hurt her. Physically hurt her and her husband for looking at and using Jacoby like the cardiologists who had created Defaecon. For seeing him as nothing more than an experiment.

      “Get out.”

      She did. Left me to cry.

      Look, miss, you have to understand that Jacoby was in a really fragile state when he was brought here.

      She pronounced his name wrong.

      Jacoby, I corrected. And you haven’t answered the question. Will he be okay?

      I can’t give you a confident answer. He’s not doing very well at the moment. His body is rejecting the Demophide. It’s like he doesn’t want to get rid of his side effects.

      I received a phone call a week later because I’d made the nurse promise to notify me if Jacoby’s condition got better or worse.

      When she finished relating to me how he was faring and I finished asking my questions, I hung up and sat outside in my garden, trying to hold the tears back.

      I shouldn’t have been crying, but thinking about him was bittersweet. It was almost like he’d…left me.

(**A/N: Last chapter. The next is the Epilogue. Three pages left. Thoughts, guys? Four hundred comments would mean so much to me :D And if you've ever read Imaginer, please let me know so I can include you when I go back to dedicate the chapters to you guys! Whether that be in a comment on this chapter, on my profile, or an inbox message, I'd really like to dedicate a chapter to anyone who's ever supported Imaginer!)