FLOOD

A Fire Inside

The fever hit me halfway through the night.

At first I lay curled in the corner of my plastic box, hugging my arms to my chest, eyes wide and staring at nothing. Kalda’s face kept flashing through my mind. The way she’d looked in the forest right before we were taken. The way her dark eyes always sparkled when she laughed. And she laughed at everything. The entire time we were growing up together she was always the bubbly one. The talkative one. The one who wasn’t afraid to take risks. I couldn’t help smiling when I remembered all the times she’d dared to break the rules. When she’d sat down at the vanity in Lady Edda’s room, how she’d made fun by primping and preening in front of the mirror, pretending to be prissy royalty. She never got caught. Not once.

She was so clever, Kalda. So funny, so full of laughter. She’d balanced me out. It sounded ridiculous, I know, but she’d completed me.

And now my best friend was gone forever. She was never coming back.

Having that realization sink in, over and over, felt like I was being repeatedly kicked in the stomach. The pain was physical.

I thought that’s what it was when the fever first kicked in. When my body began to shake violently. But when I started to get flashes of hot and cold, when chills began to rake my body and make my entire frame shake, then I knew it was something different.

My head was spinning, and at some point I must have shut my eyes, or my vision faded to black. I don’t know which.

Kalda was there. At least, I thought she was there. Wasn’t that her voice I kept hearing? Wasn’t that her face that kept flashing past me, made blurry by my tears? Kalda was with me, wasn’t she?

Low voices were murmuring beside me, and I curled my arms around myself tightly, groaning, trying to block out the sound. My head was throbbing. Why were  people talking? Leave me alone.

“She’s been like this for the entire morning…”

“…effects of the procedure…”

“…pull through?”

“The last one didn’t.”

The voices faded away like smoke, and Kalda was back, whispering soothing words in my ear, telling me she was there. Her cool hand touched my forehead, but I couldn’t move. I was hot. So hot. Why was my skin burning?

Water. I needed water. I was going to die without it.

            Fading in and out. Black, then the yellow glare of florescent lights, which blurred around the edges and grew dim again. Black and yellow. Then black and yellow again.

            And always the thirst.

            There were waterfalls in my head. Lakes. Rivers. Streams. My mouth was burning, and it tasted awful, like I’d been chewing burnt toast.

            Water. Water. Water. It was a chant my brain kept repeating.

            I knew there was water a few feet away. Just out of my reach. But my eyelids were too heavy to move, and my limbs were made of cement. Someone was sitting on my chest, crushing the life out of me. Someone was laughing.

            No, that was a dream. There was no one there. There was no one laughing.

            And Kalda wasn’t here a moment ago either.

            It was just me.

            I thought there was no one there, but when I finally came to I was clutching a cool plastic bag. I glanced down, blinking at my hands in confusion. It was the water packet that had been sitting in the corner of my cage when I’d been brought in. Had I moved in my sleep?

            Eagerly, I tried to tear the top open, but my hands were shaking too much. Sweat slipped down my back, plastered my hair to my neck. My entire body was shaking, and I still felt like I was burning from the inside out. Like the procedure, whatever it was, had lit my insides on fire.

            The foil packet wouldn’t rip easily, and my hands shook so violently that I kept dropping it. When I dropped it a third time I let out a scream of frustration. Here I was, a proud Frost Jotun, wrestling with a foil bag of water. Utterly defeated by man made packaging.

            Footsteps from outside my cage made me jerk upright, but the movement made me so dizzy I fell back down. The water bag lay forgotten in the center of the plastic floor as I tried to drag myself backwards in panic. They were coming for me again. They would operate on me again, maybe kill me this time.

            They had killed Kalda, now it was my turn.

            But there was only one figure approaching, and as he got nearer, his face became a little more clear. Cane strode forward, footsteps loud, movements aggressive. He was angry.

            I wanted to scramble backwards when he slammed the cage door open, but I was too tired to move. He could kill me if he wanted. He could bring me to them. Nothing could make me move, I was exhausted and burning all over.

            “Those idiots.” Cane leaned in and seized the bag of water, his black eyes fixed on my face. He tore it open furiously, as if he were taking out his rage on the bag. “They were supposed to watch you.”

            I only stared at him as he leaned farther in, offering me the water. In that second I wanted to tear it out of his hand and throw it in his face. I wanted to lunge forward and wrap my hands around his throat. I wanted to scream at him that Kalda was dead and it was his fault. Him and the horrible people he worked for.

            But my mouth tasted like death, and my body throbbed with pain and heat and all I wanted in the world right now was a drink of water.

            Reaching out, I took the bag with one shaking hand. I didn’t thank him.

            Cain shut the cage door and I shut my eyes, tipping the contents of the packet out into my mouth. The water wasn’t really water, it was gel….but it still quenched the fire in my throat. It still tasted amazing.

            After the contents were gone, I felt better. But totally drained, like I’d just run for miles. I slumped over onto the floor of the cage, ignoring Cain, who continued to stand there and look in on me. My eyes fluttered open and shut, the light faded in and out and I began to picture Kalda’s face again. Hear her laugh in my head. Picture her smile.

            Cain was pressing one hand against the plastic, I saw, in one of my brief glimpses before I began to fall into darkness. I thought I heard him whisper before I slept.

            “You have to pull through this, Vee.”

            I had one last thought and then I was gone. Go to hell, Cain.