The Quicksand Singularity ArQive: Array.init:0

A0T5.3 The Ëchüha Incident (Part 4)

Sanctuary, at last. In the one most holy and sacred place, there could be peace.

Then everything hit her again.

Like a freight train, the last hour body slammed her with the force of a First Marine jumping from the rafters. A freight train's worth of emotions blindsided her, dragging her at a breakneck pace back to destination fucked. Shame, terror, humiliation, rage, grief, indignation, a white noise tornado. She couldn't even keep track. She felt like bits and pieces of her mind were breaking off in piecemeal fragments, bouncing over ties and scattered ballast, dragged behind the Embarrassment Express on a runaway pace for Warzone Central Station.

The dropship, the landing, the ruins, the room, the creature, Nobuo, the chase, Kàng, Lìngbi, the rage, the terror, the grief, the horror, the frame slam expulsion, the office, the humiliation, over and over on replay at quadruple speed, accelerating with each run around the loop. It was too much. It was all too much.

Fhá gritted her teeth and clutched at the sides of her head, squeezing her eyes even more tightly shut. She screamed until she ran out of breath. She pounded against the wall, cracking a few of the tiles before losing her footing again, falling hard and half into the toilet.

Extracting herself, she kicked off her heels, whimpering and grunting as she thumped the balls of her hands against her temples, trying to derail the train in her brain. She squatted into a tighter ball, squeezing her eyes shut, clutching at her head with both hands. No matter how tightly she tried, she couldn't stop seeing the VirtuCast replaying. When she opened them, the blank, stainless steel stall walls reflected the sequence again. She tried looking at the tiles, but their white, shiny surfaces only served as a clearer canvas.

"Go away!" she shrieked, smashing a fist into the toilet roll dispenser, smashing through the cheap plastic.

Pain lanced through her hand, already stinging from shards of the wicker ball she'd forgotten about. Blood welled up around big chunks of plastic embedded in her skin. Bright red streaks ran down her arms and into the sleeve of her blazer, still soaked with stale, weeks old coffee.

Damp and cool now, Fhá felt the moist, clingy fabric sticking to her like a cocoon, like she was being wrapped in the deathly embrace of that foul wraith of wrath. Its face flashed across her vision again, and she felt something snap.

Without even realising what she was doing, Fhá tore at her blouse, ripping the once fine, now irrevocably stained fabric to shreds before flinging whatever tattered remnants were left away from her. Gripping her tank top with both hands, she tore it off, splitting it from the middle of the V-neck. She flung it and her skirt away, tearing her panties apart at the hips. It didn't matter how, she needed it all off, all away, all of it. She kicked and shoved her torn and soiled garments away with her feet before retreating into the back corner of the stall, cramming herself into the space between the toilet and the corner—the only place that felt some level of safe.

For a brief moment, like before, she felt relief. The sensation of being wrapped in that creature's skin, moist and oozing with foul, viscous fluid was gone. She closed her eyes as a moment of serenity passed over her, only to see the men the creature had killed be killed again. The violence of their death throes flashed across her eyes again and a tsunami of nausea smashed into her.

Leaning over the toilet, Fhá gripped the seat with both hands as her stomach heaved with the violence of an Imperial Arbiter. A stream of bile and half-digested breakfast smoothie poured into the bowl, the taste of bile as strong in her mouth as it was in Hvórþ's as he watched Lingbi fall to the wraith. That thought constricted her stomach even more, the feeling like her entire GI tract had joined the party and committed to tangling itself into ever more convoluted knots, forcing every last drop of stomach acid and unprocessed digestive slurry out of her. Streams of burning acid seared through her throat before scouring her mouth, pouring even out of her nose. When there was nothing left to offer unto the porcelain throne, her stomach continued dry heaving, finding new, abstract geometries to contort itself into, all while she coughed and wheezed and struggled to clear her sinuses. Each attempt to clear her nose felt like equal parts a heel kick to the solar plexus and inhaling a mouthful of hot, industrial dust blowing about the desert wastelands surrounding an Imperial Manufactory Hive.