#30 – Trapped
Cilron could hear Smith’s men talking about digging a grave for him. No problem, he had plenty of oxygen and energy stored in his aura, which had gone dark as his body had plunged into stasis. Ta would find him. Then they put him on the examining table and stripped off his uniform. He worried they would dissect him. Esther’s timid assertion that he might still be alive was a relief.
The men handling the stretcher dumped him on a cold floor. Esther’s arrival and the tenderness with which she handled him moved him greatly. He heard the constriction in her breathing. She mastered herself and got busy, boiling water for tea.
“My God, Esther, what good is that?” croaked Engers.
“Tea is good for anything. It helps shock.”
“Then I’ll drink the whole pot. I’m talking about Cilron. If you think he’s still alive, why don’t you try CPR?”
“CPR? But we don’t have any equipment.”
“Old fashioned mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. We know the Circle People breathe the same kind of air, and human beings don’t use all the oxygen they take in.”
“Oh!” she exclaimed, “It’s been years since I had that training!”
“Those of us who work at the power plant have a refresher course every year.”
“I feel so stupid,” said Esther faintly “I’d ask you, but your mouth is bleeding. I’ll try it right away. You’ll let me know if I do it wrong?”
She crept over to him and gently turned him on his back. “I don’t know if you can hear me,” she whispered “If you can, you must be as frightened as I am. Please, dear God, let this work.” Steeling herself, she sealed her mouth over his, pinched his nose closed and blew as if trying to inflate a stubborn balloon. His lungs expanded. Pain shot through every fiber of his body. Cilron’s lungs rejected the used air in a violent wheeze. Gasping like a fish, he sat up.
Esther shrieked and burst out crying. Cilron reached out with his good arm and held her against his chest. “Hush, now,” he rumbled. He looked at Engers who seemed to be trying to press backwards through the wall. “Are you okay?”
Engers swallowed a couple of times. “Relatively. What about you?”
Cilron took inventory. His spine hurt. His head throbbed. “Could be worse. I suppose unhooking you from the ceiling released the deadfall.”
Engers nodded. “It was a piece of heartwood from a giant cabbage plant, with a steel rod bolted through it. I wasn’t directly counterbalancing it, but taking my weight off the chain caused a latch to open which let the weight swing down. If you’d only taken the tape off, I’d have warned you.”
Cilron sighed. “That didn’t seem a priority.”
Wiping the tears from her face, Esther attended to her kettle. “You seem to know a lot about the mechanism, Engers.”
“Uh, Ding and I worked it out, as an exercise in exploiting the blind spot that Ambassador Cilron confided to you. We never intended to use it.”
Cilron growled, “Humans! It’s a pity you aren’t still whacking at rival tribes with stone axes. Back in then, your species seemed have some moral sense.”
“We never intended for Smith to get his hands on it,” said Engers defensively.
“Seeing as you were bait, I’m sure of that,” rumbled Cilron.
