What if you threw your life away and the world threw it back? If you found yourself in credit to the value of one life? Would you spend that credit on a worthy cause, if fate offered up the chance?
...
Sometimes, she thought the uncertainty was the worst part. No, not uncertainty as to what was coming—of that, she had no doubt. He was coming for her. He had made that clear. With every evidence of enjoying the fear she tried so hard to hide, he had made it abundantly clear.
No, the uncertainty was when. The waiting, the days and nights of tedium, sprinkled with their little indignities and minor horrors, seasoned with the menace of the nightmare to come, was a torture all its own. Especially these hours, as the city quietened and the evening deepened and the long night loomed ahead.
She'd been abducted. Imprisoned. Exposed and paraded and leered at. Judged to be...suitable. Worthy, if such a word could used for circumstances so vile. Deemed fit for purpose to fulfil whatever sick fantasy of degradation he had in mind. She'd been taken aside and kept apart, reserved for his sole use.
And then she had waited. Plotted and schemed and raged and despaired, but waited just the same. Hating every second. And yet wishing the wait might never end.
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Lukewarm. To Nick's mild surprise, oblivion turned out to be lukewarm. He'd never given the temperature of oblivion much thought but he supposed, if pressed for a prediction on the matter, he would have gone for freezing cold, or maybe even boiling hot. Something extreme, anyway. Oblivion just seemed like that kind of place. The kind of place where the burger meal-deals were all super-sized, the booze was overproof and came on the rocks, and if you called Luke warm, he'd probably punch you right in your stupid face.
Nevertheless, lukewarm it was. Not to mention, now that he thought about it, kind of uncomfortable. Painful, even. Bruisy, with overtones of sting.
Hmm.
It occurred to Nick the thoughts with which his brain was presenting him appeared to be more or less—not to put too fine a point on it—a load of crap. As he considered this, his brain next presented him with the little nugget of information that besides being lukewarm, oblivion also sounded weird—kind of whooshy. It followed this up, in rapid succession, with the observation it appeared he hadn't taken a breath in a while, and the suggestion that if he wanted the nugget-presenting to continue, he should probably do something about that.
Given their debatable value, Nick wasn't sure he did want the nugget-presenting to continue, but for lack of anything better to do, he sifted through the nuggets supplied so far, on the off-chance they might contain something useful.
The room-temperature nature of oblivion? Meh. Its whooshy soundtrack? Yeah, yeah. The benefits of breathing? Whatevs. The...wait a second.
Breathing. That was the something. While indifferent to oblivion, he was very much pro-breathing. Breathing was great. As a matter of fact, he could really go for a breath right now. That should definitely be on top of his to-do list.
He opened his eyes, only realising in doing so that they'd been closed. The soft glow of a diffuse, hazy light greeted his restored vision, hovering somewhere over him, either dim and close-by or bright and far away—it was impossible to tell. For lack of any other cues where to go, he made his way towards it, until—with a start—it occurred to him perhaps this wasn't such a good idea.
