King Eden

Chapter Five: Thief

I woke up to the beeping of a heart monitor and the tapping of rain against bottle-glass windows. It was daytime and the market was well underway. Residents and travelers haggled with merchants over wares outside the ivy-strewn walls of the Aurelian's infirmary. There was a large window on the opposite wall and I could see a blurry version of my city through it. Cattle and horses walked over tree roots growing through ancient chunks of road. Chickens bobbed along sidewalks crammed with market tents. Someone's baby was crying, a few dogs were barking, and people were shouting over one another as the sun warmed the streets and the crowd grew. The sounds of home were dear to me and they wouldn't have bothered me if my head didn't hurt so much.

Thief slept at my bedside just as she had all the other times I wound up in the infirmary. She dangled one arm over her chair and held the other in her lap, the Watchful Eye tattoo on her palm upturned and studying the ceiling. She must've touched it up recently because it wasn't as faded as mine. The pupil was a rich scarlet color and its lashes were dark sun rays that reached for her fingertips.

She'd propped her boots on my bed frame. The red mud on the soles was fresh from her patrol that morning. She slept with one eye shut, and the other was a socket that stared at the rafters. Leaving the field to command the city guard served her well and the extra time she had to train showed. She was rather muscular and that, combined with her height, made her look every inch as terrifying as she was in combat even while sleeping.

I was in pretty bad shape. Feverish, cold, terribly nauseous, and I ached as if I had the flu. My bad leg was stiff and wrapped in many bandages. Stitches beneath the gauze made an imprint of the bullet wound. I had a lump on my head, and a throbbing pain was radiating through my skull. I was most concerned about the boils escaping the gauze around my left arm. Thick, bulbous pockets of white pus oozed around the mark. What was once a yellow blemish the size of a coin was now an angry patch of necrosis swallowing my shoulder. Dark red in color and going black in places, the mark looked as foul as it smelled. The overlying layer of skin was shiny with a salve that did little to soothe the sensation of a thousand needles pricking the wound.

Corruption was supposed to take decades before it appeared like this. The nurses must have shared my alarm. I picked up the depleted IV bag teetering on the bed table's corner–Thief must've knocked it there when she reached for the packet of cigarettes beneath it. The plastic ridges had captured remnants of the medicine. I couldn't make sense of the blue text printed on it, but I'd received antibodies enough times to recognize the injection.

I dropped the bag and watched the ceiling until my vision blurred with tears, resting my hands on my abdomen where more yellow sores showed through the thin fabric of my hospital gown. I traced a line to the tender bruises on my side, then to the old c-section scar below my navel. Even if I managed to rescue Eli he would never forgive me for what happened.

I wiped the tears off the bottom of my chin and untangled myself from the bedsheets. Whatever morphine I had left in my veins allowed me to push myself to the end of the mattress and swing my legs over the side, but then everything started to hurt. The muscles of my back knotted around bruises I didn't know I had. My stomach cramped with hunger and nausea pooled at the back of my throat, then the room threw itself into a whirl of colors that shouldn't have belonged to its gray walls and white curtains. I doubled over and drooled between my knees.

Thief rocketed out of her chair. I couldn't understand what she was yelling until she hooked her arms under mine and dragged me back against the pillows. She took my shoulders and shook me. Her hands were rough, gentle, and calloused enough to pick threads from my hospital gown. "What the hell do you think you're doing?" she asked. "Do you even know where you are right now? Hey, look at me."