Page 26 of Girl, Reborn

First, take stock: extremitiescompromised, body uncooperative, but his head was clearing. Okay, he could workwith that, use the old gray matter for something other than gibbering. What didhe know? What could he trust? His senses, that's what; the data did not lie, soinventory those, one by one, like ticking items off a quality assurancechecklist.

Sight was useless, impenetrable blackpressing in on all sides, no shapes or shadows to orient himself, but smell –smell was doable. He sucked in a shuddering breath through his nose andinstantly wished he hadn't; a gag-inducing miasma flooded his sinuses, dank,musty, the stagnant funk of still waters left to fester.

And beneath that... something chemical,astringent, familiar but maddeningly elusive. Chlorine maybe, or a causticcousin, the kind of noxious brew no sane soul would willingly marinate in.

Sound then: drip, plunk, drip, thatceaseless cadence worming into his eardrums, the audio equivalent of Chinesewater torture. He strained past it, listening, reaching. The distant slap ofwater on something. Stone, perhaps. Containment of some sort, but thedimensions were impossible to judge in this disorienting void.

And a rusty hinge whine, a hollow clang ofmetal on metal.

Panic surged through him like an electriccurrent. Any illusion of rationality was suddenly ripped to shreds. Marcusthrashed and bucked like a hooked fish, mad with the need to be free. Limbsjuddered against his bonds, skin rubbing raw, ragged, bleeding under theassault. To hell with logic, with calm. There was no room for that now, nospace for anything but the primal imperative to move and fight and survive.

His flailing flipped some hidden switchbehind his eyeballs, because his environment suddenly swam into focus. Themurky outlines solidified into a grim reality, and up above, he saw adome-shaped ceiling lost in gloom. Curving walls glistening with damp. Apumping mechanism chugging away in the corner. A pistol gleaming like anexecutioner’s axe.

And dead center, looming over his splayedform like a hulking sentinel – a glass monolith.

Cylindrical, massive, a single sheet ofcurved transparency stretching floor to ceiling. This was what cocooned him inhis watery prison.

No, not glass, or not entirely; there wasmetal too, rivets, seams, the dull glint of stainless circumscribing thecasing's base and apex. And there, etched into the facing panel, was an arrayof symbols and glyphs.

At first glance, it was all random.

But no. There was a pattern there. Alogic. His oxygen-starved brain groped for significance, because those shapes,they looking hauntingly familiar.

Suddenly, understanding slammed into himwith the force of a rogue wave.

One was the Egyptian symbol Clepsydra.

Otherwise known as a water clock.

But this was the most messed up,bastardized version of a water clock he’d ever seen.

He'd studied these things, spent hoursporing over diagrams and descriptions until his eyes crossed. Marveling at theingenuity of the ancients, the way they'd harnessed the most basic elements tomark the passage of time. Egyptians had used these clocks to tell the time, toutilize the predictable flow of water to track the passage of hours, sun up tosun down and back again.

Only this one, this jury-riggedmonstrosity, was designed for a darker purpose. Ticking down to a differentsort of hour.

His last.

The glyphs blurred, jumped, resolved intostark clarity as his eyes adjusted to the gloom–not glyphs after all, butnumbers, hash marks meticulously notched into the casing's face, a scale ofsome kind.

12.

11.

10.

9.

8.

Marcus assumed it went down further, buthe couldn’t see beyond the water’s dark surface.

The markings. The water, rising withmechanical regularity. His guts turned to ice as he overlaid the scene with adiagram from an old reference book, a schematic that had once fascinated himwith its elegant simplicity.

Each etching was an hour.

The increments between, minutes.

All of them adding up to a countdown, reddigits flashing towards zero. Towards the moment when the water closed over hishead and the world went away, as neat and inescapable as lights out.

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