Page 113 of Katya and the Young God

“Rest easy,” the driver says, and she can’t tell who they are, what they want, and Katya fights to keep her eyes open, to track what’s outside the window, but all she sees is trees and stones and smeared blood. “You’ll be fine, your injuries aren’t that bad.”

She opens her mouth to speak, but nothing comes out, so she wets her lips and tries again. “Where?”

“Someplace secure,” the driver says, and Katya knows the statistics on being rescued in hostage situations, knows that her going to a second location is bad, very bad, but her eyes scrape and blood blurs her vision. “You’ll have medical care and we will wait.”

So Katya keeps her head against the window, her eyes open as much as she can, and they drive.

18

She comes to slowly, like she’s fighting through Jell-O to consciousness, as they strap her onto a stretcher. Everything burns, like her very blood is too hot for her body, but her skin feels clammy and cool against everything it bumps against.

People are talking around her, saying something, but she can’t track it, can’t get her mind to attach onto each word, instead her mind twisting away and spiraling from any concentration. Like each word is ripped away from her grasp, the moment she starts to be able to figure out, to listen, everything gets taken away.

A cool pinprick then another, and she blinks open her eyes. There’s snow falling, directly on her face, and they’re moving, carrying her somewhere. White flecks, drifting across her skin, catching in her eyelashes.

A pinch, a cold bright spot of pain, and a needle goes into the skin of her arm, and after a shock of terror, her eyes close again.

* * *

This time,she awakens with a jolt of pain. A jolt of pain, a burn in her eyes, and a deep dry ache in the back of her throat.

She sits up, fast, and a thudding in her head nearly keels her over.

“Fuck,” she whispers, and her voice rasps, dry as a bone, but she blinks through the stars behind her eyelids, until the thudding fades enough that she can see.

She’s on a cot, the sort of cot that gives a bad name to cots everywhere. Her suit is gone, leaving her with a hospital gown in pale pink. Even her boots are gone, and her exposed foot is scraped up and cold.

Her left foot is in a splint, and trying to wiggle her toes makes her almost retch. Her hands move, though her pinky finger and ring finger on her right hand are swollen and puffy, scraped up and meticulously cleaned.

Her back aches, the deep and familiar pull of whiplash tugging between her shoulder blades, but the weakness before is gone. Her shoulder, still badly bruised and colorful from the Golem, is numb, pins and needles spiraling around it.

But she can move it.

Her head aches, the deep ache of a concussion, and her mouth feels like something died in it, but she can think. She can think, she can figure this out.

The room is a tiny gray box, with a single red camera blinking in the corner next to the door. No window looking in, no door handle on this side, and the hinges on the other side.

So. They have her in some sort of prison. She’s escaped those before.

They took her lock pick earrings, took the hair daggers from her hair, but left the small garrote bracelet against her wrist. It lays there, perfectly innocent looking, and she could weep from the sight of it.

The runes are gone from her wrist, sharpie faded away under what smells like rubbing alcohol, and every scrape or scratch or cut from all the glass is clean, bandaged, and meticulously cared for.

Whoever they are, whatever they have in plan for her, they’re not going to let her die from an infection or bleeding before they’re done. Which is objectively good, on the grand scale of things, when one is a prisoner.

“Hey,” she calls out, and her voice is like sand being rubbed on her skin. “I need water.”

She doesn’t know how the rune Pieter put on her works, the one that lets him know something happened, but she’s almost certain that he’s somewhere out there, absolutely fucking panicking. Pulling the place apart, doing whatever he has to do to figure this out, anything.

So she just needs to get somewhere where he can find her.

There are footsteps, outside her door, moving past, then back. A pacing guard.

Slowly, ever so slowly, Katya eases herself up to stand on her good foot, before tentatively trying to put any sort of pressure on the bad one.

It gives, immediately, so she leans against the cot, balancing on her bare foot the best she can, blinking the sparks away once more.

Anywhere she can go, it’s gonna be hopping.

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