Page 193 of Mud

White.

There was no light here because there was nodarkness wherever we were. The sky over us was white—like a single, thick cloud had stretched and stretched to expand across the entire globe. The hard surface I’d fallen on wasn’t ground—it was ice. White-grey ice was everywhere underneath me, every inch of where I looked covered in it.

But he moaned, and I forgot all about the cold and my wet clothes and the ice shards three times my size that rose to the sky from the ground, as if water dripped upside down in this place. Gravity worked the other way around for it.

I forgot everything and I went to Taland on all fours because it was him. I recognized his black clothes even if I couldn’t see his face yet. I recognized his moans.

“You made it, you made it, you made it,” I kept on chanting, my limbs numb, my body shaking. But I went all the way to where he had landed, and by then he’d turned on his back.

He was on his back, half-open eyes on the white sky, and he wassmiling.

I grabbed his jacket, sat down near his arm, and I burst out crying—just for a moment. Just to let the relief wash over me and be done with it—because the game wasn’t done with us yet. But I still needed to let it out, so I cried a few (dozen) tears, and eventually Taland looked at me and raised his hand to my face. I grabbed it with both mine and held it against my cheek.

“You made it,” I said again, just once more to convince myself of the fact.

“So did you. We did a good job,” said Taland, and he sounded…strange. Like he was drunk.

My heart jumped. “Taland, are you okay?”

I let go of his hand and I began to inspect his chestbefore I remembered that the spider had caught him on the shoulder. On his right shoulder.

I thought about moving around him but decided it was too much trouble—and too damn cold—so I basically fell on top of him until his lungs emptied. I rolled over to the other side to inspect his wound while he moaned.

“Mhm, mhm, sweetness, that felt good,” he kept muttering, giggling under his breath, eyes closed now.

The wound was right there, but it was barely two inches long, and by the looks of it, it was superficial. I pulled his jacket down lower and leaned in to see it better, just to make sure.

“You should be fine. It’s a superficial wound. It’s?—”

“Oh, how good it felt to swim. I smell like lemonade, baby. Won’t you add some sweetness on me?” he cut me off, and then he began to laugh out loud.

“Taland, you’re scaring me,” I said because he didn’t look like he was joking.

In fact, his cheeks were flushed and his eyes bloodshot, his lips almost blue.

“Something’s inside me,” he then muttered. “Something fast and something warm…tada-dada-da…”

I bent over him again and inspected the wound—could it be that the spider leg had drugged him or something?

Or…maybe her cuts were venomous?

Goddamn sonovabitch!

I lay down on my stomach on the ice, wrapped my lips around the wound, and I began to suck as much blood out of him as I could.

Meanwhile Taland laughed his heart out every time I spit on the ice. If that spider had put some kind of a drug—please, Iris, let it be a drug—in him, I could still get some of it out.

If it had been venom…

Well, then we were both going to die, I figured.

In the last fucking challenge—which was comical, don’t you think?

I must have sucked and spit out his blood at least ten times before my mouth turned completely numb and my body let go of me.

Yes, the spider leg had definitely leaked something in Taland. Now it was in my mouth, too, and it had numbed it worse than a dentist would.

When I tried to sit up, my hands slipped and I fell on Taland’s chest. He moved, I thought maybe to push me off and get more comfortable, but instead he wrapped an arm around me. Tightly.

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