Page 32 of From the Noblest Motives
His gaze had fixed on a clay pot by the wall. At first, Damien felt certain the pot was Henri until a deep croak came from within. Ah. Henri was a talkative bullfrog.
"And Claude is by the door. Please pardon him for not saying hello. He's not very social."
The red salamander by the door was difficult to miss now that Damien's eyes had adjusted. Good thing no one had stepped on the little guy. Though Shudder's head had thumped against Blaze's shoulder, his eyes wandering, no longer aware enough for it to make a difference.
"We need to get him out of here," Blaze whispered.
"Hmm. In a moment." Damien slid out of his pack and dug out the med kit Dr. Parma had bullied him into taking, the one she had packed herself. "Keep him sitting up, please."
The med kit was, of course, meticulously organized—pharmaceuticals on the right, wound care on the left. He freed an antipyretic and a self-targeting antibiotic from their slots and fished a water bulb out of his pack.
"Gonna be okay, Shuds," Blaze murmured as he repositioned Shudder. "Hold your head up. I got you. Damien's got some stuff for you to take."
"Will you stay? I've missed you."
Blaze glanced over, the anguish in his eyes ripping strips off Damien's heart. "Of course we'll stay. You need us, you idiot. Pay attention and take your pills."
Shudder had no difficulties with the meds, and he drank in greedy gulps. While he had water in his own supplies, he'd apparently grown too feverish to reach them. Damien packed everything up while Blaze carried Shudder to the door.
"Be careful of Claude," Damien admonished in a distracted fashion as he combined Shudder's supplies with his.
Blaze grunted as he handed Shudder's blanket-encased form to Floyd. "Yeah, yeah. Stupid lizard."
Probably not the best time to point out that a salamander isn't a lizard. In an odd, superstitious moment, Damien whispered to the clay pot, "Thank you for watching out for him."
Brrrrrrep.
Floyd took Shudder in his coracle—slightly larger, with a more experienced oarsman—and they paddled back to the dock. Auntie Eunice watched their return trip with slitted eyes, white-pink tail slapping against her tree, and Damien could only be grateful that she remained where he could see her. Once there, Blaze and Floyd repeated the Shudder transfer in reverse, and Blaze carried him inside the house.
It turned out to be a neat, cozy house—two rooms and a closet-sized bathroom—that reminded Damien of his own cabin. Odd that he didn't feel homesick, though. Blaze set Shudder down on the sagging couch in the front room and unwrapped his cocoon, and while the dark rings under his eyes and the pallor were even more obvious in the better lighting, Shudder managed to sit upright on his own.
The first words out of his mouth were, "I can't be here. I can't stay here and endanger Floyd."
Damien perched on the arm of the sofa, happy to take Shudder's hand when he reached out. "What happened? They said there was an explosion. Inmates had died."
"They saying you died." Floyd nodded to his holoscreen projector.
"Are they?" Shudder sighed. "I guess they would. How embarrassing to say one got away."
Blaze sat beside him on the sofa, a hand on Shudder's knee. "Did you do it? The explosion?"
The laugh that erupted from Shudder was brittle and terrible, so far from his usual laugh that something sounded broken. "No. I was trying to be good. Follow the rules. Get an appeal going. I was…" His voice broke and he stopped to wipe at his eyes. "But they were trying to kill me. I had to… I had to…"
"Hey, hey, it's okay." Blaze put an arm around him and gave him a little shake. "Let's get this hat off. You're still too hot."
"No. It's fine. Just—"
But it was too late. Blaze had pulled the hat from Shudder's head, and in the shocked silence, Shudder began to sob. He curled into Blaze as if he could hide in his arms, but nothing could hide what had been done to him. His head had been shaved, just the barest hint of blond stubble growing back, except for a rectangular patch atop his scalp where nothing grew. Something had been attached there and ripped off again. Though Meemaw Sekhet had healed the wounds shut, the skin was still a raw, angry red.
"I'm so hideous," Shudder whispered.
"You're sick and you're hurt." Damien dared to put a hand on his back. "They did terrible things."
In fits and starts, in what Damien was sure were abbreviated bits of information, Shudder told his story, from the call about a supposed teen on the run in New Chicago, to his arrest and sham of a trial, to his incarceration and the strange disorientation of the variant prison—the mu metal, the scalp plates, the isolation. It all sounded like psychological warfare, like an attempt to break a person's soul into powder.
Then a man had threatened Shudder in the dining area, and the same man had attacked him when the initial explosion failed to kill him.
"They put me in there so their assassin could kill me." Shudder burrowed closer to Blaze. "Staying seemed pretty stupid after that."
