Page 86 of The Teras Trials

And I don’t feel it. I swear, I swear God is taking pity on me, because I see it all play out as if it hasn’t happened to my body. My arm is outstretched. There is a flash; just blood-red teeth, and a wet crunch. When I blink next my right arm is gone. To the elbow. I stare vacantly at it; blood gushes from the torn limb, and the bone has been crunched away awkwardly, so the remains of the ulna and radius sit jagged from the stump.

I have just enough time to pray: Father, into your hands I commend my spirit before I shiver, and once shivering, cannot stop.

Cannot. Stop. Shivering. And breathing. Is hard.

Oh, God. I think—

But I do not die here. I just remember watching the teras chew happily on my arm, and the crunch of glass as its teeth slam through the bottle. There’s an unhappy roar, and right before the pain hits me, right before I am knocked unconscious by the lovely combination of blood loss, shock, and excruciating, nameless pain, I think I laugh.

Fuck you, motherfucker. Eat shit and die.

25

LESSON TWENTY-FIVE

I wake three days later in my bed, dazed and alone. My body finally has a chance to rest, but resting only exacerbates all the aches adrenaline had been staving off. So now I feel the dull ache of the harpy’s claws razing against my stomach, a persistent headache from poor sleep and stress, a spasm in my right hip—did I fall? Or is that just a consequence of holding myself stiffly for weeks?—and then there is the arm.

I have a good hour to convince myself to look down. I must have shown no signs of waking, because I have been left completely alone. No one comes to check on me. There are the remains of a Healer’s work around me; bloody bandages, forceps, other aborted attempts to stop the bleeding with cotton buds and bloody water. There’s a salve, too, but I can’t think about salves without thinking about my arm, which I don’t want to look at, which I can’t stop thinking about, which I have to look at eventually, so God, Cassius, just fucking look.

I look down. A fabric sling binds the stump of my arm to my chest. I can’t see the stump, I see only the bound white-fabric mass of my arm pressed close to me, but I can feel it: my entire arm, hand and all, throbbing incessantly.

Logically, I know it isn’t there. I saw the arm be eaten. It is sitting in the stomach of teras, hopefully undigested, hopefully clutching the remains of the thing that has killed the wretched beast. But if I know this, then why do I feel it? How can the entire thing throb and ache like the great teeth of the teras are still tearing through it?

I wait for this bout of throbbing to ebb away and then I sit with the feeling, the knowledge that the arm is gone. And I wait for the hysteria or the panic, but it just doesn’t come. I think it gets filed away with the rest of the horror. Another mark in the book of awful things that happen here. But it’s all I can do to sit there and wait for it to hit, my mind compartmentalising itself to be the soother, ready to placate the part of my brain that loses its grip.

I hold myself in this impossible stasis long enough that the sun is high in my window. And then, when the bell tower rings out for midday, my door unlocks.

It’s Leo. I know it immediately by his gait and silhouette, before the light has resolved the shadows of his face. He pauses when he sees me awake in bed, propped up on the pillows. But there’s no cry of joy at seeing me, only quiet.

He glances over his shoulder and back at me. Then slips inside and closes the door, stealing an intimate moment for just the two of us.

Leo opens his mouth. I cut him off.

“Is it dead?”

His face goes still and something shifts in his eyes. How he looks at me like this, in bed and sweaty and bloody, and has such a softness in his gaze, I do not know.

Leo smiles at me. “Yes, Mr Jones. It’s dead.”

Something swells in my gut. It isn’t quite pride and it isn’t quite relief. I think the hysteria is breaking through, now that sacrifice of my arm means something substantial. I give a great sob and then bite my tongue, but Leo is already moving to me. He goes to his knees beside me puts his hands on my thighs.

“I want to ask how are you, but I think I know,” he murmurs.

“Mm,” I say. It’s the only thing I can say. If I open my mouth I’ll just start crying, and for some reason it feels important that I don’t.

“When I saw you, Cass, I. . .” he doesn’t say anything for a long while, but he lowers his forehead onto my leg and sighs. Muffled by the covers I hear him murmur, “I’m—sorry.”

I run my fingers through his hair and over his broad back. “For what?”

“Calling you ruthless.”

This doesn’t help me relax in the slightest. “It’s alright,” I tell him. “Besides. You meant it.”

Leo pulls away, and I’m sorry for it, especially when he drags even his hands back to his side.

“I,” he says, “don’t like what is happening here. I don’t like what it’s doing to us. But I don’t think there’s anything we can do about it. I’m not going back out there. And neither are you. We’re the same like that. So when I say you’re ruthless, when I say it’s monsters who survive this, don’t be offended, Cass. Take the compliment.”

His eyes have changed again, to something more unpleasant, and he reminds me of the boy I met in the woods, who saw my brother gutted and said he was sorry for the loss of a Hunter. I wonder suddenly if Leo is who I think he is. If the young man I see is perhaps as ruthless as me. If he has survived something similar, out there beyond the wards.

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