When I start to imagine myself running through the flames in a pink leotard, my dream is interrupted by a soft thud. I am halfway off the board, not even kicking any longer, but by some chance of fate the pull of the river has sent my raft to shore. I know if I don’t get out of the water now, I might not get out at all. My limbs scream in protest, but my toes find the bottom and I manage to crawl out into some muddy grass.
No one is close enough to call for help. The crowds of people forming around the bridge have become one big animal-like blur, not a face to be seen. A prickle of fear needles through the fuzz coating my brain as I watch the shadows slither closer. Did that thing get Tai-ge? Will it come for me next?
The shadow thing will see me if I sit up, so I squirm down farther into the mud, clutching the board, not quite sure if it is still actively working to keep me alive. But hiding doesn’t work because my hands and feet are gone, and the huge black animal collapsing and trembling by the bridge sends two of its thousands of legs toward me. One wraps around my waist, lifting me high into the air while the other gags my mouth to stop my screaming. The slimy feelers wrap tighter and tighter around my ribs until I cannot breathe, and my vision goes black.
CHAPTER 3
HER VOICE IS SOFT IN my dream, the slow words familiar. “She could not wake, trapped by the spell. Asleep.” A bedtime story.
I try to look at her, but my eyelids won’t open. They never do when I dream about the time I spent Asleep. Her hand brushes mine, and I want to grab it, to hold on to her, but my fingers won’t move, my voice won’t obey when I tell it to call out to her. My whole body is so still I might as well be dead, except I can hear her. I can feel her. I’m paralyzed, begging for my muscles to respond.
“Sleep settled over the whole kingdom: the cook, the butcher, the guards. The horses and cows. Even the flies. Waiting for one brave enough to break the spell.”
Frozen. Inside, I start to scream.
The beautiful voice breaks. “I’m so sorry, little rose . . .” And then again, again. The painful words chime in my head, growing darker and darker as they twist around me. A monster’s growl that squeezes the breath from my lungs, claws sinking in because I cannot move, I cannot run. My eyes will not open. I have to escape, have to break away, but I am stuck. No one can hear my voice. No one will ever hear the screams trapped in my mouth.
The world cracks apart, and I gasp, air slashing my lungs to shreds. My head feels as though it’s about to cave in, pressure from trying to open my eyes threatening to split skin and bone.
I roll over and pain tears through my abdomen. A hands presses against my shoulder, as if the owner wants me to stay Asleep forever. Suddenly, all I can see are tentacles and a black creature squeezing me, the fallen timbers from the bridge burning all around me.
“Sev? Sevvy?” a panicked voice cries. “Someone help!”
The pressure against my head pushes harder until I realize it’s my hands covering my eyes, blocking out the light. Shaking, I draw my hands away from my face, my own whitewashed walls and ceiling too bright after the darkness of my nightmare. A face swims above me, familiar but I can’t place it. Terror floods over me as the person pins my shoulders against my pillow, threatening to steal my breath and fill my lungs, to leave me cold and still at the bottom of the river. Awake, to feel myself drowning forever.
“Sevvy, please! I’m right here. You’re okay. You’re going to be okay. Please just calm down. . . .”
The voice pours like honey into my ears, slowing everything down until I recognize Tai-ge’s face only inches from mine, lips drawn tight with fear.
I’m not Asleep. Not trapped forever in my own body, waiting for the day the doctors say I’m lost. For them to burn me.
Not enough room for burials inside the City walls.
A nun bangs through the door. “Is she compulsing? Hold her still!”
“No . . .” The word grates in my throat, catching with every wave of pain cascading up from my ribs. What happened to me? I remember walking with Tai-ge and fire and . . . something dark and alien all around me.
The nun pulls my arm from my side, sending a jolt of pain through my middle. It’s Sister Shang, a syringe ready in hand.
“No! I’m not having a compulsion.” My voice tears through my throat, barely coming out in a hoarse whisper. I try to relax my arm, knowing if I pull against her, the terror of sleep will return at the tip of her syringe. “But if you touch me with that needle, I think I can come up with a better compulsion than lying in bed. Like maybe cutting all your hair off and selling it to Wood Rats as a fire starter.” The joke rolls off my tongue, as if pretending that scavenging Outsiders are reasonable enough to trade with will drown out the sound of Mother’s hollow apologies still ringing in my ears.
“I’d have to grow it out first. Or did you mean Tai-ge’s?” Sister Shang rubs her bald scalp as she pulls the syringe away from me. She’s one of the nuns I actually like, usually ready with a joke or an off-the-books snack for days when the factories don’t take normal human eating habits into consideration as they schedule orphan hours. “You should be a little more grateful, seeing as it was Tai-ge who found you half-drowned and dragged you to the medics. But if you aren’t set on shattering your windows and shaving poor passersby with the glass pieces, then you can take a more conventional dose of Mantis. You’re due.” She sticks a hand into her brown robe and holds out a packet, two green pills inside.
I take them, holding them carefully in my palm as my breaths come in painful wheezes. What is wrong with me?
Sister Shang watches me for a moment, as if to be sure I’m not about to cut Tai-ge’s nose off before leaving. The door squeaks as she walks out.
“What happened?” I ask quietly, only now able to take in Tai-ge’s battered appearance. His arm is in a red mesh sling, a splint sticking out from underneath his hand, and shallow cuts line cheeks and jaw, as though he washed his face using a bowl of broken glass. That arm looks broken. How did he drag me anywhere with a broken arm? “Was it an SS bomb? Are you—”
“I’m fine, Sevvy.” He sort of smiles, cradling his arm as he settles onto the other bed in my room. Peishan’s. It’s been stripped of sheets, bare mattress bending under him as he sits. “I haven’t fallen Asleep or tried to kill or maim anyone, members of the Watch excluded. You, however, have been unconscious for a day and a half and have at least two broken ribs. You scared me just now.”
There’s a hint of question in his voice that I don’t care to answer. I lie very still in bed, every movement sending a jolt of pain through my abdomen, each one grasping at me like the tentacles and darkness from the waking nightmare at the bridge. The hallucination.
I’ve never had a compulsion before, and he knows it. I don’t think that is what he means, though, and suddenly I’m worried I said something in the last throes of my dream or did something to alert him. I may never have had a compulsion, but SS has definitely done other things to my brain I don’t have the courage to explain. Compulsions make you believe things that aren’t true, dire things, horrible things. They don’t make you see things that aren’t there.
The monster grabbing me at the bridge is not the first time I’ve seen the world warp around me, letting in monsters and ghosts that should not exist. I’m already like a piece of faulty machinery here in the City, gumming everything up. What would they do to me if they knew my mind was broken too?
I can’t bring myself to tell Tai-ge. Not him or anyone else. I’ve never heard of any other SS victim actually hallucinating, confusing the darkness inside with the things going on right in front of them. It isn’t even what the First Circle would do if they found out that scares me most. What would Tai-ge think if he knew that I’m not just infected? That it’s worse than that.