The Gender Fall (The Gender Game #5)

I had closed my eyes, but I hadn’t given up my tenuous hold on reality. My fingertips had been resting gently on the butt of a gun, but then it had been pulled away. The movement had left me swimming in anxiety, but I felt incapable of expressing it.

My stomach roiled suddenly, and I pressed my lips together, trying to quell the urge to vomit. It took a great deal of focus. Focus hurt—it made my head ache frightfully. An image floated across my mind, of a tomato growing inside a tin can. It grew and it grew, until the tin can became too small for it, and then grew some more, the red, fleshy fruit expanding, swelling… until it popped.

I giggled a tiny bit in the back of my throat. That was how it felt: my skull was the tin can, and the tomato was my… Oh. The realization sobered me. The image was not as funny as I had originally thought. I was confused by my own morbidity. Confused and…

My thought process stuttered out as the urge to vomit returned.

I sucked air in through my nose. Sweat poured down my face and neck, making me shiver in the cool air. I focused on relaxing my body. It was hard—even breathing was its own form of agony. My ribs pinched with each inhalation, and I hoped to God they weren’t broken.

The darkness was beckoning me again, trying to seduce me into its sweet release. I wanted to respond to it so badly.

Stay in the moment, I urged myself, repeating it over and over until my breathing returned to normal, although the pain in my skull did not lessen. It was important I stayed awake, because something important was going on. I remembered that. I remembered something bad was coming. The thought tethered me.

My eyes snapped open as I heard a faint squeak above me. Viggo and Owen were looking up overhead. I tilted my head back slightly, trying to find what they were looking for, and immediately the room started to spin, tumbling on its axis, becoming a blur.

Were those voices nearby?

I waited. Moving was distinctly uncomfortable in more ways than I could even begin to categorize. It was also dangerous, judging by the soft, desperate breathing of the two men near me. Movement carried the threat of giving away our position. Better to remain still.

I squeezed my eyes together as I tried to gasp for air quietly. I dove a little deeper into the beckoning darkness—not quite all the way in, but not quite all the way out either. It was a halfway point, one that left me floating in gray. The floating was nice. It would be so easy to settle in deeper, close my eyes, and just drift.

So I did. Only for a moment, I promised myself. Only a moment to settle my stomach and still the pulse of pain that seemed to be harassing my entire body. Only for a moment…

The next thing I felt, besides a spike of agony, was movement. Whispered words torn harshly from mouths. A steady rocking that caused my pain to return.

I slowly opened my eyes, taking care to open them a fraction at a time. Something had changed since the last time I’d woken. The light seemed dimmer this time, cooler, more natural. My vision was filled with warm brown stalks that were the tallest things I had ever seen. They were withered and dying, but I smiled when I looked at them, knowing they carried an important function, one I had enjoyed in the past. I was aware of the faint rustling sound of our passage, and turned my head to the right, slowly.

The dizziness that accompanied head movement flared up, but I was prepared for it, and took my time. By the time I had finished moving, we were pushing through the corn stalks—That’s what they are, I thought victoriously—and into an open green area that led toward tall brown pillars crowned with green, looming out of the earth around us. Viggo hefted me higher against his chest, the movement causing the world to tumble. As soon as it evened out somewhat, those bigger brown-and-green objects had started flashing past my eyes, the whole scene shivering and rolling in many different ways at once, spinning me into even greater confusion. Still, I couldn’t help but stare at them, a strange sense of awe coming over me as the swaying shapes passed over my head, the tangles of their branches making intricate, snarled knots of greenery.

Trees, my broken brain informed me. A forest. And we were moving through it. I tilted my eyes down and saw that I was close to Viggo’s face again. He was carrying me. Again.

For some reason, that realization made me want to laugh. There was something… a joke… about us? Something we did together, with each other, for each other.

My head sent me a warning throb. I was thinking too hard. I tried to focus on the trees again, but now they were moving too fast. The greens and browns blurred together, faster and faster. My insides felt like they were winding up, tighter and tighter, until my breathing intensified and I felt my stomach clench.

It was too much at once. I couldn’t keep control. I gagged, and then retched. My body erupted in agony as I was forced to move, and I couldn’t stop myself. I vomited hard, and felt tears streaking down my cheeks as my stomach clenched again. A strange dizziness struck me, and I became aware of Viggo’s hands and body shifting and moving on me. It brought only the tiniest reprieve, which disappeared almost instantly as I retched again.

When it was over, I sagged slightly, unbelievably relieved my body had given up. I didn’t want to, but I opened my eyes, peeling them back like the skin of an onion and squinting up into the forest’s cool light. It took a minute, but I realized we had stopped moving. My view of the light blue sky was obscured by green tufts that felt soft and slick under my fingers and were wrapped in damp black granules.

Grass. It was the opposite of sky. I wanted to smile at my own cleverness.