Battle Royale
I was productive today! I opened a checking account for next year and finished my textbook project. So I thought I'd take some time to do a Battle entry. Somehow the drabble ran away with me and ended up being almost as long as my last doodle -_- But hey, the loss of Cade's eye was a pretty big deal, I guess it's okay that it gets a substantial scene.
Nephele came to on the floor by her bed, half buried under a tumble of catch-all boxes. Her left arm gave a dull throb as she sat up; she must have landed on it when she fell from the mattress. Funny, she didn’t remember returning to her cubby after the pick-up assignment. Her head felt thick, stuffed with packing foam or day old oatmeal. It didn’t feel quite right, not like the usual morning grogginess. She rubbed at the back of her neck, realizing from the high collar that she’d fallen asleep in her work clothes again. She’d be reprimanded again for not getting them into the communal wash on time.
She went to pull the shirt over her head and paused as it stuck to her chest. Confused, she fumbled for the light switch just above the bed. The bare bulb overhead lit with a fizz. Neph blinked down at her blood-soaked front, and shrieked. She tore off the shirt and flung it across the room, crossing her arms over her chest to ward off the sudden chill. The muscles in her left arm protested. She rubbed at it, distracted, wincing as her fingers found a puffy sore spot.
“What’s-?” Neph twisted her arm around to get a better look. A purpling hypo mark stood out against the pale skin of her bicep. The fuzzy feeling in her head made sense now. Someone had sedated her, though she wasn’t sure w-
Oh shit.
“Cade.” she dove for a clean shirt, yanked it on, and stumbled out of her room as quickly as she could. The sedative hadn’t worked its way completely out of her body yet, she felt even more uncoordinated than usual.
“Hold up,” strong arms clamped down over her shoulders and waist, hoisting her right off the ground. Neph screamed and kicked, her head cracking back against Steve’s collarbone.
“I was just coming to check up on you,” he grunted into her ear, tightening his hold on her. “I wouldn’t try to teleport, Nephele. You’re still woozy.”
“You sedated me!” she screeched, aiming for his kidneys with her heels. “You sedated me! He needed me there!”
“And I’ll do it again if you don’t hold still,” Steve was nothing if not calm in these situations. “You were only getting in the w-”
“I warned you what would happen and nobody listened to me!”
He nearly fell over backwards as her slight weight vanished. Steve swore a very quiet blue streak. His ulcer gave a sympathy twinge.
She’d been aiming for the infirmary, but she hit the showers instead. Maybe there was something to Steve’s caution after all. Neph poked her head out from behind the stall door, listening for others. The infirmary was only a few turns of the hall away, but she didn’t want to get caught.
~
She had known all along that the pick-up was doomed to take a bad turn. That flipping, churning in her stomach, coupled with the faint thrum in the jut of bone behind her ears were all the warning she needed. The supervisors had dismissed it as a child’s anxiety. What could a little girl know, after all? This was only her fourth, supervised venture. An anxious stomach was only to be expected.
“No, no, that’s not it!” she’d tugged at frayed sleeves, stomped her foot, whipped her hair around in a frenzied headshake. “I’m not scared! I just have a bad feelin. I just know!” She’d been shaken away by an irritable jerk of the adult’s arm, unheeded and ignored. They told her to get over those cold feet if she wanted to go along.
She’d fallen back, discouraged and frustrated. Cade had taken her small hand in his and solemnly assured her that he believed her, at least. “Don’t worry,” he’d whispered. “I’ve got both eyes open.” She’d smiled and adjusted his scarf, leaving nothing of his features visible but the eyes he promised to put to use.
It should have been a simple pick up. Their allies would leave sealed crates of supplies at a predetermined drop point, located within one of the fragile magic bubbles scattered across the surface of an otherwise very ordered metropolis. It was her job to lift the group of four young adults and two small children up from their hideaway, transport them through that queer neither-here-nor-there space just outside reality’s boundaries, and drop them neatly beside the crates. Simple.
This particular drop point was a pigeonhole; a flat platform between two immense skyscrapers, where one of them jutted out into the next, floors staggered so as to create a sort of box of empty space. Like a mail slot. The crates were nowhere to be found, but drop offs weren’t always on schedule. Neph and Cade had wandered away to the edge; it wasn’t often they got to see open air, let alone the entire cityscape.
A sharp, moaning wind swept through the gap, tugging their hair this way and that. The wailing had covered the sound of security bots sliding out onto the platform from hidden panels. Neph’s stomach gave a sudden sharp lurch, the only warning before laserfire swept the gap.
One of the adults, Carlin, went down without a sound, a smoking hole where her heart and lungs ought to have been. Her partner threw up a hasty shield, only able to manage a half-dome between himself and the bots. Neph froze up, her back to the edge and her hands over her mouth. Cade was already moving towards Carlin’s body, but he looked back over his shoulder for her. The shot caught the side of his head as he turned.
She saw his right eye go wide. The force of the blast twisted him the rest of the way around. He hit the ground with a sick thud, screaming like metal on metal, both hands clutching at the ruined side of his face.
“Nephele!” Carlin’s partner howled, working shields as fast as he could manage. “Get us out!”
She’d barely heard him. Cade twisted on the ground, contorting like a madman. She couldn’t recall crossing the space between them, just remembered flinging her arms around him and pulling his face to her chest as though that might protect him. He screamed into her shirt, the sound echoing through the subvocal implant in her jaw. Blood pumped from between his fingers, soaking her front and splashing onto her arms.
Neph looked up at the clank of machinery to find a bot hovering over them, cannon-arm aimed at her head. The gold flicker of a shield between them seemed way too thin to offer any defense.
”Nephele!”
Whether the shout had pushed her to action, or the sight of the gun triggered a flight response, she still wasn’t sure. But the bubble was passing the platform, she could feel it, and their escape route went with it. She snatched them all up, even the body, and dropped them back in the base cargo hold.
~
Neph slid out of the showers and down the hall. She felt steady enough to teleport reliably again, but she’d rather keep the jump as small as possible.
How long had she been out? When they’d gotten back, Steve had mobilized a team of medics to check the remaining group over. They’d peeled Cade out of Neph’s grasp and wheeled him off to the infirmary. When she tried to follow, Steve told her to hang back and let the doctors do their thing. She’d pointed out that nobody knew how to take care of Cade better than she did, but he didn’t seem to think that gave her any right to be in the emergency room.
It probably hadn’t been a good idea to throw her shoe at Steve’s head. Or to start screaming at him. But she had warned them that something would go wrong. They’d ignored her and gone ahead anyway, and Cade had gotten shot! Steve had dodged the boot, snagged her by the braid, and jabbed her with the hypo.
As she peeked around the corner at the infirmary doors, Neph wondered if he always carried one up his sleeve, or if he had hunches of his own. She didn’t see anyone outside, but she teleported past, just in case. Cade was the easiest person in the world to find, especially now that her head had cleared.
He lay on the hospital bed, hands folded over his chest, his good eye focused on the ceiling. The left side of his face had been swaddled in yards and yards of bandages. Nephele slipped around the dividing screen and touched his shoulder to draw his attention away from the lighting fixtures. It didn’t even occur to her that she was in his blind spot.
“Where were you?” he asked, turning his head to see her. He clutched her hand tighter than she could ever remember him doing, and his voice was small and afraid. She made a mental note to slip something really acidic into Steve’s dinner.
“They tranqed me,” she said, sinking down to the edge of the bed. She held his hand tightly between hers. “I only just woke up.”
“It’s been days,” the words wobbled and squeaked. “I’ve been awake.”
“I’m sorry,” Neph leaned over him, pressing her cheek to his forehead. The bandages tickled her ear. “I’msorryI’msorryI’msorry.” He reached up to wrap his free arm around her shoulders. She heard a muffled sniff against her neck. “I tried to tell them.”
“I know,” he mumbled. “It’s not your fault.”
“It’s not yours, either.”
“I should’ve paid better attention back there.”
“I should’ve gotten us out right away. I froze up.”
“It’s still not your fault.”
She bit her lip, kissed his forehead, and told him she was sorry again.
The rings on the dividing screen jingled as Steve whipped it back. Neph glared over her shoulder, noticing Danielle behind him, a tray of pointy medical things in her hands.
“Come on Neph,” Steve sighed. “Let’s step outside.”
“NO!” both children shouted. Cade’s fingers gripped her shoulder almost painfully tight.
The adults exchanged identical exasperated looks. “Don’t you at least need to eat something?” Steve sighed. “It’s been almost four days.”
“Gone longer without,” Neph reminded him, hovering over Cade. “Not hungry.”
“Well at least move out of the damn way,” Danielle snapped, all business as usual. “I’ve got maintenance to do.”
“Maint-?” Neph found herself dumped onto the bedside chair. Cade scowled fiercely at Dani, who ignored him as she ignored most things. She produced a tiny pair of scissors and snipped deftly through the bandages, which she tossed into Neph’s lap. Neph was too busy gawking to take notice.
The left side of Cade’s face, above the cheek, was a glittering network of wires and chips. The skin had begun to grow over most of the exposed wires, but it was impossible to ignore the cybernetic eye staring out of the reconstructed socket.
“Whoa,” she gulped.
The eye rolled to stare at her, pupil widening and dilating to bring her into focus. She jumped, and the visible corner of Cade’s mouth turned down. She squeezed his hand apologetically.
“The laser blast took out his eye and ear,” Danielle explained, poking about in the mess of wires with a very tiny screwdriver. “He’s lost all auditory and visual sense on the left side. The laser disabled the nanotech, too, so by the time we got to him the nerve endings were completely dead. No chance of regen. If they’re even capable of regenerating eyeballs, which, I must admit, I would very much like to have seen.”
Cade’s fingers twitched in her hand. She could feel his pulse quickening through his palm, and scooted up to sit by his head. “So you made him a new eye?”
“We stole him a new eye!” Danielle grinned, holding up the screwdriver as if to embellish a point. “This is the cutting edge of cybernetic tech right now, infa-red and heat sensor modes included! I’m sure it’ll be horribly out of date in two years. Unfortunately, they forgot to swipe a user’s manual, so it’s been mostly guesswork.”
“Guesswork?” Neph squeaked.
“Educated guesswork, yes,” Dani shone a light into the eye for whatever reason doctors do that. “It’s taking quite well. We took the liberty of installing an auditory implant and crafting him a new ear, as well.”
“Oh,” Neph leaned down to squint into the ear canal, only then noticing the hair-thin wires running back into Cade’s head.
“Please don’t stare,” he said softly. She sat back up and brushed a hand through his hair.
“Sorry.”
“I know it’s weird,” he sniffed. “You don’t have to pretend. Just don’t stare.”
“Kiddo, when your eyelids grow back, nobody’ll even notice,” Dani said cheerfully. She stashed away her tools and rebandaged his head. “Except for some of the external wiring.”
Steve cleared his throat as Danielle gathered up her things. “Nephele?”
“No,” Neph said. She climbed up behind Cade and curled up so that his head was pillowed on her rib-cage. “I’m not listening to you anymore.”
Steve pinched the bridge of his nose with a grimace. Normally he’d think that ‘anymore’ was only temporary, but this time he wasn’t so sure. The two of them had always been insular, but the way Cade clutched at the arm Neph tossed over his chest seemed more possessive than usual.
The curtain swished shut behind him. Neph toyed with Cade’s hair, her other hand still holding his. He leaned his head back against her stomach and shut his eye, relaxing a little.
“Hey,” she said after a while. “I think they matched the color.”
Cade tilted his head back and beamed at her, upside-down. She just giggled.
For the record, I really don't like the first two paragraphs. Talk about blah. I hate beginnings.
Nephele came to on the floor by her bed, half buried under a tumble of catch-all boxes. Her left arm gave a dull throb as she sat up; she must have landed on it when she fell from the mattress. Funny, she didn’t remember returning to her cubby after the pick-up assignment. Her head felt thick, stuffed with packing foam or day old oatmeal. It didn’t feel quite right, not like the usual morning grogginess. She rubbed at the back of her neck, realizing from the high collar that she’d fallen asleep in her work clothes again. She’d be reprimanded again for not getting them into the communal wash on time.
She went to pull the shirt over her head and paused as it stuck to her chest. Confused, she fumbled for the light switch just above the bed. The bare bulb overhead lit with a fizz. Neph blinked down at her blood-soaked front, and shrieked. She tore off the shirt and flung it across the room, crossing her arms over her chest to ward off the sudden chill. The muscles in her left arm protested. She rubbed at it, distracted, wincing as her fingers found a puffy sore spot.
“What’s-?” Neph twisted her arm around to get a better look. A purpling hypo mark stood out against the pale skin of her bicep. The fuzzy feeling in her head made sense now. Someone had sedated her, though she wasn’t sure w-
Oh shit.
“Cade.” she dove for a clean shirt, yanked it on, and stumbled out of her room as quickly as she could. The sedative hadn’t worked its way completely out of her body yet, she felt even more uncoordinated than usual.
“Hold up,” strong arms clamped down over her shoulders and waist, hoisting her right off the ground. Neph screamed and kicked, her head cracking back against Steve’s collarbone.
“I was just coming to check up on you,” he grunted into her ear, tightening his hold on her. “I wouldn’t try to teleport, Nephele. You’re still woozy.”
“You sedated me!” she screeched, aiming for his kidneys with her heels. “You sedated me! He needed me there!”
“And I’ll do it again if you don’t hold still,” Steve was nothing if not calm in these situations. “You were only getting in the w-”
“I warned you what would happen and nobody listened to me!”
He nearly fell over backwards as her slight weight vanished. Steve swore a very quiet blue streak. His ulcer gave a sympathy twinge.
She’d been aiming for the infirmary, but she hit the showers instead. Maybe there was something to Steve’s caution after all. Neph poked her head out from behind the stall door, listening for others. The infirmary was only a few turns of the hall away, but she didn’t want to get caught.
~
She had known all along that the pick-up was doomed to take a bad turn. That flipping, churning in her stomach, coupled with the faint thrum in the jut of bone behind her ears were all the warning she needed. The supervisors had dismissed it as a child’s anxiety. What could a little girl know, after all? This was only her fourth, supervised venture. An anxious stomach was only to be expected.
“No, no, that’s not it!” she’d tugged at frayed sleeves, stomped her foot, whipped her hair around in a frenzied headshake. “I’m not scared! I just have a bad feelin. I just know!” She’d been shaken away by an irritable jerk of the adult’s arm, unheeded and ignored. They told her to get over those cold feet if she wanted to go along.
She’d fallen back, discouraged and frustrated. Cade had taken her small hand in his and solemnly assured her that he believed her, at least. “Don’t worry,” he’d whispered. “I’ve got both eyes open.” She’d smiled and adjusted his scarf, leaving nothing of his features visible but the eyes he promised to put to use.
It should have been a simple pick up. Their allies would leave sealed crates of supplies at a predetermined drop point, located within one of the fragile magic bubbles scattered across the surface of an otherwise very ordered metropolis. It was her job to lift the group of four young adults and two small children up from their hideaway, transport them through that queer neither-here-nor-there space just outside reality’s boundaries, and drop them neatly beside the crates. Simple.
This particular drop point was a pigeonhole; a flat platform between two immense skyscrapers, where one of them jutted out into the next, floors staggered so as to create a sort of box of empty space. Like a mail slot. The crates were nowhere to be found, but drop offs weren’t always on schedule. Neph and Cade had wandered away to the edge; it wasn’t often they got to see open air, let alone the entire cityscape.
A sharp, moaning wind swept through the gap, tugging their hair this way and that. The wailing had covered the sound of security bots sliding out onto the platform from hidden panels. Neph’s stomach gave a sudden sharp lurch, the only warning before laserfire swept the gap.
One of the adults, Carlin, went down without a sound, a smoking hole where her heart and lungs ought to have been. Her partner threw up a hasty shield, only able to manage a half-dome between himself and the bots. Neph froze up, her back to the edge and her hands over her mouth. Cade was already moving towards Carlin’s body, but he looked back over his shoulder for her. The shot caught the side of his head as he turned.
She saw his right eye go wide. The force of the blast twisted him the rest of the way around. He hit the ground with a sick thud, screaming like metal on metal, both hands clutching at the ruined side of his face.
“Nephele!” Carlin’s partner howled, working shields as fast as he could manage. “Get us out!”
She’d barely heard him. Cade twisted on the ground, contorting like a madman. She couldn’t recall crossing the space between them, just remembered flinging her arms around him and pulling his face to her chest as though that might protect him. He screamed into her shirt, the sound echoing through the subvocal implant in her jaw. Blood pumped from between his fingers, soaking her front and splashing onto her arms.
Neph looked up at the clank of machinery to find a bot hovering over them, cannon-arm aimed at her head. The gold flicker of a shield between them seemed way too thin to offer any defense.
”Nephele!”
Whether the shout had pushed her to action, or the sight of the gun triggered a flight response, she still wasn’t sure. But the bubble was passing the platform, she could feel it, and their escape route went with it. She snatched them all up, even the body, and dropped them back in the base cargo hold.
~
Neph slid out of the showers and down the hall. She felt steady enough to teleport reliably again, but she’d rather keep the jump as small as possible.
How long had she been out? When they’d gotten back, Steve had mobilized a team of medics to check the remaining group over. They’d peeled Cade out of Neph’s grasp and wheeled him off to the infirmary. When she tried to follow, Steve told her to hang back and let the doctors do their thing. She’d pointed out that nobody knew how to take care of Cade better than she did, but he didn’t seem to think that gave her any right to be in the emergency room.
It probably hadn’t been a good idea to throw her shoe at Steve’s head. Or to start screaming at him. But she had warned them that something would go wrong. They’d ignored her and gone ahead anyway, and Cade had gotten shot! Steve had dodged the boot, snagged her by the braid, and jabbed her with the hypo.
As she peeked around the corner at the infirmary doors, Neph wondered if he always carried one up his sleeve, or if he had hunches of his own. She didn’t see anyone outside, but she teleported past, just in case. Cade was the easiest person in the world to find, especially now that her head had cleared.
He lay on the hospital bed, hands folded over his chest, his good eye focused on the ceiling. The left side of his face had been swaddled in yards and yards of bandages. Nephele slipped around the dividing screen and touched his shoulder to draw his attention away from the lighting fixtures. It didn’t even occur to her that she was in his blind spot.
“Where were you?” he asked, turning his head to see her. He clutched her hand tighter than she could ever remember him doing, and his voice was small and afraid. She made a mental note to slip something really acidic into Steve’s dinner.
“They tranqed me,” she said, sinking down to the edge of the bed. She held his hand tightly between hers. “I only just woke up.”
“It’s been days,” the words wobbled and squeaked. “I’ve been awake.”
“I’m sorry,” Neph leaned over him, pressing her cheek to his forehead. The bandages tickled her ear. “I’msorryI’msorryI’msorry.” He reached up to wrap his free arm around her shoulders. She heard a muffled sniff against her neck. “I tried to tell them.”
“I know,” he mumbled. “It’s not your fault.”
“It’s not yours, either.”
“I should’ve paid better attention back there.”
“I should’ve gotten us out right away. I froze up.”
“It’s still not your fault.”
She bit her lip, kissed his forehead, and told him she was sorry again.
The rings on the dividing screen jingled as Steve whipped it back. Neph glared over her shoulder, noticing Danielle behind him, a tray of pointy medical things in her hands.
“Come on Neph,” Steve sighed. “Let’s step outside.”
“NO!” both children shouted. Cade’s fingers gripped her shoulder almost painfully tight.
The adults exchanged identical exasperated looks. “Don’t you at least need to eat something?” Steve sighed. “It’s been almost four days.”
“Gone longer without,” Neph reminded him, hovering over Cade. “Not hungry.”
“Well at least move out of the damn way,” Danielle snapped, all business as usual. “I’ve got maintenance to do.”
“Maint-?” Neph found herself dumped onto the bedside chair. Cade scowled fiercely at Dani, who ignored him as she ignored most things. She produced a tiny pair of scissors and snipped deftly through the bandages, which she tossed into Neph’s lap. Neph was too busy gawking to take notice.
The left side of Cade’s face, above the cheek, was a glittering network of wires and chips. The skin had begun to grow over most of the exposed wires, but it was impossible to ignore the cybernetic eye staring out of the reconstructed socket.
“Whoa,” she gulped.
The eye rolled to stare at her, pupil widening and dilating to bring her into focus. She jumped, and the visible corner of Cade’s mouth turned down. She squeezed his hand apologetically.
“The laser blast took out his eye and ear,” Danielle explained, poking about in the mess of wires with a very tiny screwdriver. “He’s lost all auditory and visual sense on the left side. The laser disabled the nanotech, too, so by the time we got to him the nerve endings were completely dead. No chance of regen. If they’re even capable of regenerating eyeballs, which, I must admit, I would very much like to have seen.”
Cade’s fingers twitched in her hand. She could feel his pulse quickening through his palm, and scooted up to sit by his head. “So you made him a new eye?”
“We stole him a new eye!” Danielle grinned, holding up the screwdriver as if to embellish a point. “This is the cutting edge of cybernetic tech right now, infa-red and heat sensor modes included! I’m sure it’ll be horribly out of date in two years. Unfortunately, they forgot to swipe a user’s manual, so it’s been mostly guesswork.”
“Guesswork?” Neph squeaked.
“Educated guesswork, yes,” Dani shone a light into the eye for whatever reason doctors do that. “It’s taking quite well. We took the liberty of installing an auditory implant and crafting him a new ear, as well.”
“Oh,” Neph leaned down to squint into the ear canal, only then noticing the hair-thin wires running back into Cade’s head.
“Please don’t stare,” he said softly. She sat back up and brushed a hand through his hair.
“Sorry.”
“I know it’s weird,” he sniffed. “You don’t have to pretend. Just don’t stare.”
“Kiddo, when your eyelids grow back, nobody’ll even notice,” Dani said cheerfully. She stashed away her tools and rebandaged his head. “Except for some of the external wiring.”
Steve cleared his throat as Danielle gathered up her things. “Nephele?”
“No,” Neph said. She climbed up behind Cade and curled up so that his head was pillowed on her rib-cage. “I’m not listening to you anymore.”
Steve pinched the bridge of his nose with a grimace. Normally he’d think that ‘anymore’ was only temporary, but this time he wasn’t so sure. The two of them had always been insular, but the way Cade clutched at the arm Neph tossed over his chest seemed more possessive than usual.
The curtain swished shut behind him. Neph toyed with Cade’s hair, her other hand still holding his. He leaned his head back against her stomach and shut his eye, relaxing a little.
“Hey,” she said after a while. “I think they matched the color.”
Cade tilted his head back and beamed at her, upside-down. She just giggled.
For the record, I really don't like the first two paragraphs. Talk about blah. I hate beginnings.