What was that?
For a second, I thought I was imagining things, as a tiny flicker of something caught my attention out of the corner of my eye.It disappeared when I looked straight at it, making me wonder if I’d seen it at all.And then it reappeared, off to the left, just a flicker of a flicker, hardly anything...
I followed what appeared to be a distant gleam of reddish firelight through some kind of cave system.Wherever the light shone, I could just make out a little stretch of brown stone wall or maybe hard, compacted dirt.It bothered me, as I’d have hoped my brain—if that’s where I was—would be a little more imaginative, but no.
Or maybe yes, I thought, as the flame picked up speed and I started running, trying to follow the mad little thing through a maze of tunnels and out into—
Well, damn.
I grabbed the side of an opening in the rock to help me stop, because I did not want to run straight ahead, where a figure crouched in the middle of a small cave, hunched over an open fire.No, I did not want to do that at all.Because the cave was just a cave, with nothing to recommend it except the vague impression of rain blowing outside of a jagged opening on the other side, but the figure...
Shit, shit, shit.
That was me, wasn’t it?
She had the same dark brown hair and the same features, I supposed, but that didn’t mean jack in this instance.There was a fierceness about her, even in human form, a predatory intensity that I hadn’t known my face could stretch to.Those might be my features, but there was a very different mind behind them, one I didn’t particularly want to meet.
She wasn’t dressed like me, either.Instead of a bloody hospital gown, she was wearing a brief leather skirt that looked like it had been ripped directly off of some animal with no other work put into it, and, as far as I could tell, nothing else except for a lot of dirt.Long, matted, stick-strewn hair frizzed around her dirty face, and row after row of necklaces—bone, amber, cowry shell, and carved wooden beads—draped her torso.
She looked like a wild woman.She looked deranged.And now she was also looking up and—
Shit.
For a moment, the two of us locked eyes, the modern, freaked-out version and the...ancient counterpart?Was this some kind of ancestral memory, or whatever New Age stuff they were peddling these days?Or was this my third?
Or was I so high on Sedgewick’s supply that I was seeing things?
‘Cause I was voting for the latter, and I was voting hard.
“Dead war mage,” she finally said, the firelight flickering in her eyes, and her voice a low rasp.
Then she went back to poking at the fire with a stick.
I just stood there, clutching the wall and wondering if she meant me.
Was I dead?
I didn’t feel dead.
But then, what did death feel like?
Because if this was it, I had been seriously misled.
I cleared my throat after a moment.“What?”I said, brilliantly.
She looked up again, seeming surprised to see me still standing there.
“Dead,” she said again, and paused.“Not alive,” she added helpfully, as if wondering if I might be slow.
“Um.No?I’m—that is, we aren’t, if you’re me?”
I got nothing back that time.
“We’re on an operating table,” I said, trying again and venturing a little closer, because she didn’t seem hostile at the moment.“Sedgewick—the Corps’ doctor—he’s trying to help us.”
Hopefully.
My counterpart looked at me blankly for a moment and then tried again.“Did this.”
