Well, no point in dwelling on this. It doesn’t matter anymore.
Instead, I feel myself slipping away, sinking into darkness, falling into a deep void.
The last thing I hear is the sound of fists pounding on the door, voices shouting from outside; people were probably drawn by the gunshots.
I can’t answer. I lose consciousness.
???
I open my eyes and realize that I’m alive. Wow. What a strange thought.
Alive!
That alone feels like a small miracle, because to be honest, I never expected to wake up again.
Above me there’s a bright light. Under different circumstances, that might be unsettling, but this light feels far too much like a hospital fluorescent lamp to be anything heavenly.
I blink slowly.
What happened… shit, we were shot, that much I know.
I turn my head, searching for Salt, because I’m already certain that if I’m alive, then he must be alive too. The energy coil didn’t rupture.
I meet a pair of gray eyes watching me closely.
Salt lies in the hospital bed next to mine, turned slightly in my direction. At least it looks like a hospital bed. We’re both hooked up to IVs and electrodes, probably monitoring our heartbeats. The room is small, definitely not a city hospital. We’re most likely still on the island.
Without thinking, I smile when I see his catlike, familiar face, and Salt answers with a wide grin of his own.
"Fuck. We’re alive," I blurt out in disbelief, stating the obvious.
Salt chuckles.
"Very much so. Probably just because before they could get into our unit, they had to send for Harvey Bram. Only their people have universal access cards."
I stare at him blankly.
"I don’t understand."
"Right, you were unconscious. They started pounding on the door, looking through the windows, trying to break them, but it turned out the windows are solid, armored glass."
"But how did it happen that…"
Salt keeps grinning. "We were joined for a good five minutes before they finally brought Bram. During that time, the bleeding slowly started to stop. I saw it with my own eyes, and I could breathe again."
"Wow… So… it really works? Joining?" I choke out, stunned. I can’t quite wrap my head around it. What powerful magic.
"Of course it does. And as soon as they got in, they separated us. It was awkward. I told them they should leave us like that, but I think they felt uncomfortable seeing us literally stuck together. So the process isn’t finished yet. We still have ugly, barely closed wounds, but it’s nothing one night of proper Joining won’t fix."
Salt flashes that wide smile again.
I shake my head. It all sounds like a fairy tale.
"Incredible, is regeneration really that powerful?"
"Apparently so," he says. "As strange as it sounds, it literally pulled us back from the edge of the grave."
"Fuck. A miracle," I murmur, staring up at the ceiling as if the answer might be written there. Then another thought crashes into me. Drax. What happened to him?
