“Wake up, pretty bird.”
“What—” He picks me up and holds me upright against the wall until the world stops spinning. “What are you?—”
“You need to move. Time’s almost up.”
I frown in confusion as the fog clears from my mind and look into his black eyes, focusing on him to keep from falling over when he lets go. “But, why?—”
“Concentrate. You’re running out of time.”
I rub my eyes, watching as blood and clear fluid leak from the healing puncture marks without a trace of scar. “You helped me?”
“Go.” He pushes me up the stairs, and somehow my leg manages not to buckle beneath my weight.
“I don’t?—?”
“Go.” I take another step at his urging.
Another.
Every step is excruciating, but I don’t stop. I can’t stop.
When I reach the last step, gasping for breath, he’s still there. Still waiting. Still staring with those black eyes.
He shoos me away with his hand, and then I duck through the curtain of green leaves, entering the pitch-black tunnel, pushing myself along the rough, abrasive surface until the darkness begins to retreat, and then I taste sunlight again.
Someone announces my name amid scattered applause as my knees finally give out. Someone else catches me as I crumple, throwing my arm over their shoulder and supporting my weight.
“Let’s get her to the medical tent—” Between the sharp, throbbing ache in my arm and the sunlight stabbing my eyes,I have no choice but to trust whoever’s helping me limp to the medical tent. The pain barely lessens when we enter the cool shade of the tent, and I’m deposited on a squeaky cot.
“What hurts?” a woman’s voice asks as I hear the snap of exam gloves.
“Arm. Head. Everything,” I murmur.
Dr. Mercer, I now recognize, peels back my eyelid and runs through the same list of questions I remember—miraculously—from the first time I saw her.
“We really need to stop meeting like this, Ms. Bryke.”
It hurts to laugh. “No shit.”
“Your arm is definitely broken. No concussion this time, however.”
“What, no high score?”
“Then again?—”
“No wait, I’ll shut up now.”
She palpates the area around the break and I clench my jaw as pain radiates down my fingers and up to my shoulder.
“I’m going to set the fracture—your blood has already started clotting around the break, but it’ll take about a week to heal fully once I give you a potion to accelerate the bones knitting back together.”
“This is going to fucking hurt, isn’t it?” I turn to her and crack my eye open.
She holds up a syringe. “Want me to take the edge off?”
“Duh.”
She laughs under her breath and doses me up. Almost immediately my arm begins to go numb, and whatever’s in that cocktail finally eases the tension in my body for the first time since that fucking plant shanked me with poisonous thorns as she sets the bones. I close my eyes and let her work, trying to process the last hour.
