Warmth first — which was wrong, because the last thing she remembered was being very cold. Then the stillness. Then the smell, clean and faintly mineral, like stone that had been near water for a very long time.
Slowly opening her eyes, she woke in a bed.
Soft pink light from no source she could identify. The room was small, and had no windows to identify time of day.
A gray shift covered her that she had definitely not put on herself. One question she had, but at this point it was low priority.
More important was where she was and whether she was going to be allowed to leave.
She sat up slowly and took inventory.
Her hands were fine. That was the first surprise — she'd been fairly certain she'd lose at least two fingers to the cold, but they moved when she told them to and the color was normal.
Her head ached in a dull persistent way that suggested she'd been unconscious long enough for her body to start making complaints about it. Everything else seemed to be present and functional.
She looked around.
No windows. No visible door. The walls were smooth gray stone, not construction stone or alloy, but carved, or worn, as if the room had been shaped rather than built. The ceiling was low enough that she could have touched it standing on her toes. The floor, when she swung her legs off the bed and set her feet down, was cold in a way that felt deep, like the cold went a long way down.
I'm underground, she thought. Correction. I'm underwater.
She couldn't have said what told her. Something in the quality of the silence, maybe. The faint sense of pressure. The way the room felt held rather than simply enclosed. The smell of the air, tinged with sea salt, even through air purifiers, it was still there.
She was where they wouldn’t find her.
Though she didn’t know if that was good or bad.
On a shelf across the room, a single object sat. A thin post with a sphere at the top — clear crystal smooth and slightly luminescent in the pink light. She crossed to it before she'd made a conscious decision to, drawn by the kind of curiosity that had gotten her into most of the significant trouble of her adult life.
But why change now?
She reached out toward it.
Her fingertips touched the surface.
The crystal was warm.
Not ambient warm — not the warmth of a room that had been occupied, or an object near a heat source. Warm the way something living was warm, from the inside out, and for one disorienting moment she couldn't tell whether the heat was coming from it or from her own hand, whether she was feeling the crystal or the crystal was feeling her.
Something moved through the light inside it. Not a flash — quieter than that. A deepening, like a held breath deciding to release. Like recognition.
She pulled her hand back.
You are in an unknown location, having been brought here unconscious by a Fraluma, with no idea how long you've been here or who else is in the building. This is perhaps not the moment to start touching things.
The rational explanation arrived slightly too late to be the reason she had stopped. She noted that, and set it aside, and stepped back from the shelf.
The crystal went on glowing, undisturbed, as if nothing had happened.
She turned her attention back to the problem of the door.
She was still running her hands along the seam of the wall where the door should logically have been when she heard voices.
Below her.
Two of them — one sharp, one measured, both speaking in tones too low to make out words, though she pressed her foot experimentally against the floor and felt the faint vibration of them. An argument, or close to one. The sharper voice had the rhythm of someone issuing a verdict.
She stepped back to the center of the room and stood there with her hands loose at her sides, because if someone was about to come up through the floor, she wanted to look like she hadn't been caught doing anything.
