Sang has always been a little bit different. She was made fun of for being a math-whiz in school up until she was kidnapped. Growing up in the crime world from a young age, she tried to do what she was told and keep her head down...but...that was...
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Time passed. It was hard to tell what was going on. I'd given up on trying to listen to anything so that I could relax my neck and try to float. When Dell had come to get me out of the tank one time, he'd told me I had fallen asleep treading water, but that only happened once I was well and truly exhausted. Apparently I hadn't gotten to that point yet, so I was forced to try to float.
I was in and out of consciousness. There was nothing to do but feel the lap of the cold water licking the sides of my face, lethally close to my airways.
Well, that wasn't entirely true.
I could float in and out of sleep, or I could look at Kaz. I had done that several times already, my eyes drawn to him in a morbid dance of Pandora's box. Everytime I looked at him, my body seized up in sobs, causing me to sink into the water. It was a vicious cycle that went on endlessly until the shadows grew darker and night eventually fell.
When it was truly dark, and I couldn't even make out the shadow of his figure, I finally found some relief. But the knowledge of his presence weighed heavily on my mind.
The water seemed to grow colder, but that was probably just what it felt like as my body temperature dropped. It wasn't anywhere dangerous enough to cause hypothermia. That would be too easy. Nikolai liked it when people suffered.
I continued to fall into light bits of sleep that usually ended when my mind tried to slip into a nightmare. My body would tense up and slip below the surface of the water. Sometimes when that happened, I would subconsciously hold my breath, trained from sheer amounts of experience. Other times, I would continue to breathe, unaware as I sank down until the water entered my lungs. This would jolt me awake, coughing and jostling the water into a chaotic state that made the small breathing space at the top get gobbled up by waves. I would still be choking, trying to hold back a cough until the water settled enough for me to try to breathe again.
I was being drowned over and over again, and if I allowed myself to freak out, it would be only too easy to succumb.
At one point in the night, I even wondered why I was fighting it. When it happened again, I tried to let myself be swallowed up by the water, but I couldn't do it. Drowning was painful. At least the struggle of it was. The choking, coughing, and burning. Once you accepted it, perhaps it would be calmer, but I had never been able to get to that point.
That was the genius of the tank. If I was perseverant, Nikolai was innovative.
My mind continued to drift. When I was unconscious, I usually thought about bad things, so while I was awake I tried to focus on the good things in my life.
...
I was up before the sun, and that was pretty early considering it was August in Illinois. The days were long, warm, and golden as summer blazed on strongly. I knew that soon it would start to turn cold as the year progressed into winter, but I had learned to enjoy the short, dark days as well.
