The Prize of Dysprosium

Chapter XIX: Wrutting Miracles

I wake to a wicked headache tearing itself through my brain, destroying whatever's left of my sanity. It takes a second before I realize I'm lying in a bed, staring into a familiar moving darkness when I notice there's a person breathing in a rocking chair beside me. I groan and turn and try to make sense of what's happened.

"That didn't knock you out for long," a vile voice grins.

"Hannah," I mumble and wince as a machete of pain slices through my head. "What happened?"

"You tried to leave. Poppy I believe he's called, big black dude, stopped you," Hannah says and gets up to turn on the light. I'm in my room, but there's something different, and I realize it's because the open closet only contains my clothes and not Ki Aimi's. Actually, there's nothing of her's to be seen in the room. I lie and look around as Hannah takes a breath, seeming to read my mind. "Ki Aimi didn't want to stay with you anymore, said she was afraid you were going to puke again," she says as if she was reading my mind. "She was allowed to move back in with Frei who welcomed her with open arms."

I nod absentmindedly and find that the headache is already clearing. It's the kind of headache which just needs some water to go away completely. But I don't move, because Garmen is gone and I'm left alone. I deserve all the headache I can get.

"What are you doing here?" I finally ask. "And what's with the rocking chair?"

"They wanted to assign you a bodyguard so you don't try something stupid," Hannah says with a sarcastic smile. "I volunteered. The chair is just a sweetener."

"Why?" I ask.

"Why the chair? I asked for it."

"No, why did you volunteer," I groan.

"Get cleaned up," she says. "Then we'll talk."

I stagger upwards until I'm actually vertical again. Nothing comes back up so that's good, but the whole room is spinning so much I have to grab for the doorframe.

"Aren't you afraid I'll try and drown myself in the hand wash?" I ask as I regain my balance. Hannah snorts, her almond eyes rolling all the way back into her skull.

"It's too untheatrical for you," she says.

As I stumble into the bathroom and begin drinking keenly from the tap, hot anger flares up inside me again. Anger et literally everybody – at Barooba, at Alle, at the people from the bunker for dragging me away, and the Potentate and his machines for killing her, and most of all at myself. I brush my teeth until my gums bleed, and by the time I've gotten into the shower the anger has turned to despair. When the last of the blood has disappeared down the drain, whether it's Garmen's or mine or both I don't know, I don't feel anything but sadness. And so, I let myself turn heavy and sink down on the tiles, allowing the water to wash away everything. It takes me some time to notice that it's boiling hot, but I suppose it's technically morning so the new hot water must have arrived. That at least hasn't been cut off. When I step out I'm pink all over and Hannah is holding out a bathrobe.

"Let's get you fixed up, shall we?" she says. My face in the mirror is as much a ghost as I've ever seen it before, but my jaw is colored with a big bruise and I have multiple wounds on my arms and chest and one big one blooming on my shoulder, not to mention the bruises on my knuckles from whatever I punched at the school. My voice sounds like it's never going to sound even remotely fine again, and as I reach backwards I can feel a small but very distinctive bulge from whatever Poppy hit me with.

We leave my stinking clothes in the bathroom and go back to my room where Hannah sits me down on the bed and joins me. She is being all weird about my injuries. She cleans my wound with the last of my own rubbing alcohol, she makes me hold an ice pack she gets from Frei to my bump and puts another one on m shoulder, and she pulls splinters out of my palms and knees from my time vomiting on the floor. It would all seem very caring if it wasn't for the fact that it's Hannah doing it. It's not uncomfortable though. Although I'm halfway expecting her to pull out a chainsaw and slice off my hands, there's something soothing about her fixing my minor injuries, as if she's done it a million times before, which reminds me of a burning question I have. And after a long time of her patching me up, I finally gather up enough courage to open my mouth.