Food smells pulled Alaya from her slumber. Dreamless, she’d slept well enough to awaken with renewed energy. But the pain in her limbs and aches in her back held her tight to the mattress she’d woken up on. Part of the smell came from the straw of her bedding. It reminded Alaya of synthetic spices, grassy like this, but without the hint of dirt this particular bed exuded.

  Savory smoke drifted in through cracks in the building around her. Light streamed in among the smoke and gave the room a hazy, almost oceanic look.

  A room with gaps in the walls.

  It was a singularly strange room. Why in all of the Verse would anyone build a room where light and smoke could drift in through the very walls? The existence of the room offended her while it fed her delightful odors and fended off the cold nipping at the soles of her feet.

  The thin blanket which had been thrown over her had a weave closer to lace or a straw hat than any fabric Alaya would have intentionally worn. How it kept the least bit of cold at bay confounded Alaya’s reason.

  Wonder at her waking state faded into the background of her mind as the rage supplanted it. Here sat Alaya, traitor to her friends and sucker who’d gotten them all killed.

  “Fuck you.” It was whispered into the darkness of her room. It was brighter than the void, brighter even than the sky from sims from the many nights she’d spent in the Summerlands.

  “Fuck you too, Alaya.” Talani’s voice crept through the cracks, dripping with humor as she adopted Alaya’s whispered tone. For a second, Alaya had been certain Talani was in the room with her. But no, her voice had definitely come from outside the room. Weirdly, the response had drained away the sudden influx of anger choking Alaya’s thoughts.

  When Alaya put her arm down to leave her bed, pain rocketed through her body. Needles tipped with capsicum buried their barbs in her arm, tearing a shriek from Alaya’s lips. Her cybernetic implants should have cut off the pain as it ripped through her body, but they didn’t give a shit about the Summerlands.

  Her world toppled around her, a fact Alaya only distantly acknowledged. Too much pain. Her systems should have dumped endorphins through her, should have started a complete triage setup. But they failed her.

  “Alaya, are you okay?” Vague shapes, a shadow across a slitted curtain, moved to Alaya.

  If her muscles would have responded to her neural commands, Alaya would have crawled away. But somewhere in the midst of the worst pain of her life, Alaya’s body chose to ignore the rest of the signals in favor of the agony.

  “Oh dear.” Talani’s touch stopped the pain, all of it. Even the spot on her lip where Alaya had almost bitten through in her blind failings.

  Coppery blood filled her mouth, not enough to choke her or make her gag, but enough she felt needed to spit. It was the first sensation other than pain which Alaya had been able to recognize as she’d tried to move. The blood trickled down her chin and Alaya turned her gaze to her arm.

  Two thin, but sturdy-looking branches stood on either side of her forearm with pale bandages connecting them to each other with her flesh between. “Why does that thing hurt so much?”

  “The splint? No dear, the splint’s helping. You broke your arm.” Alaya snickered. She’d broken her arm before. This was different. Before she could speak and contradict Talani, the old woman clucked her tongue and said, “you’ve never broken anything for real child. Your body and then brain have always protected you from injury.” She thumped one of the sticks, which sent a tiny thread of stinging up Alaya’s arm into her head.

  “Ow! What the fuck?”

  “I am making a point.” Talani laid two fingers on the flesh of Alaya’s arm and the pain ended abruptly. “And that point is this: your cybernetics have made you weak. Constructs of the mind: pain, anger, sorrow, these are fleeting. And you should be able to control them even without your trinkets.”

  She sounded like a crazy atavist. Or one of those religious nutters who demanded everyone remove their cyberware, even the people like Alaya and Gaz who would simply die from doing that.

  “I am not crazy. This is an important lesson. The Verse doesn’t care about you or your pain.” Talani stood up and brushed her hands down the front of her robes. “Most of the time. So the only answer is to deal with it.”

  Alaya hated that answer. She could have “dealt” with her parents’ deaths. And left the fucking Mal-wares to pillage and ravage the solar system. It was their fault Alaya was saddled with her astronomical debt. It was their fault Alaya’s childhood had been shattered. And…

  “Are all those things really their fault?”

  “Fuck you and your mind reading.” For a moment, with the pain gone, Alaya had the mental cycles for her anger. As if the tide of needles had been waiting for just this moment, they rushed in and overwhelmed her.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  The room tilted as Alaya lay there, blood drained from her cheeks, and she suddenly found it hard to breath. It was hard to keep her head upright too.

  “Don’t you go into shock on me.” Talani moved with a speed which belied her advanced age. The touch of her palm across Alaya’s forehead was paradoxically warm and wet.

  This time the discomfort did not vanish the way it had previously. Instead Talani seemed to sip away at Alaya’s bucket of pain until she could focus her eyes again. “Shock? What do you mean? Does this place even have electricity?”

  Her voice echoed funny through the room, but at least it had stopped tilting and spinning around her.

  “I see. We will need to visit some topics soon. You should recover for now.”

  “No, don’t put me…” Alaya couldn’t finish her sentence. Just blackness.

  The second time she woke in the strange room, Talani was sitting in the corner snoring. It was dark in the room, and the light no longer streamed in from outside. Was it just as dark out there as in here?

  Alaya couldn’t tell, so she started to sit up. Pain though, Alaya had already discovered, was an excellent teacher. Her arm was still wrapped in sticks and bruises ran up the inner and outer part of her forearm like a trail made by a giant pogo stick. As gently and slowly as she could, Alaya tapped the marks.

  “Oh fuck.” That wasn’t nearly as serious as the first time she’d interacted with her broken arm, but it certainly wasn’t a light massage. Not quite sick to her stomach, but still vaguely dizzy, Alaya used her left arm to pivot her legs out from under her blanket. Bruises ran up and down her legs upon viewing them. It was really the wrong way to think about them, those bruises. More of her leg was purple and sickly yellow than the usual pinkish beige. How did she break her arm and end up with fewer bruises by percent than her legs? Looking down at them, Alaya froze up before lowering her feet to the floor out of fear the spicy needles would return.

  Not this time.

  Slowly, as gingerly as a first timer working a void armature, Alaya dropped her feet to the ground in stages. Each time wincing and sucking air in expectation of agony. They hurt, but only in flashes, as if her body would spend more than a few seconds on that pain before returning attention to the aches and needles in her arm.

  When her feet brushed the floor, she found it weirdly gritty and soft, not like the sand from the cylinder where she’d grown up. This had a broader range of size and texture of the particulates scattered over the floor. Unlike the swamplands, this wasn’t really wet. But it was cold. Alaya retracted her feet and curled her toes.

  Balance suddenly mattered. Leaning on her left hand and keeping weight and the lightest pressure off of her right, Alaya’s legs pivoted up and the back of her head hit the slatted walls.

  “Planning on going somewhere?” Talani hadn’t moved that Alaya could see, but her eyes opened.

  “Erk.” Head against the wall behind her, Alaya could move her legs more freely now, without having to use her right arm. She brought them down atop the mattress she laid on and turned to gaze at Talani. “Hi.”

  “Not as much swearing today?”

  Fuck you.

  Talani snickered and shrugged her shoulders. “Oh you can swear all you like sweet thing. Knock yourself out. Metaphorically I mean.” A glance at the wall and Alaya’s head sent a wave of heat through Alaya’s cheeks.

  “This sucks, haven’t you tortured me enough yet?”

  “A child teeters on the top of a staircase, above their parents, and out of balance. Is it torture to shove the child back and out of danger?”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “Torture… if we were torturing you why would we allow you to move about? Why would we teach you anything?”

  “I don’t know, but that’s not really an answer…”

  “It isn’t. It’s more than you deserve. In the old times we would have tossed you in a bog as an object lesson to your fellows and a sacrifice to the Verse.” Her arms swept out and the door opened at the same time, startling Alaya. “But as you can see, we are woefully short on fellows.”

  Plains. Alaya had known the word for a long time. Her mother taught it to her, had showed her pictures of oceans and plains, steppes and tundra. But never before had she seen it, like the swamp before it the fields of grasses and wave-like hills were utterly novel. Legs off the bed, and no pain in her arm, Alway found herself mesmerized by the scene of green grasses shifting and tilting as if the gravity plane outside broke.

  “That… is wind.”

  “Wind? Like solar winds?”

  “Something like that, sure.” Talani’s mouth quirked. “There’s only one gravity plane here and if it shifts we are rather dead.”

  “We can die here?” that answered a question Alaya had been pondering.

  “All things die, Alaya. All things. Digital minds cast across the cosmos will inevitably fail. Whether from the slow decay of entropy or the rapid decay of calamity, ends always come.”

  The fact Talani thought Alaya needed to know that, of all people, offended her. Death had been one of Alaya’s longest, most active companions. Silent and invisible, death had stalked by Alaya’s side for over half of Alaya’s life.

  “Not half. Always. Death has never, will never, leave your side child.”

  Why did that of all things provoke a response in Alaya? Was it because Talani made it sound like Alaya’s presence had cost her parents their lives? Was there another reason? “Fuck you.” The anger clouded her sight, stole away the images of the green, grass-swept plain and it not-at-all solar winds. Millions of people dead by Alaya’s hand and it was her parents she though of as she seethed at Talani.

  “Direct your anger at me all you like. Doesn’t affect me in the least.” Her chair toppled back and forth as Talani stood up. “You want out of here and you want to find your friends, do you not?”

  It was the first time Talani had suggested an end to this farce. “Yes. What do I have to do?”

  “Three things.” Talani stood at the door to the… this wasn’t a room. Alaya wasn’t sure what it was, but there was no more building out there to contain this particular room. Rather than explain what those three things were, Talani stepped out of the hut and into the brightly lit plain.

  “What’re the three things? What’s going on?”

  But the old woman ignored her, kept walking. In the area close to the room, the grasses had been kept short or driven out entirely. Out beyond the ring of cleared grass, Talani took one step and vanished.

  “Fuck you.” It had almost become a mantra.