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Chapter Three - Uncomplete

I watched her sleeping there on the cold, hard ground as the sun rose.  She was so beautiful, with an untouchable, pristine beauty that dirt and sickness and time could not ravage. 

Would not ravage.  I wouldn’t let it.

As the first ray of the dawn of the new day touched her face, I felt the machine begin to disengage, and the view faded into nothingness before my eyes.  I was able to take one more glance at Alya’s face before the scene turned black.

The blackness grew, not just over my eyes, but over my entire being, and the crushing weight of nothingness pressed into me quickly and violently.  I began to panic.  I couldn’t breathe.  Trying to move, struggling for breath, I fought against the emptiness.

“Damn it,” Cadoc said, “stop fighting it, Costia.  You’re trained better than that!”

The sound of Cadoc’s voice brought me back to my senses, and I felt myself slipping through the abyss as my body relaxed.  It was all over in a split second.  Almost before I realized it was over, I was blinded by the lights in the experimentation room. 

Gasping for breath, I felt Cadoc undo my wrist and leg restraints.  Slipping to the floor, I began to cough in a violent effort to fill my lungs with air.  The room swam around me as my head spun to regain equilibrium.  As my body threatened to loose consciousness, I felt a sharp stab in my back.  Slowly, the spinning ceased, the coughing stopped, and my body began to return to normal.

“She just so beautiful,” I muttered to no one.  “Makes me wonder if I’m doing the right thing or not.”

“You already know the answer to that,” Cadoc conversationally, as if I’d been speaking to him.  “You came up with this idea.  You justified it to me.  You made me believe.  If you even try to back out now, I’ll kill you myself.”

“I’m not backing out,” I said, spitefully, “and you fucking well know it.  Stop being a bastard, you have no idea what it’s like.  You never loved anyone or anything, so you’ve got nothing to loose.  You’d never understand the pain.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t understand the pain, would I?”  He glared at me.  “I don’t know pain, do I?  Is that what you think?  You remember what happened that cursed me to this chair.  I’ve felt more pain, in more different places, in more different ways, than your little fucking heart can even imagine exist.  So fuck you.”

With a frustrated sigh, he turned his wheelchair away from where I was laying and moved back to the command station.  He worked in complete silence for the next few minutes while I continued to recover, shutting down the power to the machine and uploading the virun that would erase the usage logs in the system.  Working with the inspiring efficiency he had been indoctrinated with, efficiency being one of the few things implanted into his mind we hadn’t been able to remove, he flawlessly made things look like the machine hadn’t run for days.  As he completed the virun erase, he started running the maintenance checks we’d originally came in to conduct.

As I picked myself up off the floor, I realized I shouldn’t have gotten on his case.  He had been through a lot, no doubting that.  And he was still going through it.  The only peace he could get with any regularity was when he took a huge dose of Sort, and that was wrecking havoc on what he had been able to salvage of his health after he escaped. 

It was amazing that we’d been able to rehabilitate him at all, really, considering what the redu camp had put him through.  His mind broken, his body nearly destroyed, and his spirit all but intact, he was a shell of the man he’d once been.  He rarely spoke of his experiences unless he was angry, like he was now.  I couldn’t blame him, though.  I rarely spoke of Alya.  People just don’t like to talk about things that are painful to think of.

Dragging myself over to the command station, I stared over his shoulder as he typed an almost ceaseless string of letters and numbers on the keyboard.  I could type, and I could do some basic programming, but his abilities could make me look like I was going backwards.  I tried to remember if he’d been this quick before the redu, but I couldn’t recall.  I had a feeling he hadn’t been, though.

“There,” he said, finally.  “Checks complete, vehicle, machine, engine, and interworkings all scanned, checked, cleaned, defragged, scrubbed again, fucked with, slept on, rebuilt, and working again.  Is there anything else you want me to do?”

“Ya,” I replied.  “Look, I’m sorry, man.  I didn’t intend to…  I didn’t mean to be like that a minute ago.  You know how it is, how that shit affects me.  Sort always hits me hard, and I loose my head for a while afterwards.”

He was so quiet for so long that I figured he’d never forgive me.  I stood behind him, hearing the eerie silence of the room echo with the pattering sound of his typing.  I hate quiet, and he knows it.  I held out for as long as I could, then turned around and grabbed a dose of Balm from my bag.  Popping back the cap, I downed three doses in one swig.  He grabbed my arm as I started to take another drink.

“That shit’ll kill you, you know,” he said, smiling. 

“I know,” I said, smiling back.  “I know, and I don’t care.”

I finished the bottle and tossed it aside as we left the room.

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