Others

      On the one hand, the awakening was visceral and agonizing, but on the other, it had a strange pleasantness. Torso seemed to be made up of pain, but this fact was mitigated by the nice sensations, coming from the back. For a while these two feelings fought within, and the pain won out, preventing the mind from falling back into sleep. And since the mind was awake, it began to demand quite logical answers. She didn’t want to open her eyes, so Kiva focused on the other sensations. Obviously, she was lying and lying on the bed. The bed was softer, than her usual lay, and it was the bed, that gave softness what enveloped her body from beneath. The girl was so used to sleep with a hand under her head, that she didn’t immediately realize, why her head was slightly elevated above her torso. “The pillow. Pillow with the bed, so I’m not home,” the thoughts refused to respond quickly, but for now the girl didn’t mind at all.       The aching pain was accompanied by a traitorous weakness, but the wounds on her stomach were no less palpable. Kiva concentrated on them, trying to remember, how they had appeared on her in the first place. So far, her memory didn’t give a clear answer, only tossed in the sounds of gunshots, breaking glass, and seemingly screams. Her stomach ached clearly in three places, a nasty, aching pain spreading from them. The perception was drowned out by something, though, and the girl realized, that the wounds were bandaged. She wanted to take a full breath, but a dull ache pierced her left side from the front. Kiva tried not to breathe fully, sucking in air often and a little at a time. She concluded: “My ribs must be tied up in some kind of tight tissue, too, and that’s what’s keeping me from fully inhaling.”       The girl wiggled her fingers, no response to the unpleasant sensations. Her wrists — nothing, elbows — nothing, and only when she moved her shoulders and tried to lift her arms up her side started to hurt. The legs were both easier and more difficult at the same time, because the leg muscles were connected to the abdominal muscles, which had three bullet holes and something else with ribs. But the legs, as well as the arms, turned out to be all right. A couple of scratches, that weren’t particularly deep and didn’t hurt too badly, didn’t give her much cause for worry. Silence, no one could be heard except for the mechanical ticking. “The clock? Yeah, I guess that’s it,” the girl tried to remember, where else she might have heard this measurement of time.       But instead, the memory tossed her something else entirely. Fuller snippets of days gone by: someone’s face under the rifle, the rumble of an overturned table, the sound of her jumping through a window, the floating image of her home, her frantic attempts to cover the wounds on her stomach with pieces of cloth, the indistinct figure, that took on Kenny’s features, and finally his face, serious and calm, gazing into her eyes. Trying to dive into the past made her a little dizzy, but at least something was clear. First, Kenny hadn’t killed her, and second, he’d taken her to another place. “Then where am I?” curiosity and necessity compelled her to open her eyes and look around.       The first thing, she saw, was the whitewashed ceiling. It was hard to judge its height now, but there was a sense of spaciousness. Kiva turned her head to the left, saw a window in the wall, a large table with a lamp and a decanter, a chair, an unexpected armchair upholstered in fabric. Next she had to shift her gaze to the right, examining the furnishings. A fireplace, soot-stained, a chest of drawers with a clock on it, a door. Her gaze fell to the right: another door and almost nothing, just a small drawer next to the bed. “I’ve studied the surroundings, now I’ll take care of myself,” the girl gave herself that command and realized, that she didn’t really want to look at herself, but she still lowered her eyes to her body. Her senses didn’t deceive her. The wounds on her stomach, her ribs, and the scratches on her legs were all neatly taped, and not with rags, but with clean bandages.       It was shocking, she hadn’t seen the bandages themselves in a long time, and the fact, that she was wearing them was stunning. In this city, only the rich could afford such care and treatment. Healers and doctors were rare underground, and they charged triple the price for their services. Although some gangs kept their own bonesetters, they were just as hard to get to. Kiva found, that her torso was bare, but the bandage was just as tight against her chest, it gave a bit of peace of mind. “Even though I can guess whose house this is, and that I have nothing to be embarrassed about, I don’t want to lie here naked,” she ran her hand over her stomach, gently probing the epicenters of pain.       Her legs were clad in ill-fitting pants, and not at all like the ones, she had been wearing before this awakening. It was slightly disconcerting, but the feeling quickly passed. Kiva tried to pull herself up and assume a semi sitting position, despite the pain and weakness in her head. Changing her posture, the girl was able to make out the view from the window, there were the lights of the Underground City, the houses standing nearby. But they were absolutely unfamiliar to her, so the exact location could not be determined. “And do I really need it now?”, she asked herself, and then answered: “No.”       Over the ticking of the clock, Kiva fell into a light, restless sleep, waiting for the owner of this dwelling. It was not a dream, but a slight delirium. She saw images from the past, strangely jumbled together, made worse by the sensation of heat. Several times she returned to reality, but she couldn’t distinguish it from a vague dream. Pain kept her from falling deeper into sleep, and weakness kept her from holding her consciousness. It was getting dark outside, and many of the inhabitants had gone to bed and turned out their lamps. A rustle and the sound of footsteps snapped her out of her slumber, which bordered on this dreamlessness. For a few moments, the girl wondered, if she was playing mind games.       It was dark, but Kiva caught movement: one of the doors opened quietly, and a figure silently entered the room. She couldn’t get a clearer look, but she had no doubt, who it was. The man walked over to the table and lit the lamp on it. Kenny, exhaling tiredly, took off his coat and hung it on the hook by the door, hat followed there. He ran hand through his hair and was about to go to the chair, when he turned to see, that the girl was not lying down, but half-sitting. He grinned as he looked at her, though his whole look spoke of displeasure: “Ah, I see, you’re awake at last. It’s been a long nap, a few days.”       Now the girl was only interested in one question, the answer to which would determine everything further for her. She couldn’t answer, what it all meant, but she felt it was decisive.       Kiva had seen with her own eyes the death of her friends and she had nothing else left. The girl would mourn them, but later, right now she needed to resolve the issue with herself. She looked at him earnestly, searching in his eyes for an answer: “Why didn’t you finish me off?” “You made such a face, when you passed out, so I spent half an hour laughing until I teared up, and the other half hour dragging your ass through the streets.”       She closed her eyes. Though he didn’t answer directly, too proud and stubborn for that, the truth didn’t escape from her. “Well, so be it,” she mentally agreed, and, with her eyelids still closed, replied: “That’s how it is.”       He walked over and sat down in the chair.       Kiva noted to herself, that the man was probably from another murder, as evidenced by the fresh blood on his shirt and pants. He’d probably just noticed them himself: “Goddamn it, got dirty. Fidgety son of a bitch.” “Tough customer?” “I’ll tell you, he was twitching like a snake on a frying pan, when I stabbed him.”       The man stood up and went to the dresser, pulled out his clothes, started unbuttoning his shirt. Then he froze for a few seconds, cursed, took a pile of rags, and went into the second room, the structure of which Kiva didn’t know yet. There came the sound of water. Kenny came back in clean clothes, a wooden tub in his hands. He set it on the table and rolled up his shirt sleeves. The girl realized several things at once, simultaneously surprised at how her intelligence had sharpened, it had never happened before.       The first, requiring that very smartness, was that the man didn’t want, at least not yet, to bare himself in front of her. “Makes sense, it’s like showing your weakness, that you’re still human too. Besides, he’s seen me without clothes and I haven’t seen him,” the rest of the thought caused her slight embarrassment. Her second guess was confirmed, when Kenny pulled a bar of soap from the dresser. He wanted to wash the soiled clothes, before the blood was absorbed in irreducible stains. As if everything was quite logical and right, who else was supposed to take care of such mundane moments. It was obvious, that Kenny liked cleanliness and order. But to Kiva, the sight of the killer washing his own clothes brought almost homeric laughter. She couldn’t laugh out loud, her side wouldn’t let her, but she laughed nonetheless.       The man, momentarily besotted, turned to her. She could tell from the look, that nothing good was going to follow, but Kiva couldn’t keep her laughter down. Kenny left his soaked clothes and moved towards the girl, he’d dragged to his house for some reason. He grabbed her hair at the back of her head and yanked, forcing her to tilt her head back. His gray eyes, where storm clouds lurked, met dark blue ones. Kiva stopped laughing, or rather managed to go into muffled laughing mode. Kenny growled in her face with barely contained anger: “Bitch, why are you giggling? You’re going to do it right now.”       Kiva replied calmly, in between laughs: “Okay.”       The girl looked at him with an open and good-natured gaze, with something else in it, but the man couldn’t recognize the exact emotion.        It was something, that made him to let go the back of her head. Suddenly the anger was gone, and Kenny rolled his eyes and stepped away from the bed. “Why the fuck I got you out of there.”       He reached into his coat, pulled out a folded piece of paper, and generously dumped the contents into a glass he’d gotten from somewhere. He poured water from the decanter, and the liquid took on a murky tint. “If you can laugh, you can drink it yourself.”       The mute question on the girl’s face made him grin crookedly: - Yeah, by yourself, not like a little kid, who has to have everything down his throat.       Kenny set the glass on the nightstand and went back to cleaning the blood from his things. Kiva reached for the glass at the same time, she hadn’t realized she was very thirsty. She took the glass and sniffed it. “The smell doesn’t bode well,” she thought. She had no illusions about the taste of the drink, nor did she have any desire to argue and not drink this dubious liquid.       And Kiva took a sip. Since Kenny kept his eyes on her the whole time, he could see the entire range of emotions on the girl’s face. On his face, however, there was a mixture of snarkiness and smugness: “And drink everything in the glass. I don’t want to wake up in the night to your unsweet moans.”       As soon as the acrid, bitter, unbearably bitter, viscous sensation let go of her tongue, the girl was able to speak, staring at him in amazement: “You… you’ve put too much powder on it!”       The man jerked his shoulders, but not an ounce of remorse: “So? You looked too satisfied, drink up.”       Kiva drank the contents with all her might. By then, Kenny had finished cleaning and put the loaf away in the second room. He returned, noted the empty glass, headed for the chair. The man sat down, relaxing and straightening his legs.       He sat like that for a few minutes, blissfully quiet and comfortable, then reached for the lamp and shut it off. It became dark. There was a rustle and Kiva thought, the man was taking off his boots. Suddenly Kenny’s calm voice sounded: “Sleep and don’t you dare throw anything out. I want to get a decent night’s sleep tonight.”       The girl didn’t answer anything, only crawled into a lying position. The medicine was beginning to take effect: the pain was dulling, the fever was no longer rising to her head, and the weakness was becoming pleasant and lulling. Already on the edge of sleep Kiva had time to think, that Kenny did not lie on the bed with her, but sat in the chair with his legs stretched out and his head tilted back, that he had probably been sleeping like that all these days. And on these thoughts the girl fell asleep.       Ackerman did not sleep for some time, he pondered, for the umpteenth time in four days, why he had not left the girl, where he found her. He had even taken her to a doctor he knew. He was used to not lying to himself, so he agreed with his inner voice on a few things. The girl could be useful to him. Kenny remembered her moves, there was potential in them. He also liked the way the girl changed to fit the situation, a high level of perception of different situations, it guaranteed survivability. The man himself remembered, how some of the family had been unable to readjust to the new reality. “Kuchel…,” his sister’s name suddenly floated into his mind. He missed his sister, regretting, that he hadn’t made it. “All that’s left of Kuchel is Levi.” Consciousness immediately, once again, asked: “Why didn’t you keep the little boy? He’s your sister’s son, he’s Ackerman.”       Kenny wrinkled his nose painfully, he hated that rare-sounding voice. He didn’t want his nephew to live the same life he lived himself, let Levi grow up and make his own decision, he deserved at least that. “I taught him how to survive, but I can’t impose that way of life on him,” was the answer he muttered to himself, whenever he thought of his young relative. And with the girl…things were a bit different, she had already passed the line, and life itself had led her to such a way of existence. He didn’t have any input on this one, just picked up some ready-made material on the street. He hummed: “The material isn’t quite right, she’s a predator. Just like me, only smaller.” He remembered, how his grandfather had once told him, that if you saved a wolf from death, it would become more loyal than any dog. “Perhaps, that’s what I saw in her eyes today. Devotion. It wouldn’t hurt.” Kenny trusted only himself, but having a loyal person owe you a life was at least useful. That the girl wouldn’t leave as soon as she could walk, he didn’t doubt. And where would she go, all her comrades were dead. If she didn’t live up to expectations, he would just finish her off himself, nothing to lose. Kenny decided to put all thoughts out of his head and enjoy his sleep.