The Rainbow Maker's Tale (45 page)

She was lay on her side facing
me: her hands clamped beneath her head as a makeshift pillow, her
breathing soft and peaceful. Beside her was a flask of water and I
could see faint lines around her mouth where spilled drops had
dried on her face. Even though she was sleeping, Cassie looked
exhausted: grey shadows were smudged beneath her eyes, while her
face looked pinched and drawn.

I wanted to reach out to her,
hold her hand or brush my fingers through her hair, but my body was
uncooperative and so I had to settle with watching her sleep. After
the previous days – eternity – without her, just being able to do
this was more than I had hoped for. I have no idea when it was that
I closed my eyes, because all I saw in my dreams was Cassie
sleeping beside me.

* * *

I regained consciousness
several times for short periods before I awoke fully. During those
little gaps the only thing I really took notice of was that Cassie
was still with me. At first she had been lay beside me on the floor
every time I opened my eyes, but when I woke this time, I found
that she had moved to a chair nearby and furnished herself with a
pillow and blanket from somewhere. Though my eyes were still weak,
I could tell she was looking better: her cheeks held some colour
now, and the shadows beneath her eyes were less deep.

A glance at the monitor beside
me confirmed that over twenty hours had passed since I first woke
and looked at it. It also told me that my vitals were almost
normal. One of the indicators reported that I was a little
dehydrated. Absorbing this information, for the first time I
noticed a drip running into my right hand, which must have been
helping my condition. The bag attached to the other end, hung above
my head on the bunk and appeared to be half full, so I was good on
that front for a while longer.

I was lying on my left side. It
wasn’t comfortable, but I wasn’t confident in my ability to either
move myself onto my back, or even if I could, whether that would be
any kind of improvement. The return of conscious thought brought me
other knowledge about my body that I’d been immune to during sleep.
Sensation had returned to several areas that up until now I had no
feeling in. That wasn’t necessarily a good thing…

The fingers
on my left hand burned dully and brought back to me the memory of
when they had been broken: snapped one after another like twigs,
whilst I screamed out in pain. My chest felt uncomfortably tight
and I discovered a securely wound bandage compressing my ribcage –
which must have been Cassie’s doing. It was the best treatment for
the broken ribs I knew I had.

I lay still
for a long while and enjoyed simply being lucid. The distorted and
confused mass of images and thoughts from the past days still
tumbled through my head, but for the moment I could not face
re-living my time outside the Family Quarter. Instead I tried to
remember what had happened with Cassie from when she had
appeared…but I found it hard to discern
real
Cassie from the
imaginary ones I had surrounded myself with when I was alone and so
I stopped trying to do that as well.

Cassie was still asleep.

My neck and throat were very
painful – probably the worst of everything I could feel. At first I
wondered if it might be the after effects of dehydration, although
flashes of a memory made me think it was something more…It was
dark, but I remembered a weight on my chest, pressing me into the
ground so that I couldn’t escape. Something gripping me around the
neck, squeezing away my voice…squeezing the air from my
body…squeezing the life out of me… Remembering this made my empty
stomach lurch and so I pushed the memory away quickly.

Focus on the physical
.

If I didn’t do this, everything
I thought of would end up dragging me back to places I did not want
to go.

With small tentative movements,
I began testing my strength and mobility. My left hand was a no-go
area and concentrating on it now, I found that there were splints
on each of my fingers. Another job that Cassie had done well, I
smiled as I recalled how many times she had unnecessarily doubted
her skills as a Medic. That felt like it had happened a lifetime
ago – to a different person.

Examining the splints I saw
that each of the fingers had been realigned and, given the trauma
they had been through, I imagined that Cassie must have used some
form of local anaesthetic in my hand to control the pain, as it was
still limited to a muted ache. A damp package, loosely bandaged on
top of my hand told me that she’d also found an ice pack…

How had Cassie got all this stuff?
It seemed astonishingly lucky.

BEEP – BEEP – BEEP

A loud
wailing noise startled me from my
deliberations and looking around – as much as I could with
the limited movement my neck seemed to have – I saw a timer alarm
flashing on the console beside Cassie, where she was sleeping in
the chair. It must have been something she’d set for herself, but
as I watched her, she seemed to struggle to wake up. Her
sluggishness panicked me: was there something wrong with her? I had
been so focused on my own injuries, I’d not even bothered to check
Cassie, I just assumed she was OK.

Cassie needed me!

I tried to
lever myself from the bunk using my right arm as a prop. Moving was
so painful, but fear was controlling me now. My muscles were weak
and uncooperative, but I was almost sat up…that’s when the alarm
stopped.

Cassie was moving – slowly
still – but she
was
moving. I flopped back with relief,
marvelling at the small gap between my head and the pillow as I
dropped: it was completely disproportionate to the mammoth effort
it had taken me to lift myself the same distance in the first
place.

Returned to a reasonably
comfortable position I was better able to focus on Cassie. After
switching off the alarm, she settled back into her chair resting
her head on the pillow. I watched as she sighed once and then
forced her eyes open. She tutted – at an unknown irritation – as
she blinked over and over again until her eyes apparently became
accustomed to the dim light in the cabin.

“Hey, sleepy head...” I
whispered.

Even though I spoke as gently
as I could, not wanting to startle her, the basic action of air
passing inside my throat set it ablaze. I swallowed but it didn’t
help.

Cassie’s eyes snapped towards
the bunk, widening in surprise as she saw me. Immediately she tried
to move, but her body was tangled inside the blanket she’d been
asleep under a few seconds earlier.

“No. Don’t move. I’m fine.” I
told her, hoping that it would stop her struggling.

Her movements stopped and she
rasied her head slowly to stare back at me. “Are you really?” she
whispered, her voice cracking over the three small words.

I nodded once and her face
crumpled.

“Don’t cry, please Cassie,
don’t cry.” I tried to sound strong, though my voice cracked. My
right arm automatically began pushing me upwards again, I wanted to
reach out and wrap her in my arms. “I’m OK. We made it.”

She nodded, but the silent
tears continued tumbling down her cheeks and I couldn’t hold back
any longer. Shoving as hard as I could, I pushed myself a little
higher in the bunk, despite the protesting of my ribs and
chest.

“Don’t!” Cassie choked through
her tears. “Please – I’ll be OK. I’m just relieved and scared and
happy…I didn’t mean to cry.” Her words hicupped over one another as
she used the grimy sleeve of her suit to brush the wetness from her
eyes.

I did as she asked, not moving,
not wanting to make things worse for her, but the tears were still
falling. “Come here,” I pleaded – needing her to be with me
now.

Throwing the blankets aside,
she hobbled stiff-legged towards me across the short distance. I
shuffled backwards as far as I could in the bunk, staying on my
left side so that she could crawl in beside me. Lifting the
blanket, she gently moved my left hand towards the pillow, putting
it out of the way. In her other hand she took the wires and tubes
still connected to me and moved those behind my head.

As she eased in beside me, I
pulled the blanket over us both and closed my right arm around her,
dragging its tube with it as I moved. Underneth her neck I slid my
left arm tighter around her, lifting it to meet my right hand on
her back, and pulling her against my chest.

Ouch.
I winced at my own
movements.

“Ribs?” she guessed.

“Yeah,” I agreed, grimacing
again as I sucked in a breath.

Cassie pressed her face into my
shoulder and I wondered if she might be crying, but then she spoke.
“I think you broke three. Two on the left side.”

That sounded about right, from
how I felt and what I remembered happening. “I know,” I whispered
back. I didn’t want her dwelling on this – worrying about me. It
was obvious that she’d done absolutely everything possible to treat
my injuries and –

I was distracted as Cassie
fidgeted in my arms, suddenly rubbing her hand against her forehead
as though she had a headache. “Are
you
really OK?” I
asked.

“Just a bit of a headache. I
was pretty dehydrated.”

Dismissive of herself as ever –
nice to see nothing had changed there! I rattled the IV in my right
hand. “Me too, I guess.” From the looks of it, Cassie had focused
on helping me, and maybe hadn’t taken too much care of herself. I
must have been in really bad shape…I remembered the darkness, the
empty nothing spaces I’d drifted through…I had been dying. She
brought me back to life.

My gaze rested on her face as
she pulled away from my shoulder. When I found her eyes, I let
myself drift seeing only the beautiful green-gold colour and
wondering at how it was possible we had made it to this place –
wherever we were.

At length Cassie spoke,
breaking the silent bubble around us. “How do you feel?”

“Not too bad, to be honest…nice
job on the finger splints by the way.” I smiled once more at the
same memory of Cassie’s insecurity about her academic ability. “You
would have made a good medic. If it had been real.”

“I think
real
starts
here.”

“You’re right,” I agreed.

We lay still and quiet for a
while, there was no where else I wanted to be, than here with the
amazing young woman I had my arms wrapped around. It was not a time
for thinking about the past or the future, about where we were or
how we got there…This was a time just for us and I lost myself in
the wonderful peace that being with Cassie brought me.

* * *

A new wailing jolted me and I
cringed as my chest pulled. Perhaps we’d both
fallen asleep again, I felt sluggish. Cassie leapt from my arms and
lunged across the room towards the circular console, slamming her
hand against the screen to deactivate it. The screeching stopped
and for a moment she stood with her back to me,
steadying
herself. She looked dizzy.

“What was that?” I asked,
realising now that each of the alarms had been set by Cassie for
some purpose. The last one – she told me – had been for her to
check my drip and rotate me in the bunk to help my healing
ribs.

“Do you fancy a little
experiment?”

That didn’t sound like it meant
something medical for me…and I wondered what she was planning.

An experiment?

“Always,” I grinned.

“This pod is designed for waste
disposal,” she began, helpfully answering one of the major
questions I had and hadn’t actually asked yet. “It’s programmed on
a rebounding course from the space station that completes after
seventy-two hours.”

We had escaped from the space
station – completely – on a small
waste
craft. That was a
relief, because part of me had wondered – given the familiarity of
our surroundings and the medical equipment – whether Cassie had
just found somewhere for us to hide within the SS Hope. We might
still have been surrounded by those
creatures
…did Cassie
even know that they weren’t human?

Not the right questions for
now, I warned, trying to focus. That wasn’t why Cassie had set an
alarm or was telling me we were inside a waste pod… We were
travelling through space, having escaped on this pod and it would
re-bound back to the station in seventy-two hours, according to its
programming.

“How long have we been on
here?” I asked, guessing what Cassie needed me to
experiment
with. We had to override the programming to take control of the
pod.

“Just over thirty hours,” she
bit into her lip nervously.

“You gave me a long rest,” I
realised, understanding once again how far Cassie had come for me,
what she might have risked in focusing on me.

“You needed it. I’m sorry if it
was too long.”

I shook my head at her. The
last thing she should be doing was feeling guilty. “It’ll be fine.”
I told her, already preparing myself to get up. “Just help me get
to the control panel and I’ll see what we’ve got to work with.”

After everything we had been
through to get out of the SS Hope, there was no chance I was going
to let a programming issue get in my way. Forty hours…I would make
it be enough time.

“Where did all this extra stuff
come from?”

My head was shoved deep inside
one of the pod cupboards and I was marvelling at the amount of food
in there. Stepping back, I closed the door and opened the next,
finding more compact packets of dehydrated food, perfect for a long
journey with limited cooking equipment.