I no longer know what time it is. I’ve been lying on the damp, gritty floor of this cell for hours. Maybe a day. Maybe more. Without a way to track the sun, I can’t be sure.
Pain is my constant companion—stabbing me with every breath and making a mockery of my attempts at sleep. At least one rib is broken, my arms and legs ache fiercely with bone-deep bruises, and my eyes are nearly swollen shut.
But worse than all of that is the burn on my neck. Every throb of agony from my seared flesh is a reminder of the Commander’s power over me. I want to use the pain to focus on a plan to remove that power from him permanently, but my thoughts are fuzzy and vague, and the pain seems so much more important.
A chill seeps into me from the stone floor I lay on, and even with my cloak, I’m shivering. I should force myself to stand up and walk. Loosen the muscles. Promote faster healing.
I inhale slowly, trying to keep from pressing my lungs against my rib cage with too much force, and place my palms flat on the floor in front of me.
My body shakes as I slowly push myself to my hands and knees, inch by torturous inch. Gray dots swirl in front of my limited vision, and my empty stomach rebels against the waves of dizziness swamping me.
I may have gained my cloak, but I’m in no shape to gain my freedom.
It’s a devastating thought, but I can’t hang on to it for long. Heat is eating away at my brain, blurring the edges of reality until I can’t tell if the contents of my head are memories, dreams, or wisps of things not worth the effort it takes to force them into something that makes sense.
I can’t stand without help. Crawling toward the wall is a slow, agonizing process, and I stop frequently to rest, laying my face against the filthy stone floor and shivering both from external cold and the internal heat that blazes through my head but refuses to warm my body.
How does one cure a fever? I can’t remember. My body shakes as I force myself to keep crawling. Keep moving. Keep pushing my muscles to work through the bruises because he’ll come back. And I refuse to let him kill me.
I reach the wall sometime later and discover my nose is bleeding. I don’t know how long that’s been going on, and I decide I don’t care.
From a distance, I hear the main dungeon door open, and I know I should be afraid, but that takes too much effort. Instead, I dig my fingers into the rugged texture of the wall beside me, and pull myself to my feet.
The room spins in slow, sickening circles. I try to breathe through the nausea this creates, but dragging air into my lungs ignites the terrible pain in my side.
Someone is walking along the row between cells. I don’t know who it is. I can’t seem to turn my head to look. Instead, I lean my forehead against the cold stone of the wall and shake uncontrollably.
Rachel is out there. Somewhere. I know I should remember something important about her situation, but with fire eating at my brain, all I can think about is her hair in the sunlight. Like flames. Like the flames pounding at the inside of my skull.
I bang my head against the wall to put out the flames, but they just multiply.
Move.
I have to move.
If I don’t, he’ll kill me before I can escape.
I slide one foot in front of me, but it wobbles, and I have to hang on to the wall to keep from falling over.
Someone opens the door to my cell. The noise explodes inside my head, sending brutal hammers of pain into my temples. I let go of the wall to cover my ears, and pitch forward onto the unforgiving stone floor.
Footsteps hurry my way, and I reach for my sword. It isn’t there, and the motion triggers the pain in my side until I’m gasping air in quick, shallow breaths.
The owner of the footsteps reaches me and crouches down. I can’t see who it is, but the soft scent of lavender seeps through the stench of my cell and makes me want to close my eyes and pretend I’m in a field. Safe. Free. Lying on a bed of crushed lavender while the pain in my body subsides into nothing but memory, and those I love are still alive and well.
“Oh,” a girl’s voice exclaims in a whisper. A cool hand presses against my forehead.
I’m dreaming. I must be. There aren’t any girls walking freely through the dungeon. My brain has cooked up a fantasy, and if I don’t snap out of it, whoever is truly inside my cell with me will kill me before I can keep my promise to Rachel.
Rachel.
Rachel doesn’t smell like lavender. She smells like citrus and midnight jasmine, and I wish the lavender would disappear and become Rachel’s scent instead.
It doesn’t.
Instead, the same cool hands that were pressed to my forehead are busy pushing something into the pocket of my cloak.
“Food,” she whispers against my ear. “I’m putting medicine for your fever in the water. When the fever goes down, eat.”
A cup tips against my lips and a trickle of bitter-tasting water dribbles into my mouth. I swallow reflexively, though part of me is screaming that this is a trick. A trap. Another wicked ploy of the Commander’s to torture me. Maybe it’s poison. Maybe it’s something that will scrape me raw inside, doubling the pain until I want to kill myself just to make it end.
I turn my face and let another mouthful of water leak out onto the floor.
A girl lays her face next to mine, her outline blurry through the swollen slits of my eyelids. “Swallow,” she says softly. “We’re trying to help you.”
I want to ask her who she means. No one helps you once you’re in the dungeon. No one has ever helped me outside the dungeon either, except for Oliver, Jared, and Rachel.
The hard, brisk steps of a guard echo down the row, coming swiftly toward my cell.
“Hurry!” she whispers and presses the cup to my lips.
The water feels good, even if it tastes vile, and I swallow. It might be a trick. It might make things worse, but the heat beating at my brain won’t allow me the luxury of thinking through my options, and I’m desperately thirsty.
“What are you doing, girl?” the guard demands.
“Watering the prisoner as you asked,” she says, her tone low and respectful.
“He’s had enough. Get out of there.”
She stands immediately and exits the cell, her steps hurried. The guard laughs as he looks at me lying on the floor, shivering while blood slowly seeps out of my nose.
I close my eyes and wish for a world where Rachel and Jared are safe and Oliver is alive.