Page 6 of Heat Unwritten
Total darkness swamped the room, a physical weight that pressed against my eyes, save for the terrifying crimson strobe on my wrist and the dying, ghostly glow of the computer monitor.
There, suspended in the fading pixels, Anders Svinton’s email still demanded the impossible. The words dissolved into black as the backup battery on the monitor failed.
The breath left my lungs in a ragged, wet wheeze. I stumbled away from the heavy dark desk, my legs feeling like they were made of rotten wood, porous and splintering under my own weight. I needed light. I needed equilibrium. More than anything, I needed the pills.
The amber bottle sat on the kitchen island, twenty feet away across a stretch of polished floorboards that suddenly felt pitched and rolling like the deck of a sinking ship.
I took a single step, and my knees buckled.
It wasn't a swoon. It was a demolition. A wave of heat, not the slow, sultry build of a natural cycle, but a jagged, chemical spike, slammed into my nervous system with the force of a freight train. It felt like someone had injected boiling water directly into my spine, searing every nerve ending until the pain was blinding white.
This was the withdrawal. This was the reckoning. This was the exorbitant price of forcing my biology into a tidy little box for three years with black-market suppressants, the Omegablock XR-9s that I popped like candy just so I could churn out bestsellers for executives who didn't even know my real name.
"No," I whimpered, the sound scraping my throat raw as I hit the floor. "Not now. Please, not now."
I crawled. The smooth polished floor, usually cool and grounding against my bare feet, felt like sandpaper dragging against my sensitive skin. My oversized sweater, usually my armor against the world, was suddenly a suffocating wool embrace that scratched and burned, every fiber feeling like a wire brush. I tried to pull it off, dragging at the collar, but my coordination was gone. My hands were spasms of useless muscle, refusing to obey.
Projected timeline for total systemic failure: ten minutes,my brain supplied, the internal monologue helpful and cruel.
I reached up, blindly groping for the marble countertop of the island. My fingers brushed the cool, smooth stone, scrambling for purchase. I felt the ribbed plastic of the cap. I swiped.
Clatter.
The sound of the plastic hitting the floor was deafening in the silence, louder than the storm outside. The cap popped off on impact. I heard the sickening, skittering sound of fifty precious stabilizer pills scattering across the dark concrete like dropped pearls.
"No!" The scream tore out of me, raw and animalistic, stripping the lining of my throat.
I scrambled after them, abandoning dignity, patting the floor blindly. My vision swam with black spots and violent red flashes from the wristband. I found one. A tiny, chalky disc nestled in a groove of the floor. I shoved it into my mouth dry, chokingas it stuck to my parched tongue, swallowing it down with a convulsing throat.
But it was too little, too late. The chemical levees had broken.
The heat bloomed in my belly, a twisted, corrosive parody of desire. It didn't feel like arousal; it felt like a fever that was melting my bones into slag. My skin felt too tight for my body, stretched to the bursting point. The scent of my own distress filled the air, so thick and pungent I could taste it on the back of my tongue. It was the smell of a library left open to the sea, drowned and decaying.
Bzzt. Bzzt. Bzzt.
The smart-home panel on the wall by the fridge flickered to life, glowing an eerie, low-power green on its backup battery reserve. A generic, robotic voice cut through the dark, devastatingly calm.
"Alert. Seismic anomaly detected. Sector 4 Bridge access compromised. Main power grid offline. Perimeter security running on reserve."
The bridge was damaged.
The realization hit me harder than the heat. The narrow, steel span that connected my private cliff to the mainland, my umbilical cord to civilization, was unusable. I wasn't just isolated; I was besieged by the elements. Firefighters couldn't get here. An ambulance couldn't get here.
I was trapped in a glass cage with my own broken biology.
I tried to push myself up, frantic to get to the bathroom. If I could just get to the cold tile and ride out the sickness in the tub, maybe I wouldn't die on the kitchen floor. But as I lifted my head, the hallway stretched out, twisting and warping in the shadows.
The lightning flashed outside, illuminating the rain-lashed trees through the glass walls. But in the strobe-light effect of thestorm and the red pulse on my wrist, they didn't look like trees anymore.
They looked like people.
Rows and rows of them. Standing in the dark. Watching. Judging.
A low roar filled my ears, rushing like water, drowning out the wind. It wasn't the ocean. It was applause. Polite, golf-clap applause that slowly morphed into a rhythmic, mocking beat.
Create distance,the logical part of my brain whispered. It sounded remarkably like Anders Svinton, cold, detached, concerned only with the liability.Secure the asset. Minimize exposure.
"I'm trying," I sobbed, dragging my body across the floor by my elbows. My hip bone struck the corner of the wall, a sharp crack of impact, but the pain was distant, muffled by the lava flowing through my veins. "I'm trying to get off the stage."
