Page 114 of Code Bound
Smiling I hold my fist in front of her so she can bump her arm against my knuckles. Only then do I notice the raw meat of my arm and my eyes widen.
“You were passed out,” Svetlana says. “But you called out to me in your sleep and I was able to spawn.” She tilts her head. “Sorry about your arm, but you did not wake from the pain, so it is a win, dah?”
“Will you two shut up?” Locke grumbles.
He’s lying on the bed beside me, his back turned to us so that he faces the wall. I reach out and move my hand along his side, almost as if to reassure myself that he’s alive. At my touch, he turns and looks over his shoulder at me. Our eyes lock, and something passes between us.
Relief? Fondness? I don’t know. But it’s something.
My body still aches, a reminder of the Minor Boss battle with the orca pod. The water had been numbing, but my fingers and toes are all normal-looking. There’s no way we weren’t effected by the icy water. We should be covered in frostbite. How are we so . . . okay?
“The warming potion,” Locke comments. “They forced us to drink potions when they dragged us on board.” He flexes his own fingers, as if he’d been thinking the same thing. “Apparently, they all but cured us. What it didn’t fix, the healing room did.”
I rub at my thighs. “I wish they could cure this ache,” I murmur. “My thigh muscles are killing me.” How long had we swum for before the horned creature appeared? I don’t know, but apparently, the safehouse healing room doesn’t work for fatigued muscles, only actual injuries. At least the ache isn’t so bad that I can’t walk. It’ll just be annoying.
I glance at Svetlana, sizing her up. “So . . . a praying mantis can’t survive in the cold?”
“Of course not,” she replies. “I am a summer girl.”
“You’re getting blood on the sheets,” Locke murmurs.
I’d laid my arm on my knee and hadn’t even realized. The white sheets are stained red where my arm had been sitting and I wince. I hope that won’t be a problem. I’m gonna need to wrap the wound up. I don’t have any more of the minor healing ointment from before, but I do have a strip of cotton cloth that will work as a bandage. Maybe there will be a trader at this safehouse, too.
“Why doesn’t it heal, too?” I muse. “Everything else does.”
“A familiar wound is not the same as a regular wound,” Svetlana declares. “It is purer, magical in some ways, and it can only be healed with time or an equally magical ointment.” She shrugs. “Or perhaps, safehouses take issue with Beast Bound’s and their familiars. I don’t actually know.” She snickers. “I sounded like an expert there for a moment though, didn’t I?”
I snort. “You did. It’s okay though. Whatever the reason, I’ll address it later.”
I’m not wearing any clothing. Neither one of us are. Everything had been soaked, so there was no way we could have slept in them. Luckily, the clothes I’d been wearing in the ocean are hanging up around the room where they’d been able to dry. Locke’s are scattered around as well, hanging wherever they were able to. I press a hand to my forehead and rub, trying to remember what had happened after we were dragged from the water.
“How long were we out?” I ask. Everything is fuzzy. I can’t remember anything after watching Svetlana die in my hands.
“Three days, eighteen hours, twelve minutes, and forty-one seconds.”
My shoulders ease. “Cipher,” I breathe.
“I’m here, Vespera,” he answers. “I am always here.”
“We were out of it for three days?” I clarify.
“Yes. Almost four.”
I have enjoyed our banter . . .
He’d pulled back when we’d needed him most, and now here he is as if nothing had happened. My face hardens and the relief I’d felt at hearing his voice disappears.
“You left us,” I accuse. “You leftme.”
He hesitates. “You had a point-zero-zero-three percent chance of survival?—”
“It doesn’t matter,” I growl. “If I was going to die there, you didn’t have to leave. You didn’t have to abandon us for your statistics.”
Locke studies me. “Vesper,” he murmurs, getting my attention. I glance at him. “Cipher is just a machine,” he reminds me. “He isn’t human. We shouldn’t forget what he is.”
My throat tightens. I want to argue, to point out that Cipher is more than that and I expected more from him, but then I’d sound insane. Cipher doesn’t talk to Locke like he talks to me, and I’d thought . . .I’d thought . . .
“You’re right,” I murmur, shutting Cipher out of my mind. I think of a wall, layering it up piece by piece, until I can no longer feel him there. “I shouldn’t expect him to be there with me when I die.” I tip up my chin. “Cipher? Have the Harrow Gates opened?”
