Page 21 of Prima (After the End #8)

She opens her eyes only long enough to put her back against his. Once the brothers open fire, at least she’ll no longer worry about the body servant approaching from the fore. “To the left of the crank there is a lever. Use it to raise up the shield.”

The body servant stops for a fraction of a second longer—he too must be calculating how not to get caught in the crossfire. She pulls the trigger. He screams, but the sound is drowned by barrages from the autocannon and the plane’s gun.

The body servant runs again, slower this time. The red dot behind her eyelids fades somewhat. Is he too injured to project as much ill will?

Armor-piercing shells screech through the air. The raft wobbles with the autocannon’s powerful recoil. The muscles on the boy’s back, pressed into hers, coil and flex as he cranks the next round into the autocannon’s barrel.

The red dot disappears. She dares not open her eyes right away in case it’s trickery on the body servant’s part. But what if he’s dead? That would make the red dot go away, wouldn’t it?

She opens her eyes but can see no one on the ring of the atoll around the lagoon. The atoll has no vegetation and its highest point is barely fifteen centimeters above sea level—there is no place to hide.

Except—

Sirens go off in her head. She scans the lagoon on the side of the raft closest to where the body servant was. Nothing. Shit. She whips her head around just as he surfaces on the other side of the raft, a nerve gun in hand.

He is not aiming at her, but at Prince Nineteen, the one they’ve come to kill in the first place.

She throws herself in front of the boy she loves and opens fire at the same time.

Blood blooms from the body servant’s forehead, a grotesque flower. He sinks into the lagoon. She falls to the raft.

Did he hit her? She feels normal. She feels fine. She—

So much pain hits her at once; she twitches and spasms. Then twice as much pain. Twice as much pain again. Her skin burns. Her inside burns. She opens her mouth but she can’t make any sounds.

Her eyes dissolve. Her spine is on fire. A red-hot scalpel scrapes the inside of her head.

Something thumps against the raft. It’s her, convulsing uncontrollably.

The next second she’s in water, completely submerged. But that does nothing for the pain. She thrashes. Knives have been wedged under her nails. She—

Someone catches her and holds her tight. It will not help. Nothing will help.

But her full-throttled agony stutters and hiccups. One moment she’s in the very depths of hell, the next she’s in pain that would have had her rolling on the floor, moaning, but not losing her mind. And this practically normal pain feels like the first drops of rain after a hundred-year drought.

Pain slams into her again, vile, infernal. But it’s a lesser circle of hell. And when this torment splutters, the normal pain in the seconds that follow is so beautiful she might as well be rolling around in flower petals.

She opens her eyes. They float vertically in the water, she and the boy, his arm banded around her, his forehead against hers. Behind his tightly closed eyelids, the movement of his eyes is rapid and erratic.

Another wave of wretchedness roars through her. She closes her eyes and plummets back into hell.

* * *

When she opens her eyes again, it’s because something wet, cold, and possibly massive is nudging her in the foot, repeatedly, insistently.

And it’s raining, raindrops as heavy as pebbles smacking her everywhere.

She lies face-down on her raft—or most of her does.

Below mid-thigh, her legs stick out over the edge, her toes dragging in the water.

That something wet, cold, and possibly massive nudges her again. She stays still. A vague yet powerful memory makes her think that she can’t move without causing grievous damage to herself, because—because—

She scrambles to a sitting position. The nerve gun. The body servant sinking into the lagoon. The unearthly pain. Her lover holding her tight in the water.

She panics. Where is he?

His orca, which has never been closer than a kilometer away, turns her raft slightly.

With the broken mast—when did that happen?

—and the autocannon out of her line of sight, she spies him on the atoll, lying on wet sand in an odd way, his head near the water’s edge, not on the lagoon side but on the ocean side, as if he was pitched from the lagoon and landed just short of the Pacific.

She tries to stand up but collapses again. She’s no longer in pain—or at least no longer in any kind of pain that can’t be ignored—but now that the rush of adrenaline that brought her to a sitting position has dissipated, she’s almost as useless as a newborn.

“Hi,” she says to the orca, as loudly as her weakened vocal cords allow. “Can you push me closer to shore?”

She finds the remote in her pocket that detaches the raft from the understructure.

Without the understructure, the raft rides disconcertingly low in the fore, due to the weight of the autocannon, but she can’t care about that now.

The orca does as she suggested, prodding the raft gently.

She feels around on her person—as they were hauling the autocannon out of the understructure, she also strapped on the usual battle-prep kit.

She unwraps a nutrition bubble, sucks it dry, and jabs herself with a dose of stimulant—she doesn’t have time to wait for the effect of the nerve gun to wear away.

At the shore, she staggers off the raft face-first into knee-high waves, crawls onto the beach, and drags herself to his side.

At least he’s alive and breathing normally, thank goodness.

Now what?

Shit, how much time has passed? She consults her watch.

It’s five in the afternoon on the same day.

Which means she has right about forty-eight hours left for a forty-eight-hour journey home before she becomes disqualified for taking too long to complete her Grand Tour.

And she can’t leave yet, not with him unconscious and—she glances to the east—a dead Prince Eleven in the seaplane.

She checks his pupils, his stimuli response, and his airway. Everything seems fine, except that the sky has poured water all over him and he’s still unconscious.

She struggles to her feet, returns to her raft, and paddles out to the understructure—her body seems to have responded rather well to the two-pronged approach of calories and stimulant.

Somewhere in the understructure is a dose of experimental drug the young lieutenant who’d showed her around the war zone had given to her as a parting gift.

If you or a comrade absolutely have to get up and carry on, this is the thing. Fast-acting and not too many side effects.

What’s the catch?

The effect wears off in three or four hours, by which time you’d better have reached safety.

She finds it, returns to the beach, and pumps the full dose into his veins.

The rain is stopping. She brings the woven straw mat that earlier acted as a canopy on her raft to the beach, places him on top of it, strips off his wet clothes, and covers him with a blanket.

After she changes out of her own wet clothes, she discovers, on the beach, his camping stove with the pot of rice porridge he made for her breakfast still sitting on top of it, as if there hadn’t been flying shells this day on this atoll and a murderous servant zipping around at superhuman speeds.

Tears fall from her eyes, shocking her. They haven’t even said goodbye yet. She’s worried, tired, aching all over, her mind far too active thanks to the stupid stimulant, but she isn’t sad. No, she isn’t.

“Are you okay?”

She whips around. He’s awake. She runs, still a little unsteadily, toward him.

He wraps the blanket around his middle, picks up her mat, and rolls it up. “What happened? You don’t look too good.”

She stops. “You don’t remember what happened?”

This is an odd question to ask a young man who forgets things as part of his concurrent ability, but she was expecting to be a stranger to him when he woke up, wasn’t she? That’s why she was crying.

He rubs his temple. “Eleven and I were shooting at each other, and you and the body servant were engaged in your own death struggle. I guess we won. But did I get knocked unconscious by something?”

Her heart sinks endlessly. The forgetting has already begun. She has disrupted it, maybe, but it has begun.

He comes close and places a hand on her arm, the perfectly normal warmth of his hand a shock to her system. “Lanzhou, you weren’t hurt, were you?”

“I—I was.” Her voice shakes and she can’t make it stop. “The body servant hit me with a nerve gun right before I killed him. You took away the pain.”

And saved her.

And doomed them even more than they already had been.

He looks as if she struck him and doesn’t speak for nearly a minute. And when he does, he sounds dazed. Lost. “That memory is already gone. I thought—I thought I would remember you for longer. But how come I’m awake and feeling more or less normal?”

Her voice still shakes. “Must be the effect of the experimental drug I gave you to wake you up. But it lasts only three or four hours. Afterwards you might fall unconscious again.”

He still remembers her. All she wants is to hold him, for as long as possible. But they do not have that luxury. “Listen, time is short. You must first deal with the situation at hand.”

He rubs a hand over his face. “You’re right. There’s so much to do.”

They gather up all their belongings, including the blankets, now a sodden mass, that he threw on the sand in the morning before he kissed her, an eternity ago.

They attach the laden raft back to its understructure, collect the mast blasted off by gunfire from the seaplane—its presence might lead to questions he doesn’t want to answer—then navigate out of the lagoon.