Kiro
I’m floating forwhat seems like days. Maybe it is. Then her scent comes to me, like the sun through clouds.
I open my eyes. Her ponytail flops over her shoulder as she peers down. Eyes the color of grass. Pink lips in a frown.
“Fuck,” she whispers. “Tell me you’re not as out as all that, dammit.”
She’s silent after that. It’s a minute, or maybe an hour, before she speaks again.
“Can you hear me?”
I say nothing. You never give them anything, or they hurt you. Even her. She hurt me worst of all, but my heart still sings when she lays a hand on my cheek.
“Fuck.”
I fight to open my eyes, or maybe they are open.
“Fuck, 34.” She strokes my beard. It feels like heaven. “34, 34, 34.” She pats my cheek.
My heart pounds.
“Thank you for what you did. I know what you did. I know what you gave up. I’m going to take a look at you now.” She’s unsnapping my shirt. “If he fucking broke anything…” She’s talking, but I’m not hearing words. Only the tone of her voice. I soak in her tone the way the wolves would soak in mine. The way I would soak in theirs.
I dream of home. The pack. My head on Red’s warm, furry belly rising up and down. The one place I wasn’t a savage beast.
Something settles onto my chest where the pain is sharpest. Gentle. It’s a cloud. It’s a whisper. No—it’s her hand. She’s whispering fast words. Ann’s upset—it’s in her tone. In the distance, I hear the birds. That’s what she took from me. Any chance at freedom.
Her hand is gone. She swears again—Fuck it!
A softness settles back onto my chest. Different from the glove. Warm. Alive. Nourishing, somehow. Her skin on my skin. She’s touching me without her glove!
Am I dreaming?
She’s touching me with her bare hand. She’s my enemy, my beautiful enemy, and I drink up her touch. I drink it like sunshine.
Fuck, 34, fuck. Fuck!And then other things.X-ray. Where’s the doctor. Did he even fucking see you yet?
More words. Her skin on my skin. My breath shakes with the power of her touch.
Shhh. Here we go.Suddenly her hand is gone. She’s snapping my shirt back up, quick, furtive movements.
She takes my hand and holds it open, palm up. She’s crouching over me, as if to hide me. She’s brushing something wet onto my fingers, touching my fingers. She presses my thumb onto something dry. Then she presses my finger onto something, rolling it. She keeps doing it, one after another, a strange caress on each of my fingers.
“We need this, 34,” she says. “I’m going to help you…get us the truth.”
Alarm bells go off in my head. We. Us. Help you. That’s the way the professor talked when he pretended to be my friend. The way the medics spoke when they pulled me out of the forest, when I was too weak to run. It’s how my adoptive father would talk when he was trying to trick me.
I always fell for it. I always wanted to think things would be different. Especially with my father. But as soon as I appeared, he’d grab me and make me sorry out in the woods or in the root cellar, trying to beat the savage out of me.
I was savage and feral from the first moment I can remember, a creature of blood and violence and hell with a fever inside me. My father told me so.
He tried very hard to beat the savage out of me, but he never could.
It was the cries of my adoptive sister Glenda that brought the savage out of me most. Kids down the road would tease her and make her cry because of her deformed lip. Sometimes they’d hurt her. The sound of her crying would take over my mind and turn me wild with rage. I would hurt a lot of kids trying to protect Glenda.
Things would be calm for a while, but then the boys would gather an even larger group, sometimes even a few older boys, and they’d make Glenda cry again, and I would get angry again and want to hurt them.
They always thought a bigger group or larger boys would help, but it never did. I’d hurt them all. Then the beatings. The root cellar.