Letter Q: Quotation (on Science Fiction Romance Brigade: Both Sides Now)

Q is for quotations, and that is what two of the regular blog hops I belong to are all about: quotations from one’s own work, published or not. Today’s quotation is a continuation of last week’s, also on Science Fiction Romance Brigade Presents, and is from my work in progress tentatively titled Both Sides Now. Click on the logo above for information on the blog hop and links to other authors.

Kevi turned his head from side to side, trying to locate the source of the pain, but it was somewhere beyond the walls of hay. He stretched cautiously, testing his body’s responses. No real pain. His back was straight, which was a blessed relief, and while his hands and feet were distorted and tender, they seemed to be there and whole.

He struggled to a sitting position, in the process discovering that he was wearing a kind of long loose shirt, and then swung his feet to the floor. He had to suppress a gasp as he tried to put weight on them—the wounds had closed, but some of the broken bones had healed crooked. A quick inspection of his hands confirmed that they were in even worse shape.

Under normal circumstances, that would be no problem. He was a Healer, and part of his talent lay in his ability to realign and force knitting of even small fragments of bone. But Healing required both esper and empathic abilities, and Zhaim’s first move had been a massive overdose of hiControl. That didn’t affect empathic abilities or shielding, but his esper talents would be non-existent until he could get the antidote—and that was unlikely to be available on Horizon.

Letter K: Kevi (on Science Fiction Romance Brigade)

Click on the logo above to get links to other SFR Brigade snippets. This one is from a WIP, Both Sides Now

He was Kevi. Roi knew perfectly well who he really was, but the other name was so deeply set in his first awakening that he knew he himself must have set it there, deeply, before he slept.

Further, he had no idea of where he was or how he had gotten there. That argued that he’d been confident enough of his safety that he’d gone into HealSleep. Which in turn meant that he was no longer in Zhaim’s hands.

So why had he awakened with someone else’s pain ringing in his head?

The scent of hay and grain was heavy in the air, and he lay on something that, while not soft, molded itself to his body and shifted slightly when he moved. He opened his eyes to see stacked hay bales, dim in the light of a rechargeable hand light, and found he was lying on piled sacks of grain, with a sheet tucked around them to make a bed. Fine. How had he come here?

It took a little thinking to recover his rescue from Zhaim’s hands, and Terry. How had he ever forgotten that youngster, even for a moment? Then Mikal and Doc, doing what they could to get his shattered body to safety, even though they had no reason to think of him as anything but an enemy, and finally the explosion of Zhaim’s rage as he found Roi missing. He had a faint memory of trying to tell Terry what to expect, no longer able to keep himself conscious, and then nothing.