Hunger

I ate because the food came and because my body, broken in ways that demanded fuel, took it. I ate on the floor because I could not stand. The first day I crawled to the tray the attendants left by the door and I ate with my hands and the bread tasted like nothing and the soup tasted like nothing and I ate it anyway because the cracked wrist had swollen to the size of an apple and my knees were scabbed and my shoulder burned where it had been wrenched and my body needed to repair itself and it would repair itself whether I wanted it to or not.

The attendants did not help me. They set the tray inside the door and they stepped back and they watched me crawl to it and they did not move and their eyes followed me with the flat curiosity of things observing a process and I was the process.

By the second day I could stand. The wrist was still swollen. The knees still scabbed. But the body is a machine and the machine repairs and I stood and I took the tray to the table and I sat in the chair and I ate and the food tasted like ash and I did not care because the craving had started and the craving made food irrelevant.

It was in my blood. In the marks. The needle spinning, searching, reaching in every direction and finding nothing. A frequency my body was tuned to that was no longer broadcasting. The silence of it louder than any sound she had ever made.

By the third day I stopped eating. The tray came and I looked at it and my body refused it with the flat animal certainty of a thing that knows what it needs and will not accept substitutes. I drank the water. The water I needed. The rest of it might as well have been gravel.

The elder came on the third day.

She did not knock. The door opened and she was inside and the door closed and she stood with her back to it and she looked at me and I was standing, mid-pace, my hands opening and closing at my sides, and the marks throbbed and the pull in my blood swung toward her and fell back, confused, the wrong signal.

She crossed the room. She picked up the untouched tray. She set it on the table in front of me.

"Eat."

"I can't."

"Eat."

"I can't."

Her hand came up. I flinched. The flinch was automatic, the body remembering the hands, the pavement, the stairs, and her hand stopped. She looked at my flinch and something moved behind her eyes that I could not read and her hand lowered and she pressed it flat on the table and the knuckles went white.

She did not explain. She did not offer the bond or the mercy or the clinical justification. She stood with her hand white on the table and her jaw set and she looked at me and her eyes went to the marks on my neck and stayed there and the thing behind her eyes was the thing I had seen before, the rigidity, the fixation, the look of someone standing at the edge of something they are thinking about taking.

She looked away. She straightened. She left. The door closed. The lock turned.

I stood at the table and I stared at the door and I thought, she did not tell me to stay. She has never told me to stay. But the program was running, Elena's program, the last instruction, and my body held it like a lock and I did not go to the door.

She came at night.

The woman. Not the elder. A woman, young-faced, beautiful, cold, and she entered without knocking and she closed the door and she looked at me with the same flat clinical interest the attendants had and she crossed the room and she did not speak and she put her hand on my jaw and she turned my head and her mouth found the marks.

The gold flickered.

One second. One blinding second of the old light, the old warmth, the old promise, and my body arched into her mouth and my hands found her arms and the sound that came out of me was raw and desperate and full of a relief that lasted exactly one second before the gold died.

Salt water.

The mouth on my neck was just a mouth. Cold. Wrong. The hunger sharpened with every swallow instead of easing and my body was responding anyway, the old conditioning, the training, arousal and pain braided together, and none of it helped, none of it fed the thing that was starving.

She pulled back. She looked at me. She looked at the door. She said something in the musical language, fast, sharp, and she left and the door closed and I was alone and my neck was bleeding and the marks were worse, inflamed, burning with a low persistent heat that had not been there before the false feeding.

I went to the floor. My back found the wall. I sat there with my hand on my neck and the blood warm between my fingers and the wound closing human-slow and the hunger clawing at me from the inside.

I went to the door. I put my hand on it. I pressed my forehead to the wood.

I did not turn the handle.

I stood there for a long time. The program running. The instruction holding. And on the other side of the door, very quiet, I heard breathing. Not mine. The quality of presence that meant someone was standing very close, very still, on the other side.

I did not know if it was real.

I went back to the wall. I sat. The edges of things started to go soft. A blurring at the periphery. A faintness in the candlelight, as though the flames were behind glass. The walls seemed to breathe, very slightly, and the marks pulsed and the pulse seemed to extend into the room, into the air, as though the room itself had a heartbeat.

The fever was starting.

I closed my eyes. I felt it coming, the soft dark tide, the thing that blurred the line between the world and the dream. I did not fight it. In the dream she might be there. In the dream the marks might sing. In the dream the salt water might become wine.

I let it take me.

And at the very edge of the fever, at the border between waking and gone, I felt something. A presence. Not Elena. Not the pull. Something close. Something standing over me, beside the bed, near enough that I should have felt its breath on my face if it had breath to give.

I opened my eyes. The room was empty. The candles flickered. The marks burned.

I was alone.

But the air where the presence had been was colder than the rest of the room, as though something had been standing there long enough to leave a shadow in the temperature, and the cold was the shape of a woman, and the shape was wrong, too short, too still, too old.

I closed my eyes. The fever took me down.

And the dreams began.