Taking

It happened on a night like the others.

No warning. No shift in the air. No omen. I had spent the day turning over the details of the elder, the garden, the doorway, the chair leather creaking under her grip, and by afternoon I had filed them away because there was nothing to assemble. I ate. I rested. The marks sang low and content. The bed smelled like Elena and I pressed my face into it and I slept, and the sleep was good, deep and dreamless and warm.

I woke to a hand on my face.

Not Elena's. The hand was across my mouth and jaw, pressing down, and the weight behind it was absolute, and before I could open my eyes fully there were more hands, on my arms, my legs, my chest, pinning me flat, and the pressure was not careful. My left arm was wrenched sideways and something in the shoulder wrenched with it and the pain was bright and immediate and I tried to scream and the hand on my mouth absorbed it.

I bit. I felt skin tear under my teeth and the hand did not move. Did not flinch. The taste of blood, cold and thin, and the hand stayed exactly where it was, pressing my jaw shut, and I understood with a clarity that went through me like a blade that the hand did not move because my teeth meant nothing to it. I could not hurt them. The biting was a fly biting a stone.

Something hit the back of my head. Not a blow. A placement. A palm against my skull and a pressure, inward, and the room went dark at the edges and I felt my body go loose, not unconscious, not quite, but dimmed, the lights turned low, and the hands lifted me off the bed and I was moving.

I was carried through the door. Through the corridor. The candles were out. The stone was cold under the air and I was naked and the cold was a thing with edges. My arms were pinned. My legs were pinned. My head lolled and I saw the floor moving under me, stone, then darker stone, then a door I had never seen, low and narrow, and the air changed, damp and mineral, and beyond the door a passage that smelled of earth.

I tried to move. My body made a sound that was supposed to be her name and the hand on my mouth adjusted, pressing harder, and the fingers found the hinge of my jaw and squeezed and the pain was precise and surgical and I understood that it was a message. Move again and the jaw comes next.

I did not move.

The passage opened onto cold air. Night. Rain on my skin. A street and a car idling and the hands put me down on the wet pavement and held me there and someone said something in the musical language and someone laughed and the laugh was short and flat and bored and I understood that I was cargo.

They lifted me again. They put me in the car. The door closed. The interior was warm and dark and I was on the floor, not the seat, the floor, curled on the carpet with my face against the upholstery, and someone's shoe was on my shoulder holding me down and the shoe did not move when I shifted.

The car moved. I lay on the floor and I shook and the marks on my neck throbbed and reached and found nothing and the nothing was a sound, a high thin whine, the broadcast gone silent.

I do not know how long we drove. Long enough for the shaking to become a steady tremor I could not stop. Long enough for the shoe on my shoulder to lift and the foot to nudge me onto my side and someone threw a coat over me, heavy, smelling of nothing, and the covering was not kindness. It was so the driver did not have to look at me.

The car stopped. The door opened. Hands pulled me out by my arms and my feet found pavement and then gravel and the gravel bit into my bare soles and they walked me forward, fast, faster than my legs could manage, and I stumbled and one of them caught me by the hair and pulled me upright and the pull tore at my scalp and I was walked through a gate and down a path and the path was lined with trees I could not see and the air smelled of water and pine and cold.

A building. A door. A corridor. Stone under my feet. Then stairs, and the hands on my arms did not slow for the stairs and my feet caught the edge of a step and I went forward and they let me go and I hit the stairs with my knees and my hands and the stone bit into my palms and my kneecap and I heard something in my wrist crack, not a break, a crack, a line of fire that went up my forearm, and one of them said something flat and the other reached down and gripped my arm and pulled me to my feet and the grip was on the cracked wrist and I screamed and the sound went up the stairwell and no one cared.

A door opened. They pushed me through it. Not guided. Pushed. A hand between my shoulder blades and I stumbled forward into the room and the door closed behind me and the lock turned.

I fell. My knees hit the floor and then my hands, one, the cracked wrist screaming, and I went down onto my side and I lay there on the stone in the dark and I breathed and the marks throbbed and the room was wrong.

Wrong. The proportions close to Elena's but not right. The ceiling too high. The walls too far. The air empty of her, empty of ozone and copper, empty of the particular frequency my body was tuned to, and the emptiness was a physical thing, a pressure, the absence of her pressing against me from every direction.

I lay on the floor and I bled from my knees and my palms and my wrist swelled and the marks burned and I pressed my face against the cold stone and I said her name into the floor and no one answered.

The door opened. I did not hear it open. I heard the elder's voice, close, above me, and I had not heard her arrive.

"You will heal," she said.

I looked up. She was standing over me. She looked down at me on the floor and her face was the mask, geological, vast, and she did not offer her hand. She did not kneel. She stood over me the way you stand over a thing on the ground that is not your concern.

"Eat when food comes. Drink. Sleep."

"When is she coming."

"She is not."

"She will find me."

"She will not look."

The door closed. The lock turned.

I lay on the floor and the room was dark and the marks reached and reached and reached and there was nothing there.