40. The Deep Breaths
The Deep Breaths
Cosmer is slipping away from me. I’m dizzy, like I’m on a carousel. I can’t get off it.
The world fades in and out as it goes round and round. I get glimpses of Dezeeves, who’s rushed out from behind me and is hanging out the airlock to help Cosmer in. He’s helping him because –
I’d let go of him.
Someone with strong arms, a warm, musky scent, has taken hold of me. Pulls me backwards, back out of the airlock – but I’m thrashing against him.
Because Dezeeves is a monster, and maybe he’s not helping Cosmer. Maybe he’s trying to throw him out.
Cosmer needed me.
And I let go of him.
Drake looms right over me, blocking my view of them. His eyes, deeply black right now, are narrowed. Determined. He’s trying to put something over my head.
It must be osimidite. I’ve been too disruptive. They’re going to drug me again.
Turn me into an addict. A half-dead huffer.
I panic, fight it. Punch the air. My fist collides with his jaw.
He hardly flinches. Keeps forcing the brass mask over my flailing head.
It’s over. The mask is on me.
I’m trying to get my fingers under it to throw it off, but he’s doing something to me to make me stop. I no longer want to.
I try not to breathe in the gas that will hook me.
I’m laid to rest on the wooden platform.
I wonder if, just maybe, I’m dead.
It would make sense.
My life was just a hell others had made for me.
When I wake again, I’m not on the platform, but in the world in my mind. It’s changed. No longer smoky and dark – now it’s much like the world at altitude. A bluish milky sky, like the colour of Old Mother’s eyes. A raging, deafening wind that won’t let me be. An emptiness.
The only sound I can hear over the wind are my breaths. Are they coming from me? They’re rattling. Shallow and irregular. Sound like they’re being sucked painfully out of me.
I understand. They’re coming from the real me. Outside.
Drake put a mask on me.
Did he drug me?
I don’t think he did. My thoughts are clear.
It was an oxygen mask.
He gave me air. Just air.
And then I hear something else. Commands, being spoken to me. They blend into the wind.
Breathe, Ara, Drake’s voice tells me, calmly.
Breathe. Deep, and slow. In, and out.
I need you to calm down.
And breathe.
It’s softer than his usual voice.
Tender.
He repeats the words again and again.
And his magic is working.
I am calmer. I hadn’t realised how panicked I was. I’d been shuddering, as if being rocked from within. My heart was thundering.
The wind is still wild, but it’s no longer raging against me. More like with me. And now that it’s not so loud, I can hear my breaths clearer. Bring them into more of a rhythm. Get them deeper, steadier, just like he wants me to. In and out.
Deep and slow.
Oxygen fills my cold, aching lungs.
I didn’t want to breathe. I was scared to.
But for Drake – his softly spoken words, as if they were being said to a lover – I do.