She was heavy, so heavy, as if hands held her down, as if gravity clung to her jealously.
Calea knew where she was–in her bedroom. She could lift her aching head, move her good arm and leg, but the others were anchors, shackles. She tried to push herself up, but her mechanical arm would not respond. Her shoulder moved futilely, the great chain of her own invention solid and immobile.
Her breath came in short gasps, suddenly, as the memory hit her. A girl in magic, like a fly in syrup. Her arm, caught between teeth, sucked in inch by inch. Devoured and savored like a delicacy.
Calea forced away the absurd fancy, the fancy of an irresponsible and silly girl. A fancy burned deep by the events of that day. A fancy that gripped her still in dreams in the long, dark nights.
Calea inched forward, dragging herself by hand and foot. She had trained herself to sense the levels of her batteries, to mentally calculate efficiency. They were completely drained. She couldn’t sense….
It was gone. She recognized it by its absence–the Well, with its power, empty. Like a limb removed, one you could almost will to move though it no longer existed.
Her first emotion was pleasure. The girl who had survived smiled and triumphed. The girl who spent her first night faced with the reality that nothing mattered, that everything could change in an instant, smiled and let the warm taste of revenge roll about on her tongue, just behind thin, smiling lips.
It had tried its same old trick–take a leg, take an arm. Calea struggled forward, nearly delirious with the strange emotion welling up. Alongside anger and despair, irrational hot-blooded vengeance. She laughed.
She managed to sit and surveyed her suite. Through the missing wall, she could see the city filled with smoke in the early morning light. Her chest heaved with exertion. Her mechanical limbs had long overcompensated for her fleshy ones.
The joy was fading. She felt tired. The path out of her rooms was made serpentine and difficult by the disaster. Black smoke twirled about in the red light of morning.
The girl remembered the fan above her hospital bed, twirling, twirling, hours passing thoughtlessly, without visitors. She drifted like the smoke, black and rising, churning and formless.
“Guide Lisan!”
Calea shuddered and turned away.
“Guide Lisan, are you in there?”
She wanted to shrink down behind the rubble, like the girl who hid beneath the covers when a friend had finally come to visit, to see what remained of the eaten girl, the girl magic spit out. Scrambling footsteps sounded in the adjoining room.
“Go away!”
“Are you injured?”
“No–not at all! I am collecting my things. Leave me.”
A hesitation. They would go. She knew how to make people listen and obey. She knew how to drive people away.
The girl who survived was not the same as the one who fell in. So much had been devoured by the Well. It had pruned her, stripped away what was nonessential.
No more voices came. She watched the city and considered joining the view, tumbling out and among all those suffering people.
No, the Well had tried its last assault. She survived. It was something. It was all that really mattered. She dragged herself forward, inch by inch. No one was going to pull her out this time. The girl who survived had left her friends for dead long ago.
She was on her own.
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