I became very familiar with the inside of that little guest room. Very, very familiar. It was our prison cell, after all.
Two beds. One small table. A drawer, mocking us with the implication that we might have anything at all to store inside of it. I traced out the patterns on the walls, guessed at how they had been carved, mused on the amount of skill shown by the probably-human crafter. I swept the dust off as best as I could, using my shirtsleeves and Ikamja’s jacket, purely out of a need to have literally anything to do. We’d tried breaking out, but the doors were made out of incredibly thick, hardy wood, reinforced with metal bands that not even my speed and Ikamja’s strength could shatter.
For twelve long days we were confined to that room, the door locked, receiving our meals slipped through the cracks. Thank goodness it had an attached lavatory, at least, but that was about the end of the proper amenities. There was nothing to do, nowhere to go. I thought they were going to keep us prisoner forever, but Ikamja had her own theory, that this was a display of strength designed to make us pliant and desperate, so that when they set us free we would make all sorts of concessions, maybe even offer our fealty to Tarvaka.
If it weren’t for Ikamja, I would have probably done something drastic. Being immortal meant that I could have done all sorts of mad things, carved through the walls and leapt all the way to the ground or the like; I certainly felt the urge. Blame the ADHD; being confined with nothing but my own thoughts for ten hours out of every twenty-four was an absolute hell. But she was far more composed, even as the days wore on and the inevitable stress turned into a subtle tremor in her muscles, even as sweat and dirt ruined her elaborate uniform. Her quiet, ready dignity forced me to keep up with her.
It also helped that I, unlike her, had some means of escape, in the form of Earth. It was the first time since my initial return from Selene where Earth felt like a comfort, a safe place, as opposed to its own form of slow, steady, aching entrapment. There was really nothing interesting going on there–the same repetitive grind of commute, lab work, home-cooked dinner and sleep–but at least it varied. It was a different, delicious home-cooked meal every day, not the same gruel and cheese that the stonewose guards fed us on the other world. The work in the lab was humdrum, the sort of thing I’d spent years doing, but at least it wasn’t counting the number of clockwise and counter-clockwise turns in a bit of wooden scrollwork.
Also I had the internet, which was another leg-up Earth had over Selene. Lots of fun things you can do on the internet when your life is meaningless and you don’t give a shit.
The endless monotony and boredom of imprisonment, the struggle against my own psyche, meant that I almost didn’t notice the ticking time bomb in the room until it was too late. Ikamja’s condition was degrading. The muscle tremor that I’d attributed at first to ordinary stress started getting worse until she was struggling to stand at times. Her eyes became wide and red, her jaw developed an uncomfortable set, her hands would flex and curl into claws without meaning to. After twelve days of watching this happen, it finally hit me. A few hours after that, I broke the uncomfortable topic.
“It’s been a while since the last time you ate anybody, hasn’t it been?” I was sitting on the bed that had been decided was mine, looking at Ikamja as she leaned up against the far corner of the room.
Ikamja glared at me with an intensity of hatred that, in any other context, would have relayed murderous intent. “It has. Almost… two entire months, now.”
“How bad is it?”
Ikamja paused, looking down at the floor. “Agonizing. I can feel my own blood tearing at my flesh. My focus is growing weaker, and I find myself drawn to violence.”
“How much longer before I have to fight you off?” I asked.
She shrugged. “I have become used to feats of will. Days longer, perhaps. Not that I’d be stupid enough to do it while you were awake.”
It didn’t come as a surprise; hell, I’d been thinking the exact same thing. If Ikamja wanted to eat me, all she had to do was wait until I was asleep. There were decent odds that I wouldn’t even wake up until I was halfway down her throat. The way my regeneration worked, I wouldn’t be able to grow back anything that got properly separated, at least not without cutting her open and ripping it back out.
“I could just kill you now, I suppose.”
“But you will not,” she replied.
“No. Not unless I have to. You’ve been… much better to me than I had any right to ask for.”
“Which is precisely why I have not killed and eaten you already. I would like to imagine that restraint will pay its dividends.”
And that was the end of that conversation. We knew where we stood; neither of us would try to kill the other, not until deprivation left us with no other choice. Again and again, Ikamja had surprised me by how honorable she was, how erudite. Her species were cannibalistic raiders, but the more I came to know of them, the more strongly I understood that it was not by choice.
But willpower is not an infinite resource, and Ikamja’s state continued to decline. There was one day where I went to sleep with Ikamja curled up in the corner muttering to herself, spent my full allotment of thirteen hours on Earth, and woke up again to find her in the exact same place and position, still conscious and whispering. It was like the fire of her spirit was slowly dying down, leaving only the ashes behind. Our captors had to have known that she was a stonewose, that human flesh was a requirement rather than a preference. Once or twice I even considered banging at the door and begging for help, but that would mean asking for someone to be killed and slaughtered for my friend’s benefit.
It had been over two weeks when the breaking point finally arrived. I was lying face-up on the bed, trying to remember Laura’s face and failing miserably. Suddenly there was a horrible crash, loud enough that for a second I seriously thought someone was breaking down the door, that Ikamja’s followers had figured out where we were being held and come to rescue us. But no; Ikamja had just slapped the table all the way across the room, sending it careening onto its side.
“I should never have let you trick me into this,” Ikamja growled.
I lurched out of bed, and without realizing it, put myself in a combat crouch. “Ikamja? What are you talking about?”
“You beat me through trickery. Turned me against my own benefactor. And now you’ve returned to siphon the life out of me and lead me to the slaughter!” She glared at me with a look that transcended murder, went beyond hatred. It was the look of a beast glaring at prey.
“Come on now,” I said, holding out my hands. “You don’t actually believe that. I know you, Ikamja; if you wanted me gone, you’d have already gotten rid of me.”
“I was a coward,” she said, advancing step by step. “I should have had you killed while you slept. Should have devoured you as soon as you awoke, kept my people strong. I have abandoned my own kind for a damned human, believing for a moment that I could befriend the cattle.”
I started backing away but, fuck, I was caught between the two beds and the back wall. We were trapped inside that hotel-room-sized cell, with nowhere to escape. My speed was useless, and Ikamja was both larger, stronger, and more skilled. I looked to the side, considering vaulting over one of the beds to escape her, but she must have seen right through me, because with a scream of anger and fear, she lunged.
I knew exactly how fast Ikamja could be. I knew how she moved, how decades of battle had worked their way into every sinew and bone. All this I knew because I’d fought her before and won. But this time, I was genuinely scared, because I’d grown to actually like her, and I didn’t want to have to fight back.
Ikamja basically had my permission to get into grappling range, and once she did it was all over. In a grapple, speed can overpower strength; that was the only way I’d survived my many battles against Tersine’s werewolves. But speed and strength are entirely useless against leverage, and the ability to use leverage instinctively is the sort of thing that comes only with experience. That, plus Ikamja’s size advantage, meant that there was nothing I could do. I struggled and struggled, and though I could hold her off for a few moments, I wasn’t going to be able to do so forever.
“Ikamja! Stop! You have to hold on just a little longer! Just another day!”
I don’t quite know what I was trying to do at that moment. In desperation, knowing that I couldn’t outfight her, I suppose my panicked mind fell back to an attempt at charisma. If my words were well-spoken enough, I could overpower the maddening hunger and get her to hold off, at least for a little while.
It wouldn’t have worked, obviously; Ikamja was well past the point of rational appeal. But in the process, I did something that I still don’t fully understand. I think it must have come from Alonhall’s lessons, teaching me how to defend myself against psychic attack, centering my mind and turning will into a wall. In my desperation, I did the same thing, except outward, trying to project some semblance of control into my voice. It obviously didn’t work; even Alonhall’s abilities require more guidance than that. But something did happen.
I could feel the decay. Ikamja’s body was electric, a map of fields and charges rapidly falling into chaos and vortices. I could feel exactly how the instability was metastasizing, killing her slowly and spreading to the brain as it did. I could see, for a split second, how devouring my flesh would allow her to stabilize herself.
So I gathered all of my energy, the web of power and force that made up Emma Marcus Farrier, and pressed it forward. To ascribe even that amount of purpose to what I was doing would be a fallacy, of course; all of this was entirely instinctual, a trapped rat lashing out at anything that could possibly free it from impending death. Sparks and static charges started to build up all across my skin, and my heartbeat slowed as though I were bleeding out.
An immense, overwhelming pain filled my entire body, and yet still I pressed onward. As I went limp, the lightning bridging the gap between us, Ikamja finally overpowered me, sinking her lethal fangs into my shoulder and started to pull and tear at the flesh. I crammed everything I had into her, lightning channeling across my skin and into her heart, overwhelming pain causing the vortices to unwind and order to take hold. I was being spent, devoured invisibly just as sure as Ikamja was about to devour me outwardly, but something was being healed in the process.
There was a flash of light and a horrible sensation of electric shock, all of my muscles tightening. Ikamja suddenly let go of me, staggering away. Before I even hit the floor, I was gone. I jolted awake in my bed on Earth; it was the middle of the night, maybe one AM, but no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t force myself to go back to sleep.
So, obviously, I spent the next day a complete wreck. For all I knew, that was how my story on Selene ended, with me getting eaten by my own ally, my consciousness too busy being in another dimension to do anything about it. I walked through the world, going to and from my lab, in a zombie-like state of dissociation. Outside, I must have looked like I was sleep deprived, given how readily that particular excuse was accepted; internally I was terrified, heart hammering in my chest as I felt the fear of impending death without any way to fight against it.
And don’t even get me started on how difficult it was to actually get to sleep that night. Even with four hours of sleep missing, I still had to break out the melatonin in order to fall unconscious before midnight. I couldn’t have told you what I was more afraid of: waking up on Selene with all of my limbs bitten off, or not waking up on Selene at all.
And yet, when I woke up, I was fully intact. The first several seconds of consciousness were spent verifying that fact; only after I was sure I had all of my limbs did I look around. I was in bed, which definitely wasn’t where I’d collapsed. When I tried sitting up, I learned something else, that being that I felt like hell. My body was heavy as lead, and an awful headache thumped against the inside of my skull. Ikamja was pacing back and forth over by the locked door of the room, fully coordinated.
Then she noticed that I’d woken up. “Ah, excellent. You’re awake. Now you can explain how, exactly, you were able to do that.”