I knew before I wanted to know.
The pain had been there from the start, but shock had kept it at a distance, like a dog held behind a gate. It had barked. It had paced. It had not yet bitten.
Now it bit.
I was crouched behind one of the refinery tanks with my back pressed against cold metal that smelled faintly of oil and rust, my breath coming too fast, my hands red in places that should not have been red. The tank loomed above me like an indifferent wall. Around us, the refinery breathed in machine sounds and human menace. Engines somewhere beyond the building. Boots on gravel. The hard, clipped movement of men who knew exactly where they were and what they had taken.
"Kidnapped."
The word arrived with a sickness all its own.
Not attacked. Not delayed. Not trapped by accident.
Kidnapped.
It sat in my chest and made everything inside me tighten.
I looked down at my hands again as if they might tell me something new. They did not. Blood had dried on my fingers in uneven streaks. More of it was soaking through my shirt where the metal had gone into my stomach. More still had spread down my thigh, dark and warm and difficult to ignore now that the shock had thinned out enough for my body to start reporting its losses like a clerk tallying the dead.
I tried to breathe slowly.
It did not help.
My mind kept moving in ugly loops.
"Who knew where we were? Would anyone come? Could anyone even come? The police at the checkpoint had been wrong, the men at the road had been wrong, the empty vehicle with blood on the ground had been wrong. Everything about the world outside this refinery now felt thin, distant, badly assembled. If law enforcement came at all, would they come in time? Would they even know where to look? Would they know the road had split open and swallowed us?"
My first thoughts were stupid.
My second thoughts were worse.
Maybe nobody was coming.
I could hear the fear in myself now, not as a feeling but as a change in pressure. It moved through my body like cold water.
We were not on a trip anymore.
We were most definitely a problem.
Maybe worse.
Maybe cargo.
My eyes drifted to the others nearby, half-hidden behind the refinery equipment, thrown into whatever shelter they had found when I dragged them here. Nila was closer to the tank's shadow than the rest, her face white beneath the dust, her expression sealed in a kind of shock that had not yet decided whether to become terror. Will lay nearby, slack and pale, one arm bent under him awkwardly.
I had gotten some of them away from the wreck.
That should have meant something.
It did, a little. It meant my body had functioned for one brief stretch of hell. It meant I had done something that was not complete surrender. It meant I had earned, perhaps, one or two seconds of pride.
But the pride did not stay.
Fear pushed it out.
I stared ahead at the refinery yard, where the men moved between tanks and the control building with the calm of people who had already decided how the next hour would go. Their rifles looked too familiar in their hands. Their movements were not careless. They weren't showing off. They weren't rushing. That was the part that made my stomach twist harder than the wound.
People only move like that when they are sure.
I swallowed.
My mouth tasted like blood and dust and the inside of fear.
That was when another voice reached me.
Not from outside.
Inside.
The part that had learned how to stop panic from becoming visible. The part that I didn't know how it had hardened into function. It did not sound like me exactly. It sounded like me like I had no room for weakness.
"Get up."
"Find something, meds, supplies."
"A shirt. Water. Something to stop the blood. Move before you slow down too much."
It wasn't comforting. It wasn't kind.
It was useful.
I looked down at my stomach again. The shard of metal still sat in me, ugly and still, as if it had rooted itself there on purpose. I did not touch it this time. I was learning, slowly, that pain had a memory and would punish curiosity.
My thigh throbbed harder now that I had been sitting still. The muscle around the wound felt thick and wrong. My leg was not obeying the way it should. Every few seconds a pulse of pain ran up from the injury to my hip and made the rest of my body flinch. I could feel blood had gone farther than it should have gone.
I needed to move.
I hated that I knew it.
I looked at the tank beside me, then at the narrow strip of cover behind it, then at the distance between where I crouched and where I would have to go to find anything useful. Medical supplies, if those existed here. Bandages. Cloth. Water. Anything that could keep me from becoming another body on this dust.
"Stand."
"Move."
"You don't need to die here."
I pressed one hand against the tank wall and tried to push myself up.
Pain detonated from my abdomen so violently that my vision snapped white at the edges.
I gasped.
My body folded halfway back down before I could stop it. My leg gave a hard, useless twitch. The metal in my stomach seemed to grind, and for one horrible instant I was sure the shard had shifted deeper. My throat made a sound that was not quite a swear and not quite a cry. I tried again, because sometimes pain demanded defiance if only so it could be answered.
I got one knee under me.
That was enough.
The world tilted.
The refinery lights above, the gray sky beyond the perimeter, the distant movement of armed men, the red inside my own wound — all of it suddenly thinned. A pressure built behind my eyes. My hearing narrowed until everything became a tunnel of engine noise, my own breath, and a wet, pulsing throb in my leg.
No. Not now.
I held on to the tank with one hand, fingers scraping over rough metal, and tried to stay upright.
'Move."
My stomach lurched.
The pain hit harder.
Not sharp now. Deep. Total. It rolled up through me in a wave that took the strength from my shoulders first, then my arms, then the rest of the room. I tried to breathe and could not get enough air. The sound of the refinery stretched thin. My face went cold. Then hot. Then cold again.
The tank wall slid sideways.
I remember thinking, absurdly, that the metal was moving.
Then my legs stopped holding.
Then there was nothing.
---
I was standing in a field that had no edges.
The sky above me was too bright, almost white, and the ground beneath my feet looked wet even though I could not see water. People were moving in the distance, but every time I tried to focus on them, their shapes melted and changed. Men in uniforms. Men without faces. Men whose mouths opened and closed with no sound coming out. Their outlines shimmered the way heat does over tar.
I knew, without knowing how I knew, that they were trying to take us.
Not just me. Us.
There was a hand on my arm, then another on my shoulder, and I jerked away from both, but the hands came back as if attached to the air itself. The men were coming closer. Their shoes made no sound. Their clothes changed color whenever I looked directly at them. Blue. Gray. Brown. Then red at the edges.
No, I thought.
Not here.
Somebody shouted my name, but the voice came from far away and underwater at once.
Then the nearest man's face opened.
Not in a human way.
It split along the jaw and poured down his shirt like something alive had been hidden inside him. Blood ran where skin should have stayed. The second man followed. Then the third. Their bodies lost shape too quickly, too easily, as if the idea of them had been weak from the beginning. One moment they were reaching. The next they were leaking into the ground in thick dark ribbons.
I stared.
The field around us changed with every step.
The men became stains.
The stains became people again.
Then they became blood again.
There was a motorbike somewhere, I think, or maybe it was only a buzzing in the back of my skull. The sound grew and grew until the whole sky trembled. I turned and saw the road behind us stretching into impossible distance, lined with the silhouettes of boys from school, teachers, the bus, the checkpoint, the refinery, all of it stacked on top of each other like a badly remembered dream.
A man reached for me.
His hand turned red before it touched me.
Not red.
Not just red.
It liquefied.
It ran down his wrist in bright pulses, too vivid to be real, splashing across the ground in a pattern that looked almost like petals if flowers were made from wounds. I backed away and found Nila beside me, except she was not Nila yet. She was shifting too, her face flickering between fear and a blank calm that did not belong to a living person. Her mouth moved.
No sound.
Then the men all lunged at once.
I opened my mouth to scream and the air flooded with blood instead.
It filled my throat.
It spilled down my chin.
It coated my hands.
The field, the road, the men, the sky — everything broke apart into red motion.
Then I woke with a jerk so hard it hurt.
---
The first thing Nila saw was Timi's shirt.
It was soaked.
Not damp. Soaked through with blood that had turned the fabric dark and heavy against his chest and stomach. His body was slumped half behind the tank, half in the open, one leg stretched awkwardly, the other bent wrong from where he had collapsed. His face was pale under the dust, and there was blood at the corner of his mouth. More had leaked through his clothes and onto the ground beneath him, where it had started to spread in a dark stain she did not want to keep looking at.
For a second she could not move.
The dream still clung to her skin.
Men reaching. Blood where men had been. The strange wet field. The way everything had kept changing shape just as she thought she understood it. Her eyes had opened into the refinery's harsh, rust-colored reality, but her body had not yet fully left the dream behind. The world wavered once and nearly tipped back into it.
Then she saw his chest rise.
Barely.
Once.
Then again.
Her breath returned in a rush so sharp it almost hurt.
"Timi?"
His eyelids did not open.
She pushed herself upright with a grimace and looked around fast. The refinery was still alive with threat. Men moving in the distance. One of the motorcycles idling near the edge of the yard. The control building standing in the middle of the complex like a hard, blind eye. The ground around them was littered with dust, grit, and shattered bits of the bus that had followed them here like a broken memory.
Nila swallowed hard.
Timi's clothes were blood-soaked now, and there was more blood than she wanted to count. Enough that it was impossible to pretend the injury was small. Enough to make her stomach tighten with a cold, dull fear. She looked at his thigh first. Then at the dark spread around his abdomen. Then at the way his skin had gone waxy under the dust.
He had dragged them.
He had carried people.
He had stayed standing far longer than he should have.
And now he was down.
She moved closer on her knees and touched his shoulder. His body was hot and then cold through the fabric. She shook him once, gently at first, then harder.
"Timi."
Still nothing.
Behind her, Will shifted with a grunt.
Nila turned fast. He was beginning to wake, face creased in pain, one eye opening just enough to be confused by the light and the dust and the blood. He tried to sit, then stopped with a sharp intake of breath.
"Don't," Nila said, already moving to him. "Stay still."
He frowned like the order had insulted him.
"Where—"
"Later," she said.
Her voice came out too tight. She hated that. She forced it steadier.
"Help me."
Will looked at Timi, then at the blood darkening under him, and the last of his confusion cleared. He pushed himself up on one elbow and grimaced as his own injury answered him. There was a slice across his temple, dried blood on his cheek, and his arm was shaking, but he was awake enough now to understand the shape of the problem.
Timi was bleeding badly.
Not dying yet. Not gone.
But not safe.
Will got one hand under his side and, with a sharp breath, leaned in to help roll him enough that they could see the wound properly without making it worse. Timi made a small sound when they moved him, an involuntary noise that told them just how deep the pain ran even through unconsciousness.
Nila looked at her skirt, then at Will's shirt.
Then she made a decision.
"Give me your shirt," she said.
Will stared at her for a second as if she had asked him to remove his skin.
"My what?"
"Your shirt."
He blinked, then swallowed hard and reached for the hem. The motion cost him, but he pulled it off anyway with a grunt and handed it to her. The fabric was dusty and already marked with blood from earlier, but it was clean enough to work with.
Nila tore it.
Not neatly. Not politely. She grabbed both ends and ripped the cloth into strips with a force that surprised even her. The sound of it was small and brutal. She kept tearing until she had enough bands to wrap and press.
Then she reached for the hem of her skirt.
Will looked at her.
She did not look back.
She tore that too.
The cloth gave with a sharp, ugly sound and became something else in her hands. Bandages. Pressure. A way to keep someone alive long enough for the next problem to arrive.
Together, they worked around Timi's injuries with shaking hands and short, focused breaths. Nila pressed one strip over the wound in his abdomen and held it there while Will wrapped the cloth around it tighter. Another strip went over the thigh injury, layered against the blood that kept trying to come through. They did not have proper gauze. They did not have antiseptic. They did not have time to invent miracles.
They had only cloth, fear, and the determination not to let him slip away while everyone else around them was still trying to understand what had been done to them.
Timi did not wake.
His face stayed slack under the dust, one eyelid twitching once and then going still again.
Nila pressed the bandage harder and looked up at Will.
"Tap him," she said quietly.
Will frowned. "What?"
"Wake him."
He hesitated only a fraction before reaching out and tapping Timi's cheek once, lightly, as if testing whether the body beneath his hand still belonged to the living.
No response.
Nila stared at Timi for one more second, then said, lower this time, "Again."
Will lifted his hand.
And tapped him harder.