He shifted under her, spasmed, tried to push her away. The mesh in his right hand was broken, the haptic motors ripped it off of his bones. A scream, gurgling.

“Stop!” she pulled her weight up on top of him, pinned his arm “You HAVE to be quiet.”

He whimpered, still trying to run away from his broken body. “I’m gonna die, Cybil, I’m gonna die, Cybil, I’m gonna…” his struggles shifted a cracked rib. “OH, GOD!”

“please” she whispered. Her hand clamped over his mouth. Her tears fell on his swollen face. “please.”

He snorted. Blood covered the back of her hand. He spit words out between her fingers. “it hurts so bad it hurts it hurts”

“I know, but you have to be quiet, they’re going to find us, I can’t protect you, please be quiet, please.” His body bucked under her weight. The pulse drummed in her ears, her scalp tightened, she looked directly into Tim’s wild eyes.

“Don’t leave me, don’t leave me. We have to go. We have to go home. I’m gonna die, we have to go home.”

“Tim. Shut up.”

Tim stopped squirming. He was quiet. Cybil’s eyes came into focus. Less blue than the first time he saw them, now cold and gray. Her forehead was pressed against his.

“Seriously, Cybs, we need to go.” He tried to roll her off of him.

She clenched her eyelids shut, sucked in a sharp breath between her teeth.

“Please try not to move.”

“What are you… No. Cybil, no.” He could feel the blood running down the back of his throat but the need to cough had subsided.

“Just. Be. Quiet.”

He shut his mouth and watched her shudder in sync with his own breathing. His body no longer hurt, but the pain of watching her started to take its toll. She was every time he had ever failed, a living, breathing validation of every insecurity. She was the clippers cutting his afro after school in sixth grade because Leandra Simmins laughed at him and said she “doesn’t date old town hood rats;” the professor whose emails he never returned after he bombed the first exam on Stochastic Processes; the broomstick that broke and hit him in the face when he was showing his mother that it was like a bo staff. She was the woman who stole his pain when he couldn’t bear it himself.

The HOUNDs passed by the hole that Cybil had dragged him into, and behind them, so far behind them, the security officers with their leashes.

And the moment of peace ended.

Tim screamed; his pain returned. Cybil rose in a column of white heat and lit upon their pursuers.

When it was done she came back and carried him out.

He wouldn’t remember much through the haze of shock.

He would remember watching the pack of HOUNDs part before her. He saw them cower.

And he would remember the bodies of those that didn’t.

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