Elias coughed, tasted copper. He forced his eyelids up and blinked through his blurred vision.
Pain flared in his shoulder immediately, feeling something beneath his collarbone had shifted wrong. He pushed with his palms on the car door and tried to haul himself up.
Yet nothing wanted to obey.
His arm felt heavy, numb at the fingers. A hot line ran down his ribs too, where something sharp had torn his shirt.
The Mnemonic Echo hit him like a blunt again.
'You die here.'
Images slammed in like a flood released by a shattered dam.
Cycle 14
The blast had hit closer that time. Hot flames stuck on his long sleeves. He crawled as his world had folded into bright orange.
With him scorching, he remembered the smell of burning hair and how his skin had melted from his muscle in thin strips. He remembered thinking, absurdly, of the rotisserie chicken he had left on his kitchen counter.
Cycle 22
The pressure wave had thrown him into the car with the force of a falling building. He felt a blade slide into his back as he rolled, and then the taste of iron that slid slow through his chest.
Cycle 26
Teeth had been close enough to chew him. Elias showed and tried to get up, but the hands had torn at his legs until he could not move. The last thing he had heard was someone shouting and running toward him.
Elias tasted each end again, folding into the next until his head ached.
'Three times... I know it will happen.'
The present came back in a snap of a finger. The smell of the detonation crept to his nose.
Elias still tried to stand, and a hot spike of pain lanced through his shoulder. He swallowed a groan, heaving while a wet warmth spread down his side and soaked his shirt.
The shoulder gave with a crack that felt like something inside snapping free. He drove his fingers into the concrete and forced himself up, each small movement an act of argument with his body.
Useless.
This passive skill of his. It told him what would happen, not how to stop it. Seconds. No more than that.
Elias laughed once, a wet, short sound. "Thanks," he said to the Mnemonic Echo, but the voice in his head offered no reply.
He pressed his free hand to his shoulder and discovered how much he was bleeding. The fabric squelched under his palm. The smell of iron intensified. The wound did not look survivable if left unattended.
"Urgh... I need to patch myself up," he whispered, though he could not see how.
Elias could imagine with cruel clarity the way his blood would pool. He could taste the exact note of it.
If only the skill had done more than watch.
An active skill. Something he could wield. Something that would answer a call and not just show him the coffin.
He imagined a hand that could shove a detonating man aside, or a wall that would hold an infected back. Anything would be better than the echo's cruel pictures of how he failed.
"Real helpful."
"Grugh..."
A low growl echoed somewhere down the street, and Elias stiffened. Wet footsteps scraped against the floor, dragging.
'This is how it happens if you don't get out fast enough---'
"Shut up," Elias hissed, teeth clenched.
Gritting his teeth, he staggered away from the car, every step sending lightning through his shoulder. He leaned hard against a concrete pillar, sliding around it.
Teeth snapped shut on empty air. Its jaw hung wrong, eyes glassy and unfocused. Blood slicked its chin.
Elias did not wait for the echo to finish. He turned and ran, tumbling down the side street as he clutched his useless arm to his chest.
"Hey!"
The voice cut through the street, emerging from the shadows at its far end. A woman stepped in, wearing a medic clothes.
Elias barely heard her. His world was focused to the thumps of his pulse and pain burning through his shoulder.
Then she came closer, outstretching her hand toward Elias, and he recoiled instinctively. His gaze locked onto her, not her expression or the red cross on her shirt, but at her skin.
Green spread across it in odd smears, like faint veins of leaf fibers. It looked like a smear between a plant and flesh.
The green crept up from her palm to her wrist, where it thickened before fading gradually along her arm, dissolving back into human skin near her elbow.
Before he could breathe, the green sprouted. A long vine burst from her palm with a wet snap, lashing through the air toward him. Elias froze, his body refusing to obey his mind.
Then came the sound of a meat being punctured.
Elias jerked his head back. Behind him, the vine drove clean through the infected's skull. Its body convulsed once a sharp jerk before it collapsed with a wet thud.
"Hey," she called again, softer this time, as if afraid of startling him if she spoke too loudly. "Are you okay?"
The vine withered between them.
Its green bled into yellow, then brown, fibers curling inward as if embarrassed to exist. It snapped and fell to the pavement in dry fragments that crumbled under the medic's boot.
The infected lay still behind Elias, skull split clean through. Blood pooled beneath its head, already darkening.
Elias stared. His legs trembled violently, the adrenaline bleeding out of him at once.
The woman lowered her hand, palm open. "I will not touch you," she said. Her voice tight. "I swear."
Elias did not answer. His eyes were locked on her arm. The green was fading fast now, retreating like something ashamed of being seen.
'Cycle 26. She existed then, too.'
His breath caught.
He remembered being dragged by her to a pharmacy counter once, shaking hands with his blood as she tore open bandages with her teeth. Her voice shaking as she pressed gauze into his arm. The way she had cried when he stopped answering her.
That memory sat bitter in his chest.
The medic took another careful step closer. "You're bleeding badly," she said. "Your shoulder---"
"I know," Elias snapped, harsher than he meant to. He immediately regretted it, but the pain flaring down his arm made patience impossible.
She stopped.
For a moment, Elias thought she might retreat altogether. Instead, she straightened slightly
"Okay," she said quietly. "Then let me help you patch up. There's a clinic two blocks east. Basement level."
But Mnemonic Echo barged in.
'You don't make it that far.'
The insistence landed a weight on his chest. Elias sucked in a sharp breath and squeezed his eye shut. The echo tried to drag the images back up--- him slumping halfway there, the street blurring as he bled out--- but he fought the vision away.
He opened his eyes again, jaw locked.
"I can't," he said to her instead, voice breaking. "I... won't be able to make it."
The medic studied him more careful this time: the way his arm hung wrong, the blood soaking through his shirt.
"Then we don't go far," she said, sounding like she made a decision. "Come on. I found an ambulance vehicle along the road two minutes ago. Supplies intact."
Elias did not answer right away.
He looked past his shoulder, down the street where the infected body. Then he pushed himself upright anyway, teeth clenched against the pain.
"Alright," he said hoarsely.