Chapter 53
AttayearIt was so dark when Jinsu came to that she thought she’d gone blind. Her head was throbbing like somebody had tried to split it open with an axe and. . . and. . . she winced. Thinking hurt.
Slowly, she tried to sit up, but that hurt too, sending sharp, stabbing pains through the back of her head. Whimpering to herself, she raised her hand to try to soothe the pain. Her hair didn’t feel like hair, though. It felt sort of like a gooey plastic mat. And it hurt. It hurt a lot.
Her eyes gradually adjusted to the colours around her. It was all in black and white: black sky, dark shadows of trees (everything was in pairs, which was aesthetically pleasing, but something about it seemed wrong at the same time), lighter snow. Jinsu lay there, staring up through the canopy of branches above her and at the night sky. It told her absolutely nothing. She didn’t even want to think about whether or not she could recognise the stars.
Snow, though. Snow was supposed to be cold and she felt. . . well, frozen. But not damp. Snow was supposed to be wet, too. Especially when it melted.
After a good few minutes, her tangled thoughts more or less made sense of the fact that somebody had wrapped her in a blanket and that there was a large backpack beside her – and that she’d been nestled in the roots of a large tree like a lost child where, miraculously, no snow had gathered. That or the snow had been moved. With great effort, she managed to sit up, and the horrible throbbing headrush almost made her pass out with pain.
Gasping in an attempt to get air into her, Jinsu tried to take proper stock of her situation. It was not an easy task when her vision was swimming so much it felt like she was in a badly driven car or sitting on a rollercoaster, and when her head hurt so much she could barely think. There was a word for the condition she was in, she was pretty sure, but all she really wanted to do was lie back down and go to sleep, and maybe wake up again when her head was feeling better.
What am I doing here? she wondered to herself. She remembered. . . she wasn’t totally sure what she remembered. A tribe. People. Oil. Walking with. . . with one other person.
She turned, with some effort, to look at the backpack again. Where had it come from? It didn’t look like hers. Maybe it belonged to the other person.
Shivering, she huddled back into the tree trunk, aware of the rough bark at her back. If she waited, the other person would come back. She was sure.
Possibly.
Something niggled at the back of her mind, though, telling her it wasn’t nearly that simple. She turned back to the backpack and reached out a frozen hand that had almost lost circulation towards it.
Pain almost as bad as at the back of her head shot through her fingers as she grasped the top of the backpack and dragged it towards her, and she abruptly remembered – oh, my fingers are broken.
That appeared to turn on the tap for the memories and she flinched as she relived being hit in the back of the head again, teeth chattering in her head. It hadn’t been Minhwan because she’d been hit from behind, and— Youngdo. She remembered now: Minhwan had wanted her to stay behind so that they’d be able to repair the Attayear in the present and then go back to rescue everybody. They’d been planning on deserting her all along – and thoroughly so, if she even had a survival kit or whatever it was with her.
Her stomach lurched as the bag suddenly divided into two, and then three in her vision, and then slowly slid back to one. Carefully, she reached out, patting around until she actually hit the backpack rather than where she thought it was, and opened it up. How long had she been out for? What did she actually have with her? Were there wild animals out in the forest?
Right at the top was a handwritten letter, but one glance at it told Jinsu she didn’t have a hope in her current condition of making out what it said, so she ignored it and dug further in. Almost immediately, her hand hit what felt like a torch, and she pulled it out and switched it on, almost oblivious to how anachronistic it was. It was hard enough to see in the dark with her head still swimming, but the beam from the torch was so bright that it blinded her, knocking her vision out for a good few seconds.
Blinking as her sight returned, Jinsu started to dig deeper into the backpack, but a sudden noise nearby had her whipping around in fright. Something large was in the woods with her. And close to her.
She switched the torch off. It was a bit too late not to inform whatever it was of her presence, as it had probably seen the light, but with any luck it wouldn’t come over to inspect.
Her brain really wasn’t working fast enough for that, though, because a figure stepped out between the trees. Or maybe it was two. Jinsu wasn’t quite sure. Either way, she froze up, holding her breath. The figures were human, but if they were from the tribes and wondering about the strange light they’d seen, Jinsu wasn’t sure how to explain herself. She probably had a whole bunch of anachronistic things with her and that was going to be a tough one to ignore if they saw.
A phone light came on and one figure slid behind the other as it hurried forwards.
“Oh,
Comments