Exit Wounds

[Jane Hartman]

Exit Wounds

"I have my own matches and sulphur, and I'll make my own hell."
Rudyard Kipling - The Light That Failed

Jane Hartman, 807 A.S

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Lance Corporal Jane Hartman never remembered the explosion that took her face.

It was, the doctors told her, to be expected. Traumatic events were rarely memorable directly. Even without the cocktail of drugs floating down her veins the mind had... Tricks. Twists. To keep her from damaging herself. She remembered a white-gowned man telling her that... Sometime. It felt like a millennium ago. It felt like yesterday. No matter. What concern was time to her? It was a river, and she a boat. She could float, she would endure, could endure forever. Outlast the rocks and the sky and the steel that ringed her like a cage. Time could flow and tick and trickle all it liked, for it was the concern of far more grounded creatures than she. She was something else. Something separate, something related but unfamiliar, something that drifted and floated from the touchstones of their reality, pleasantly, comfortably unfeeling.

A small, animal part of her wondered vaguely if it ought to have been it pain. It did not worry long. Not with the soothing mix of drugs trickling through the needle in her arm, coursing through her body, leaving her pleasantly warm and comfortably numb. Like a baby still on her mother's tit. As long as the needle was there, everything was alright. The course darkness pressing at her eyes when she tried to prise them open did not matter. The frantic beeping that dragged her from her sleep to the rhythm of pounding footprints was of no consequence. The voices she heard, half-remembered now, fleeting glimpses of reality in a sea of dreams – they mattered no more to her than the raindrop mattered to the thunderstorm. She was above them, soaring above them like an eagle over the plains. Her medicated subconsciousness was a little editing room, carefully snipping away anything too confronting, too painful, for her to remember.

Her own breathing was comfortably distant. A gentle hiss from somewhere far off, and her chest rose. Another hiss and it fell, though she felt no air between her lips, her mouth as still and silent as the midnight sky. Strange, how her mouth could be so dry in the absence of air. Perhaps she could ask Tancher why that was, when they were next on duty. Tancher would know. The Captain always knew, always had the answer. He had taught her how to shoot, after all. Yes. She decided, the thought meandering through the winding pathways of her mind with all the haste of a man taking an afternoon stroll. Yes, she would ask the Captain. It was a good plan. She had come up with a plan, and surely that was enough work for the day. Yes. She loosed the anchors of her mind, listened to the clockwork hiss, felt her chest rise and fall as though watching someone else.

Rise.

Fall.

Inhale.

Exhale.

Breathing was important. Good than, that she was keeping track of it. Breathing controlled the fall of shot. She remembered that, the faint pressure of foam matting beneath her, the heavy clicks of working parts sliding back in gloved hands. Thin beads of sweat on her forehead, a man's voice in her ear, low and steady and insistent. Steady. Relax. Yes, it was easy to remember.

Very easy indeed.

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