Sac'a'rith by Vincent Trigili

stories from her childhood, a childhood lived ten thousand years before we were born.

Chapter Eleven
    My head hurt, my back hurt and I couldn’t see at first. Slowly my vision started to return, but I couldn’t shake the cloud that seemed to cover my mind and blur my thoughts. With some pain … no, with great pain, I slowly sat up and looked around. It was hard to see. It was as if I were in a light fog or maybe a smoke-filled room.
    I was lying on a couch in a modern office, in the center of which an aged human sat behind a desk with a holographic terminal. He was dressed in formal work attire and looked like the quintessential rich businessman. The room itself was neat and proper with everything precisely in place. I knew the fog was all in my head, but I suspected that, if it were real, every molecule of it would be as perfectly placed as everything else in the room.
    “Where am I?” I asked hoarsely through the pain and mist. The words hurt my throat.
    “Easy, Purwryn; you had a nasty fall,” said the man. His voice was perfectly even and betrayed no feelings.
    “Fall?” I repeated. I tried hard to remember how I’d got here or where I might be, but I just couldn’t think clearly. Every time I tried, my mind became cloudier instead of sharp.
    “Yes,” he said. He waved his hand to close the display in front of him, then stood and walked towards one of the walls. “May I get you something to drink?”
    “Water, please,” I said. As much as I wanted something stronger, I had to keep what was left of my wits about me until I figured out what was going on. There was a dread growing slowly inside me. Somehow I knew I was in great danger, but I couldn’t work out how or why. I was sure I was either hung over or drugged, and with my history I wasn’t sure which was worse. Drugged meant I had been taken captive by some hostile force, but hung over meant I had lost control and anything might have happened. I wondered briefly if having been captured and drugged was actually the better alternative.
    “Here,” said the old man as he held out a cup of water.
    I took a deep drink of the water and almost choked on it. As the liquid hit my throat it felt like acid burning its way down. The pain gave my mind a moment of clarity. “I was attacked in my room!”
    “Go easy with the water. You almost choked to death on your vomit and we had to clear your air passage with a tube,” he said.
    “What?” I asked. The moment of clarity had passed and I was struggling to remember what I had just said.
    “Your throat is irritated from the tube we used to clear your lungs,” he repeated.
    “Where am I?” I asked again.
    “My office. Now, you took a bad blow to the head and I need to ask you some questions to assess what damage has been done. First, say your name for me,” he said.
    “Purwryn,” I said.
    “Good, and where do you work?” he asked.
    “Um, just a sec,” I said as I raked my clouded mind for the answer. “Robotics! I’m the lead robotics engineer on the Paradise .”
    “Excellent. For how long have you had this job?” he asked.
    “I guess a week or so?” I said.
    “Good, good. And what was your job before that?” he asked.
    Instantly memories of Zah’rak and his team came to mind. “I was working with – ” I started to say but some internal alarm went off, stopping me from finishing the thought. I couldn’t think through the cloud, but something told me I shouldn’t answer that question.
    “Yes? Go on,” he said.
    I tried to stand, but a wave of dizziness caused me to fall back onto the couch. My back screamed in protest, and my legs felt as if ants were crawling up and down them, throwing a party to end all parties.
    “Easy; I don’t think you are quite ready for that,” he said.
    Where was I? Why wasn’t I ready to stand? What had I just been talking about? My mind struggled against the fog , trying to make sense of my world. Was I in trouble?
    “My head is so cloudy,” I