High Flyght – Chapter 23

A sourness fills my mouth. 

A long corridor with bulkheads, Jinzo talking to someone at the end. 

Tomu’s face in a tiny window. “You were always a selfish bitch,” he says. “But you got what you wanted.” 

My hand coasts over a bundle of small, round objects hanging from a tree. 

A handsome man smiles at me before grabbing me by the waist and swinging me around. 

Ugh, what is in my mouth? 

Skylar in tears, “I’m so sorry, Viv. So sorry.” What? What’s wrong? 

A little boy kneels on the floor. Someone gets him a blanket.

I sit bolt upright in bed and vomit onto the sheet.

“Vivi!” Ken’s voice breaks through the last image of a woman with dark hair laughing. The lights fade up, and sparks flash in front of me before my stomach clenches again. “Vivi, who’s Renny?”

My naked body is so slick under the sheet, I slide from the bed like an eel to get away from the vomit. Too late.

I open my mouth, and puke comes up again. More sparks dance in front of me, and this time I see Tomu’s face, pale, mouth open to yell at me.

“Vivi. My god.” Ken stands over me, his lips twisted in disgust. He shakes his head, sparks fly up around him like a halo, and he says, “I don’t need to be number one.”

“What?” I mumble, dragging the back of my hand across my mouth.

“What?” he repeats. He grabs the sheets on the bed and folds them over each other.

“What did you say?” I retch, and my belly tries to emigrate from my body through my nose.

“I didn’t say anything.” He bends over and tries to pick me up. “You’re freezing.” My teeth chatter, knocking my jaw around.

“Bathroom.” My voice is in another quadrant, and I can’t find it. I roll over and crawl to the bathroom in time to puke on the floor of the pulse shower. It senses movement and liquid, so it turns on and begins to steam.

Oh, God. I’m so sick. This didn’t happen to Ken.

The sour taste in my mouth builds, sparks fly across the bathroom, and I groan. I close my eyes and Kostas Levine, my lawyer, says to another woman, “It’s confidential.”

“I thought he was dead.”

“Who’s dead?” Ken asks, his face turned towards me from the other room.

I peer up through my lashes at him scrambling to pull on some underwear. He’s talking to someone. An upsurge of nausea reaches into my stomach and rips out the only fluids I have left in there. They end up on the floor right next to my head.

“Oh, shit.”

Gus is in the doorway, and I’m naked and covered in vomit.

My arms aren’t working.

A flurry of sparks swirls around Gus’s head. “My mother is horrified.”

I start to laugh, but it’s cut short by another retching attack. This time I have nothing left in me.

Gus steps around my limbs and crouches over me. His hands begin their examination. Pulse, eyes, temperature.

“What’s so funny?” he asks, yanking a towel off the wall and putting it under my head.

“Your mother. She’s horrified. Or will be.”

He pauses his examination and glances over his shoulder at Ken before looking back at me. Ken and I had both fallen asleep naked after our night together, and I won’t ever be doing that again, I can tell you that much.

“What did you take?” Gus’s tone is soft but insistent.

“I think I’m supposed to be asleep.” I close my eyes, and the sparks are far in the distance. They swirl around dark figures. I don’t know who they are.

“Prescient dream berries,” Ken says. “She took them after we…”

Gus’s fingers probe up under my chin and along my throat. My body starts to shiver again, and I can’t stop it.

“So, how many hours ago?” Gus asks. I pry open my eyes, and they’re both back in the room together.

“About an hour, a little more?”

“Okay. Go get Jinzo. We’re going to carry her out of the bathroom and back in here where I can work.”

Gus is intent on his bag while Ken is gone. Whatever’s in there better help me because either this will wear off or I’m paralyzed for good.

“I don’t like this high at all,” I burble out through lips made of rubber.

Gus returns to my side. This time he has two more towels. One of them he uses to push the vomit to the drain in the floor. The other he uses to dry me off.

“No, I don’t imagine you enjoy this at all.” He’s concentrating on each area of my body as he dries it off. “My mother, huh?”

A small flurry of sparks brightens his eyes as he looks at me with such fondness, such love, my eyes fill with tears. I blink, and he’s back to his professional bedside manner.

“Are you in pain?” He panics at the appearance of my tears.

I shake my head. “I think it’s starting to wear off.”

“Good.” He lets out a relieved sigh.

Jinzo arrives and pops up in surprise. “You couldn’t even get dressed?” he asks, then cracks a smile.

“Ha, ha.” My head swims, and I try to turn to puke, but my body won’t respond.

Gus’s quick reflexes roll me on my side just in time.

“Okay, we need to get her out of here. Possibly to the floor. Ideally to the bed. I’ll pump saline into her, anti-emetics, pain killers, and then we need to bring up her body temperature. It’s low, for some reason.”

“Have you ever seen this before?” Jinzo asks, stepping over my prone body to slip his hands under my shoulders.

“No. But I can treat symptoms. I would’ve pumped her stomach if she hadn’t puked up everything. The saline and drugs will help. And as long as she doesn’t go into shock or have an allergic reaction, she’ll live. We’ll just have to watch her.”

With Jinzo carrying my upper body and Gus in charge of my legs, Ken strips the bed of the vomit sheets and throws down a blanket.

“Let’s get her dressed and some more blankets.” Gus is immediately at work.

“I have plenty of blankets.” Jinzo runs out, and I let out a laugh. Oh yes, he has blankets. Plenty of those.

Gus cracks a smile.

“You’re not exasperated with me?” I ask him. I seem to be concerned with how the guys feel about me lately. “Angry that I’m playing around with my life?”

Ken appears at my feet with my underwear. “I’m a little angry.” He pulls my underwear up to my hips and looks around for my shirt. It’s on the back of his desk chair.

“No, I’m not angry,” Gus says, joining Ken at my side. Ken wrinkles his nose at the vomit in my hair as they both get me into my shirt. “I’ve seen the best and worst of humanity. If I didn’t want to be here… If I didn’t believe in you and what you were doing, I would never have stayed.”

Jinzo appears with blankets, Gus looks for a vein on my arm but finds one near my wrist, and Ken sinks into the bed next to me.

I look up at them all and realize that I love each of them in my own way. Even Gus. Sparks swirl around us, and I see Jinzo, Ken, and me sitting at a desk across from Renata Dellis.

I burst into tears.

“He’s dead, and it’s all my fault.”

Ken freezes, Jinzo comes to my side, and Gus stops rummaging through his bag.

“Who’s dead?” Ken insists, squeezing my hand.

I shiver and shake the tears from my face. “My lawyer. I hired a lawyer on Rio. He’s dead.”

“When…” Jinzo’s expression turns to stone. “When did you hire a lawyer?”

My tears turn to gut-wrenching sobs. “I’m sorry. So, so sorry.” I want to close my eyes and slink away, but my body is not cooperating. “I thought, maybe, if I sold the seeds wholesale, just got rid of them, I could… I…”

Looking at their shocked faces, I realize how selfish I’ve been. I went and talked to that lawyer in secrecy. I didn’t ask for help, and I should have.

“I needed the money, and you… I didn’t know.” I try to hold my chest still so I can speak. “I thought you would go back to Cressida, and Ken would remember that I dumped him. And I would never find someone to love me…”

Jinzo sighs, grabs another blanket, and piles it on top of me. He slips into the bed and adds his warmth to the blankets. I close my eyes and turn my head to him.

“Why did you take the berries?” he whispers, wrapping his arm around me. Ken shifts his weight on the bed so he’s closer.

“I need answers to what’s going to happen. I’m scared, and we’re walking into the office of the most powerful woman in the universe tomorrow. She’s probably killed my lawyer. She’ll probably kill you too.” I close my eyes, and the sparks show up again, but they don’t bring any visions. “I’ve put everyone’s life in danger.”

“You don’t have to do this alone.” Jinzo squeezes me, and the tightness of his embrace is enough to chase away the nausea. “We’re here for you. That’s why networks exist. We’re stronger together.”

I sniff up and raise my head to look at Ken and Gus. Gus’s thoughts are a million kilometers away, and Ken’s face is consumed by a deep frown.

“I’m sorry, Vivi,” he says, sighing and leaning over to sandwich me between Jinzo and him. “This is so much bigger than just you. We’ll figure it out.”

Nah, I fucked up big time. There’s no coming back from this. We’re going to walk into Athens Industries tomorrow, and that’ll be the last anyone ever sees of us.

My chest rises and falls rapidly, and my breathing runs away from me as I picture the scene, the last thing I’ll see is Renata Dellis’s face. I won’t die old and gray on the farm. I won’t have a family. I’ll never see my parents again.

“She needs a sedative.” Jinzo’s voice filters through the ringing in my ears.

“Right,” Gus replies. “I’ll give her something to sleep.” He raises his voice as he squeezes my foot. “We’ll be right here. If you need to puke again, I’ll find a bucket.”

I lift my head to see what he’s doing. I try to focus on the points of light in the room, but my eyes droop and slam shut like two steel doors.