SWEAT. Everywhere. All the time, all the fucking time. Sickly Hiigaran sweat. Not the kind you get from fear, or exertion. The kind that leaks out when your body has forgotten how to exist without performance enhancements. Marie turned over in her cot again and again. Slowly. Like her bones were filled with rust and shards of broken glass.
“You’re in a place designed for recovery,” a voice said. “You are safe. Nothing will be demanded of you. Not now.”
It came from a speaker above her bed, filtered, calm. Male and female at once. Kaic’hir. The voice of an overly civilized professor who also happened to be an eldritch entity. Always speaking as though it were reading from a book that it found a little sad. Marie didn’t answer. The lights above her were dim - bioluminescent pads instead of harsh space station lights. Easier on the nerves. Someone had thought about that.
Craving came in waves. Like riptides of thought. Not thoughts, exactly. Just... needs. That horrible electric hunger that rode along her teeth and spine.
“Could use a little D-63,” she mumbled.
Her voice barely left her lips. Didn’t matter. No one was in the room. Just sensors. Scanners. Fluids dripping slowly into her vein. First week: nothing but sweating and nausea. Second week: dreamless sleep - 16, 18 hours a day, waking up only to vomit up bile, half-digested porridge, or dry-heave, her body curling on itself.
Sometimes she spoke. Mostly she didn’t. Once, she stared at the monitor’s soft blue glow and thought about the 13th floor of a building she remembered from Tiir. A government tower. She had snuck into the elevator as a child with her brother. The doors had no button for floor 13. Just 12, then 14. That had meant something then. Now it meant nothing. Everything did.
Kaic’hir kept contact. Not constantly, but enough.
“Stimulant withdrawal is not a punishment,” it said on day ten. “It's a recalibration. You will return to yourself.”
Marie blinked slowly. That sentence felt like a bad trick to her, like something a faith healer might say before laying hands on a dying man.
“What self?” she whispered back.
The channel stayed quiet after that for a while.
Day seventeen. Marie opened her eyes and realized she had wanted to. That was new. She didn’t want to jump out of the bed or take on the Zone. But she wanted... coffee. Or something like it. Then she craved food, maybe something cheap. Real solid food. Her body still ached. There was still sweat, though less. Her mind was less fog and more static – noise instead of absence. A good trade.
She tapped the console by her cot. The AI assistant, a soft-voiced synthetic with a Kharakid accent - answered.
“I’d like,” she croaked, “uh... something. Soup. I think.”
The AI chimed in response. “Acknowledged. Nutrient soup, warm. Hydration enhanced.”
“...Thanks.”
She sat up, slowly. Her spine popped like an old fusion reactor switching back on after going through a purging cycle. She leaned forward, breathing in shallow gasps like someone halfway between the womb and the grave.
“Marie,” came Kaic’hir’s voice again, later that day, unprompted. “You climbed out of the hole. You may not feel it, but I assure you: you did.”
She didn’t respond immediately. But she reached up and touched the comm unit lightly, a gesture more than a reply. Alive. Present. Real. For now.
It was enough.