Seen and Unseen

Ash Nazg's Letter to Rowana
26 / 05 / 2120 F.A.

Ro,

You cannot read this now, but I hope when you wake you will find it in the files in your head, or that my words will filter through your dreams.

Bebe had his shorts off, the tip of his dick in the water, joking how he would catch us a fish for supper. I was thinking about how we would share him when we got home. Over and over. I wanted to take him in my mouth and spit his seed into your womb. It was a pleasant fantasy, but I worried. You had been gone so long.

The thing dragged you from the mouth of the pipe, already more dead than alive. Your body was flickering in and out, Seen and Unseen. What I saw of your flesh was shot through with black veins, eyes rolled up in your head. Blood soaked your armor, your clothes. So much blood.

I didn't know what to do. The wound was beyond my skill to heal. Bebe was beside himself, sitting on the shore of the pool with the medkit. We had started a fire, were boiling water for soykaf. He knew the wound went deep. Babbled about shrapnel, infections, yet I could see the wound went deeper. It was something else. Something magic.

I thought about taking the ring off your finger. About cutting your finger off. Yet I didn't know if it was making your situation worse or if it was keeping you alive.

So I asked the hackers. Plugged myself into the satlink. Pled for them to do something, anything.

A Man named Aubert came onto the line. He told me what to do.

We had to strip parts from the shrike. I remember how pale your skin was, as we peeled off your armor and blood-stiff shirt. How weak your gasps for breath were, those small breasts barely moving, nipples small and cold and grey. We sanitized your Elf-blade over the fire, and with an ****-wipe.

I **** my hands still as I pushed the blade into your chest, to widen the wound. I was glad you weren't awake for that part. Aubert provided diagrams, but it was a crude surgery. Cauterizing veins and arteries. Making space as I cleared a spot on your sternum. The blade that wounded you left a cleft in the white bone. From the boiling water, we drew the crude device we had fashioned. A circle of copper and iron around a power cell, to make a simple electromagnet. I screwed it into your breastbone, felt it hum and glow. Just enough pull to keep the metal shard from your heart.

Bebe sewed you up. It will make a proud scar. Something to tell our children about. I hope.

The hackers say we need to leave. That corporate security may be coming. I have seen helicopters rise from the South. None are coming this way. The thing is soaking in a bucket, covered with wet clothes, in the back seat where we laid you. Its hands roam over your body, squeeze your cold breasts, and its songs echo in my head, though Bebe cannot hear them. I do not know what it is, and its eyes disturb me, but it saved you, and the hacker Carvedinstone told us to take it with you.

Bebe is in the front seat with me. He doesn't know how to drive. I do. They trained me. One of the memories the hacker Looseleaf unlocked in my head. Simulators. Never on the road. This will be my first time.

We are SINless. There is no medical care closer than the Morgul Vale. I have no credits.

So we are headed home.

I need you to read this. I need you to live.

You are my life.

Do not go to the hall of your fathers. They do not call for you.

You are too precious to me to ever let you go.

• Ash Nazg