Twenty-Six
Consciousness returned. Slowly, but not smoothly. In fits and starts. I knew where I was early on, as my brain made sense of Talan’s last words. I was in the mine. The fear took a while to return, though. There were long moments of dreamy peace that I wanted to cuddle into; then little nudges to my brain to wake up. When the last dregs of the sedative wore off, panic hit me. I flung my arms out wide into solid rock all around me. I was buried in the dark. I was a tiny kernel surrounded by layer after layer of pitch-black, flint-hard rock. My hands battered it, looking for a way out as it encircled me, pulling tighter and tighter. I screamed until the effort of it hurt my lungs and made me gasp for breath. And then I screwed myself into a tight ball, desperate to avoid the rough
