Wanderer

Chapter 3-2

Kaira struggled awake as her shivering became too intense to ignore. She opened her eyes to utter blackness and panic gripped her chest. She was laying on her back but there wasn't even a glimmer of light.

She tried to move her fingers but she couldn't feel them or her hands. Everything was cold and numb. She tried to move her arms but they felt like they were made of lead.

Her left arm slammed against something solid. She barely felt the impact but suspected she’d pay for it soon enough. Then something smacked into her nose painfully, making her smell blood. It took her a moment to realise that it was her right hand which had slammed into her nose.

With no control of her arms she had to keep moving them, and try to keep them from hitting her face again. The pain from her nose at least broke through the initial terror, and after a few moments more she remembered where she was — in the hold of the Glimmer. Tucked away in a wooden crate. And absolutely freezing cold!

Feeling slowly started to return to her hands and fingers as her blood started to flow again, but now every pulsing heartbeat drove agony through them. She hadn’t known pins and needles could hurt so much. She gritted her teeth against the pain and kept rubbing her hands and arms, slowly recovering normal feeling.

It didn’t help with the shivering. While her hands were no longer icy cold they were far from warm. At least she now had enough feeling in her fingers to root around for the torch, then turn it on.

The light was blinding after the total darkness. She covered most of the light with her hands. Now she could see without being blinded, but the torch provided no heat. She needed to find something to keep her warm, and that meant exploring the cargo hold. It was risky, but she had no choice. She shook her head. She seemed to be saying that to herself a lot recently.

She moved into a crouch, then slowly lifted her head until her eyes were above the level of the crate, worrying that she might be spotted. Then she chuckled slightly. The rest of the cargo hold was still pitch dark. The only part that was lit up was within the crate and the ceiling above it. There was no point in her slowly raising her head when anyone in the hold couldn’t possibly have missed the fact she was there.

She lifted the torch higher, still shielding most of the light from it, and clambered out of the crate. She tried to be as quiet as possible, both to avoid detection and so she could hear any threats. It seemed unlikely that Tarkus would creep around his own cargo hold if he thought somebody was stowing away, but it wasn’t impossible.

There were no sounds and no shouts of discovery, so she started to explore the area. The hold was maybe one third full, so there was plenty of room to move. It was mostly filled with sealed barrels and crates, boxes and containers.

None of those were any use to Kaira. She had no way to break into them, and even if she had that would be a sure way to give her presence away. Even if the damage wasn't discovered until they reached the next station she could still be executed there as a stowaway.

Most of the cargo hold was tidy, if not precisely clean. That meant there were no conveniently discarded scraps or rubbish for Kaira to make use of. She was starting to despair of finding anything useful when she rounded some large crates and found a pile of covers and several sealed buckets stashed in one corner.

She checked the buckets first. It turned out they weren't actually sealed, they just had lids on, and all four were empty. She turned her attention to the pile of covers. It was quite a large pile. The covers varied from grubby to outright stinking, but the material of some of them felt as if it would keep her warm. Some of the others would work well to insulate her from the cold floor of the crate.

Part of her wanted to take all the covers, to make sure she was as warm as possible, but she forced herself to only take a third of them. The rest she tried to rearrange so they looked as if the pile hadn't been disturbed.

Would Tarkus really notice the pile of grubby old coverings had been moved around? Maybe. She didn't want to take the chance.

She dragged the coverings she’d liberated back to the wooden crate. Two went in first, spread on the bottom of the crate to act as a barrier against the cold. Then she added one of the warmer covers. The filthiest one. She’d decided she’d rather sleep on top of it than be wrapped in it.

She hung the rest of the covers over the edge of the crate so she could reach them, then climbed in and started wrapping herself up. Finally she managed to hook one of the covers near the top of the inside of the crate so it formed a ceiling. She hoped that would greatly reduce the light escaping when she had the torch turned on, if not eliminate it altogether.

As she lay there, bundled up in her new coverings and trying to ignore their smell, she actually felt warm. Most of that was from the exertion, but she had hope that she would now be able to avoid freezing to death.