Sage's POV
Warmth against my skin.
That was the first thing. Not pain, not the antiseptic smell of the facility, not the beeping of monitors counting my heartbeats like they were currency. Just warmth, coming up through whatever I was lying on, spreading across my back and shoulders in a way that felt so unfamiliar after days of the facility cot that my body did not know what to do with it and simply stayed very still.
I kept my eyes closed and I listened.
Fire. Wood burning somewhere close, the soft irregular crackle of it. Stone walls, I could tell by the way sound sat in the room, the particular deadness of it. No machines. No fluorescent hum. No third light flickering its endless cycle above me.
I was not in the facility.
I opened my eyes.
The ceiling above me was rough-hewn sto
