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Kaira had no idea how long she hung in the darkness, body and mind flayed by invisible blades. It seemed to go on forever, with no possibility of an end. And then, as abruptly as it had begun, the pain flowed away. Finally she was able to slip down into the darkness and let thought fade away completely.
* * * *
Kaira returned to consciousness slowly. At some point her mind started to register the sounds around her. The sounds of the medical room, and the machines within it. After a while there were voices as well. She didn’t know if they’d just started speaking, or if they’d talked the whole time and she just hadn’t registered them.
For a long time the voices were there but she had no sense of the words, or of anything else. Before the words came to mean anything, other sens
