Steph Bennion - Paw-Prints of the Gods

Ravana frowned, but took the drink and idly sipped at the straw. She watched the industrious robot retrieve the last of the broken pieces of pot, which had hit the floor with some force. The aged robot was not doing a very good job and kept halting with a faint electronic murmur of ‘Reboot me!’, prompting Jizo to give it an over-zealous kick to start it moving again. Ravana’s thoughts however dwelled upon the brief meeting with the little boy who had asked her what planet she was from. Oddly enough, it was word-for-word what she used to ask people in far-flung spaceports on early trips with her father, especially when she saw someone struggling to cope with the local gravity.

“Your medication?” reminded Lilith, interrupting her thoughts.

Ravana scooped the pills into her hand, aware that both nurses watched her closely. The notion of gravity stuck in her mind. She had lived the last nine years on the Dandridge Cole , an abandoned asteroid colony ship in the Barnard’s Star system, which spun on its axis to create pseudo-gravity roughly twice that felt on the moons of Yuanshi and Daode. Upon their arrival in Hemakuta, she remembered being pleasantly surprised at how light she felt. She certainly did not feel as she did now, where every clumsy movement of her aching bones was like trying to wade through custard with a sack of bricks on her back.

“Is everything okay?” asked Lilith, eyeing her curiously.

Ravana gave her a puzzled stare, then looked at the pills in her hand.

“I’m fine,” she said. She gave a weak smile and popped the tablets into her mouth.

The nurse nodded, satisfied. Ravana leaned back into her pillows, sucked thoughtfully on her drink and watched as the nurses left the room and locked the door behind them. It was only when she could no longer hear the footsteps in the corridor outside did she put her hand back to her lips and gently spit the tablets out of her mouth. Placing the tablets under her pillow, she settled back into bed and tried to get some sleep.

The grey shapes at the end of the bed were not as blurry as the previous morning, but that was not what held Ravana’s attention. She had awoken with a terrible headache, one that gripped her head like a vice and when she closed her eyes again caused dancing shapes to jump gaily across the back of her eyelids. What was more, she was so hungry it hurt and her stomach was rumbling in a most undignified manner. Yet though still groggy, she felt more alert than she had in days and was shuffling into a sitting position even before Jizo had time to offer her the usual tablets and glass of water.

“Did you sleep well?” the nurse asked.

There was something in Jizo’s tone that suggested the nurse already knew the answer to her question. A pot of fresh blooms had appeared to replace the one that had smashed, which meant someone had returned to the room whilst Ravana was asleep.

“I think so,” Ravana replied. The response came easy and her words did not sound so slurred. She relieved the nurse of the pills and water, then winced as another roll of pain crashed through her skull. “I had some very strange dreams.”

“Dreams?” asked Lilith, far too quickly for Ravana’s liking. “You’ve not mentioned having dreams before.”

“No,” Ravana mused. “I don’t remember dreaming before. Not here.”

The nurses waited for her to take her morning tablets. Ravana fumbled with her pillow with the air of someone ready to lie back down, changed her mind and slid out of bed. Still holding the pills and water, she stumbled across the floor to the mirror. Her reflection gazed unblinking back, slightly sharper than normal and she was struck by how thin she looked, but not in a good way. The hole in her mind seemed to taunt her from behind her reflected gaze, a blackness now haunted by the ghosts of her dreams.

“Mirror, mirror, on the wall,” murmured Ravana. “What is it I can’t recall?”

Despite her headache, she decided she looked slightly less worse than yesterday. Behind her, Lilith noisily cleared her throat.

“Have you taken your medication?”

Ravana put the pills to her mouth, then paused. “What will these do to me?”

“Restore your vitality!” declared Jizo.

“They help you sleep,” said Lilith, glaring at her colleague.

“Vitality and sleep?” asked Ravana. “Is that possible?”

“I must apologise for my fat friend, for she is an idiot,” Lilith replied tartly. “What she should have said, if she knew her arse from her elbow, is that it’s vitally important you get plenty of sleep. You can’t expect to run before you can walk.”

“But I can walk,” Ravana pointed out.

Keeping her back to the nurses, she raised a hand and then the glass to her mouth and swallowed. As she turned, her aching legs wavered and she grabbed hold of the table to steady herself. Her elbow brushed against the replacement plant pot.

“Sorry,” she murmured and caught the hard stares of the nurses as she quickly put a hand to the pot to stop it falling. “Maybe I do need to work on my walking, after all.”

“Has she been at your flask?” asked Lilith, glaring at Jizo. “She looks drunk.”

“Don’t blame the demon drink,” Jizo said cryptically. “Blame the demon king.”

Puzzled, Ravana handed back the empty glass to Lilith, who gave a satisfied nod. There was something in the air that made them dispense with any further barbed banter and she allowed herself to be led away to the washroom without another word.

Neither nurse gave the plant pot a second look, otherwise they may have noticed the fresh indentations in the soil where a finger had pushed two sets of tablets deep out of sight.

There was only one monk in the interview room that morning. His red sash was decorated with lions and it took her a while to recall this meant it was Brother Simha.

“zz-raavaanaa-zz,” rasped the hooded figure. “zz-hoow-iis-yyoouur-meemooryy-zz?”

The momentary jolt of panic that greeted her every time she was in the presence of the monks this time failed to ebb away. Ravana sat nervously before the desk and tried hard to remember where she had seen the figures before. The seaside scene through the window had lost its calming influence upon the strange fears building up within her. The dreadful inhuman screech of Brother Simha invoked an image of spindly grey fingers reaching out to suffocate consciousness at the merest touch. Ravana gave an involuntary shiver and dropped her gaze to the monk’s own hands resting upon the desk before her.

Startled, she froze. Emerging from the sleeves of the monk’s robe, clear as day, were twelve skinny digits, six to each hand. She was so surprised she had to count them twice. It seemed incredible she had never noticed it before, but after missing two doses of medication her mind was becoming clearer by the hour. Simha still awaited an answer and she forced her stare away from the monk’s strange hands.

“My memory is no better,” Ravana replied, but even as she spoke she realised there were bits and pieces lurking in her mind that were no longer forgotten. “I think…?”

The monk leaned forward. “zz-whaat-doo-yyoouu-thiink-zz?”

“Last night I had a dream,” she said carefully. “I was in a grand palace, trying to rescue my father. There was smoke everywhere, Que Qiao agents firing guns, but we escaped and flew off in the Platypus , my father’s ship.” A face popped into her mind of the chirpy young Chinese women who had become a good friend and confident on the Dandridge Cole and Ravana smiled. “Ostara helped me rescue him. She’s head of security at the hollow moon and the Raja’s kidnap was her first real case.”