Spoiler! :
Ugh...
What was that!? A voice exploded from the ringing in Everen's head.
What? Everen asked thickly.
I thought you'd died!
What? Everen repeated.
I was so scared. Everyone's been dying and I thought it was you too and of course you didn't respond for days, and I thought I was gonna be alone forever. What even happened?
Everen felt like she was thinking through soup, and half of Kerra's words didn't mean anything at all. Kerra, listen... I can't...
She could feel Kerra's frustration burning through her mind, before it ebbed a bit. I'll talk to you when you're back to your senses but you need to tell me what happened.
Free from Kerra's voice, Everen was able to get a sense of where she was. She was lying down in a quiet room, though she could tell someone was nearby by small tapping sounds and the occasional sigh. When she pried her eyes open -- they felt like they'd been wallpapered over -- she saw that she was in Janna's office, on one of the beds. Janna was tapping away at her tablet, as usual.
"What's going on?" is what Everen tried to say, but all that came out was a rasping hiss, accompanied by a sharp pain in her throat.
Janna immediately looked up at her, standing when she met Everen's open eyes. "Good grief, don't try to talk, Everen!" She hurried over to stand at Everen's side. "The captain got you in the neck with that pen, and it was, shall we say, not pretty. Luckily you had the only nurse on the entire ship with you in the room, otherwise you could have been dead in minutes."
Everen was suddenly very aware of her neck. It hadn't hurt before she tried to speak, but it was wrapped in something. Everen couldn't see what it was. She looked around a little more and noticed that she had an IV in her arm, connected to a bag of liquid hanging from the IV pole.
"We rushed you back here and I operated immediately." Janna sighed and looked at something in the corner. "They really should have brought a real surgeon on board. I have some trauma and surgical experience, but it's not enough for something life-threatening like that. And the surgical robots creep me out. They did a good job on you, but I always wonder, what if they're bugged? It's hard for me to trust them when you could have died with a single misstep." She looked back at Everen, fear in her eyes. "I just didn't want to lose you. It would've been all my fault too."
Everen wanted to say, "Of course it wasn't your fault! Did you stab me in the neck? No! Of course not. This is all the captain's fault. None of this would have happened if she wasn't a murderer!" But she couldn't, so she just tried to communicate it with her eyes. It would be so much easier if Janna was telepathic too.
"Don't worry, you're gonna be okay. They have some really great drugs on this ship, not to mention cutting-edge technology. Although, I guess back home all of this stuff is super old news. But you probably don't care too much about that. Um, what else do you want to know about?" Janna peered into Everen's face.
Everen tried to indicate that she just liked listening to Janna talk but didn't feel that her subtle eyebrow movements were very helpful in portraying that message.
"Right, don't talk." Janna ran a hand through her hair. "You've been in and out of sleep after the surgery for the past couple days. I'm sure the drugs have been helping with that. What's happened since then hm..." Janna tapped her lips with the pads of her fingers. "Oh! The captain has been locked up!"
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