Page 79 of Dark Chains: First Link
Gertrude deposited him in the wheelchair with surprising gentleness and adjusted his position, straightening his spine against the backrest and arranging his feet on the footrest. She tugged the gown back into place and reached for a blanket, which she spread across his lap and legs.
"There," she said. "How does that feel?"
Humiliating. Degrading. A reminder that the body he inhabited was broken and that the independence he had taken for granted for thousands of years had been reduced to this with one stupid act of devotion to the female who was his entire life.
His reward was being picked up by a nurse he could have crushed with one hand in his prime. She'd carried him like an infant and tucked a blanket around his legs as if he were an elderly human in a nursing home.
"Adequate," he said.
He had been bathed by these nurses. Gertrude and the other one, Hildegard, who took the alternate shifts. They had seen every inch of him. They had dealt with his bodily functions, had cleaned him, changed his bedding, and performed the dozens of small tasks that kept a bedridden patient from deteriorating further. He had endured all of it because he had no choice.
Still, the wheelchair was in a way worse. Being carried was worse.
In bed, he could pretend that he was still the big and mighty lord who was temporarily indisposed, convalescing. The bed was a cocoon. Inside it, the damage was hidden beneath blanketsand medical equipment, and the CPM machine's steady hum provided the illusion of progress.
The wheelchair stripped away that illusion.
In the wheelchair, he was visibly broken. His legs were dead weight beneath the blanket. His spine, which the doctor said was healing but which still couldn't support him without the chair's backrest, was a column of reconstructed bone and regenerated tissue that wasn't yet strong enough to hold him upright on its own. The blanket covered the worst of it, but the picture it presented was unmistakable. A crippled male in a hospital gown being wheeled around by a nurse.
He had never known what it felt like to be sick. In over five thousand years of life, he had never been injured badly enough to require so much care. He had been cut, bruised, and battered in countless skirmishes and training exercises, but his immortal body had healed those injuries in minutes. He had never lain in a bed and waited for bones to knit. He had never depended on another person to feed him, wash him, or carry him from one place to another.
The experience had given him an unwelcome education in vulnerability, and the lesson was not one he could ever forget. When he regained his strength, and he would, the memory of this helplessness would fuel everything that came after.
"I'm going to take you for a short trip outside the clinic," Gertrude said, positioning herself behind the chair and releasing the wheel locks. "Just to get you accustomed to the chair and give you a change of scenery."
"I would appreciate anything that is not this room."
She pushed him through the doorway, and for the first time in weeks—or was it months—Navuh left the room that had been his entire world.
To leave the clinic, they had to go through a double-door system, entering a claustrophobic chamber and waiting for the door to close behind them before the other door opened to the corridor outside.
Had the clan installed such extensive security measures just for him?
He was flattered, making him feel a little less pathetic.
The corridor was unremarkable. Polished concrete floor, white walls, soft lighting that didn't seem adequate for the space. It buzzed faintly at a frequency that only immortal hearing would detect. The air smelled of the same cleaning product as the clinic, and he wondered if the clan used human servants to do the cleaning in their underground fortress.
A Guardian was stationed outside the door. He wore civilian clothes, not a uniform, and he carried a side weapon.
A flicker of satisfaction passed through Navuh.
They still considered him a threat, which meant that they hadn't dismissed him entirely. A prisoner who warranted a guard was a prisoner who still had value, even if that value was measured in the potential for harm rather than the potential for negotiation. They were afraid of him, or at least cautious, and caution was the sibling of respect.
Navuh would take what he could get.
"Danny is here to escort us," Gertrude said, nodding to the Guardian.
"Daniel," the Guardian corrected. "But Danny is fine."
Navuh didn't acknowledge him. He was too busy cataloging.
The corridor stretched in both directions from his room, and there were doors leading to other spaces on both sides. All closed.
Gertrude turned right and pushed him toward the corner.
The wheels made a soft sound on the polished floor, and the rhythm of it, combined with the steady footfalls of the Guardian behind them, created a cadence that Navuh used to measure distance. The fluorescent panels were spaced approximately three meters apart, and it took four seconds to cover the distance between each panel. At the pace Gertrude was maintaining, they were covering roughly one meter per second.
He filed this away.
