Ki Book One

Chapter Eighteen

  She awoke to a blinding headache. Shifting backwards, her arms heavy and hard to move, she forced her bleary eyes to open.

  There was an unfamiliar ceiling above her.

  Ki did not know where she was and could not remember how she’d gotten there.

  Panic bursting through her lethargy, she tried to sit up. Staring at the room around her, she noted the pale blue medical curtains, the softly beeping equipment by her side, and the tubes in her arms.

  A half-choked scream twisting through her throat, she clutched at the drip lodged into the back of her hand and tried to yank it free, her fingernails scratching at the medical tape that held it in place.

  The curtains were yanked back and several men and women raced in. One man pinned her shoulders while someone else yanked her hands down.

  “Calm down,” a woman said from by the curtain, one tensed hand clutched on the fabric. “You’ve been unconscious.”

  Ki shifted back, shoulders digging into the thin mattress supporting her. With a sharp groan she tried to struggle free.

  She was too weak and the hands that pinned her down were too numerous.

  “Calm down or you will be drugged again,” the woman by the curtain snapped.

  Where was she? How had she ended up here?

  As crippling fright ripped through her fatigue, Ki desperately tried to remember what had happened to her.

  The last thing she could recall was being on the dock with the Major and his men... then... then....

  With a breathy scream, Ki tried to clutch at her chest.

  She’d been shot.

  She could not move her hand high enough to check her breast and stomach, but as she struggled, she realized there was no pain. A heavy drugged feeling, yes, but no throbbing agony.

  “What happened to me? Where am I?” she began to lose her fight.

  A dull feeling started to course through her veins. It brought with it a blanket that seemed to cover her body and pin her down. Blinking slowly, she looked up at the figures around her.

  “How did I... get here...?” her words were groggy, her lips hard to move, her tongue heavy in her mouth.

  “By ship,” the woman answered clearly.

  Ki tried to ask another question, but she could no longer open her eyes, let alone make a noise.

  The last thing she heard was a curt “go and get the Major.”