A wave of nausea washes over her body as she wakes. The room simply a blur of shadows and light, filled with the sound of her blood pumping through her ears. Clutching her head in her hands, she forces down the urge to groan as another assault of nausea attacks her.

Get up.

A voice, distant and like a whisper. She said nothing.

Get up!

Groaning painfully she tries to look for the source of the voice, she can't see through the fog her eyes hide behind and she rises painfully the tears springing to her eyes as her body protests. No- No, more I can’t.

On her feet now, her vision clears enough that she can register the remains of glass and concrete scattered about her feet. Her next step forward causes the ground to twist and tilt beneath her and she falls to her knees. She tries to make her way across the rubble, only pausing when the bouts of nauseous pain wrack her body. In one of these intervals she looks up. Blinking and squinting up through the light, she sees the vast ceiling made of glass. Only vaguely she recognises and sizable hole in it, cracked like an egg a baby bird has just emerged out of. Panting with the effort of movement she slumps onto the ground to rest.

A blink and her eyes are open again. The room has changed. Now the shadows had crept in to occupy much of the room, the sky visible above, has darkened to a bruised purple. She must have laid there longer that her body told her she had.

“Kat!”

A voice pierces the air, causing her head to shout back in response, her eyes pinching shut to shield her senses from any more noise.

“Kat! Are you okay?”

A pair of feet stumble through the rubble about her, halting by her side to try and lift her to her feet. She groans and opens her eyes. A stranger. His brown hair crusted in a layer of dust and his expression open and concerned. He pulls her into a hug that presses against her aching ribs and with a grimace she tries to push him away from her.

“Who are you?”

The foreign voice that speaks her thoughts echoes through her throbbing body. The only response from the man trying to help her out of the building was an amused laugh. She frowns, some distant alarm ringing in the back of her mind. She resists his arms and stumbles back a step, back into the shelter of the building.

“Who are you?”

“Don’t screw with me Kat. We need to get you back to the Academy so we can get you fixed up.”

He makes to hold her arm again and she frowns, shying from his grip.

“Don’t screw with me Kat.” He says, frowning

“I asked, ‘Who are you?’”

“Look, I don’t need to humour your dark jokes. You’ve put me through enough today.”

She doesn’t move

“Kat?”

The feel of the name on her tongue is foreign and she lets it onto her lips again.

“Kat…”

He approaches, face filled with an emotion she couldn’t read. He pulls her into another embrace, lowering his lips to brush hers. The embrace ends when the back of her hand meets his face.

“Get away from me!”

“Kat! What the hell!? It’s me, Jay? Can’t you even recognise your fiancé?!”

She blinks, her expression blank.

He lowers the hand nursing his face and shakes his head slowly.

“No… It can’t be… Oh god…”

Her head throbs again and she doubles over in agony. The only thing audible above her angry pulse, thundering in her head is a gasp.

“Your head…”

Hearing this, she lets her hand gingerly wander her hair to the source of pain. Her fingers grow hot and sticky with blood and she winces away from the swollen lip of a wound.

“Jesus… What happened?”

She looks up at the stranger, a glare levelled at him. She tried to get away from him, her vulnerable state sparking her instincts, but her body refuses, dropping her to the floor instead. With a peaceful ‘thud’ she is reunited with darkness.

When I wake, I am greeted with the smell of…

I can’t remember what you call it, but I can see where I am laying. The room is white and quite, the only noise being faint goings on from the other side of the white door. I try and sit up but the movement is too much and I collapse backward into the pillow. It’s soft, which is pleasant but I can’t shake the fear of being somewhere I don’t recognise. I rub my eyes to clear my mind. It stays foggy. The place where my mind reaches to find things is dark. My stomach clenches in fear. There’s nothing I can recall or find, it’s all a mess of fog and darkness. My pulse picking up I look down at my arm, a small thin tube links me to a bag of translucent fluid and I try and pull it out. As I manage to do this, not without hissing in pain, a figure appears in the door way.

“Miss Hunter! Don’t!” he runs in and quickly picks up the needle end of the tube, beginning to bring it toward me.

“No!”

I twist away from the man and he gives a tut of irritation.

“You must be adequately supplied with the anti-biotic, you have some nasty injuries.”

I glare at him, untrusting.

“I’m a doctor. I can help you.”

The silence is waiting for my response. I reluctantly offer my arm to him and he goes about reinserting the needle.

“See? Much better.”

He pulls a clipboard from the end of my bed and stares at it for a moment. He fixes the glasses that had been put askew in my little protest and levels his gaze at me.

“You’ll need to tell me roughly what height you fell from, Miss Hunter.”

I look at him blankly.

“Your head. You were badly concussed and had several fall related injuries.” I reach up to feel my head and freeze when my fingers touch the stubble that was all over my scalp.

“Many apologies, we needed to do that to treat you head wound. Do you remember what occurred before your fall?” I shake my head slowly. He jots something down.

“It seems you have sustained a much more serious head trauma then we thought. You seem to have some memory loss.”

No shit.

“I’ll be back later tonight after I’ve done some fact checking and see how you’re going.”

All I can do is nod as he leaves, white coat swishing. I close my eyes and sigh deeply but regret it instantly. A stab of pain through my ribs has me biting my tongue.

“Kat?” I open my eyes and level my glare at the intruder.

“Jay, was it?” He flinches at my words but enters the room anyway.

“Yeah. How are you feeling?”

“Alright I guess”

“That’s good,” he says, “I guess.”

I quirk an eyebrow at him.

“You said we were fiancés. You know me?”

“Of course, I do…” A light flicks on in my head.

“Alright then, what’s my name?”

“Katerina May Hunter”

“Hunter? That’s my family name?”

“Yeah. You’re twenty-one-and-a-half”

I frown.

“I’ll ask the questions.”

“Sure.” he says, taken aback.

“Who are my family?” I ask, he hesitates

“You don’t have a family, so to speak. No one in the Academy does. It’s complicated.”

“Surely I have a father and mother?”

“Ye-es. Although no one in the Academy is really meant to know who their parents are.”

“Do I- Do you know?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me.”

Another hesitation.

“Your mother died when you were young. She was part of the Council with your father, she died from an illness we called Lentum Moris or ‘the slow death.’ Your father was killed in a rebel uprising.”

I take it in, my mind eager to clear out the fog that dwells inside.

“What is the Council?”

“They are a board of people who run our world.”

“What’s the Academy?”

“It’s a place where people learn stuff…”

“Like?”

“It’s complicated.” I wait to see if he was going to expand on that, but he didn’t. I decided to breech a more pressing issue.

“You do realise I can’t remember you.”

“I know…”

“So, any relationship we had before… I remember none of it.”

“I know…” His face is shadowed with an emotion I can’t pick.

“Are you okay?”

He shrugs half-heartedly.

“Look, I’m sorry. I guess we can be friends, right?”

He looked at me sadly.

“Sure. Friends.”

I nod and shift uncomfortably in my bed. I was feeling more and more restless, like I had something I needed to do. Jay looks at me in thought.

“You wanna go get some food?”

I want to deny the offer, still wary of this stranger, but my stomach growls as if on cue.

“That’d be great…”

“I’ll just go get some supplies and I’ll be back to pick you up.”

All I can do is nod as he leaves.