Cold

The events that came after the ship split occurred in what felt like flashes.

Like her life was the living embodiment of a slideshow.

First, there was the falling. It was endless and felt as if it would go on forever.

Then it didn't matter because she was letting go, her awareness of her terrible surroundings gone blissfully dark.

The last thought she had was that, incredibly, she could still feel Selene's fingers laced through her own.

It was a good thought on which to go dark.

The next flash of consciousness found Juri and Selene clutching onto large pieces of debris, their lives very much dependent on keeping their grip tight.

"I'm so tired," Selene moaned.

As they watched the last bit of their ship fall below the surface of the ocean. It felt like they had been floating for hours, and days, but Juri knew that couldn't be so. Ships wouldn't take days to sink, and the rain was still falling on them in merciless sheets.

The squid-like things were nowhere in sight, but she was certain they lurked around, somewhere in the ocean's depths gone with their notions of safety and remnants of their friends.

"I know," Juri said in a broken voice, "I am, too. But you have to hold on. We both have to hold on. It's the only way we have a chance."

The third and final time Juri came into awareness of herself, she was almost positive she was stuck inside of a dream. Not just any dream, either, but inside of the dream.

It was the dream that had set her screaming the night before her mother had implored her to go and seek medical help for her little sleeping problem. So many things about it felt the same; the overly loud sound of her breath, rushing through her in time with her beating heart too rapidly.

"Please," she whimpered, throat parched and screaming. "Please, somebody. Somebody tell me what's going on here."

She croaked the words rather than spoke them, her voice barely over a whisper. This, too, was terrifyingly familiar and she was sure they were the same words she had used in her dream.

So then not a dream, maybe, but a warning instead? Had some part of her knew this was going to happen? Had some part of her been trying to warn her that there was danger coming into her life?

The thought was almost too terrible to bear, and she heaved a deep, shuddering breath that was also half a cry. She tasted salt in the air, then felt it prickling on her skin.

"It burns," she whispered, "what is happening to me?"

Noticing the salt on her skin was a mistake. As soon as she noticed the state of her skin, she was forced to notice the state of the rest of her body, and it was very far from good. Sharp pains were shooting through her shoulders and even worse pain in her arms.

This was because she was in chains, her hands suspended all of the ways over her head and cuffed to bars inlaid in the ceiling. At some point during her incapacitation, she had been stripped almost naked.

All that remained of her clothing was a lace, see-through bra, and the smallest thong she owned. Her hair was dry but crusted over with what felt like all of the salt in the ocean. Every part of her shivered, which was made infinitely more unpleasant with her arms stuck straight up over her head.

"Stop struggling, sugar. It will be better for you if you can stop struggling. It hurts less that way," a voice called weakly from somewhere in the dark. Juri jerked when she heard it, followed by an immediate yelp of pain.

"See what I mean?" The disembodied voice continued, a voice that sounded like it was coming from the dead, "Hurts less if you can stay still."

"Selene? Oh my God, is that you?" Juri asked, desperate to be right.

"The one and only. I would say I'm glad you're awake but I'm not. It's no good being awake here. I can't tell you how much I wish I could just go back to sleep and wait for this to all be done."

There was something in Selene's voice that Juri didn't like at all. It was that dead quality that did it, something in the tone that said that she would be pleased as punch if someone came along and put her out of her misery.

After a moment and nothing more, Juri understood what she was hearing; Selene had given up. In the time it had taken Juri to come to, her friend had gone and given up.

"Selene, what is this? Where are we?" Juri asked pointedly, squinting into the dark and desperate to adjust enough to see Selene. She managed to do it, but she didn't think it was because of the tricks she played with her eyes.

Now that she was shaking off some of her disorientation she noticed that there was a low, glowing green light pulsing at the site of her imprisonment.

"Does it matter?" was the only half-hearted response she got.

"Of course, it matters! We need to get out of here, Selene. We need to find the rest of the people from the ship," Juri demanded.

Careful not to think too hard about the people she already knew would never be found. She knew that if she wanted to, she could call up the image of that garish blood spreading all over the deck. She could do that with little to no trouble at all.

"There's no point," Selene continued in the new listless voice that made Juri wish she could haul off and hit her, "if anyone survived they'll be in here with us. I think most of them are dead. Either from drowning or from those...things."

"You don't know that," Juri pushed stubbornly, "you can't possibly. And even if they are, even if all of them are here, that doesn't mean we just hang here and wait. We have to do something, and we have to do it before they come back."

"Do we? Do we have to, Juri?" Selene asked in a cold voice Juri hadn't ever heard from her before.