The Girl Who Chases the Wind

Chapter 7: Broken

I moved closer and touched her with my open hand. She immediately batted it away, which sent her sprawling on her back. She still didn’t pant in pain or exertion. Clawing at the cement gave way to falling arms slapping the ground.

“Do you want me to get someone to help….Greenie?”

She looked at me from the ground like she wanted to throttle me right there. I couldn’t tell if it was because of the name I’d used or the question itself.

Shifting to her side (and away from me), she reached into her pocket and pulled out a little device, small, plain, and white. She gave it a heavy squeeze and held it up to her mouth. Through a speaker hidden on the device, a young woman’s voice spoke in a soft, slightly-muffled tone.

“Again?”

She answered, “Again. Legs. Usual place.”

The voice from the device repeated “Again” with a trailing sense of annoyance before saying, “Sit tight. I’ll be there soon.”

“How soon?” Greenie clung to the device and nearly pressed it to her mouth. “I need help.”

A faint chuckle came. “I know that, but you just sit tight. You’re not going anywhere, and I will be there….in due time.”

Greenie cursed and smacked the device against the ground before letting go of it. It clicked off. She remained turned away from me. Carefully, I stepped closer and crouched before her. I put out my hand and turned her words around to say, “You need help…”

She turned her head, so her cheek was on the ground. She answered, “I sit tight…and wait.” I settled down next to her with my legs underneath me, set my bag down, and told her, “So will I. To make sure you’re alright and won’t go into shock or anything.”

Pressing her words through her teeth like the beginnings of a curse, she spat out onto the ground, “I’m fine. It doesn’t matter. Just…inconvenient.”

I raised an eyebrow. More than I expected she would say to me. I asked, keeping my tone as one asking any normal, injured person, “There’s no pain or discomfort?”

She strained the twisted, torn leg curled out nearest to me as though she intended to bat me with her limp, floppy foot. Roughly, she answered, “No. No pain or anything.” Her leg twitched one more quivering spasm like a land-deserted fish flailing its last.

I believed her. Her expression when she fell was more of annoyance or frustration than pain. I folded my arms and glanced around. No one nearby yet. I put out my hand again and said, “I’m willing to help…”

She spared no time in shooting it down. “I don’t need it.” She scooted herself further away by undulating her legs and body. Her broken legs flapped grotesquely behind her.

This was my opportunity, but I had to measure my words carefully. I persisted with my hand, bringing it over so I knew Greenie saw it outstretched for her arm. I told her, “Everyone needs help sometimes. Would you rather crawl on the ground or be helped to your feet?”

She sunk her face even deeper into the dust-spattered pavement. “That’s not a choice. I can’t stand up on these.”

I let out a puff of air and tried to think. I asked, “How do the nurses usually take you back?”

The dust didn’t seem to bother her as she pressed her face right up to it and resisted sneezing. Her voice barely carried, but I was still able to hear it.

“Never in a wheelchair.”

The word “wheelchair” mashed in her throat like venom gurgling out. I pondered this and offered, “I can piggyback you…and I know a fireman’s carry. Do the nurses use that?” She was smaller than me and I assumed her weight wouldn’t be too much with how she was able to run.

“I don’t NEED YOU! And they don’t haul me around like a baby! I get into a special thing so I can lift and move BY MYSELF!” She didn’t give more description than that and she looked thoroughly finished with any and all chat.

I wasn’t about to give up there. I settled down and stretched back as much as was comfortable as I said, “So, you run until you break, and then you do it again. Why? Seems pointless.”

She mashed her fist so hard against the pavement that I thought for a moment she’d managed to bust that too. I looked away. A wind from the hills traced over the two of us. It didn’t carry the dry starkness of the valley with its sandy flats. I thought I sensed a trace of Feldon’s little transplanted wood in the aroma.

I asked, “Do you ever run in the hills or just here?”

“Will you ever shut up?” Her voice moved with muffled agitation.

I gave a little snort. “Just making sure you’re still conscious, no concussion or anything like that.”

She gave the faintest of private growls as she told me, “I’m conscious. I’m fine. I didn’t get hurt.”

I put a hand on her shoulder, which she immediately shook off. “You’re hardly one to know. You could be completely delirious.”

“I never get hurt, dammit! So, leave me alone!”

No mistaking her words even as she projected them into the ground. I celebrated this new tidbit of information as I held my poker face and sighed with the words, “Suit yourself. But I can sit wherever I like and I’m still sitting here. And I’m not going until a nurse arrives.”

Edging her face from the ground, she only glanced back at me a moment. Time and the soft wind spiraled around us both. The nurses were still nowhere to be seen. Greenie’s frustration continued to swell as she made wordless noises and grunts to no one in particular to demonstrate her displeasure.

Eventually, it seemed that even I was an option. She wiggled on the ground and said, “There’s a bench around here.”

Setting my palm aside my cheek, I asked, “Oh? Is that so?”

“Yes. Not far from the main…path. West a bit. See it?”

I glanced up and it didn’t take long to find the bench she meant. I affirmed her question. Her next words sheltered in waves of grumbles before she told/warned me, “I’ll grab your back. And I might strangle you by the throat. Do you risk it?”

With a quick shrug, I told her, “If that’s what I need to do then…so be it.” I brought my arm down again and this time she clutched it roughly. It felt like she was trying to yank my shoulder out. Her fingers, though her nails seemed short, dug like sharpened pins into my flesh.

Fortunately, she was light, lighter than I expected for someone with her size and shape. So that meant synthetic products were likely lighter than a human equivalent. It also made sense with the way her body caved like plastic. I couldn’t remember if Memetic Crystalline was lighter than a biological equivalent. Something to ask Feldon.

I bent but didn’t tumble as she dragged herself onto my shoulder and seized me by the neck. Despite her threat, she assaulted my shoulders more than my neck. I reached back to hold her thighs above where the damage had been done. She nearly crunched my hips like a pair of pliers. It only occurred to me then that she might feel the real me through the scant layers of my clothing.

I made certain her arms didn’t slip down to my chest where she might find what I had buried below. Fortunately, I always had mannish hips so that wouldn’t be too much of a clue. I steadied myself and tried to position her strategically.

She sharply chided me, “Get on with it! Don’t feel me up!”

I would’ve laughed if she didn’t have her hands so near my throat. She still wasn’t my type and what she had so far as breasts or figure barely beat out my own. Before she got the idea to kick me like a horse, I started walking in the direction of the bench. It wasn’t far, but holding the comparable weight of a large child definitely slowed me down.

As I walked, she finally held her tongue. Her broken legs hung twisted backwards and torn out of shape.

I wanted to be cool, all strong and resilient but each step was like hauling several times my usual equipment and with the worst positioning possible. My arms burned and my back felt like it was being pressed in a vice. I didn’t feel like talking either. Still, words slipped out of my mouth.

“Just…keep…going…one…more…step.” I didn’t mean anything by the words. I said them softly, to myself, but still spoken. I kept them as a mantra. It really hurt, not enough that I worried I might injure myself but enough that I wished I was doing anything else in the world at that moment. Greenie leaned forward and clung to me tightly with her legs. This helped a little and I appreciated it.

Just when I felt I couldn’t go any further, we were finally at the bench. I backed up and lowered her onto it. With the weight gone, I heaved a sigh of relief. I’d left my bag behind, but I was fine with it waiting for later. I sat on the same bench a respectable distance from Greenie.

She used her hands to steady her with her useless legs dangling and leaning askew on the ground. Glancing over at me for a quick moment, she muttered, “Thanks.”

The breeze kicked up and pushed her hair over her face. She turned to brush it back and said no more. I leaned back on the bench and sighed. I could’ve asked a question, one of the more prying questions, and perhaps gotten something closer to a response.

I had a question in mind. It wasn’t one delving into mysteries of synthetic body parts or determinations of gender. It was just a simple one.

“Are you okay?”

She didn’t react at first. She just looked forward and tried to fix her hair a few times. When she did respond, she curled her lips slightly and repeated from before, “I’m fine. It doesn’t hurt.”

Actually, she said before that she never got hurt. I could’ve inquired further about that, but I stuck to my question and clarified, “I know that. It’s just…how hard you run. How much you push yourself. All that. Are you okay?”

From the opening a ways away, I could see a young woman in a blue outfit walking towards us with something silver with lots of straps and a few wheels trailing behind her. The nurse to take Greenie away. I pointed her out. Greenie didn’t look over, she just whispered, “I’m still here. After everything, that’s all I can say.”

It didn’t sound like she said that intending to be vague like before or like Lily and Feldon. Also, the way she said it. It began with resignation. She was still here. Still alive? After a long life? I could only assume.

I felt a bit of relief she didn’t have questions for me, didn’t accidentally feel the shape of my body under my layers of protection. Or, if she had, she didn’t show it. Still, I watched her eyes for some trace of suspicion.

The nurse was close enough to wave and shout above the breeze, “Hey, Greenie! Who’s your pal?” I leaned away and brushed at my knee.

Pushing with her knuckles into the bench, Greenie glanced at me and told the nurse, “Hogan? I wasn’t listening…”

I gave her the usual name. The nurse remarked, “Dr. Feldon told me you’d be around. I’m Kathryn. And you…I have a three-year-old at home, but you take the cake for breaking things.”

Greenie wore a sour expression. She directed it to the clay ground and muttered, “Too easy to break.”

Setting the wheeled contraption with straps nearby, Kathryn remarked, “That so? All this time we’ve put simulated legs through their paces. All the people…who’ve gotten legs with less to them than yours and they don’t go blowing them to pieces. And if only it were just that.”

Greenie retorted simply, “What I do is my own business.”