Ashe rested the back of her head against the wall behind her and let her chin tilt upward despite the rain falling directly over her face. The droplets struck her skin in perfect rhythm as she kept her eyes closed and waited.
The sweetness of the liquid she had taken was still lingering at the back of her throat, but beyond that there was no immediate sign that it had done anything at all. The pain in her abdomen where the scavenger's blow had landed was still there, and her limbs still felt heavy, as if they were in fact separate extensions of sorts not belonging to her own body at all. The shivering hadn't subsided either. If anything, the rain was driving the cold even deeper into her.
For several long moments she simply stayed there, too exhausted to do anything at all. Part of her had already begun to suspect that the vial was in fact meaningless. Either an act of guilt without real use behind it or perhaps some cruel attempt at ending her life sooner. She didn't know enough about how people were in this new and strange place in order to decide which possibility felt more likely.
But then, little by little, something began to change.
The pain slowly started to retreat as though some invisible healing force was muting it. The ache remained, but no longer with the same violence.
Ashe kept her eyes closed through it and at some point during that silence, she thought she heard laughter. It was a child's laughter reaching her in a distorted way, echoing among the ruined walls and rusted structures until it no longer seemed to come from any specific direction.
For a moment she thought she might have imagined it, yet there was something strangely persistent about it.
When her eyes opened, she couldn't make sense of what she was seeing. Grey particles drifted through the rain, slow and almost delicate.
The sky above had lost its earlier blue, replaced by a uniform layer of clouds, yet there was no source she could identify for what was falling. It wasn't cold enough so it couldn't have been snow either.
She watched it for several seconds before a new sound drew her attention.
A series of beeps emerged from somewhere close to her body and this time it was an all too familiar sound, only in a way she didn't really like. Her first instinct was to tense up, because the last time her suit had done that it had been followed by pain and discomfort. But this time the sensation that followed was different. Much different.
The suit started emitting warmth which slowly spread across her back, shoulders and torso. After everything she had been through, this new sensation felt almost overwhelming. A shiver ran up her spine in response to it.
She lowered her gaze and tried to find the source of the sound.
Her fingers moved over the front and sides of the suit, tracing seams and subtle changes in the material itself. As she moved them, her hands came into view, and she immediately saw how the blackening on them was still there. The liquid in the vial didn't seem to have had any effect over that. Against her pale skin, those dark branching lines looked like some sort of organism that had entered her and was now claiming territory.
"The suit is designed to sustain you," Seven wrote all of a sudden on the wetted ground near Ashe. "It can regulate temperature and support certain basic functions for a limited time."
Ashe stared at the words with a blank expression at first, then let out a scoff though nothing in what was going on really amused her in any way.
"Really," she said with a voice that sounded rough even to her. "That's useful information now."
The rain kept falling, reinforcing the distance between her and that strange voice that kept returning to her.
"Where were you earlier?" she asked. "You seemed to have plenty to say when I was walking through empty corridors. But when those people actually found me and nearly beat me to death, you disappeared. No warning at all." She moved slightly against the wall and felt the remaining ache in her abdomen. "That was a fairly important moment to miss."
For several seconds the marks remained where they were until they gradually faded, dissolving back into the dark wetness of the stone.
A bitter expression pulled faintly at her mouth. "Of course," she murmured. "You can all go to hell then."
She let her head fall back once more, though this time she kept her eyes open, looking at everything and nothing in particular.
Soon afterwards, the markings reappeared only this time they formed on a wall directly facing the angle of her gaze.
"Look to your left," Seven wrote.
The impulse to ignore him was very much there, but reason pushed back for her to recognize that her chances of survival had nothing to do with fairness. She just had to push through it and find her way out of this.
So she eventually turned her head to the left.
There was a patch of wet stone partly obscured by tall grass that had grown wild along the base of the structure. Through the movement of those plants, she saw a strange shimmer. It was faint, but she could see it now that her eyes had focused on that area.
"Is that…?"
"Yes," Seven replied. "Go. Now. Otherwise the corruption will keep spreading, and the next thing that happens will be you entering cardiac arrest."
The sharpness of that answer stripped the last of her hesitation away.
Ashe pressed one hand against the wall and forced herself upward. For a moment, the world around her tilted in all directions, so she needed to wait it out until she recovered her balance.
The grass was high and heavy with rain, brushing against her legs as she walked. The next thing she saw was the cluster she had been searching for. It stood near the stone wall as if it had gathered there on its own, like vegetation does over time.
Several crystalline bodies floated close together, in a suspended group of sorts, each one having narrow and somewhat elongated structures that caught what little light reached them. Within each of them floated a soft blue glow concentrated toward the center.
Nothing visible held them in place, at least nothing Ashe could identify at first glance. They simply hovered there in a silent group, serene and almost unreal.
Ashe had not expected Harmonic Seeds to look like that.