The big yellow sun swam lazily through the sky, winked at her. She lay in the cool grass, a warm wind blowing over her, carrying the smell of butter. Althea soaked it in. It didn’t matter to her how she got there or why – just that she was happy and at peace – most of the time. The only thing that seemed wrong was the wind. It whispered intermittently, incoherently. She expected so much more. They belonged to each other; her and the wind. They were devoted.

Sometimes it whistled, sometimes it sounded like the buffeting of cloth, sometimes the howl of a monster – very, very rude – very wrong. The wind was supposed to be soothing, not a herald of pain and confusion.

Those times she felt tightly constricted, brutal sensations assaulted her – physically painful – nightmarish. But, somehow, she couldn’t muster the motivation to act.

She should – she needed to – didn’t she? She had somewhere to go, somewhere to be.

The first time that idea suggested itself was when the wind became especially loud: the sound of fabric, being beaten violently, by something powerful – something angry. There were voices inside the noise, speaking barely intelligible words that wandered in and out, floating around her in a worrying way.

Cold and ice, that should mean something. So should fracture and blood.

She couldn’t hold on to them, or make sense of them, and just as quickly, they were gone. She was back in the warm meadow, with no reason to be worried. She was just fine, didn’t need to act at all.

Then–

She was grabbed, jerked, pulled. She felt severe pain in her head, a change in pressure all over her body.

Her eyes wouldn’t open. The harsh sounds were back, the loud, beating noise again. Why wouldn’t someone stop it?!

“This doesn’t look proso,” she could hear a voice – understand it! It was male, it sounded old, grandfatherly, spoke in a slow drawl, a kind that was new to her.

“Her pupils are completely exposi,” the voice continued. “Her breathing is ineffi, I can barely find a pulso.”

Pupils dilated? Nerve injury? Head injury?

Another voice piped in, keeping her awake. It was younger, excited, also male. She felt bound, strained to float away.

“She should be glacia.” The younger voice sounded unhappy, even disappointed that she wasn’t. “She’s not wearing any cold weather apparati, and so thin… What’s keeping her ferve?”

“She may be geneered,” the older voice guessed.

Althea wanted to giggle at the ludicrous suggestion. Visions of twisting DNA spiraled around her; nothing wrong with them, nothing in them other than unadulterated human genes. Of course, they weren’t alone; she did have millions of tiny, industrious friends to help her, sliding up and down the strands, to fix whatever might be broken.

She should be able to talk to them, to command them, to visualize what they were doing inside her, and to visualize herself.

Only… when she tried to, all the images she could muster shattered like glass in to pieces and splinters. She grew afraid.

Am I broken?