Borrowed Time

"I always thought 'mind over matter' was inspirational nonsense. Turns out it's worse than that—it's a loan with a very unpleasant repayment schedule."

I dreamed of falling.

Not the sharp, sudden drop of a nightmare—the kind that jerks you awake with your heart pounding and your hands grasping at sheets. This was slower. A gradual descent through darkness, the world above receding, the void below rising to meet me. I fell without wind, without resistance, without anything to tell me how fast I was going or how far I had left to go.

And somewhere in that darkness, a voice whispered words I couldn't quite hear.

You are mine, Joel Gibbons.

I woke with the echo of it still vibrating in my chest.

The overhang was dim, the pale light filtering through the entrance in soft grey waves. For a moment—just a moment—I lay still, trying to remember where I was, why I was there, what had happened to bring me to this hard stone floor in this narrow shelter in this world that wasn't mine.

Then the memories came flooding back. The wasteland. Nelson. The endless walking. The pain. All of it crashing over me like a wave, drowning me in the reality of my situation.

Get up, I told myself. You need to get up.

I tried to move my legs.

Nothing happened.

The signal went out—I felt it leave my brain, felt it travel down my spine, felt it reach the point where my body was supposed to respond. And then... nothing. A void. An absence where movement should have been.

What?

I tried again. Concentrated harder this time, putting everything I had into the simple act of bending my knee, flexing my foot, doing any of the thousand small movements I'd taken for granted every day of my life.

Nothing.

My legs lay there beneath the thin blanket like they belonged to someone else. Like they'd been attached to my body by accident and had finally decided to acknowledge that they weren't really part of me at all.

No. No, no, no—

Panic clawed at my throat. I pushed myself up on my elbows—that still worked, thank God, my arms still responded to commands—and stared down at my legs. They looked normal. Unchanged. The same legs I'd been dragging across the wasteland for days, battered and bruised but fundamentally functional.

Except they weren't. Not anymore.

"Move," I whispered. "Come on. Move."

I watched my thigh, willing the muscle to twitch, to contract, to do anything at all. The flesh remained still. Unresponsive. Dead.

Not dead, I told myself. You're not dead. You came back from dead. This is something else. This is—

This was my body shutting down.

The realisation hit me with the force of a physical blow. Two days of walking on legs that should have been resting. Two days of pushing through pain that should have stopped me. Two days of burning through whatever reserves the resurrection had given me, spending energy I didn't have, borrowing against a debt that was now coming due.

And now the debt collectors had arrived.

I let my head fall back against the stone, staring up at the rough ceiling of the overhang. My chest was heaving—I could feel that, at least. My heart was hammering against my ribs, each beat sending little shockwaves of pain through my bruised torso. My arms trembled from the effort of holding myself up, so I let them collapse too, let my whole body go limp against the cold, hard ground.

This is it, I thought. This is as far as you go.

The thought was almost peaceful. Almost. If I could have ignored the terror underneath it, the primal, animal fear of being helpless in a hostile world, I might have found some kind of acceptance in this moment. Some kind of surrender.

But I couldn't ignore it. Couldn't push past it. The fear was too big, too raw, too immediate.

You're going to die here. On your back. Unable to move. And there's nothing you can do about it.

I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to block out the thought. Trying to find something—anything—to hold onto.

Mum.

The image of her face surfaced in my mind. Sitting at the kitchen table, her hands wrapped around a cup of tea, that particular expression she got when she was thinking hard about something. She'd looked at me like that when I'd told her I had dropped out of school. When I'd said I was taking the courier job.

What would she say if she could see me now?

I knew the answer, actually. Could hear her voice in my head as clearly as if she were sitting beside me.

One step at a time, Joel. That's how you get through anything. One step at a time.

"I can't take steps," I whispered to the empty air. "My legs don't work."

Then you figure out something else. You don't give up.

The words were so clear, so present, that for a moment I almost believed she was there. Almost turned my head expecting to see her, perched on a rock, watching me with that combination of love and exasperation she'd perfected over nineteen years of raising a child on her own.

But she wasn't there. Of course she wasn't. She was back on Earth, probably sitting in that same kitchen, probably staring at the same table, probably wondering if her son was ever coming home.

I'm sorry, Mum. I'm so sorry.

I opened my eyes. The ceiling of the overhang stared back at me, indifferent to my grief, unmoved by my situation. Stone didn't care about human suffering. Stone just existed, unchanged by the small dramas that played out beneath it.

Try again.

The thought came from somewhere deeper than the panic. Somewhere older. The same stubborn core that had gotten me through two years of dawn shifts and angry customers and pay that never quite stretched far enough.

You tried twice. Try again. Try until you can't try anymore.

I gritted my teeth and focused everything I had on my right leg.

Move. Please. Just a little. Just enough to know you're still there.

I stared at my thigh, watching for the slightest twitch, the smallest sign of life. My whole world narrowed to that one patch of flesh beneath Jamie's borrowed trousers. Everything else—the cave, the cold, the fear—faded into background noise.

Move. Move. MOVE.

Nothing.

I switched to my left leg. Same result. I tried my feet—flexing, pointing, rotating. Nothing. I tried my knees—bending, straightening, anything at all. Nothing. I tried simply tensing the muscles, holding them rigid, proving that the connection between brain and body still existed.

Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

Each failure was a small death. A piece of hope crumbling away. By the time I'd exhausted every variation I could think of, I was shaking—not from cold, not from effort, but from the sheer overwhelming terror of being trapped in a body that no longer obeyed me.

This is what it feels like to be broken, I thought. Really, truly broken. Not bent. Not cracked. Broken.

I'd pushed too hard. Demanded too much. And my body, in its infinite wisdom, had decided that enough was enough. That if I wasn't going to respect its limits, it would enforce them itself.

Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. Well done, Joel. You've really outdone yourself this time.

The dark humour felt hollow. A reflex without substance.

I lay there for a long moment, breathing. Just breathing. In and out. The only movement I could still control. The only proof that I was still alive, still present, still something more than a collection of meat and bone arranged in a vaguely human shape.

What now?

The question hung in the air above me, unanswered and unanswerable.

What the hell do you do now?

I heard Nelson before I saw him.

The soft scrape of movement near the entrance. The rustle of fabric. The particular quality of silence that comes from someone who knows how to move quietly but isn't currently bothering to do so.

"You're awake."

His voice was flat. Neutral. The same tone he might have used to observe that the sun had risen or that the sky was grey.

"Yeah." My own voice came out rough, cracked. "I'm awake."

I heard him approach. Heard his footsteps stop beside me. Could feel him looking down at me, those ice-chip eyes taking in the picture I made—flat on my back, arms limp at my sides, legs motionless.

"We need to move," he said. "We've lost enough time already."

"I know."

"Then get up."

The words were matter-of-fact. An instruction. As if getting up was simply a choice I was making not to exercise, rather than an impossibility I'd been grappling with for the past however-long.

"I can't."

"You can. It's going to hurt, but you can. Get up."

"Nelson." I turned my head to look at him. He stood perhaps a metre away, already kitted out for travel, his rucksack shouldered, his posture radiating impatience. "I'm telling you, I can't. My legs aren't working."

Something shifted in his expression. A flicker of... not concern, exactly. More like reassessment. The calculation of a man realising that a variable in his equation had changed value.

"What do you mean, not working?"

"I mean they won't move. I've tried. They just—" I swallowed, the words catching in my throat. "They just lie there. I can't feel them. Can't control them. They're—"

I didn't finish the sentence. Couldn't. The admission was too enormous, too terrifying to put into words.

Nelson crouched beside me. His expression didn't change as he studied my legs—the same clinical detachment I'd seen when he assessed terrain or evaluated threats.

"Can you feel this?"

He pressed his thumb into my thigh. Hard. Hard enough that it should have hurt.

I felt nothing.

"No."

He moved his hand down. Pressed again, just above my knee.

"This?"

"No."

Further down. My calf. My ankle. The sole of my foot.

"No. No. No."

Each negative was another nail in a coffin I hadn't known was being built around me. By the time he'd finished, the full scope of my situation had become horribly clear.

Everything below my hips was gone. Not missing—I could see my legs right there, attached to my body, intact and undamaged. But the connection between them and me had been severed. Cut. Dissolved by exhaustion into nothing.

Nelson sat back on his heels. His face was unreadable, but I could see the wheels turning behind those cold eyes. The calculation shifting, new factors being incorporated, conclusions being drawn.

"You pushed too hard. Used up whatever the waters gave you."

"Is that what this is?"

"I don't know." He stood, looking down at me with an expression I couldn't interpret. "I've heard of the waters healing wounds, curing sickness. I've never heard of them giving someone a second life." He paused. "Maybe this is what happens when you run out of borrowed time."

Borrowed time.

The phrase lodged in my chest like a splinter. Was that what this had been? Everything since the lagoon—the recovery, the walking, the desperate journey across the wasteland—had it all been borrowed? Temporary? A grace period that was always going to end, one way or another?

"What do I do?" I heard myself ask. The question was pathetic, desperate, the words of a child asking a parent to fix something broken. But I didn't have anyone else to ask. Didn't have anywhere else to turn.

Nelson looked at me for a long moment. I watched emotions flicker behind his eyes—calculation, irritation, something that might have been pity if he'd been capable of such a thing.

"Can you move your arms?"

I demonstrated, lifting them, bending them at the elbows. The movements were weak, shaky, but they worked.

"Your core? Can you sit up?"

I tried. The muscles in my abdomen engaged, pulling me upward, but without the support of my legs for leverage, I couldn't generate enough force. I made it perhaps six inches before collapsing back against the stone.

"That's something," Nelson said. "Not much, but something."

"Something?" A bitter laugh escaped me. "I can wave at the things that are going to kill me. That's something?"

He didn't respond to the sarcasm. Just stood there, looking down at me, that endless calculation still running behind his eyes.

"Can you crawl?"

The question caught me off guard. "What?"

"Crawl. Using your arms. Drag yourself along the ground."

I hadn't thought of that. Hadn't considered any alternative to walking, because walking was how humans moved, how I'd always moved, the only paradigm my panicked brain had been able to access.

"I... maybe. I don't know."

"Try."

I rolled onto my stomach—that much I could manage, though the movement sent fresh pain lancing through my ribs. Then I planted my forearms against the stone and pushed.

My body moved. Barely. A few centimetres at most. But it moved.

"Again," Nelson said.

I pushed again. Another few centimetres. The effort was enormous—every muscle in my arms and shoulders screaming, my chest heaving with exertion—but I was moving. Actually moving.

"That's—" I gasped. "That's something, right? I can—"

"You can crawl half a metre per minute." Nelson's voice was flat. Final. "The caves are at least fifteen kilometres away. At that pace, it would take you..." He did the calculation. "Roughly twenty days. Assuming you didn't need to sleep. Or eat. Or drink."

The hope that had flickered to life in my chest guttered and died.

"So that's it, then," I said. I let my head drop against the stone, my arms giving out beneath me. "I can crawl, but I can't crawl far enough. I'm still going to die here."

Nelson didn't contradict me. Didn't offer false hope or meaningless comfort. He just stood there, looking down at me with those cold eyes, his expression utterly unreadable.

"I kept you alive because you have value," he said finally. "Because there are people who would pay—or trade—for what you represent. A man who died and came back. A man who emerged from the waters."

"And now?"

"Now you can't walk. Can barely move." He crouched again, bringing his face closer to mine. "So the question becomes: is your value worth the cost of keeping you alive?"

The words were brutal in their honesty. No pretence. No softening. Just the cold, hard calculation of a man who had survived in hostile territory by never letting sentiment cloud his judgment.

"I can't carry you," he continued. "Not for fifteen kilometres. Not over this terrain. And I'm not going to drag you behind me like a sled." He paused. "So unless something changes, unless some other option presents itself..."

He didn't finish the sentence. Didn't need to. The conclusion hung between us, unspoken but understood.

He's going to leave me.

The realisation should have brought panic. Terror. Some surge of desperate energy that would miraculously restore my legs and let me walk out of here under my own power.

But all I felt was... tired. So unutterably tired. Three days of walking, of pain, of fear, of pushing past every limit I'd ever known—and for what? To end up here, helpless on my back, about to be abandoned by the man who'd kidnapped me in the first place.

At least he's honest about it, some detached part of me observed. At least he's not pretending this is anything other than what it is.

"How long?" I asked.

"What?"

"Before you decide. How long do I have?"

Nelson looked at me. Something flickered in his expression—not sympathy, not exactly, but perhaps some distant cousin of it. Some acknowledgment that I was a person, not just cargo. That my death would mean something, even if only to me.

"I need to scout ahead," he said. "Check the route. Make sure we're not walking into anything." He stood, adjusting the straps of his rucksack. "When I get back, I'll decide."

"And if you don't come back?"

He paused at the entrance to the overhang. Turned to look at me one last time.

"Then the decision's been made for both of us."

He stepped out into the light and disappeared.

And I was alone.