More water, simir in size to the st one.

  I was exhausted, although his moaning about the bad music I was inflicting on him had been helping my spirits for a while.

  Maybe enough mushrooms made a serving of food, but I was behind by at least one meal, probably more. I was less hungry, at least. I was fairly sure my Recovery had stopped doing anything.

  I needed to be rid of him for a while.

  I unfastened the brooch securing my sarong and unwound it.

  “What the hell? I don’t want to see that!”

  “Then don’t look.” I dropped the bloodied, ripped sarong next to the water and knelt on top of it, carefully.

  “Put your damned clothes on!”

  “When I’m ready.” I cupped my hands to drink thirstily. A crack in the wall let the water run down a shallow groove into the pool, and it spread up and over the edge into a thin film that seeped down into narrow cracks. I could see the cracks because there were actually quite a lot of those glowing copper-coloured crystals in here.

  Which also gave Zombie Boy a pretty clear view of my naked and battered self.

  “Perv.”

  “Maybe. Better than some things I could be.” I drank until I wasn’t thirsty anymore, then moved off my sarong and balled it up into a sort of pillow. “Time for a break before my skull cracks open from all the pounding.”

  “Probably that so-called music. I didn’t hit you that hard.”

  I didn’t answer, just did my best to arrange myself in the position of the least pain. That was definitely not on my right side, which had taken the brunt of my fall, but my left was also unenthusiastic. I tried on my back. Not great, but it distributed my weight more and kept the pain broad but diffuse.

  “Great, another nap, and this time you’re naked. I am out of here.”

  I gave him long enough that I was comfortably sure he was gone for the moment, then rolled over, breath catching, to turn the water into another Recovery. As before, I drank as much as I could, spshed the rest all over my skin, and id down again to rest for real.

  A foot nudging my ribs roused me with a grunt.

  “Fuck off.”

  “I’m bored. Wake up.”

  “I was dreaming I was having sex with Ryan Reynolds. You woke me up for that?”

  “Who the hell is Ryan Reynolds?”

  “You poor thing. After your time? Actor with looks, brains, personality, skills, and heart. Absolutely the whole package, there. Fine. I have a crush on Patrick Stewart too. We can pretend it was him instead. The Starfleet uniform is optional.”

  “That’s disgusting. And he’s old!”

  “Says the guy over a hundred years old who’s currently inside a zombified corpse to follow around his kidnap victim. It was a really good dream, too. A big comfortable bed, medium lighting, cssic rock sexy balds in the background, lots of whipped cream.”

  “I don’t give a fuck about your sick fantasies.”

  So of course, while I was making sure all of my parts were still there and trying to loosen painful muscles, I told him all about my supposed dream. In extreme detail, with as much vivid and matter-of-fact description of every possible sense as I could, although pulling up memories of sex with various partners hurt. A few of them I missed badly, especially Lee and Grace.

  It horrified my shadow, though, judging by the dramatic gagging sounds.

  When the gagging sounds stopped, I figured he’d disconnected, and sure enough, when I sat up and looked, the zombie felid was unresponsive.

  Good.

  I didn’t know how long I’d been out, but it was long enough for him to get impatient. Maybe another Recovery would work. I had no idea how much the effect would weaken each time, or for that matter if it would, but it was worth any small boost it could give me. I charged the water into swirly multi-coloured light, drank quickly, and soaked myself with the rest. It was going to take time for the pool to refill, so I got up to look for mushrooms.

  Near one wall, a copper-coloured crystal y on the floor, not embedded into the rock. I stooped, with a hand on the wall for bance because I was definitely not healed and my head still throbbed and the world still wanted to tilt, and picked it up.

  It glowed, warm and rather comforting, really. Maybe I could take this one with me, so I wouldn’t be completely in the dark on the stretches that cked crystals in the walls or glowing mushrooms.

  As much out of curiosity as anything else, I made sure my back was to the zombie felid and used Identify on the coppery crystal.

  Morning star crystal. Glows. Light has mild cumutive Cleanse properties. Advanced alchemy ingredient. Found in several cave systems in the Highnds. QUEST ITEM DO NOT SELL OR LOSE!!!!!

  The number of excmation points at the end felt a tad crazed, but I couldn’t exactly disagree.

  Assuming I got out of here, I was holding the st piece I needed, the one remaining ingredient for my alchemy upgrade so I could find out whether I could do a Purification potion.

  I absolutely was not letting go of this. I hadn’t seen any others that were loose, and I didn’t exactly have a way to chip one free.

  Just to check, I did Identify on the nearest mushroom.

  Blushing Mooncap. Edible raw or cooked. Best market: restaurants and other food services. Grow profusely in Highnds caves lit by morning star crystals, which gives them their glow and an extremely mild Cleanse and Antidote effect on any food they’re mixed with.

  “You about done with your sick porn shit?”

  “You have no appreciation for anything.” I picked and ate the mushroom I’d been identifying, and took the stone with me, back to the water’s edge. After drinking until I nearly sloshed, I got up and oriented on the next tunnel. “Hey. How have you never seen these mushrooms before if you know the cave system?”

  “Thought you had it all figured out. Cave’s been here for a long time. The crystals and the mushrooms are new. New crap turns up all the time. It’s like someone installs a DLC now and then.”

  “Uh-huh. This isn’t a game.”

  “You sure about that? You sure home wasn’t?”

  I didn’t feel like arguing about it. Singing ‘I Wanna Be Sedated’ off-key and as loudly as I could, I wrapped and pinned my sarong back into pce. After a bit of experimentation, I figured out a way to pull a fold through the waist to create a sort of makeshift pocket, and tucked my precious crystal into that. I still needed one hand able to grab the wall at no notice, and while I was worried about it, it was safer if it wasn’t in my hand.

  Then I got back into motion.

  “About fucking time. I guess you won’t get to meet the mid-sized lindwurm that broke through into the cave system.”

  “Not sure I believe you.”

  “Suit yourself. It probably wouldn’t actually eat you unless you do something stupid anyway. Might squish you though. It’s behind you, if you start walking it’ll miss you.”

  I couldn’t tell whether he was just being an asshole or was telling the truth in an asshole way. It probably wasn’t worth the risk.

  These caves just never seemed to end.

  As my head cleared and my aquian sense of direction came back, I picked up more and more gradual changes to the slope, tending more often up than down. That would have given me more hope if I had any idea what it had been doing previously, but if underground, ‘up’ seemed on the whole to be more likely to lead out than ‘down’ did, so I was cautiously optimistic.

  On the other hand, there seemed to be less water, and I was definitely getting thirsty, plus my st Recovery was wearing off. Sure, the Quickheal in it was helping with the damage, but I hadn’t even had the equivalent of one full one, as near as I could count with things blurring together. The mushrooms were keeping me fed, but I really needed the energy boost from that tiny bit of Refresh to keep fighting the pain and staying on my feet—and whatever the Anodyne component could do made it go a bit further and reduced the pain spikes that made it hard to keep the endless mushrooms down. Lulbye probably kept me from waking up screaming, sleeping on stone with this many bruises, and hey, Soce might have something to do with not giving in to the longing to just curl up beside the next water source and never move again.

  I couldn’t tell whether each was weaker or not. Lulbye spread across a week didn’t have diminishing returns, but full potions of most kinds did. Each still seemed to be effective. Maybe it was a pcebo effect. I’d take it.

  The sound of bubbling drew me to a narrow split in the wall; by turning sideways I could ease my way through, although it took me a moment and it hurt. It was worth it: the small alcove inside had just enough dry space for me to lie down, and otherwise held another pool, fed from underneath by a spring and draining through one wall. There was only one embedded crystal, and it was in the wall of the pool, so the water glowed coppery in the gloom.

  Under other circumstances, I’d actually find it rather beautiful.

  “That’s cheating!” the zombie felid shouted.

  “What? How is finding water and staying alive cheating?”

  “I didn’t mean you.”

  “Well, there’s only the two of us here.”

  “Yeah, you’d think that, wouldn’t you?”

  He refused to say anything more about it, lurking sulkily outside the little alcove—and how he managed to make a zombified felid sulk so dramatically was a mystery to me. I ignored him as I pulled my crystal out of its makeshift pocket in my sarong, unwrapped the tter to cushion my knees, and knelt next to the pool.

  There wasn’t much room and the light from the crystal would mask a lot. I really needed that potion.

  So I took a chance, set my morning star crystal next to the pool, and charged the water.

  “What was that?”

  I swallowed. “What was what?”

  “I saw light.”

  “Zombie optic nerves breaking down?” I took another gulp. “You stole my bag and my head’s still ringing too much for magic, so what the hell are you being all paranoid about?”

  He shoved his way through the narrow gap, and I cringed away from contact, more revolted by the animate dead than averse to more pain. He looked around suspiciously, and I tried to keep breathing—the charged water still had a faint glow, but the position of the two crystals did a surprisingly good job of minimizing that.

  “I should jump in the water, then let you decide whether to drink that,” he snickered.

  “Yeah, that would be a hard ‘no,’ so if you want me to stay alive so you can keep getting your sadistic jollies, that would be stupid.”

  “You wouldn’t die. I made sure you took the right fork st time, there’s water in the main hall a bit farther ahead. You really have a thing about zombies.”

  I leaned over the water again for another mouthful. “I’m a paramedic. Medical first response. My job is keeping people alive. I’ve had to deal with patients dying while I tried and patients dead before I could. It’s hard to cope with but someone has to, in order to be there for the ones who really need help and when there’s something I can do. But every patient’s a real person. Once they’re gone, that should be it. Stealing their corpse and walking around in it is just sick and disrespectful.”

  “It’s not the same here. They die, I have a short window to borrow their body and do stuff I need to do, like watching for cocky fucking noobs who think they know everything and are actually the world’s worst damned escort mission. I let them go and they respawn with no bad memories, just a bit of lost time. ”

  “You keep telling yourself that. You were wandering around interacting with people for a while, right? You really still believe they’re all NPCs?”

  He didn’t answer, just stormed out of the little alcove. I heard him growling profanity at the walls.

  I soaked myself with the remaining charged water, and id down to rest and give the potion a chance to work.

  Who had he accused of cheating? And how?