Everything hurt. His chest felt as if a cargo container had fallen on it. His arms and legs ached. His head pounded so badly he had trouble keeping his eyes open. Even when he could, the world was nothing more than a silvery smear. Twin spikes of pain lived somewhere on his back. But the worst of it was inside. Emptiness. A space where something had been was now void. Then he remembered everything. The attack on the Corper ship. The battle for revenge. The escape. The search for Spike. The battle with the Boxers and the death of Donnie Wu. Then his capture. His pairing with the monkey. Monkey-backing. Gree. He remained silent for awhile as visions of tree-filled skies and monkeys hanging from the moon captivated him, filling him with the idea of what he’d had, what he could have been, what they could have been had they just been left alone. The ennui was debilitating. A heaviness settled on his chest and stayed there for a long while. But like the way his muscles sometimes tingled with numbness after sleeping awkwardly, the heaviness and the longing faded, until the monkey was nothing more than a memory of what he once had—like the memory of a string of islands where his people once roamed, or the memory of his father, someone who still managed to touch him from the darkest corners of his mind when he least expected it.
