Free The Burn by Annie Oldham

cauterize the wound as soon as I’m
done.”
    Did she say cauterize?
    “Are you ready? Relax, dear, you won’t feel a
thing.”
    Then she puts the scalpel in my mouth. The bitter,
metallic taste of blood floods my mouth and I choke. She turns from
me quickly, my tongue dangling from her right hand, and grabs the
hot metal piece from the burner. I open my mouth wider—I don’t want
that searing metal to touch anything more than my bloody stump.
Gaea presses it in with a hiss, and a wisp of smoke curls from my
mouth. I smell burning flesh and gag. Gaea pulls the metal out
quickly, and I retch all over her floor. I look up, and tears
glitter in her eyes.
    Why is she crying? She intimidated me so much, why
the moment of vulnerability? She smears a tear away with the
blood-stained towel and the moment disappears like shadows.
    “Now then, that should do it.” She hands me a pill.
“An antibiotic. Mouth wounds do heal quickly, but we want to be
safe, don’t we?” She turns and walks through the door.
    I roll my stub of a tongue around in my mouth. I
can’t reach the roof of my mouth anymore, only the soft palate. The
bitter blood taste washes away with the water I drink for the
antibiotic.
    Gaea refuses to look at me as she grabs a backpack
off a shelf and shoves supplies in it, rattling off names as she
goes. I struggle to keep up with it all.
    “Sunscreen—be sure to put it on, especially with your
skin tone. I see you’ve already had a bout of UV exposure, and it’s
not any better up there. MREs—you eat these—blanket, first aid kit,
flint and steel wool—for lighting fires—a knife,” she holds up a
large, mean-looking knife, then sheathes it and puts it in the
pack. “You’ll probably want to carry that on your belt. Let’s see
here, what size?” Then she rifles through the stacks of clothes
until she finds a few things that will fit me. She eyes my dress.
“You’ll definitely want to put these on before you land.”
    She puts the pack into my trembling hands, and I
follow her numbly back to the sub dock.
    “I think that should be all you need to start.” She
bends, her skirt pooling around her feet in brilliant colors, and
opens the hatch.
    I’m halfway down the ladder when she speaks, a
heaviness in her voice that almost forces me the rest of the way
down the hatch.
    “You will never speak of us, Terra. But don’t forget
us.”
    Her eyes fill with tears again, but not just of
sadness. There’s also a triumph there. And suddenly those eyes look
so familiar to me. But I must be going wonkers with all the
pressure on me now. So I just nod and close the hatch behind
me.

Chapter Seven
    I don’t notice the absence of my tongue in the sub.
There’s no one to talk to, and I’m not going to pick up Dad’s habit
of talking to someone who isn’t there. I look at the coordinates
Gaea programmed into my sub. It will take two days to reach the
Washington coast and then just a few hours to maneuver through the
waters into the Puget Sound.
    Two days to myself aboard a claustrophobic sub. The
thoughts of loneliness press like fingers into my brain. I close my
eyes and breathe deeply to keep myself from screaming.
    The sub follows the trench north through the system
of canyons that are used for navigating this territory. At the
precise latitude, it will ascend and go straight east toward
Washington. After gazing through the window at nothing and studying
the monitors until my eyes are fuzzy and dry, my body aches with
tiredness. I’m hunched over the controls, tracking each mile of
endless progress, and feel like my mind is on the verge of shutting
off.
    I need sleep. I didn’t sleep well the night before,
and now it’s five o’clock in the morning. I lie down on the bunk
that lines one side of the sub but my eyes feel wired open. I force
them shut, and behind my lids all I see are forests, rain, rocky
beaches. Over and over these images flash, faster and faster as
they count down to a future that