Free Chrono Spasm by James Axler Page B

over it, but it didn’t seem to be anything too worrisome. There was, of course, always the chance of internal bleeding with a skull injury like that, but Krysty was strong. And besides, there was nothing that Mildred could do while they were stuck there.
    Mildred then moved across to check on Nyarla, keeping her voice low as she asked some simple questions about how the young woman was feeling. Like Krysty she seemed fine. It transpired that she had been rendered unconscious using a drug of some kind, sounding to Mildred like chloroform or similar from the way she described it.
    After that, Nyarla returned to her spot next to the heater, and Mildred and Krysty could feel the heat radiating from it as they crouched to join her. Mildred was pleased to note that some color was coming back to Nyarla’s cheeks, but she still looked exhausted and scared.
    “It’s okay,” Mildred soothed. “We’re safe for now.”
    “No.” Nyarla shook her head. “They’ll come for us. The men. They always do.”
    Krysty fixed Nyarla with her emerald eyes. “We’ll look after you,” she promised. “No one will come tonight.”
    Slowly, the young woman nodded, but her fear remained palpable. Krysty thought it best to change the subject, to take Nyarla’s mind off of the threat of being raped here in this awful hive of ice. She recalled the thing that she had said earlier, about the place where time had frozen.
    “When we spoke earlier,” Krysty began, “back in the woods, you said something about a frozen area where time itself had stopped. You gave it a name— Yegok Rask...? ”
    “Yego Kraski Sada.” Nyarla nodded.
    “Yego Kraski Sada,” Mildred repeated.
    From the floor beside her, one of the women spoke up, her eyes still closed and a thin woolen blanket pulled up tightly to her chin. “We call it His Ink Orchard in English,” the woman said.
    “Yes,” Nyarla agreed, “it is dark place where God sows time like crop. My father, he tell us to stay away from place. People, they go there and we don’t see them again. They get...held.”
    Mildred looked from Nyarla to the sleeping woman. The woman had short hair dyed a vibrant shade of rusty red by some food coloring. She looked about twenty, maybe twenty-five, and her face was flat and tanned in the familiar manner of an Inuit. As if aware that she was being stared at, the woman’s eyes flashed open.
    “Do you know about this place?” Mildred said. “His Ink Orchard?”
    The woman nodded, her eyes narrowed in the flickering light of the burner. “Everyone knows about it,” she said quietly. “Whole herd of babas got lost out there once, couldn’t get them back. After that no one would go there.”
    Mildred didn’t know what babas were but she guessed it was local dialect for sheep or cows or goats, most likely something that could be farmed and eaten in the unforgiving climate. “How far away is this place?”
    The red-tressed woman closed her eyes and gave her head a visible shake of irritation. “Closer every day,” she said with a resigned sigh. After that she rolled over, pulling the blanket over her head intending to go back to sleep.
    “So, what do we do now?” Krysty asked, pitching her voice low so as not to wake the other women in the room.
    Nyarla had fallen asleep already, her tired body curling into a fetal position, light snoring emanating from her open mouth. Mildred looked at her and smiled. “We sleep in shifts,” she said, “and try to avoid getting surprised again.”
    Krysty nodded in wordless agreement, and she made her way back to the door to assume the first watch, crouching there with boot heels touching her rear.
    Mildred was grateful that her friend had volunteered without asking. She needed sleep. The cold seemed to have drained the last of her energy.
    * * *
    J.B., MEANWHILE , had been locked in a similar cell to the one that Ryan and Doc had been forced to share. His also had a small window that was open to the elements, and