The scene before him was incredible. He stood upon a field of ice and snow which stopped abruptly at a sheer cliff face which fell several hundred meters straight down into a thick fog. Across the crevasse, some ten to fifteen meters away sat a large block of impossibly clear ice.
He could see a shape inside the ice, a humanoid shape which was coming into clearer focus as he stared. The shape became a female shape, became an armoured female shape, became an unconscious armoured female shape. “Wake up,” he whispered. She opened her eyes and they flashed green.
“Ah!” he woke with a start in a pool of sweat, the green eyes quickly fading from his memory.
“Well, it’s about time you woke up,” a voice said from next to the bed. “Eva, go get the nurse will you?”
“But I want to tal-”
“Plenty of time for that, nurse first.”
“Fine,” footsteps followed the surly voice out of the room.
“I don't know what happened to you,” the first voice said quickly, “but leave out the bit about the fire.”
“What?” he said. “What fire?” the blur from his eyes finally cleared and he could see an older man next to the bed, his face was worn with years, but his eyes shone with kindness.
“Close enough. Good luck,” the older man said, visibly relaxing.
The door opened and at least three sets of footsteps entered the room. A nurse started to check him wordlessly. After a few minutes of poking and prodding, she stepped back from the bed. “He seems fine.”
“So, Mr Ross. Do you want to tell me what’s going on here?” a stern voice asked. When he didn’t reply, an elbow nudged him.
“That’s your cue.”
“Oh, sorry,” he said. “I don’t really know what you mean, though. I don’t remember anything before waking up just now.”
There was a silence that seemed to stretch longer than necessary. “You don’t remember the incident that put you here?”
“I don’t think so. I remember something green and a lot of ice.” The others in the room all exchanged a look and visibly relaxed. “What?” he asked.
“There was an accident,” the girl, Eva, said. “An explosion. You were caught in it.”
“What happened?”
“We don’t know. We were hoping you did.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Over the next few weeks, he was put through a lot of physical rehabilitation since he hadn’t been using any of his limbs since the explosion, which he had learned was several months prior. He didn’t get much time to himself, and as he probed the others about what put him in the hospital, he began to realise this was deliberate.
One night, after a few long hours of learning to walk again, he lay in the hospital bed watching the various lights around him blink on and off in their many patterns.
He got up and crutched his way to the common room of his wing. He clumsily sat in front of the computer, cursing his partially working legs. Calling up what passed for the internet here, he searched for anything about the incident that had caused his memory loss and weeks of horrible physical rehab. He used details he had managed to gather from the conversations to narrow down the potential things that he could have been involved in.
He found only a single reference to an unexplained explosion in the Arctic region of Greenland and even that didn’t tell him anything useful; just something that would always be unexplained from an uninhabited part of the country. He closed his eyes in frustration and sighed.
He was standing on a cliff. He recognised it instantly as the one from his coma dream. Across from him, where the ice block had sat, was a large smoking crater. No ice, no girl. Just smoke.
“You saved me,” a soft voice said next to him.
He wasn’t surprised and didn’t move. “I tried to,” he said not knowing why he was saying these things.
“You did more than you know. Don’t take it too hard. I had to make you forget.”
“Why?”
“What you did, and what you were trying to do were two very different things. You wouldn’t handle it if those things stuck around.”
“What happened in Greenland?”
“You woke up.”
He was laying on the floor, his crutches laying next to him. The early morning sun shone through the break in the curtains and lit up a cranky looking night shift nurse standing over him, tapping her foot impatiently.
“Morning,” he croaked up at her.
“Your bed not good enough for you?”
“I must have fallen asleep while surfing the web,” he said struggling to his feet, with no help coming from the nurse.
“Must have,” she said sceptically. “Now move. If you make it back to your room before anyone else finds out about this, I’ll forget all about finding you like that.”
“Deal,” he said, walking out the door into another nurse who had obviously been waiting there the whole time.
“Oh, such a shame,” the first nurse said, enjoying this a little too much.
“You could have hurt yourself,” Eva said a little over-protectively. She hadn’t left his side since she found out.
“I didn’t, Eva,” he said. “I just fell asleep and fell off the chair. And, besides, its not like my legs are broken or anything. They’re just weak.”
“Still. I don’t want you hurting yourself anymore and spending more time here than you need to.”
“I know, I want to leave too.”
“Then you need to follow directions better.”
“I still don’t know who you are.”
“I’m who was next to you when you woke up.”
“I know that,” he said. “But I don’t know who you are.”
“That’s my father,” Eva said, pointing to the older man who had also been at his side when he woke up. “He found you after the thing.”
“Oh,” he said coming to a few realisations all at once. “Thank you.”
“Just get back on your feet again and we’ll call it even.”
“I’m working on it,” he paused and looked between the two of them slowly. “Was there anything else where you found me?”
“Like?”
“Other people?”
“No. You were the only one there,” the man said. “We still don’t know everything that happened.”
“Oh.”
“Why? Should there be someone else?”
“Maybe,” he said, piercing green eyes filling his head.