When he came to the third time, it was to find that his arms were bandaged.
Feeling the slight stiffness when he tried to move, he sat up as much as his still-spinning head would let him and pushed up his sleeve, only to find that his arm was covered from wrist to elbow in thick gauze.
“It’s for your own protection.”
He looked up. It was the same big man, Mikkel, who’d been there with Onni when he’d first woken up, the one who’d been holding his wrists in a firm grip the last time he’d been awake. He shuddered.
“They can’t be removed,” he continued. “Most of them go deep into vital areas. If we tried, you could be paralyzed… or you could bleed to death. Even if you did manage to survive, you would still be heavily scarred.”
He didn’t answer, only looked down at himself again. Someone had dressed him in a set of oversized clothes, but underneath, he knew that his body was still weird.
“It will do you some good to get up and move around.” The man was propping him up now, continuing to support him as he stepped down from the table, but at least he didn’t touch too much.
“Okay,” was the only response that Lalli gave.
Mikkel kept a grip on his elbow as he walked him out of the metal room, through the metal hallway, down the metal stairs, and into another larger space that was also entirely metal. Once, Lalli tried to pull away, only to stagger and pitch forward, but Mikkel grabbed his arm again before he could fall. He couldn’t ever remember being so weak.
He looked around the room as Mikkel walked him to an empty stair and helped him to sit. There were people here that he recognized—Emil and the loud red-haired woman, both sitting asleep in chairs; Onni, staring at a bank of computers—and one that he didn’t, a girl sitting beside him. As Lalli slumped on the step and tried to catch his breath, Mikkel sat down beside them and began talking to the girl quietly.
There wasn’t much to look at here, just a lot of metal and the cascading green numbers on the screens. All of it was real, though. Lalli wrapped his fingers around the metal railing, feeling its rough-edged solidity. It didn’t feel weird the way everything in that other place had. It existed. It was.
He frowned. Without thinking about it, he released the metal of the railing, moving instead to press his fingers into his other arm. He could feel it, even under the layers of gauze: the weird things embedded in his skin, so deeply that they could never be taken out. Even though he didn’t have nails (just like he didn’t have hair), his fingers began curling into his flesh, seeking any sort of purchase against which he could grip the thing…
“Hi!”
He looked up. The girl who’d been at the computers before was now standing in front of him; Mikkel had taken her place in front of the monitors.
“I’m Tuuri,” she continued, sitting down much too close to him—he tried to shift his position, but the railing was in the way. “You’re Onni’s cousin Lalli, right? I’m Onni’s sister, so I guess that makes me your cousin too, I’ve heard so much about you, welcome on board the Valkyrie, oh and don’t worry about your hair, it grows back…”
As she continued to spout out a lot of words, though, Lalli noticed something else about her. Her sleeves had been rolled up to her elbows, revealing arms smudged black with grease… but there wasn’t anything else in her skin.
“Oh yeah.” She pushed her sleeve up further and held her arm out in front of him. “I was born here. Third generation, my grandmother came out of the Matrix in—”
“Tuuri.”
“Oh. Sorry, gotta get back to work!” To Lalli’s relief, she jumped up and ran over to where Onni was gesturing for her. Onni spared him only a quick nod before saying something to Tuuri in a hushed voice. Mikkel, meanwhile, had moved to stand behind Emil's chair, pulling at something on the back. He sat up with a groan.
Mikkel raised an eyebrow as he moved on to the next chair. “I take it that you couldn’t keep up with Sigrun again.”
“Doesn’t she ever get tired?” He rubbed his shoulder as he pushed himself out of the chair, even as the woman next to him blinked awake in turn. “I think I might have an actual scar this time.”
“You’re fine.” Mikkel turned back to the monitors without another word.
"Don't be a wimp, wimp!" Sigrun gave him a big grin as she stretched, before her eyes came to rest on Lalli. "Hey, the little twig's awake! Welcome onboard the Valkyrie!" She seemed to be about to say something more, before Mikkel caught her attention as well, and she turned away.
Tuuri, meanwhile, was giggling. “No one’s ever gotten worse than bruises from a sparring simulation, Emil. I don’t think even Sigrun could hurt you that badly.”
“Easy for you to say,” he grumbled. Seeing that he wasn’t going to get any sympathy from that quarter, he trudged over to the stairway where Lalli sat and dropped onto the step beneath him with a huff.
“Do not ever spar the captain if you can avoid it,” he advised. “She’s insane.” He pushed up his sleeve. “I better not have bruises this time…”
His arms were also wrapped: not in bandages, but in strips of clean cloth that started at his knuckles and disappeared under his sleeves, but Lalli could still see small, hard bumps poking up from underneath. Carefully, he prodded the skin between them. “Ugh, I’m so sore…”
At least he didn’t seem to expect Lalli to answer. He slumped backwards onto the steps, leaning his head so that his hair brushed against the metal by Lalli’s feet.
Lalli reached up to run a hand over his own head. Someone had given him a hat, but his scalp was still cold.
The other had turned to watch, peering up at him from the bottom of the stairs. “I know, right? It’s absolutely awful waking up without any hair. It took me forever to grow mine out…”
As he talked, Lalli stopped paying attention to his words, instead simply listening to the rhythm of his voice. In the Matrix or out of it, the people here—Onni, Mikkel, Tuuri, Emil—were all real. That at least was something that he could be sure of.
