Before:

     The restraints were gone the next time Trevor came to...

     and he still had to pee.

     He spotted a cistern on the floor next to the bed.

     He went to rise.

     Yeow! His body! Yeow! Yeow!

     He reached for the lid of the cistern moving only his arm and hand and no other part of his body.

     He brought the lid of the cistern to his nose and sniffed.

     Yep, just like he'd suspected.

     Urine.

     Okay, so how exactly am I going to be able to pee into this cistern without moving? he wondered.

     He tried to lift his body, just the slightest bit, in the direction of the cistern without moving his shoulders, see if that...

     Yeow!

     His right leg.

     He'd injured it badly in the last battle he'd been in.

     He needed to look at it, see just how badly he'd been injured, but to do that he'd have to move his head.

     And he still had to pee.

     "Help!"

     He didn't mean to say that out loud, yet out it came.

     They rushed in.

     Four of them.

     Four women.

     Three sisters, while the fourth woman absolutely had to be their mother, she looked so very much like them, and they looked so very much like each other. 

     Trevor pointed to the cistern and asked, in a softer tone, "Help?"

     The women exchanged glances, then the youngest among them, by the look of her, picked up the cistern to hold close to Trevor so that he could grip it if he wanted to.

     The thing, though, was that he didn't feel sure he even could use it, not right then. 

     In front of women, all strangers?

     Trevor clutched.

     And he didn't reach for the cistern.

     The women conferred with their eyes. That intrigued Trevor because their eyes were all almost identical, wide and open and gray.

     Their skin was the color of porcelain.

     Two of the women got on one side of Trevor while the other two stayed on the other.

     Then, so very gently, they leaned him to one side while making certain not to jostle his head.

     Their mother handed the cistern to Skip.

     They, then, all turned their heads.

     Oh.

     He opened the thin robe he wore. If Trevor didn't pee right then, he'd maybe insult them or something, or maybe it'd be his last chance for a while, so...

     Yet he still clutched. It was nothing he had any real conscious control over.

     Several uncomfortable moments passed.

     Finally, he sensed the women were about to turn their heads back around...

     and out it came. Just like that.

     He finished, put the lid back on the cistern, then handed the cistern to the eldest sister...

     after which, the women returned him to being flat on his back.

     They observed him...

     while he observed the four of them.

     Obviously, the three daughters were born within a year of each other. 

     Trevor got a look at the youngest one first. The family resemblance was so strong as to make Trevor think clone, but there was a softness to this young woman's features that the other two daughters didn't share. 

     Trevor spotted a tomboyishness in the manner of the young woman who stood next to her. She observed Trevor as if his presence amused her. 

     Trevor had already met the eldest daughter, in a manner of speaking, the one with the sad and knowing eyes. Trevor noticed as he looked at each of the sisters in turn that, the older they got, the thinner their faces. The eldest daughter, the one who'd attended to Trevor that other time he came to, had the thinnest face of all...

     except for the face of the mother. This was the woman Trevor had seen before aboveground just as he was about to get wailed on. Trevor saw a depth of wisdom in this woman's eyes that comforted him, somehow.

     Then,

     KNOCK! KNOCK! KNOCK!

     Concern crossed the features of each of the four women.

     They ran from Trevor.

     This is not good, Trevor thought.

     He heard voices from the other room, men's authoritative voices, the women's responding voices.

     He then heard a flurry of footsteps...

     and some came his way.

     Trevor got the impression the guys weren't just stopping by for a friendly chat. 

     Okay, now what?

     He couldn't move.

     He figured he had a single defensive angle left to him, and it was a weak one, almost non-existent, a fantasy, really.

     When he and Niki were first transported into this demon hole of a futurescape, they both tried to turn invisible, an ability granted to them by the Azure. Over his four years of combat training, along with every other kind of training, with the Azure, he'd turned invisible thousands of times.

     It didn't work. They couldn't turn invisible on the surface of Earth 10,000 A.D. (10K) Why not? Neither of them had a chance to figure that out because they were too busy being relentlessly attacked. Did it have anything to do with that band of illuminated energy that seemed to form a halo around the globe, or was it because they'd been thrown 8,000 years into the future or...

     Whatever.

     "Bye," he said.

CONTINUE