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How long had passed? Anne didn’t know.
Time moved strangely in Pandoria. It didn’t flow like a stream, but stopped and started like a sputtering, rusty faucet in the stable yard.
Sometimes Anne thought she’d been trapped for thirty seconds. Other times it felt like thirty years. She couldn’t move, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat. It was just as well she didn’t need to. At first, she’d wondered if she’d ever feel hungry or tired again, even if she got free of her prison. These days, she didn’t think about getting free. Instead, she thought about dressage tests. About Concorde.
It was a scorching day in southern Italy as Concorde halted on the centre line. Anne’s fingers twitched minutely on the reins, and he shifted into a four-step rein back. But over-eager, he made five steps. Anne felt a sharp burst of frustration, and Concorde picked up on it, his grey ears pinning back as he lost collection in his neck.
That mistake had cost them first place. In her mind, Anne replayed and replayed that memory, like a scratched-up, warped DVD, until her imagination made them do it perfectly. It passed the time.
Sometimes, if she thought about Concorde hard enough, she could almost feel her link to him. The bond that had always been there, through the cold, lonely nights in foreign countries and the isolated walks down school hallways, pretending she never heard anyone call her a snob.
It wasn’t there anymore.
Sometimes, in her memories, pink cracks appeared in the sky over whichever arena she was riding in. Things came through. Sometimes shadow-seekers. Sometimes tentacles. But Anne kept riding. Everyone was looking at her, an audience full of expectant faces. Sometimes their eyes were all glowing pink. They were always waiting for her to perform, waiting for her to slip up. They had been her whole life. These days, Anne couldn’t tell if the cracks had always been there, or if they were a product of her exhausted, sleepless brain.
When she ran out of dressage tests, she imagined she could feel pain where her cheek was splitting open, where the crystal bit into it, rather than nothing but a numb coldness as pink poured out of her skin. It was just the cracks that had always been underneath finally breaching the surface. You break granite enough, and you’ll find veins of quartz. Inclusions. Flaws.
At first, Anne had wondered if she was splitting apart. If a stonecutter had driven his maul into her, and now she was in a thousand little pieces, the crystal the only thing holding her together. She thought that if she ever got free, she might shatter onto the pink ground. Here lie the pieces of Anne.
These days, she didn’t think about getting free.
She didn’t want to.