Download Sleeping Beauty - Harper Voyager Books

Unconsciousness is a blessing, but only a temporary one.I found myself amid a forest of blackened coils, thorn-toothed,stark against blueness of the sky.Rolling my bald and weeping head, I saw with blurred eyes acorridor cut through the midst of the hook-briar where only finewhite ash remained. The silver-steel of the cylinder lay beneath me,scorched but unbuckled. I jabbed at the buttons with sticky fingers,some welded together with molten skin, clumsy in a pain that admitsno description.Three times I tried the numbers. I would have wept but I’d gonepast tears. At last, infinitely slow, the lid rotated off and I dipped myhands into the nu-skin. I daubed the slime across each finger. As thestuff writhed across them I held each digit wide, despite the pain. Ismeared slime across my face, into my mouth, into each eye, downacross my body as far as the remaining thorns would let me.Whatever science or enchantment the nu-skin held it proved tobe powerful. The unguent worked different wonders depending onwhere it found itself, repairing my sight, flowing down my windpipeand healing my lungs to the point where I could scream once more,building new skin across my arms while the dead stuff sloughedaway.I tore free of the thorns, only to snare myself on new ones, butallowing the application of my dwindling stock of slime to new areas,groin, legs, back. The skin’s work drew on my own strength, anexhaustion rising through me that dragged me into a torpor despitethe crawling agony of it all.At last a light rain woke me. I stood, caught amid the skeletalremains of the briar, impaled on black thorns, smeared with ash, but