The pain is sudden. Intense and all-encompassing. It nullifies all else, for an instant I am nothing but pain. For longer the world is gone, I am alone with my pain-self. More alone even than I was before, without my egg. I see nothing, feel nothing. In this shearing nothing I find I am less than myself. The absoluteness of my pain is less absolute. Where the rest of my body feels pain, my arm feels nothing at all.

I feel the hard contact of metal against my opposite side. The sensation pushes the pain away, reignites me. The overwhelming thing of pain I was is replaced with the deafening shriek of the world. I feel it all at once. A screaming whistling projectile, the draining of my body, the changed it-thing that holds my egg, the raining shards of scrapped machinery, the slick ooze covering my leg and side, the smoke blown away in the air.

Then, silence. It is silent for a moment before the pain returns, no duller than before but leagues more focused. Localized. Thick blood pours from where my arm was in heaves. My limb has been taken from me. An echo of the theft of my egg. A machine attacked me, the same one that took my egg from me. Pieces of it are scattered around me. It is destroyed. The theft of my egg is avenged. I feel my fading, the creeping closer of my death. I don’t fear my death, my egg has been protected. Contentment.

I feel cold metal hands on me. Fear. They lower me to the ground. Something is wrong. Panic. I try to resist. I am weak, weaker than before, but the hands do not force me. I sense it, a new machine. No, the old one. Dread. The it-thing that took my egg has changed again. It isn’t destroyed despite the scattered pieces of its first body. Horror. It has my egg and it has my body. I am too weak to fight as its limbs enclose me from behind. Hopelessness. The machine won, it has my egg and I am going to die. As I feel myself disappearing it places something in the crest of my legs and limb. I feel my egg, snug in my grasp.

We are one again. We are cradled in our soft lap, soothed. Reunited.

We are cradled in its solid lap, protected. Safe.

Loved.