Rhiane was dazed, frozen in place, staring straight ahead into the forest beyond their destroyed windshield. Her brain was still struggling to process what happened when she turned that tight corner and something, some animal she had never seen before even in a textbook, was staring her down like a harbinger of death. She had been too stunned by its appearance to initially react. Luke had reached over and grabbed the wheel instinctively, steering them towards the left and around the creature, taking control during her moment of inaction. It had been the wrong choice but there had not been a right choice. They would not have been able to stop in time, a head-on collision with the beast would have killed all three almost certainly, to the right had been the ravine, and going to the left had left them so off-balance it was impossible to correct their course.

"The brakes," she murmured to herself. In that second before before they became airborne she had slammed her foot on the brakes. The pedal had been hammered into the floor but there had not been an ounce of resistance. Vehicle 014's wheels should have burned rubber before the momentum claimed them in a downward trajectory. [i]Something[/i] should have happened- but nothing did. Had she been more cautious in operating the 4x4 intially, Rhiane could have had an opportunity to notice the sabotage before their lives flashed before their eyes. Logically fault lay with whomever cut the lines, dooming their trip even if she hadn't been reckless, but the princess elect blamed herself. This could have been prevented if she had not lost herself; they could have perhaps found a way to safely slow down to a stop rather than be flung through the terrain.

She finally released her death grip on the steering wheel to lay her shaking hands in her lap. Suspiciously none of the air bags had deployed when they struck the railing and flipped down the embankment. It cemented her fledgling theory someone had manipulated their circumstances. One defect could be accidental but two, two that would ordinarily lead to death, was damning. That neither of them were crippled or mortally wounded was nothing short of miraculous. "Should have..." she whispered again to herself as her eyes slid down to the spot where a balloon of air and fabric ought to have erupted minutes before.

Luke's hand grazed her shoulder and she jumped several inches. If it was not for him she might have been lost in the haze of the terrifying mystery for hours. "You're hurt," she said, avoiding his question unintentionally. Rhiane awkwardly pulled herself out of her seat, heavily favoring her right arm over her left, and spotted the shard embedded in his thigh. All color drained out of her face. For as courageous as she had been in the contest, in jumping off a cliff into water, in confronting her own mortality, she looked stricken. The rebellion had labelled her a martyr but were not that far in that assessment of her personality; she would much rather sacrifice her health and well-being for almost anyone else.

"I'll.. I'll... stay there. There should be an emergency kit in the back," she said as she crawled over the center console. There was some loss of mobility in her left arm, her legs were bruised from being around, and her mind was fuzzy, but none of these things bothered her the wake of her discovery that Luke had been harmed. A brand new first-aid kit was tucked under the rear passenger seat. Fortunately it was wrenched free easily so that Rhiane could move back into her seat. With mounting panic she unlatched the box and dug through its contents. She was genuinely unaware, but Luke could see she was still only utilizing her right hand, leaving her left to dangle uselessly at her side. Moving it earlier had proven it was not broken but the way she ignored it completely spoke to some level of impairment.

"We should patch you up so you stop bleeding," she prattled on to herself more than to him. There was a pair of gloves, antiseptic spray, needle and thread, a localized anesthetic, bandages, and something with a name she had never heard of before but that boosted an ability to heal cuts and abrasions more rapidly. "To reach it I'll need to get on top of you," she said as she tried to force herself to focus on a solution rather than the problem. Getting upset would do neither of them any good. Rhiane plucked the anesthetic spray out of the package and tried to steel her nerves. It was not as if she had never played nurse before. Neither her father nor Gerald had been able to handle tending to Edwin or her mother before their deaths.

Unexpectedly, however, a tear fell from her left eye. Another fell from her right. It was when she was staring at the moisture on her pants that she felt a choking sob rise up in her chest. Rhiane, the mighty and proud, who would argue Luke into madness, who didn't wince at the insults of the court, and whose throat had been burned with poison, was openly weeping. "I'm sorry," she heard herself saying between two heaves of emotion. "I never wanted you to get hurt. I'm sorry," she repeated, almost like a personal mantra. She was paralyzed with fear again, not at what had happened, but at what might have happened because of her stupidity.