2. Rhykor
RHYKOR
Pain drags me back to the surface.
The pain arrives in layers, beginning with the sharp, screaming protest of torn muscle and escalating into the duller throb of burns stretching across my left side like someone poured molten slag into my skin.
My chest feels caved in, each breath a coarse negotiation between my lungs and whatever's left of my ribs.
Deep under all of it, smothered by the wreckage of my own body, three bullet wounds pulse with their own separate demands, hot and insistent.
Opening my eyes, I see nothing I recognize.
The ceiling hangs low, cracked open in places, leaking dust with every tremor.
Dim yellow light from a generator on its last legs throws weak shadows across cluttered shelves and stained walls.
Medical equipment, old, dented, and held together with wire and stubbornness, crowds the surface of everything.
The air tastes like antiseptic and rusty metallic blood, layers of it, human and otherwise, soaked into the concrete over years of use.
And cutting through all of it unveils something else.
Something warm and clean, almost, threads through the chemical sharpness of disinfectant and old gauze.
It winds through the stale recycled air of this underground room and hits some part of my brain far removed from rational thought.
A pulse kicks harder in my veins, accompanied by the twitch of fingers against the cold concrete.
Disorientation grips me; I’m on the floor, sprawled across rubble and the shattered remains of what might have been furniture.
Heat flares through my palms involuntarily, leaving dark marks where my skin touches stone.
A hand shoves my wrist sideways.
“Stop doing that.” A woman’s voice, clipped and irritated, emerges. “You’re already lying on my floor. Keep throwing heat like that, and you’ll burn through to whatever’s underneath us. I’d prefer it to stay a mystery.”
I turn my head, and the muscles in my neck scream in protest.
She crouches beside me, this human, working a pair of forceps into the gunshot wound below my left collarbone.
She has warm brown skin smudged with grime and old blood.
Her dark curly hair pulls back in a braid that's falling apart, loose strands falling across her forehead.
Amber-brown eyes lock onto her work with a focus so intense it borders on aggression.
She's small—compared to me, compared to any Kraaj, she's practically fragile—but the motions she makes carry the certainty of someone who has never once considered that about herself.
Her hands are quick and sure inside my wound, and she keeps working through my growl of pain.
She should flinch. Everyone always flinches.
"Where—" Wrecked, the words claw their way out—a rasp scraped across gravel, so I try again. "Where am I?"
"My clinic, or what's left of it, anyway, after you decided to use my ceiling as a door.
" Her eyes stay on the wound. The forceps dig deeper, and white-hot agony splinters through my shoulder.
I snarl, and the sound fills the small room like a thunderclap, vibrating off the walls.
She pauses for exactly one second before going back to work.
"I said stop. You move while I'm in here, and I'll sever something important. "
I could kill her. The thought surfaces through the fog of pain with cold, mechanical clarity, an automatic strategic evaluation hardwired into years of combat training.
She's unarmed and unarmored, close enough to reach before she can draw a single breath.
One hand around that narrow throat, and this ends before she inhales again.
It's the same ciphering I run on the living things that get within striking distance while I'm wounded, an instinct older than language.
Except my body defies me. My muscles lock up when I try to move. A deeper, unfamiliar instinct is driving it, refusing to let me raise a hand against this woman. The wrongness of the idea floods through me so completely it makes my teeth ache; my senses reject the thought mid-formation.
The logic escapes me, and it feels wrong.
"You know who I am." A monotone response slips past my lips, weighted by a reputation of blood and fear I’ve spent decades earning.
"Rhykor, the Dragon of District Seventeen.
" She says my name like she's reading it off a casualty report.
"A Kraaj enforcer who’s very scary and very famous.
" The forceps twist, and I feel metal scrape against bone.
"Also very full of bullets at the moment, so maybe save the intimidation routine for when you can sit up without passing out. "
Nobody talks to me like this. Nobody has talked to me like this in years, maybe longer.
I've watched grown soldiers—Kraaj warriors bred for combat—stumble over their own words when I enter a room.
I've seen black-market bosses with kill counts in the dozens go pale and quiet at the mention of my name.
This woman is elbow-deep in my shoulder wound, covered in my blood, and she's scolding me like I'm an inconvenience she didn't budget for.
I watch her work as the generator light flickers, and her hands never stop, never hesitate, navigating tissue and muscle by touch alone during the half-seconds of darkness.
Despite disciplined breathing and gritted teeth, a faint tremor betrays her, flickering through fingers she works hard to keep still.
She is afraid of me; I can smell the sharp tang of it on her.
Adrenaline cuts through that warm, clean scent underneath, sharpening it to a serrated edge.
But the fear never reaches her hands. It stays out of her mouth too, which seems incapable of staying shut.
"You crashed through my storage room," she announces, still working on the wound.
"Secondary exam table destroyed, three shelving units of irreplaceable supplies gone.
Half the building's structural integrity is compromised.
" Yanking a particle from the wound, she drops the dark, slick bullet fragment into a tray with a metallic ping.
"I hope whatever you were doing up there was worth it. "
The memory surfaces in rocky pieces. The deal happened in the market district. Crates of weapons tech were laid out under tarps in a bombed-out loading bay while my crew ran security on the perimeter. Everything was routine and under control until the droids turned.
They came out of nowhere, a swarm of cargo loaders and maintenance units alongside a pair of security bots that should have been decommissioned months ago.
Their optics burned wrong, flickering between standard operational blue and a sickly, glitching yellow.
They hit both sides simultaneously, shredding Kraaj and human dealers alike in seconds with no discrimination and no regard for target priority.
I watched one of my own men get cut in half by a cargo loader that was capable of independent movement, its arms swinging with a speed and precision that defied standard programming.
I shielded my crew from the blast when the weapons crates detonated.
Failing power cells cooked off in a chain reaction that turned the loading bay into a furnace.
I took the worst of the burns across my left side.
The bullets came after, during the chaos of the retreat, when everyone still standing started shooting at everything that moved.
My wings caught the air wrong as I launched from the rooftop, damaged and burning, and then the ground was gone and I was falling and?—
"—listening to me?"
Blinking back to reality, I find the human medic is staring at me with those sharp eyes, forceps in midair, one eyebrow raised.
"You back with me?" she mutters, adjusting the forceps. "Good because I've got a waiting room full of people outside of that curtain who need me almost as much as you do, so the sooner I get these bullets out, the sooner we can both pretend tonight didn't happen."
I glance down at my hands. The air surrounding my fingers wavers, a sweltering haze radiating from my palms. The concrete below my right hand darkens and turns brittle, stress lines webbing outward from where my palm rests.
Clenching my fists, I grind my claws into my palms, locking down my reactions with layers of trained discipline that feel thinner than usual.
As she leans closer to examine the wound's depth, that scent hits me again—piercing through the chemicals and the bloody grime.
It is unmistakably warm and alive, flooding my senses until the pain almost melts away.
My vision narrows, leaving only the rhythm of her breathing as a backdrop to the wet, methodical slide of forceps deep within my flesh.
A growl develops in my throat, faint and involuntary, a reaction that comes from a place far older than thought.
She freezes, and her eyes snap to mine. For one raw second, I see the fear she’s been masking—real, visceral, primal fear, a predator three times her size pinning her with a sound that means danger in any language on any world.
Straightening her mouth into a hard line, she shoves the forceps deeper.
"Growl at me again, and I'll leave the next bullet in."
Biting the inside of my cheek until copper floods my mouth, I force the sound down.
My body has become a war zone of screaming injuries and instincts clawing against my self-control with an unprecedented intensity.
Every fiber of my being fixates on the woman whose hands are keeping me alive and the desperate, rising urge to grab her, pull her closer, and pin her against me until that scent saturates every cell in my body.
The thought repulses me almost as much as it compels me.
Finishing the extraction of the second bullet, she drops it into the tray beside the first. "One more in the shoulder. But this one's deeper. You must stay still and stay conscious. Can you do that?"