6. Rhykor #2
We're closer than we were a moment ago. One of us moved—maybe both—and the gap between where I'm sitting and where she's kneeling has shrunk until the air between us grows thick and stifling.
The air shimmers with heat—mine, radiating outward in waves I can no longer fully control—and her scent fills my lungs so completely I can taste it on my tongue.
Her eyes are wide, her breath coming fast, and that flush still burning across her cheeks and spreading down her neck.
The curtain rustles, and Wen's tired voice cuts through from the other side.
"Cassia, the Henner boy is back with a laceration on his calf."
Cassia leans backward so fast she nearly topples over. She catches herself on the supply shelf and stands. Smoothing her hands down her jacket, she walks through the heavy fabric, pointedly ignoring me.
I sit on the floor of her alcove with heat venting from my body, hands scorching the concrete, and count my own heartbeats until they slow enough that I trust myself to think clearly.
It takes a very long time.
The next day, Cassia is elbow-deep in a dockworker's infected hand wound when the clinic door slams open and a girl's scream tears through the corridor, high-pitched and ragged with panic.
"Help! Somebody—please, he's hurt, he's really hurt?—"
I'm on my feet immediately, shoving my pain into a distant corner of my awareness, screaming into the void. Through the fabric divider’s gap, a teenage girl, human, maybe fifteen, filthy and hollow-eyed, drags an older boy through the clinic entrance.
He's likely in his late teens but so severely malnourished he looks frail, with soot-stained skin and messy blond curls matted with blood.
Oversized mechanic goggles hang around his neck on a cracked strap, and his right leg hangs in shreds from the knee down, with deep lacerations and exposed muscle, the ugly signature left by a droid's industrial cutting arm.
Cassia drops the dockworker's hand while barking an order at Wen before reaching the boy in three strides. She lowers him onto the exam table and cuts away the blood-soaked fabric around his leg with a precision that turns frantic energy into surgical action.
"What happened?" she demands.
"Droid attack—" The girl is sobbing, barely coherent. "In the generator room on Seventh. He was fixing a relay and the maintenance unit just—it turned on him, it started cutting, we couldn't stop it?—"
Cassia is already irrigating the wounds, her hands moving with that terrifying speed I've watched from the alcove for two days. "What's his name?"
"Elias Renn."
The boy, Elias, is conscious but fading.
His soot-streaked face is chalk-white as his body shudders from the rapid onset of shock.
Blood pools on the exam table and drips onto the floor at an accelerating tempo.
It has to be an artery. She's dealing with arterial bleeding in a teenager on a makeshift exam table with one assistant and a generator that keeps threatening to die.
I push through the heavy drapes.
Surprise flashes across her face for a fraction of a second. She's been treating me as a patient and a problem—a mere inconvenience occupying her storage room. The sight of me upright and moving toward her operating space rewrites every one of those categories in real time.
"I need another pair of hands." She says it instantly, already reaching for my wrist, the medic in her overriding everything else with a ruthlessness I'm beginning to understand is her most fundamental trait.
"Hold pressure here—" She guides my hand to a pressure point on the boy's upper thigh and pushes down.
"Stay firm and constant. Don't let up until I tell you. "
My hand covers the pressure point, and the heat in my palm—the same heat that melts steel and scorches concrete—modulates instinctively; it warms the skin instead of burning it, increasing circulation to damaged tissue.
Cassia notices, and her eyes flick to my hand, registering the warmth, and her countenance shifts behind them in a quick, diagnostic reassessment that she files away for later.
"Wen, clamp now." She works with a ferocity that borders on violence, clamping the severed artery and suturing tissue while packing wounds.
The boy whimpers and the girl sobs in the corner as the generator light flickers above us like a countdown.
I hold down where she tells me to and apply warmth where she points, handing her instruments when she barks names I half-recognize from watching her operate.
We work together for forty minutes. It feels like forty seconds.
When it's over, Elias is stabilized—pale and unconscious, yet breathing evenly with his leg bandaged and elevated. The arterial bleed is stable. The lacerations are sutured. He'll keep the leg if the infection stays clear and the repairs hold.
Cassia leans into the sterile, brushed-steel doorframe, chest heaving, blood coating her gloves and forearms to the elbow. She looks at me, really looks at me, breaking the silence she’s kept since our argument, with an expression too complicated to dissect.
"Thank you," she murmurs, and only that and nothing else.
I nod and step back from the table, giving her space.
The teenage girl who brought him in collapses into a chair, still crying softly.
"He lives next door to me," she manages between sobs.
"I heard him screaming from the hallway near the generator room.
" Cassia moves toward her, already shifting into comfort mode despite the blood drying on her arms.
But Elias stirs first.
A small, pained sound escapes the boy's throat.
His eyes crack open, glazed and unfocused, swimming with tears and confusion.
He sees the ceiling and the lights before turning his head to see me, a seven-foot Kraaj male with obsidian horns, crimson skin, and wings folded against his back, looming near his bed covered in his blood.
Fear flickers through the boy's glazed eyes, the automatic, bone-deep flinch that decades of occupation have conditioned into human children who grow up hearing stories about what my species does to theirs.
But blood loss and shock have dulled the instinct and softened its edges, and what surfaces instead is closer to bewildered curiosity.
"Did you... help fix my leg?"
The question is so small, so dazed, that the wall shielding my conscience sharply fractures.
"The medic fixed your leg," I answer, keeping my tone carefully even. "I held still and followed orders."
"Oh." The boy's eyes drift shut, then open again, fighting to stay conscious. "Are you... the Dragon?"
"Yes."
"You're really big."
A muffled rumble escapes my chest while I reach down and pull the thin blanket higher over the boy's chest, covering the bandaged leg, tucking the edges around narrow shoulders that feel like bird bones through the fabric.
Elias watches me through half-closed eyes with an expression so trusting it makes my chest ache.
"You're gonna be okay, kid." My assurance is rough, barely above a murmur. "Your leg's gonna hold. The medic's good at what she does."
Elias offers a tiny, drowsy dip of his chin, and his eyes close. Within seconds, his breathing evens out into sleep. The teenage girl who brought him in waits just long enough to know he's stable before slipping out the back, frantic to find her own family before the streets get any worse.
I straighten up and find Cassia watching me from across the room.
She's standing very still, bloody gloves hanging at her sides, her lips slightly parted.
The look on her face matches what I've seen battlefield commanders wear when tactical realities fundamentally shift in the middle of an operation, a recalculation.
It is a rewrite of all assumptions that came before.
She turns away, leaving me to stare at an unreadable back as she bends to check Elias's vitals with hands that are perfectly uniform.
But I saw it. Whatever wall she's been building against me, I simply put a crack in its foundation.
I retreat to the alcove and try to convince myself that the warmth spreading through my chest is a symptom of injury rather than a growing attachment.
Hours pass, and the clinic fills and empties in waves with the usual tide of sick and wounded civilians and the occasional Kraaj soldier who slips in through the back looking ashamed.
I stay behind the curtain, conserving energy, letting my body repair the damage from the tunnels.
The membrane tears are closing, new tissue knitting across the gaps at a rate that still surprises Cassia when she checks.
My ribs ache less. The pulse round wounds have scabbed over into tight, dark circles that itch more than they hurt.
Peering through the curtain gap allows me to watch the clinic operate. More importantly, my eyes remain fixed on Cassia.
Late in the afternoon, a man enters the waiting area, human, mid-thirties, lean and sharp-featured, with the easy swagger that comes from weaponizing charm in a district where charm is almost as valuable as ammunition.
He's carrying a minor burn on his forearm, the kind that barely warrants a bandage, and from the moment Cassia approaches him, his entire body angles toward her like a compass finding north.
"Well," he grins, all teeth and confidence. "You must be the famous Ward. I've heard stories, but nobody mentioned you were?—"