9. Cassia
CASSIA
The clinic closes late.
Wen leaves at midnight, pulling her coat tight against a bone-deep exhaustion—the price of stitching together a district that refuses to stay whole.
I lock the corridor door behind her, check the generator one last time, and find Elias asleep on his recovery pallet with his mechanic goggles still around his neck and a half-disassembled comm relay resting on his chest like a mechanical teddy bear.
The clinic door hangs warped on its hinges, still dented inward where machines slammed against it hard enough to buckle the strengthened frame, and beyond it, the alley is littered with wreckage of molten chassis and sparking wires.
The charred husks of machines Rhykor tore apart hours ago still give off faint heat that shimmers in the recycled air.
Two of his crew flank the entrance with pulse rifles and the rigid focus of soldiers on a post they take personally.
I'm wiping down the surgical tray when the air in the alcove shifts.
In the span of a breath, the room goes heavy and suffocating.
My instincts fire ahead of thought, the sharp, animal certainty of a predator closing in on my blind spot.
I turn, and Rhykor stands beneath the hole in my ceiling, watching me with a predatory intensity that makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
He's been up there, watching. Waiting for the clinic to empty, for Wen to leave, and for the noise to die down enough that this conversation could happen without witnesses.
Time passes in the dark before he drops in, and the thought of him crouched up there, bleeding from claw marks and staring down through the aperture with that furnace-hot focus.
It twists the pit of my stomach, complicated and deeply inconvenient.
"No," I say before he opens his mouth.
His brow lowers. "You haven't heard what I'm going to say."
"I can see it in your muscles. You want to move me." I set the surgical tray down with a metallic clang that echoes through the empty clinic. "The answer is no."
"This building is compromised." Each word falls out of him like a hammer striking an anvil.
"The structural damage makes it indefensible.
The door buckled under last night's assault, and the machines that hit you were coordinated—programmed.
Someone sent them here on purpose, and whoever gave that order can give it again. "
"You demolished an entire army on my doorstep. If anything, this is the safest block in the district. Nothing with a functioning sensor array is coming within a mile of this alley after what you did to the last batch."
A muscle twitches, rippling the skin of his jaw. Heat ripples from his shoulders in a shimmer I've learned to read as frustration rather than threat.
"My compound has fortified walls, armed perimeters, and backup power independent of the district grid.
" He uncrosses his arms and takes a step closer, the massive breadth of his shoulders making the room feel dangerously cramped.
"Your clinic has a door I watched buckle and a ceiling I've already put a hole in.
Half your equipment is wrecked. The generator is running on borrowed time.
And after what happened tonight, do you really think patients are going to line up outside this building begging for treatment? "
My rebuttal delivers harder than I expect.
He's right, and I hate that he's right, because that heavy door bowing inward under mechanical impact, Elias screaming behind me, the stench of melted metal and burnt circuitry filling the air—that memory is going to keep people away for weeks.
The clinic's reputation as a safe space got incinerated along with everything else in this alley.
"I refuse to abandon my patients."
"You won't be." He takes another step, and suddenly I have to tilt my head back to maintain eye contact.
"Bring your supplies. Set up inside my compound.
I'll make sure anyone who needs treatment knows where to find you.
" A pause, and almost careful restraint enters his tone—a rare concession.
“You can operate out of my territory. Treat whoever walks in, human or Kraaj. It makes no difference. But you do it behind walls that hold and under a roof that stays secure over your head.”
I stare at him. His reasoning is sound, and that infuriates me more than the relocation itself, because I came into this argument ready for a fight and he's making it very difficult to fire.
"I spent three years building this clinic from nothing, and you should forget about me abandoning it because a Kraaj enforcer got protective."
His hand catches my wrist. Gently, impossibly gently for fingers with claws capable of peeling iron-clad plating, but firm enough that my arm stops moving.
The contact sends a jolt up my forearm and into my shoulder, and the heat from his palm sinks into my skin until I'm positive he can feel the rigid tension in my muscles.
"You’re temporarily relocating for your own safety until we contain the threat. It is a necessary precaution, and you know it."
I yank my wrist free. "Fine, but I want my generator moved; my surgical tray packed properly—properly, Rhykor, if one of your soldiers bends my forceps, I will use them on him—and I want full access to your medical supplies while I'm there."
"Done."
"And Elias comes with me."
His gaze flicks to the sleeping boy on the pallet. Elias shifts in his sleep, the comm relay sliding off his chest and clanking against the floor. The kid stays asleep.
"The boy comes," Rhykor confirms.
"I need to leave a note for Wen. Let her know where we've gone and that she can either take some rest or hold down the clinic for any patients brave enough to show up.
" I grab a scrap of paper from the counter and scribble instructions in handwriting that gets worse the angrier I am.
"If she decides to come to the compound, your crew at the door can direct her. "
Rhykor acknowledges this and crosses to Elias's pallet, crouching down with a care that seems impossible for an alien his size. He scoops the boy off the floor—pallet, blanket, comm relay, and all—and Elias mumbles incoherent words, curls tighter against Rhykor's chest, and stays asleep.
Grabbing my med-pack, I follow him out the door.
Rhykor's compound sits in the industrial bones of an old Kraaj military depot on the district's far eastern edge—roughly two miles from Ash Alley—a sprawling complex of fortified concrete and repurposed cargo bays, connecting buildings that defy any standard for civilian use and have been aggressively adapted anyway.
Guard stations dot the perimeter, staffed by mixed crews of Kraaj and humans armed with pulse rifles.
We receive stares as we pass, with the Kraaj showing open curiosity and one enormous teal-scaled male tracking Elias's sleeping form in Rhykor's arms with an expression I can only describe as baffled.
The human guards are harder to read. Some acknowledge me while some look away.
None of them question Rhykor, and nobody asks why the Dragon is carrying a human teenager through the compound like cargo he's afraid to drop.
The interior corridors are wider than the cramped tunnels I'm used to featuring high ceilings that accommodate Kraaj's wingspan alongside industrial lighting that actually functions.
It is, grudgingly, safer than my clinic.
Rhykor tucks Elias into a cot in the east wing, positioning him right against the vibrating signal equipment, knowing the sight of it will be enough to send the kid into a delirium of happiness when he stirs.
Then he leads me to a room off the main freight bay, a converted storage space that his crew has cleared and outfitted with a medical pallet, supply shelving, and a portable generator patched into the compound's power grid.
It's spartan and functional, approximately four times the size of my clinic's storage alcove.
The concrete walls are thick enough to muffle the sounds of the compound's daily operations, and someone has bolted additional shelving to the walls at heights that accommodate my reach rather than Kraaj proportions.
Grease-stained fingerprints mark the brackets.
Whoever did this works with their hands for a living.
Spending the first morning unpacking supplies, I organize my surgical tray while seething quietly.
By the second morning, the seething escalates to open warfare.
"You stationed a guard outside my door." I corner Rhykor amidst the stacked cargo as he reviews perimeter reports with a nameless Kraaj lieutenant—tall, narrow-horned, with steel-blue skin, his expression stiff like a soldier trying very hard to become invisible.
"There is a Kraaj male with a pulse rifle sitting on a crate outside the room where I sleep, Rhykor. Care to explain?"
"Security protocol."
I cross my arms across my chest. The lieutenant retreats to a distance that suggests he's seriously considering a career change. "And the guard who followed me to the communal water station? Also security protocol?"
"The corridors between the sleeping quarters and the water station pass through two unsecured junctions." He delivers this like a briefing, aloof and factual, as if stationing surveillance on a woman walking to get water is a perfectly reasonable military decision.
"And the one who trailed me when I walked Elias to the east wing for breakfast?" I fold my arms tighter. "Let me guess. The east wing is adjacent to something terribly dangerous."
"I'm going to stop you right there." I step closer, tilting my head back to meet his stare, which requires a neck angle I refuse to let him know bothers me.
"I’m a grown woman who has survived three years in District Seventeen's worst corridors with a stolen pulse pistol and a bad attitude.
A chaperone is unnecessary to walk to breakfast."