11. Cassia
CASSIA
The outer corridors of Sector Ten reek of wet rust and desperation, and they're packed with people who need me more than the compound walls do.
I argued for this run for two days straight.
Families in the settlements beyond Rhykor's perimeter have been cut off from medical care for over a week now—too scared to venture near Ash Alley, too far from the compound to know I've relocated, and too stubborn or too sick to send someone asking for help.
Wen brought back word from her supply contacts that a respiratory infection is tearing through the housing blocks east of the old rail line, hitting children and the elderly hardest, and that three people have already died from treatable complications because nobody with a med-kit could reach them.
Three preventable deaths, and that number sat inside my body like swallowed glass until breathing around it became impossible.
Rhykor fought me on it, naturally. Stood in the loading bay with his arms folded and his wings flared and delivered a fifteen-minute tactical briefing on the threats between the compound and Sector Ten, including malicious droid activity, anti-Kraaj militia patrols, structural instability in the connecting corridors, and—my personal favorite—"unpredictable civilian hostility toward Kraaj-adjacent personnel," which is military speak for people might throw things at you because you're traveling with me.
I told him I was going with or without his protection. He stared at me, shoulder heat shimmering, jaw grinding through whatever argument he was swallowing, and then barked orders at his crew so fast I barely caught the names.
So here we are. We travel with a full escort.
Britt and Dessik flank the rear while four additional crew members spread through the formation.
Nysera walks near the center with her datapad and her amber-gold surveillance, leaving Rhykor on point to fill each corridor we pass through with a suffocating brand of menace that clears foot traffic faster than a bullhorn.
Elias threw a fit about being left behind until I reminded him that his leg is still healing and that if he tears my stitches chasing us through the outer settlements, I will personally sedate him for a week.
He retreated to the signal array with Varrik, muttering dark things about medical tyranny.
The first housing block takes two hours.
I set up my tarp-and-crate station in a ground-floor corridor while Rhykor's crew secures the perimeter, and the line forms within minutes, mothers clutching wheezing toddlers alongside an old man whose lungs sound like a pipe organ filled with gravel, plus a teenage girl with an infected burn she's been treating with cooking oil and prayer.
I work through them one by one, administering the antibiotics and lung sealant from Rhykor's stolen military supplies, stitching wounds, draining infections, and handing out the clean bandages that used to feel like luxuries and now feel like basic decency.
Nysera watches from a doorway across the corridor, arms folded, silver markings catching the overhead light.
Since arriving at the compound, her only communication with me has been those eyes tracking me through rooms and hallways with a patient, discerning gaze that assembles a puzzle she already knows the answer to.
Britt had quietly let it slip that she and Rhykor had a history—a complicated, military-grade romantic entanglement from before he came to District Seventeen.
The knowledge of their past has been sitting heavy all morning.
Twice I catch her watching Rhykor watch me, and the look on her face during those moments is brimming with enough history and unresolved tension to make my stomach tighten with a sharp, unwelcome spike of jealousy.
We move to the second housing block as the afternoon light fading through the ventilation shafts turns the corridors amber and gray. I'm treating a boy with a fever so high his skin feels like paper over a furnace when Britt's voice crackles through the comm, tight and urgent.
"Movement in the south corridor. It’s multiple contacts. Their optics are wrong; they're cycling that discordant blue-green. Commander, they're Legion-infected."
The transition happens with blinding speed.
One moment I'm placing a cooling pack against a child's forehead; the next, Rhykor is hauling me upright by my jacket, the crate station scattering, and my med-pack slung over my shoulder by muscle memory alone.
The lights in the corridor die—a hard, total blackout that swallows everything in a single breath—and the grinding shriek of rampant machines fills the darkness from every direction at once.
"Get in defensive positions!" Rhykor roars, and his hands ignite, furnace-bright light blazing from his palms, casting the corridor in hellish crimson shadows. "Britt, get the civilians into the upper floors! Dessik, cover the south access!"
Britt and Dessik move without hesitation, herding screaming families toward the stairwells while the crew opens fire on shapes pouring from the south corridor, including maintenance droids and cargo units, as well as a construction bot dragging itself through a doorway too narrow for its frame, tearing the walls apart as it forces through.
Their optics burn with that sickly, malignant light, blue-green and pulsing, and they move with the coordinated wrongness I remember from the tunnels beneath Sector Nine.
Rhykor wades into the first wave with a violence that turns the corridor into a furnace.
Thermal blasts arc from his palms, melting chassis and detonating power cells.
He rips a maintenance droid apart with his weaponless hands and uses the sparking remains as a club against the construction bot grinding toward us from behind.
Waves of heat sear off him, making my lungs burn and my eyes water, and the smell of melted metal saturates my surroundings.
But more machines flood through the south corridor and then the east, and then a huge mass crashes through the ceiling two blocks down, the unmistakable grinding of heavy industrial units tearing through infrastructure to reach us.
"We need to split!" Britt screams over the comm. "North stairwell is still clear; I can get the crew and civilians topside!"
"Do it!" Rhykor bellows back. Grabbing a cargo loader by its deranged arm, he superheats the joint until it sags and separates before kicking the chassis into the machines coming in behind it. "Nysera, go with Britt! Get them to the compound!"
Nysera hesitates for half a breath. Her eyes cut between Rhykor and me, and grim confirmation settles across her features, the look of someone watching a prediction come true in real time.
Then she holsters her sidearm, pivots toward Britt's position, and vanishes into the stairwell, never glancing behind her.
An explosion tears through the east corridor.
The shockwave slams me into the wall, knocking the wind out of me, and when I shove myself upright, the passage connecting us to the north stairwell vanishes under a cascade of concrete and twisted rebar, dust billowing through the section in choking clouds.
The northern escape is sealed. Britt, Dessik, Nysera, and the crew are on the other side, their shouts already fading behind tons of fallen infrastructure.
Rhykor and I are alone.
His hand locks around my wrist and drags me forward, and then we're running, sprinting through corridors I've never navigated, his free hand blazing crimson to light the way while hostile machines crash through the wreckage behind us.
I can hear them adapting, reconfiguring, and squeezing through gaps that should be too narrow, and the sound, grinding metal and shrieking servos, bounces off the walls until it seems to come from everywhere.
"There," I point toward a set of stairs descending past the old mag-lev rail line. "The abandoned transit station—the walls are reinforced, pre-occupation construction?—"
He follows without hesitation. We plunge down the stairs and into the transit hub—a cavernous underground platform where three tunnel systems converge, overhung by a vaulted ceiling of cracked concrete and rusty steel supports.
Derelict boarding gates line the walls. Toppled information kiosks litter the floor, everything submerged under decades of dust and the faint chemical tang of degraded insulation.
Emergency lighting flickers from independent panels along the ceiling, casting the space in stuttering amber.
A service corridor branches off the southern end of the platform, ending at a sealed maintenance room with a thick steel door and a beefed-up frame, featuring emergency locks still functional despite decades of neglect.
Rhykor shoves me through the doorway, ducks his horns to clear the frame, and slams the door shut behind us.
The locks engage with a heavy, mechanical thunk, and on the outside, the first rampant machines reach the transit platform.
They slam against the steel—once, twice, the impacts reverberating through the walls, but the door holds.
The frame absorbs the impacts. Preoccupation engineering, built for a war that ended before I was born, holds out against machines that were never supposed to exist.
The impacts continue for minutes that feel like hours, rhythmic and relentless, until gradually they thin out, growing further apart, weaker, and fading into distant metallic groans.
The machines redirect, pulled by whatever corrupted logic governs their movement, chasing signals we're no longer broadcasting.
Silence drops over us, filling the corners until there’s no room for sound.