Chapter 2 #2
The medics shift, and then she snaps, "We can help. We have transport. We can—"
"Your talk is for when your engines bring you medals," I say. My patience is brittle. "Your words do not matter. I want people to help me find them or I will take what I need by other means."
She opens her mouth—human lungs working—then closes it as if some invisible hand folded it shut. The man with the coffee breath says something like, "We can't be seen helping an Ataxian—"
"Vakutans," I correct him, the word like a blade. "They will not thank you for your loyalty."
He stumbles back as if I spat. He reaches for his radio. His fingers are wrong. My claw finds his wrist and squeezes until he tastes the iron he swore he'd never like.
The leader—she keeps looking at me, measuring me with all the clinical training in her bones.
In her pocket is a medikit. Her hands are shaking.
I want to tell her: You have what you came here for.
Leave your shiny moral codes in your pocket and give me a way to get off this rock with my family.
But I don't speak like that. I speak like hunger.
Her lips press into a thin line. Then footsteps on rubble take my attention.
They are a different group, coming in from the other street.
Not Alliance—something else, quieter. Boots that are not on a clock.
And in that group, a woman stumbles into view—mud crusted at her knees, hair a hot blaze threaded with grime, eyes like knives.
She is small, but the way she moves is fast and precise.
There is a hate in her face that matches the desert in my chest.
She locks onto me and stops, and then something in the human band's reaction sharpens.
One of them says, "Medic—" and there's a flippant note, like they think this is a rescue.
The woman notices the IHC badge on her arm before the others do.
Her eyebrows pinched together as if tasting betrayal.
She looks at me—really looks—and something flashes there. Not pity. Not at first.
She lifts her chin like she is willing to die for a clipboard and stethoscope. "I am medic," she says. The declaration is thin, like a reed in a river. "I can't—"
I nearly kill her.
It's reflex. Muscle remembers the smell of human blood, the taste of stolen lives.
I move like the old world, like a storm.
My hands clamp on the woman's throat before she can finish.
The world narrows to the hot press of her carotid beneath my fingers, to her inhale scraping like paper.
Her eyes flare, and she tries to spit into my face—not a brave thing; it's an insult. Human spit lands against my scales.
She has fire. I respect that. I also have a need. I peer at the badge again, the damnable IHC sigil. Human medics are supposed to be neutral; they mark people as sacred, hands that should not be bound. Treaties carved by men with clean hands. Treaties that mean very little here beneath Lurax's ash.
"Do not tell me about treaties," I growl, the sound under my teeth like a low drum. I am no soldier; no law will bind me. I do not wage wars by the book and I have no time for the rules of men who sell souls for medals.
She spits again, harder this time, and the taste slaps me.
I cannot have it. My hands move almost without thought; a strip of fabric—her gag, made from a torn rag I find on the blood-slick stones—goes between her teeth.
Her jaw works around it. She kicks my side, small and furious, but my grip is unshakeable.
I secure her hands behind her back with coarse rope I take from a broken tent.
Her protests are muffled, and for a moment I almost laugh. The sound is sad and terrible.
"You're going to help me," I tell her, my voice a blade. "Whether you like it or not."
She squirms and spits more muffled curses. I snort. "Do you really want me to drop you in a field of—" My mouth pulls into something that attempts to be a smirk and fails. "—debris? Think of the tetanus shot you'll miss."
She snarls, and the sound makes a strange aching in me that is not anger.
It is annoyance and something else. A rattling at the edge of my chest that I cannot name and do not want to.
For a second, a memory like a thin glass frame shudders: a woman laughing by a spice rack, the smell of cinnamon on her hands. I shake it off.
I sling her over my shoulder, one arm under her knees, the other around her bound wrists.
She claws at my scales and hisses soundlessly.
I walk the ruins like I walk the memory of my life—forward, heavy, purposeful.
My footfalls throw up ghosts of dust and char.
I do not know where I will take her yet.
Perhaps to the basement by the mannequins, where the silence holds no mercy and the light is easy to block.
Perhaps to the place where my parents might have left a trail. Either way, she will help.
She gasps through the gag. She is alive and noisy, which will be convenient when I need her to wake up and do hands-on work.
When she spat earlier, I saw a fury in her that I don't often see in humans: a refusal to be small.
It will be useful or it will be trouble.
Either way, I am done being alone, and I will use whatever helps.
As I start walking, her boots thudding against my flank, something else stirs in the ruined air—something that moves like a thought.
I feel a pull that is not hunger or grief.
It tugs at my ribs in that peculiar way that makes your breath hitch and your claws want to knead.
I do not understand this. I do not name it.
All I know is I am carrying a human medic over my shoulder, and I have a list of names burned into my brain like coals. Tomorrow, Lurax will answer me or I will break it trying.