Chapter 1 Brecca
The thing about stitching someone's face was that they always wanted to talk.
"Hold still."
The man — Miguel, maybe, or Marco, I could never keep the new arrivals straight — kept trying to tell me how it happened. Something about a patrol and a wall and a Lucian blade that came out of nowhere. I'd heard it before. I'd stitched this exact story before, just on different skin.
"You're going to lose that eyebrow if you don't stop moving," I said, pulling the thread taut.
It wasn't surgical thread. It was dental floss, waxed, mint-flavored.
I'd learned early on that dental floss held a wound together almost as well as real sutures, and it was a hell of a lot easier to find in the ruins of a CVS than a medical supply kit.
He flinched. They always flinched.
"Almost done." I tied off the last stitch and cut the floss with my teeth because I'd lost my scissors somewhere in the chaos of yesterday's intake and hadn't had time to find them.
"Don't get it wet for two days. Don't scratch it.
Don't touch it. Don't let anyone else touch it.
If it turns red and hot, come find me. If it starts oozing anything that isn't clear, come find me faster. "
"Thanks, doc."
"I'm not a doctor." I wasn't even a nurse, technically. I was a phlebotomist who'd taught herself surgery from a veterinary textbook she'd found in a ransacked public library in Pasadena. But three years into an alien apocalypse, the distinction felt academic.
Another day, another body.
The cleanest rag I could find (which wasn't very clean at all) did its job well enough.
I stepped out of the medical tent into the blinding California sun.
The camp spread out below me on the hillside, a sprawl of tents and tarps and repurposed shipping containers that passed for home.
Solar panels lined the ridgeline like ugly metal flowers.
Someone had gotten the garden going again after the last Lucian raid tore through the south fence, and I could see green shoots pushing through the dry dirt in neat rows that struck me as absurdly optimistic.
Welcome to the Mojave resistance. Three years old. Two hundred and change humans clinging to a scrap of hill country north of what used to be the most glamorous city in America.
Los Angeles was visible from here on a clear day, and today was clear.
I could see the skyline. What was left of it.
Half the towers were gone. Some were still burning, weeks or months after whatever had set them alight.
The smoke drifted east on the wind and you could smell it even up here if the breeze shifted: ash and concrete dust and that other smell underneath it, the one nobody talked about.
Looking at the city too long was something I'd stopped doing months ago. It wasn't that it made me sad. It was that it made me feel nothing at all, and that bothered me more.
"Brecca!" That was Jonas, the camp's supply runner, jogging toward me with the look of a man about to ruin my afternoon. He was always about to ruin my afternoon. "We've got three more from the south checkpoint. One of them's got something in his leg. Metal, I think."
"Metal."
"Like a spike."
"Like a Lucian spike."
"Yeah."
"How deep?"
"I can see about three inches of it sticking out. He says there's more inside."
My eyes closed for exactly one second. One breath. That was all I could afford. One second of feeling anything about any of this before locking it down and getting to work.
"Bring him in. And find me a bottle of anything alcohol over forty proof. The good stuff's gone but the bad stuff sterilizes just as well."
Jonas nodded and jogged off and I turned back to the tent.
My tent. My world. My twenty-by-twelve-foot kingdom of blood and dental floss and the kind of screaming that made you deaf to everything but the wound in front of you.
I'd chosen this. When Cassi and Danton left for Chicago about a year ago to join whatever political revolution was happening with the Vampyren council, I'd stayed.
Someone had to. The camp had people and the people had wounds and nobody else knew the difference between an artery and a vein.
My two gun-nut brothers, both dead in the first year, had taught me how to shoot and fight.
My phlebotomy certification had taught me where blood lived inside a body.
The apocalypse had taught me everything else.
Three years. I'd kept this camp's mortality rate to something I could almost live with.
I tracked it in a notebook: deaths per month, causes, what I could have done differently.
The numbers were getting worse lately. Not because I was getting worse but because the things out there were getting bolder.
The Lucian.
Vampyren invaders we could almost handle.
They were brutal and enormous and they drank human blood and they'd turned our planet into their personal feeding ground, but at least we understood them.
They were conquerors. They wanted resources.
They wanted women. They had structure and hierarchy and, after years of being here, some of them had actually started wanting peace.
You could negotiate with that, even if what you were negotiating was the terms of your own subjugation.
The Lucian were something else entirely.
They'd started showing up on the coast about a year ago.
Fast, pale, silent things that moved like nothing I'd ever seen, like the air bent and blurred around them when they got going.
They killed without noise and without apparent reason.
They didn't eat humans. They didn't breed with us.
They didn't seem to want anything from us at all.
They just killed and moved on, leaving their goddamn trophy heads staked in the ground like calling cards.
I'd lost eleven people to Lucian raids in the last month alone. I'd stitched up thirty more. My tent was a revolving door of Lucian-inflicted damage and I couldn't close it no matter how fast I worked.
The man with the spike in his leg — it turned out to be about six inches of serrated Lucian metal buried in his thigh, seated against the femur.
I got it out in one piece without nicking the femoral artery, which was more luck than skill.
He passed out about halfway through, which was a mercy for both of us.
I packed the wound, wrapped it tight, gave him a shot of whiskey that he couldn't drink because he was unconscious, so I drank it myself.
Then I told Jonas to make sure he had water when he woke up.
Afterward, I sat on an overturned supply crate outside the tent and ate a granola bar that was two months past its expiration date and tasted like sawdust and defeat.
This was my life. Wounds, thread, granola bars, sleep, repeat.
I was fine with it.
* * *
The shout came from the north perimeter just after noon.
I'd been doing inventory, cataloguing what was left of my medical supplies, which wasn't much and was getting less every week.
I had enough antibiotics for maybe ten more serious infections.
After that, people would start dying of things that hadn't killed humans in a hundred years.
The irony of surviving an alien invasion only to die of a staph infection was a joke nobody laughed at anymore.
"Incoming! North gate!"
The gun under my cot was in my hand before I'd finished standing. A beat-up Beretta that had belonged to one of the camp's founders before a Lucian removed his head from his body. I jogged toward the perimeter.
The north gate was a gap in the chain-link fence topped with razor wire that the camp's engineers had reinforced with welded steel plates and sandbags. Not exactly Fort Knox, but it funneled anyone approaching into a kill zone, which was the point.
Except the people approaching weren't enemies.
There were ten of them. Walking single file along the ridge trail, moving slowly, looking like they'd been walking for a long time. And even from a hundred yards out, I could tell something was wrong with the picture.
Four of them were enormous.
Not human-enormous. Not even bodybuilder-enormous.
Alien-enormous. Vampyren males, seven feet and change, moving with that liquid predatory grace that always looked wrong on a dirt trail in the California hills.
They wore human clothes, jeans and t-shirts, one of them in Converse sneakers of all things, and it still looked like watching wolves try to pass as house dogs.
You could put them in a three-piece suit and they'd still radiate menace that made every instinct in your hindbrain scream run.
I knew who they were. Not personally. I'd been running a field hospital out here while Cassi was off making alien alliances in Chicago.
But she'd sent messages when the radios were working.
Descriptions. Names. I knew there were four mated pairs out there somewhere, four human women who'd fallen for Vampyren males, and I knew the group had left Chicago on a chartered jet that had crashed somewhere on the California coast.
My best friend in the world had watched me swear, years ago, that I would never be one of those women.
I'd said it with my whole chest while Cassi was falling for Danton, while some woman named Mindy was apparently shacking up with a Vampyren general in Vegas, while a string of other women I'd never met were one by one toppling into the arms of alien invaders like dominos.
Not me, I'd said. Never me. I'd rather die alone.
Famous last words, I'd later learn. But not yet.
The woman in front of the group was small and dark-haired and walking with grim determination I recognized immediately, because I'd been seeing it in my own mirror since the invasion.
"Cassi."
The word came out quietly. Under my breath. Like saying it too loud would make her disappear.