Chapter 2 Rael #2
On the sixth day, the group reached the hills above Los Angeles and made contact with a human settlement.
A resistance camp. I watched from a ridgeline as they were admitted through a gate in a chain-link fence, and I saw a woman come out to meet them, dark-haired, moving quickly, embracing the fierce one called Cassi with an intensity that I could feel even without psychic contact.
Brecca. That was Brecca.
She was smaller than I expected. There was muscle in her arms and efficiency in her movement, but she was small in the way humans were small, which was to say breakable.
She pulled away from the embrace after only a few seconds and immediately began examining Cassi's arm with focused, clinical precision.
Then she turned to the pregnant one, and I watched the authority with which she directed people twice her size into a tent for medical evaluation.
A healer. She was a healer. Even from this distance, I could recognize the patterns: the way she touched with purpose, the way her eyes moved across bodies cataloguing damage, the tension of someone who spent their existence keeping others alive.
Among my people, the healers had been the most respected.
Before Tyvor. Before the militarization, before the wandering, before everything became about survival through violence.
On Lucis, the world the Vampyren took from us, the world I had never seen, the healers were the ones who maintained the psychic network, a web of shared consciousness that held a civilization together.
The network had been beautiful once, or so the oldest among us said.
A communion. A constant awareness of every other mind, felt as connection.
Tyvor had turned it into a leash. But it had been beautiful once.
The healer in the camp below me would not know any of this. She would see me, if she saw me at all, as the enemy. As one of the things that had been killing her people, leaving trophy heads, making the darkness unsafe.
She would be right.
I was one of those things. That I had not personally killed on this world did not absolve me of the killing done through the network I was part of, by the swarm I had served, under the commander whose orders I had followed on seven worlds before this one.
There was a word the humans used. I had learned it from listening to their broadcasts, their fragmentary communications that leaked through the airwaves and could be intercepted by any Lucian with basic sensory training.
Complicit.
That was the word.
* * *
I let myself be seen at dusk.
It was not an accident. There were no accidents in Lucian scouting. We controlled our visibility the way humans controlled their breathing: with conscious precision. When a Lucian was seen, it was because the Lucian had chosen to be seen, or because the Lucian was already dead.
I was not dead. Not yet.
I moved down the ridgeline toward the camp's northern approach, keeping to the trail where their patrols walked.
Five human heartbeats moved toward me through the brush.
A patrol, returning from the perimeter sweep.
They were tired and nervous and one of them was injured, limping on a twisted ankle.
I could have avoided them effortlessly. Instead I slowed my pace, let the scrub thin around me, and waited.
The first one to see me screamed.
It was a short, sharp sound, surprise more than terror, and then they were all shouting, weapons up, and I raised my empty hands in a gesture I had observed humans using on broadcasts. Surrender. Submission. I left my blade strapped to my back. I kept my hands open and visible and my body still.
One of them hit me. A blade, drawn fast, catching my ribs.
The pain was bright and specific — a clean cut, driven more by fear than intent.
I did not retaliate. I let my knees fold and went to the ground and let them bind my hands with the thin plastic strips and the coarse rope, and I kept my eyes down and my breathing steady and my presence in the network dampened to almost nothing.
They dragged me toward the camp. The dirt scraped against my knees. The wound on my ribs bled freely, black against the pale dust, and the heat left my body through the opening in my skin. Lucian blood ran cool, cooler than the humans whose hands gripped my arms with trembling, terrified strength.
They forced me through the gate and onto my knees in a clearing.
People gathered. Their fear was everywhere.
Humans were opaque to the psychic web, but the cruder channels of biological perception screamed loud enough.
Elevated heart rates. Sweat. The sharp chemical signature of adrenaline.
The camp smelled of fire and food and human bodies and the dry earth of the hillside, and underneath it all, the particular scent of people who had been afraid for so long that fear had become their baseline.
I heard voices. A command to kill me. An argument in the Vampyren tongue, low and fast. The sound of a blade being drawn.
Then a voice I recognized, though I should not have, because I had only heard it once, from a ridgeline, carried on the wind.
"Bring him to my tent."
I looked up.
The healer stood at the edge of the crowd.
She was holding a weapon in one hand, a gun, the small kind, and looking at me with dark eyes that were neither afraid nor angry.
She was assessing me the way she had assessed the pregnant woman, the way she had assessed the Vampyren with the injured ear.
Clinically. As a body with damage that needed to be catalogued before it could be addressed.
No one had looked at me like that. Not ever. Not on any world. To the Vampyren, I was a threat or a target. To the humans, I was a monster. To my own people, I was a node in the network, indistinguishable from any other.
She looked at me like I was a patient.
The Vampyren protested. The humans protested louder. The healer did not appear to hear any of them. She turned and walked toward the medical tent, and after a moment of confused shouting, two of the patrol guards dragged me after her.
Inside the tent, the light was dim and warm and it smelled of chemicals and clean fabric and something astringent that stung my nostrils.
Medical supplies. Healing. The scent triggered something old in me, something from before the wandering, before Tyvor.
A sense memory that belonged to the network's deeper layers, where the accumulated consciousness of generations still lingered like sediment at the bottom of a river.
Home, it said. This is what home smelled like.
I suppressed it. There was no home. There had not been a home for three hundred years.