Chapter 4 Rael #2
"Running from what?" Alek said.
"From you." The undertone in my voice thickened, carrying something I had not intended to release — the accumulated weight of three hundred years of displacement.
"The Vampyren took our world. Our home. Our civilization.
They broke the network — turned it from a communion into a survival mechanism.
The survivors followed the Vampyren conquests because the Vampyren had taken every habitable world. Where else were we supposed to go?"
"You followed us."
"We followed the only trail that existed. From Lucis to Sereth to Kallos to the three unnamed worlds to Earth. Not because we wanted your conquests. Because you left us nothing else."
Alek's jaw worked. I could see the conflict in him — the general who had been trained to see Lucian as parasites, confronting the possibility that the parasites were refugees.
"That doesn't explain the trophy heads," Kal said quietly. "The killing. The civilians. The children."
He was right. And the explanation was the part I dreaded most, because it would require me to indict my own commander, my own people, the structure that had defined my existence.
"Tyvor," I said. "Our commander. He was born after Lucis fell.
He never knew the homeworld. He knew only the wandering, and the anger, and the Vampyren who had caused it.
" I paused. The words were heavy and my throat ached with the effort of producing them.
"Tyvor learned cruelty from the Vampyren.
The trophy heads — that is not Lucian. That is Tyvor, imitating the conquerors who destroyed his world. Becoming the thing that broke us."
"Victims becoming perpetrators," Kal said.
I looked at him. There was understanding in his face, a recognition that went deeper than the strategic assessment Alek was performing.
Kal had lived among humans. He had, from what I had observed, abandoned his own military to protect a human woman.
He understood what it meant to look at your own people and see something you could not be part of any longer.
"Yes," I said. "That."
"Pretty speech," Alek said. His voice was hard again, but the hardness sounded manufactured now — a defense against something he didn't want to feel. "How do we know any of this is true?"
"You don't."
"Then give me a reason to believe you."
"I let myself be captured," I said. "No Lucian has ever done that. In three hundred years of conflict with the Vampyren, no Lucian has ever surrendered. I let your patrol find me. I let them bind me. I did not fight back."
"That could mean you're a scout trying to infiltrate—"
"If I wanted to infiltrate this camp, I would not have gotten myself stabbed in the process. I am a scout. I am very good at being unseen. I was seen because I chose to be seen."
Another silence. Kal and Alek exchanged a look that communicated something in the way that people who had fought together could communicate without words.
"Why?" Kal said. "Why choose this?"
I thought about the answer. I thought about the beach, and the pregnant woman, and the Vampyren who rubbed her feet in the surf. I thought about the human healer who smelled of antiseptic and exhaustion and who had treated my wound as if it mattered.
"Because I watched your group on the beach," I said.
"I watched Vampyren carry supplies for humans.
I watched humans fight beside Vampyren against my own people.
I watched a pregnant woman fire a weapon to protect the people she loved.
" I paused. "I was told that cooperation between species was impossible.
That the Vampyren were only conquerors and humans were only prey.
I watched your group for six days, and what I saw was neither of those things. "
Kal's expression did something complicated. He turned away from me and looked at the tent wall, and I heard him exhale slowly, and I felt — through the faintest edge of the network — a bloom of emotion from him that was warm and complex and tinged with a taste, psychically, of grief.
"I need to discuss this with Loren," Alek said. He straightened, looked at the guards. "The prisoner stays here. Nobody enters without authorization." He looked at me one more time, and I could not tell if the expression on his face was suspicion or the beginning of something else.
They left. The guards took position outside. The tent was quiet again.
I sat with my hands bound and my ribs aching and the fading echo of my own spoken words ringing in my ears like a bell that would not stop vibrating.
I had said more in the last ten minutes than I had said aloud in the entirety of my existence.
My throat was raw. My mind felt exposed, like skin stripped of its outer layer, vulnerable to every current of air.
Then I felt the warmth again.
She was close. Approaching from the east side of the camp, walking with the quick, purposeful stride that I had learned to identify as hers.
The faint pulse of her heartbeat grew stronger as she neared, and I closed my eyes and allowed myself one moment — one forbidden, dangerous moment — to simply feel her proximity.
I heard voices outside the tent. Hers. Sharp.
"—was I not told about the interrogation? He's my patient—"
A guard's voice, defensive: "General Alek ordered—"
"General Alek can order his own people. That man in there is under my medical care and I have a right to know when someone's going to interrogate him, because stress elevates every physiological marker I'm trying to track and you've just thrown my entire baseline out the—"
"Ma'am, we were told—"
"I don't care what you were told. Where's Alek? Where's Loren? I need to talk to whoever's running this circus."
Silence. Then her voice again, lower: "Is he hurt? Did they hurt him?"
"No, ma'am. They just talked."
A pause. The tent flap moved. She stepped inside.
She looked at me. Her face was flushed, from walking fast, from anger, from something else I could not name. Her dark hair was pushed behind her ears and there was a smudge of something on her jaw that she hadn't noticed — blood, I thought, from another patient.
"Are you okay?" she said.
The question was so unexpected that I did not answer immediately.
I was not sure anyone had ever asked me that before.
Lucian did not ask each other if they were okay.
The network made the question unnecessary — you felt what everyone felt, always, and the concept of asking for a verbal confirmation of a state of being that was psychically self-evident did not exist.
"Yes," I said.
She blinked. Then she nodded, once, like she was checking something off a list, and knelt beside me and opened her kit.
"I heard what you told them," she said. She was not looking at me. She was looking at the wound, which she unwrapped and examined with the same focused precision as always. But her hands were not entirely steady. "About Lucis. About running."
I said nothing.
"When you said you wanted to stop running — your blood pressure dropped." She looked up at me. "I wasn't in the tent but I heard it through the canvas, and I've been watching your vitals for three days. When you're stressed, your pulse changes. It didn't change when you said that."
"I do not understand."
"You weren't lying." She rewrapped the wound. Stood. Looked down at me with those dark, exhausted, fiercely intelligent eyes. "When people lie, their bodies betray them. Heart rate, blood pressure, respiration. You weren't lying about wanting to stop running."
She shouldered her kit and turned to leave.
"Wait," I said.
She stopped. Didn't turn.
"You asked me a question," I said. "Yesterday. How I knew your name."
She turned. Slowly. Watching me.
"Cassi," I said. "She spoke your name. On the beach.
I was watching from the ridge. I heard it carried on the wind, and I—" I paused.
The honest answer was more than I was prepared to give.
The honest answer was that her name had lodged in something deep, had resonated in the network at a frequency I did not understand, had stayed with me the way a melody stays with you after you have forgotten where you heard it.
"I remembered it," I said. That was as close to the truth as I could come.
She looked at me for a long moment. Something worked behind her expression — calculation, wariness, and underneath both, a thread of something warmer that she did not seem to want.
"Stay alive," she said. "I'll make sure they don't kill you."
She pushed through the tent flap and was gone.
I sat in the quiet and thought about what she had said. I'll make sure they don't kill you. Not the camp. Not the council. Not the military leadership. She would make sure. As if her word alone was sufficient to keep a Lucian prisoner alive in a camp full of people who wanted him dead.
It should not have been comforting.
It was the most comforting thing anyone had said to me in three hundred years.