Chapter 6 Brecca
I drew his blood on the fifth day.
Not because anyone asked me to. Marta wanted intelligence about weaknesses — "anything we can exploit" — and Alek wanted tactical data, and Loren wanted understanding.
But I drew the blood because I was a phlebotomist, goddamn it, and there was an entirely unknown alien species sitting in a tent in my camp with a vascular system I'd never documented, and the part of me that had once spent six hours memorizing the venipuncture sites of the antecubital fossa was losing her mind with curiosity.
"I need to draw blood," I told him. I'd brought a needle, a tourniquet, and three collection vials that I'd been hoarding since the first year. They were meant for human blood. I had no idea if they'd work on Lucian blood, but I was going to find out.
He looked at the needle. Then at me.
"I know," I said. "It's sharp. You've probably been stabbed with worse. This is for science, not for hurting you."
He extended his arm.
I knelt beside him and wrapped the tourniquet above his elbow.
His skin was cool under my fingers, that same below-human temperature I'd been documenting all week, hovering around ninety-four degrees no matter the ambient conditions.
The veins were visible through the translucent skin, which made my job easier.
They ran in roughly the same places as human veins, which made sense from a convergent-evolution standpoint, assuming that was even a thing across alien species from different solar systems. The veins themselves were darker than human veins, a blue-black instead of blue-green, reflecting the black blood within.
I found the median cubital vein, or what I was calling the median cubital vein in the absence of a Lucian anatomy textbook, and slid the needle in.
Black blood filled the collection vial. Thick.
Viscous. Darker than anything I'd ever drawn from a living creature.
It moved slowly through the tube, clinging to the glass, and where it caught the light it had an iridescent quality, like oil on water, shifting between black and a deep, shimmering blue.
"Holy shit," I whispered.
I filled three vials. His blood didn't clot around the needle the way human blood sometimes did, which meant either his clotting factors were different or his blood chemistry operated on an entirely different set of principles.
I withdrew the needle, pressed a gauze pad to the puncture site, and held it for thirty seconds.
When I lifted the gauze, the puncture was already closing.
"Your healing rate is genuinely insane," I told him. "I need you to know that. In three decades of medicine... okay, three years of apocalypse medicine and one year of phlebotomy school, I have never seen tissue repair this fast."
He was watching me. He'd been watching me all week, silently, attentively, with that focused quality that felt less like surveillance and more like study. Like he was trying to understand me the way I was trying to understand him.
"Can you tell me how it works?" I asked. "The healing? Is it cellular regeneration? Something in the blood? Some kind of—"
"The network," he said.
I went still. He'd barely spoken since the interrogation.
A word here, a word there, mostly in response to direct questions.
His voice still did that thing. The harmonic doubling.
Two tones layered, one carrying the word and one carrying something underneath it, resonating in my chest more than my ears.
"The psychic network helps you heal?"
"The network maintains the body. When we are connected — fully connected — to the other minds, the network...
directs. The body repairs itself because the network tells it to.
" He paused. The effort of speech was visible in his face: the slight tension around his jaw, the deliberate formation of each word.
"I am dampened now. Barely connected. The healing is slower than it should be. "
"This is slow?"
"Among my people, this wound would have closed in hours."
I wrote that down. Psychic network involvement in cellular regeneration. Network directs tissue repair. Current healing rate (dampened connection) = days. Full network rate = hours. Implications for battlefield wound recovery: significant.
"Why are you dampened?" I asked. "The network — why are you blocking it?"
He looked at me for a long moment. Something shifted behind his eyes, a consideration, a calculation, a decision being made.
"Because Tyvor would find me through it. And through me, he would find this camp."
I set down my pen. "So you're blocking your connection to protect us."
"Yes."
"At the cost of your own healing."
"That is a minor cost."
I looked at the three vials of black, iridescent blood on the ground beside me, and I looked at the creature who was deliberately handicapping his own biology to keep two hundred humans safe from his commander, and I thought: you absolute idiot, Brecca, do not start caring about this person.
Too late, said a small voice in the back of my head. Way too late.
* * *
I spent the next two hours examining the blood samples under the camp's one functioning microscope, a battered compound scope that someone had liberated from a high school biology lab in the first year.
It wasn't ideal. The magnification was limited and the light source was a flashlight duct-taped to the stage.
But it was enough to see that Lucian blood was nothing like human blood.
The cells were different. Not red blood cells.
The oxygen-carrying cells were dark, nearly black, and shaped differently from human erythrocytes.
Oval rather than concave-disc. Larger. I counted what might have been white blood cells but couldn't be sure without staining, and the plasma (the liquid portion) had a viscosity and sheen that suggested a chemical composition entirely alien to anything I'd studied.
I wrote pages of notes. I sketched the cells as best I could.
I recorded temperature observations: the blood samples cooled rapidly once drawn, reaching ambient temperature within minutes, which suggested the body maintained its warmth through active metabolism rather than the blood serving as a heat reservoir the way human blood did.
I tested the blood's reaction to temperature.
In a hot water bath (the best approximation of body temperature I could manage) the cells became more active, vibrating under the microscope lens with a low-frequency oscillation that matched the subdermal vibration I'd felt through his skin.
In cold water, they slowed dramatically, becoming almost motionless, the iridescent quality fading to a flat, dull black.
Cold-blooded? Not exactly. Not the way the Vampyren were cold-blooded.
More like... temperature-responsive. The blood didn't just carry heat passively; it reacted to temperature at the cellular level, changing its behavior based on the thermal environment.
When warm, the cells hummed. When cold, they went dormant.
I thought about what Rael had said about the psychic network maintaining the body.
What if the network wasn't just directing healing — what if it was generating the energy that kept the blood active?
What if the "dampened" state he described meant his blood cells were operating at reduced capacity, like a battery running on a trickle charge instead of full power?
That would explain the slower healing. And it would mean that a fully connected Lucian — one operating at full network capacity — would heal even faster than what I'd already observed. Maybe fast enough to recover from battlefield injuries in minutes.
No wonder they were so hard to kill.
I wrote all of it down. Pages and pages of observations and hypotheses, filling the notebook with a kind of feverish energy that felt foreign and familiar at the same time.
It was the most intellectually engaged I'd been in three years, and the realization hit me like a slap.
I'd been surviving. Stitching wounds and bandaging limbs and counting mortality statistics and measuring my worth in bodies kept alive.
I hadn't been thinking — not really, not the way my brain wanted to think, with curiosity and analysis and the restless, hungry need to understand how things worked at the level of cells and chemistry and the beautiful, terrifying architecture of alien biology.
Rael's blood had reminded me that I used to be someone who was fascinated by the world.
I hated him a little for that.
* * *
"You look different," Tess said.
I was checking her vitals in the medical tent that afternoon — standard prenatal assessment, blood pressure, fundal height, fetal heartbeats, the whole exhausting routine that I performed daily because there was no ultrasound machine and no obstetrician and no hospital within a hundred miles, so constant manual monitoring was the only way to catch a problem before it became a catastrophe.
Both hearts were strong and rhythmic, offset by about half a beat, which I'd decided was probably normal for half-Vampyren pregnancy since I had literally no other data to compare it to.
"Different how?"
"Less—" Tess searched for the word. She was propped up on two flat pillows, one hand resting on her enormous belly, looking at me with the sharp, assessing gaze of a woman who noticed everything. "Less gray."
"I don't know what that means."
"When we got here, you looked gray. Not your skin. Your — everything. Like someone had turned down the brightness. Now you look more like a person."
"I've always been a person, Tess."
"You know what I mean."
I didn't respond. I inflated the blood pressure cuff and focused on the gauge. One-eighteen over seventy-four. Good.
"I hear you've been spending a lot of time with the prisoner," Tess said, with the casual air of someone lobbing a grenade.
"He's my patient."
"Kal says he talks to you."
"He answers medical questions. Barely."
"Kal says he doesn't talk to anyone else."