Chapter 10 Brecca
Three dead.
Seven wounded. Two critical, five stable. The critical cases took me until dawn.
The first was Hector — a perimeter guard who'd been twenty-two years old for exactly three weeks, I knew because I'd stitched a birthday tattoo his friend had given him with a safety pin and ink.
A Lucian blade had gone through his chest wall, puncturing his left lung, and by the time they carried him to my tent he was drowning in his own blood.
I improvised a chest seal from a plastic bag and medical tape — a technique I'd learned from the veterinary textbook, of all things — and decompressed the pneumothorax with the largest needle I had, which wasn't large enough, and held the bag in place with one hand while I worked with the other while Jonas held a flashlight that shook so violently the beam danced across the tent like a strobe light.
Hector lived. Barely. I told Jonas to keep him upright and monitor his breathing every five minutes.
The second critical case was a woman who'd caught a Lucian blade across her forearm — defensive wound, she'd raised her arm to block — and the serrated edge had opened the brachial artery.
She was losing blood faster than I could pack the wound.
I clamped it with a hemostat I'd been saving for exactly this kind of emergency, sutured what I could, and used the last of my O-negative blood supply — a single pint that I'd been hoarding like gold — to stabilize her.
By the time I'd dealt with the five stable cases — lacerations, a broken wrist, a concussion, two cases of mild shock — the sun was up and the camp was operating in the grim, shell-shocked mode that followed every Lucian attack.
People moved in silence, cleaning up debris, patching the south fence with whatever materials were at hand, carrying the bodies of the dead to the camp's burial ground on the eastern ridge.
I should have been exhausted. I was exhausted. The bone-deep kind that made your vision blur and your hands tremble. But underneath the exhaustion was something hotter. Something that burned. Fury.
Not at the Lucian who'd attacked. Not even at Tyvor, whose name I now associated with the psychic leash that forced his people to kill on command.
I was furious at the waste of it. Three people dead.
Seven wounded. A camp full of survivors who'd already lost everything once now losing more, because an alien warlord wanted to punish a defector and didn't care how many humans burned in the process.
And I was furious at myself, because while Sandra had been dying on my tent floor, part of my brain — the part I couldn't control, the part that was tuned to a frequency I'd never asked for — had been tracking Rael's pulse through the battle like a compass needle pointing north.
I washed the blood off my hands. Changed into my last clean shirt. And went to the council meeting, because Marta had called one for 0800 and I knew exactly what it was going to be about.
* * *
"He brought them here."
Marta's voice was flat and cold and carried the weight of three dead people. She stood at the head of the Denny's table with her arms crossed and her face set in the expression of a woman who had made her decision before the meeting started and was conducting it only as a formality.
"The Lucian prisoner has been in this camp for two weeks. In that time, we have been attacked for the first time in three months. Three of our people are dead. The connection is obvious."
The tent was packed. The full council, Loren and the Vampyren, Cassi, Crystal, a dozen senior camp members who'd earned the right to be in the room. I was standing against the back wall, arms crossed, jaw tight.
"Marta," Cassi began.
"I'm not finished." Marta held up a hand.
"I gave this camp's military leadership forty-eight hours to produce actionable intelligence from the prisoner.
The forty-eight hours are up. The intelligence we've received, some history lesson about a destroyed homeworld and a sob story about running, has not prevented three of our people from dying.
I am calling for the prisoner's immediate execution. "
Murmurs. Some approving, some uncertain. I watched the room divide along the fault lines I'd been seeing since the day Cassi arrived with four alien warriors: those who trusted the alliance and those who'd been burned too many times to trust anything that wasn't human.
"He fought for us," Danton said. His voice was quiet but it carried. Even among the Vampyren, Danton had a presence, the lean, intense authority of a prince who'd spent years proving himself on the side of humans. "Five Lucian are dead outside this camp. The prisoner killed three of them."
"Which means he's capable of killing," Marta said. "And he did it while loose inside our perimeter. How do we know that next time, those kills won't be our people?"
"Because he had the chance and he chose not to," Kal said.
He was leaning against the tent pole, still in the blood-stained clothes from the battle, his hair loose and his face drawn with exhaustion.
"I've fought Lucian. They don't hold back.
If he'd wanted to kill us during the chaos, he could have. He chose to fight for us."
"Or he chose to eliminate the only witnesses who could tell Tyvor he'd defected."
"That's a reach, Marta."
"Is it? We know nothing about Lucian psychology. We know nothing about their motivations. Everything we 'know' is what he told us, and he has every reason to lie."
Silence. The kind that meant she'd scored a point and everyone knew it.
Loren spoke. He looked worse than I'd ever seen him. The battle had opened an old wound on his shoulder, and even with Vampyren healing, the fatigue was etched into every line of his face. He looked like a man who'd been holding something together for too long and could feel it starting to crack.
"I hear your concerns, Marta. They are legitimate.
The prisoner's presence may have drawn the attack.
That is a reasonable conclusion." He paused.
"But we are fighting a war against an enemy we do not understand.
Killing the only source of intelligence we have ever had about that enemy is not strategy. It is fear."
"Fear keeps people alive."
"Fear keeps people hiding." Loren's gold eyes swept the room.
"Since the invasion, I have been trying to move humanity and the Vampyren past fear.
Past the instinct to destroy what we don't understand.
If we kill this prisoner, we learn nothing.
The Lucian continue to be an enigma. And the next time they attack, we will be exactly as blind as we were before he came. "
Marta opened her mouth to respond and I stepped forward.
"His vitals don't lie."
Every head in the tent turned to me. I felt my heart rate spike and I told it to calm down because if there was one thing I could do in this room full of warriors and politicians and terrified civilians, it was present data.
"I've been monitoring the prisoner's physiology for two weeks.
I've drawn blood, measured vitals, documented healing rates, skin temperature, subdermal vibration patterns, everything I could track with the equipment I have.
" I pulled my notebook from the waistband of my jeans and held it up.
"This is the most comprehensive medical data on a living Lucian that exists anywhere on Earth. Possibly anywhere in the galaxy."
"Medical data," Marta said. "How does that help us survive?"
"It helps us understand them. Their blood operates on a temperature-responsive cellular system.
Their healing is directed by the psychic network.
Damage it, and you damage their recovery.
Their combat speed is generated by a subdermal vibration mechanism that has a telltale frequency before it engages — learn to detect that frequency and we can predict their movements.
Their commander controls them through psychic pain broadcast through the same network. "
I was talking fast now. Faster than I usually talked, faster than the clinical detachment I'd built my identity around.
Because this wasn't just data. This was Rael.
This was the creature who had dimmed his skin for a frightened child and told me about a silver sky and held my hand and let me feel the shape of his loneliness through a connection that shouldn't have been possible.
"He told me things he didn't tell anyone else.
About the network. About Tyvor's control mechanism.
About the fact that most Lucian don't want to fight and would stop if Tyvor's psychic leash was broken.
" I looked around the room. "Kill him, and you lose all of that.
Every insight. Every tactical advantage.
Every chance we have to understand the species that is killing us. "
"You're defending a monster," someone said from the back of the tent. I couldn't see who. It didn't matter.
"He's not a monster." My voice was steady.
I was surprised by how steady it was. "I've spent two weeks studying him.
I've drawn his blood, measured his vitals, observed his behavior under stress and in calm.
Monsters don't dim their skin to avoid frightening a child.
Monsters don't teach you the history of their destroyed civilization with grief in their voice.
Monsters don't fight their own people to protect strangers. "
"Pretty words from someone who didn't lose anyone last night," Marta said.
The fury spiked. White-hot. "I spent four hours with my hands inside people's bodies trying to keep them from dying. Sandra Martinez died while I was holding gauze against a wound that wouldn't stop bleeding. Don't tell me I didn't lose anyone."
The tent went absolutely silent.