Chapter 12 Brecca
A hundred and forty-seven people. That was what walked through my tent flaps in the three days after Cassi’s blood farm raid.
I say walked. Some of them walked. Some were carried.
Some were wheeled in on improvised stretchers made from tent poles and blankets.
Some crawled. One man was dragged by two friends who refused to leave him behind even though I could tell from ten feet away that he wasn’t going to make it, and they knew it too, and they dragged him anyway because leaving someone behind was what the blood farms did and they weren’t in the blood farms anymore.
His friends sat outside the tent and didn’t cry. They’d used up their crying a long time ago.
I stood over his body and washed my hands and moved to the next patient, because there were a hundred and forty-six people who were still alive and some of them were going to die too if I didn’t keep moving.
Jonas worked the overflow tent. Two of the camp’s volunteers — a retired paramedic named Ed and a woman named Sylvia who’d been a veterinary tech before the invasion — handled the stable cases.
I took the critical ones. Always the critical ones.
The ones who needed skills I’d taught myself from a veterinary textbook and three years of desperation and the absolute refusal to let someone die when I could hear their heart beating.
The blood farm captives shared a constellation of symptoms that I’d started calling Blood Depletion Syndrome in my notebook, because giving it a name made it feel like something I could treat instead of something I was witnessing.
Severe anemia. Malnutrition. Muscle wasting.
Immune suppression. Skin breakdown at the feeding sites.
Psychological dissociation ranging from mild withdrawal to full catatonia.
Cassi’s mother was in the worst category.
Elena King — fifty-two, former gardener, former mother, former person — lay on a cot in the corner of my tent and stared at the canvas ceiling and didn’t speak.
Her vitals were stable but her consciousness was somewhere far away, in a place I couldn’t reach with a stethoscope or a blood pressure cuff.
She ate when food was placed in her mouth.
She swallowed water when it was held to her lips.
But she didn’t initiate, didn’t react, didn’t show any sign that she was aware of where she was or who was sitting beside her bed.
Cassi came every morning. Sat in the chair I’d placed beside her mother’s cot.
Held her hand. Talked about the camp, about the weather, about the garden someone was building behind Tent C, about tamales.
About everything and nothing. Elena’s hand lay in Cassi’s like a dead bird and I watched my best friend pour words into a silence that gave nothing back and I thought: this is what the invasion costs.
Not buildings. Not cities. People. The insides of people.
On the third day, while I was changing the dressing on a captive’s feeding wounds, Rael appeared at my tent entrance.
He wasn’t supposed to be there. He was supposed to be helping with the perimeter expansion.
Marta had assigned him to the construction crew, partly because he was strong and fast and useful, and partly because keeping him visible and working served the political purpose of showing the camp that the Lucian prisoner was earning his keep.
He’d been hauling lumber and digging postholes for three days without complaint, his pale skin burning in the California sun to a color that wasn’t exactly a tan but was at least less translucently white.
“You haven’t slept,” he said.
I looked up from the wound I was dressing. The patient — a woman in her forties with feeding scars on both arms and a secondary infection in her left elbow — stared at Rael with wide, terrified eyes. She’d never seen a Lucian before. She’d only seen Vampyren, and from the wrong side of a cage.
“He’s with us,” I told her. “He’s safe.”
She didn’t look convinced. I finished the dressing, gave her a dose of the antibiotics I was rationing like water in a desert, and sent her to Jonas for monitoring.
“You haven’t slept,” Rael said again. He was leaning against the tent pole, arms crossed, watching me with those silver eyes that saw everything I wished they couldn’t.
“I’ve slept.”
“Three hours in the last forty-eight. I can feel your fatigue through the bond.”
“Stop feeling my fatigue through the bond.”
“I cannot turn it off. You know this.”
I washed my hands. Dried them on my last clean towel, which was no longer clean. Pressed my palms flat on the table and breathed and tried to remember the last time I’d eaten something that wasn’t a protein bar consumed standing up between patients.
“There are a hundred and forty-six people who need me,” I said. “Sleep is a luxury.”
“Sleep is a medical necessity. You told me that on my second day in the containment tent. You said—” He paused, and the deeper register of his voice shifted in a way I’d learned to read as the Lucian equivalent of a small smile.
“‘Sleep is when the body repairs itself. Even your weird alien body needs it.’”
“I don’t sound like that.”
“You sound exactly like that.”
I looked at him, and he held the look. The warmth between us pulsed—that impossible, cross-species, shouldn’t-exist connection—settling behind my sternum like a second pulse.
His. Steady and slow and fourteen beats per minute and so profoundly there that I’d stopped being able to remember what it felt like not to carry it.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll sleep. But first—” I pulled a chair to my work table and sat down and opened my notebook. “I need to talk to you about something. Sit.”
He sat. Cross-legged on the tent floor, the way he always sat: still, attentive, his body arranged with the economy of a creature trained not to waste movement.
The sun coming through the canvas caught his skin and it did that thing, the faint luminescence, barely visible in daylight but there.
A silver sheen that reminded me of moonlight on water.
“The blood farm captives have been fed on by Vampyren for three years,” I said.
“Their bodies are devastated. I can treat the symptoms: anemia, infection, malnutrition. But I can’t fix the underlying damage with what I have.
Some of these people are going to die because their systems are too depleted to recover. ”
“I understand.”
“What I keep circling back to is the psychic network. You told me it directs healing. That it can repair tissue at the cellular level. That Lucian healers on your homeworld could diagnose and treat through the network.”
“Yes.”
“Could it work on humans?”
He went very still. The luminescence dimmed, that involuntary response I’d documented. His skin reacted to strong emotion by pulling light inward, like a candle being cupped by a hand.
“The network has never been used on non-Lucian,” he said. “Human minds are—”
“Opaque. You said. Except mine isn’t.”
“You are... an anomaly.”
“What if you’re the anomaly? What if the bond we have — this thing that isn’t supposed to be possible — what if it’s the key? Not just to us, but to understanding how the network interacts with human biology?”
He was quiet for a long time. I could feel him thinking—not the specific thoughts, but the shape of them, the weight, the way they pressed against the space between us like stones settling in water.
“There is something else I need to tell you,” he said. “Something I have been considering since the raid.”
“Tell me.”
“Tyvor controls the Lucian through the psychic network. He broadcasts pain—I have told you this. But what I have not told you is the full tactical implication.” He looked at me.
“If Tyvor is killed, the pain stops. The broadcast ceases. The network goes quiet. Still alive, still intact, just silent. Without Tyvor’s voice driving them, the Lucian on this planet would have no reason to fight. ”
“You told me this before. Back in the containment tent.”
“I told you the principle. I did not tell you the strategy.” He leaned forward.
The second tone in his voice deepened. “Tyvor is a single point of failure. One mind controlling thousands. If that mind is destroyed, the system collapses. Peacefully. The network returns to its natural state. The Lucian stop fighting because the thing forcing them to fight is gone.”
“You’re talking about an assassination.”
“I am talking about ending the war.”
I sat with that. The weight of it. A single surgical strike to kill one Lucian commander, and the entire species stops fighting. It sounded too simple. Things that sounded too simple usually were.
“Where is he?” I asked.
“Downtown. In the territory the holdout Vampyren controlled until your friend liberated the blood farm. Tyvor allied with them — the holdouts provided blood and cover, Tyvor provided the Lucian military force that kept other Vampyren from retaking the district.” He paused.
“The blood farm raid disrupted that alliance. Tyvor has lost his Vampyren partners. He is exposed.”
“So this is the moment.”
“This is the moment.”
“And you want to lead the strike team.”
“I know his mind. I know his patterns. I know the frequency of his psychic broadcasts and the range of his network and the way he positions himself during combat. No one else in this camp has that knowledge.”
“You’d be going back. Into his range. He’d feel you coming.”
“Yes.”
“He’d try to kill you through the network before you got close.”
“Yes.”
“And if he succeeds, you die. And the bond—” I stopped.
The connection between us that hummed and pulsed and carried his heartbeat into my awareness every second of every day.
If he died, what would that feel like? A silence where the warmth had been?
A gap? An absence so specific and permanent that it would be like losing a sense I’d only just discovered I had?