Chapter 20 Brecca #2
He let that settle. Around the circle, people shifted, the small involuntary movements of humans and Vampyren processing the idea that the thing they'd been surviving for three years might actually be over.
"What comes next is harder," Loren continued.
"We are three species on one planet. One of us invaded, one of us followed, and one of us was here first. The history between us is complicated.
" A diplomatic understatement from a man whose species had enslaved the other two.
"But history does not have to be destiny.
We have, in this camp, proof that coexistence is possible.
Humans and Vampyren have been building that proof since the beginning. Now we extend it."
He looked at Rael. "The Lucian on Earth — how many?"
"Approximately two hundred," Rael said. "Scattered. Disoriented. Most are in the southern territories. Some have moved closer to the city."
"What do they need?"
The question was not tactical. It wasn't what do they want or what are they planning.
It was what do they need. And Rael, standing at the edge of a circle that included the species that had destroyed his homeworld and the species that had been his enemy five days ago, answered with the honesty that had earned my trust in the first place.
"Food. Shelter. Time. Purpose." He paused. "And someone to tell them that they are allowed to stop. That the running is over. That they do not have to earn the right to exist by being useful."
The circle was quiet. I watched the faces: the skepticism on Marta's, the careful calculation on Alek's, the open empathy on Kiera's.
And on Cassi's face, something I recognized.
The expression of a woman who had been exactly where Rael was, a member of an occupied species asking the occupiers for mercy, who knew that the asking was the hardest part.
"They can stay," Cassi said. She looked at Danton, who nodded. "Los Angeles is big enough. God knows we need the help rebuilding."
Marta opened her mouth. Probably to argue, probably to list the security risks, probably to be the voice of caution she'd been since the day I arrived.
Then she closed it. Looked at the circle.
Looked at the baby in Tess's arms, gold-eyed, two-hearted, the living proof that species boundaries were less permanent than everyone assumed.
"On conditions," Marta said. "Disarmament. Integration. They work alongside us, not apart from us."
"Agreed," Rael said.
And that was how the Lucian became part of the alliance.
Not with a treaty. Not with a ceremony. With a conversation in a circle of mismatched chairs on a Tuesday morning in the foothills of Los Angeles, where three species that had been killing each other for centuries decided, tentatively and imperfectly, to stop.
* * *
That evening, I climbed to the roof of the camp's tallest building — the old water treatment facility that served as our eastern watchtower — and sat on the edge and looked at the city.
Los Angeles was still a ruin. The skyline was broken. Fires had scarred entire neighborhoods. The roads were cracked and overgrown and the buildings were shells and the infrastructure that had supported four million lives was gone and would take years to rebuild, if it could be rebuilt at all.
But in the streets below, people were moving.
Walking. Just walking. Human and Vampyren and, here and there, the tall pale shapes of Lucian who had emerged from the southern territories and were making their way toward the camp, drawn by word of mouth and the absence of pain in the network and the strange, unprecedented idea that somewhere in this ruined city, three species were trying to coexist.
Rael sat down beside me. His long legs dangled over the edge of the roof. His skin glowed faintly in the fading light, the silver-blue shimmer that I'd documented in my notebook a hundred times and still found beautiful.
"How's Syl?" I asked.
"Healing. She asked if she could come back tomorrow for the bandage change."
"She doesn't need a bandage change tomorrow."
"I know. But she wants to see you." He paused. "You are becoming known among the Lucian. The healer who treats all species. They are calling you something in the network. I cannot translate it precisely. The closest approximation is the one who draws blood and gives it back."
"That's my entire career in one sentence."
He smiled. The real smile — the one I'd earned, the one that transformed his face from alien severity to something warm and human and mine.
"Rael."
"Yes?"
"Where will you go? If the Lucian leave Earth. If they find another planet, or go back to the stars. Will you go with them?"
He looked at me. The connection between us pulsed, warm and steady, carrying the answer before his voice did.
"Where would I go?" he said. "Lucis is gone. The ships are gone. The homeworld I never saw exists only in the network's memory, and the network is learning to remember it differently now — not as a grief but as a history. A place we came from. Not a wound."
"That doesn't answer my question."
"I have spent three hundred years without a home." He reached for my hand. His fingers interlaced with mine, cool and warming, the luminescence blooming where our skin touched. "I am not leaving the first one I've found."
"This camp is your home?"
"You are my home."
I looked at him. The alien who spoke with two tones and had black blood and glowed in the dark and had been born on a ship between dead worlds and had let himself be captured by strangers because he saw a Vampyren rub a woman's feet in the surf and something inside him broke in a way that could only be repaired by choosing the other side.
"You're going to make me cry," I said.
"You have been crying intermittently for five days. I have been tracking it through the bond."
"Stop tracking my crying through the bond."
"I will not."
"You're impossible."
"You are the one who bonded with an alien."
I leaned into him. He put his arm around me.
Careful, always careful, the controlled strength of a creature that could blur with speed but chose, in this moment, to be perfectly still.
His heartbeat pulsed through what lay between us, fourteen beats per minute, slow and steady and warm, the rhythm I'd carried behind my sternum for weeks and would carry, I was beginning to understand, for the rest of my life.
The sun was setting over the Pacific. The sky, which had been red and orange and smoke-gray since the invasion, stained by fires and destruction and the accumulated debris of a civilization being torn apart, was changing.
The smoke was clearing. The fires were going out.
And underneath the haze, the sky was turning colors I hadn't seen in three years: gold, amber, rose, the warm spectrum of a sunset on a planet that was, for the first time, not burning.
"It's beautiful," I said.
"Yes."
"We're going to be okay."
He was quiet for a moment. Through what lived between us, I felt him weigh the statement with the careful precision of a mind that had spent three centuries learning to distinguish hope from delusion.
"We are going to try," he said. "That is better than okay. That is the beginning."
I looked east. The city sprawled below us, broken, scarred, populated by three species that were learning to share the wreckage.
Somewhere down there, Cassi was sitting beside her mother, holding her hand, waiting for the woman who'd made tamales on Sundays to come back from wherever she'd gone.
Somewhere, Crystal was organizing a supply run and snapping at Mark for smoking near the ammunition cache.
Somewhere, Tess was feeding Auriel, and Kal was watching them both with an expression that could only be described as a man who had found the thing he didn't know he was looking for.
And here, on a rooftop, a medic and a Lucian sat with their legs dangling over the edge and watched the sun set over a city that was learning to breathe again.
The sky wasn't red anymore.
It was gold.