1. Cassia #2
The kid slips out through the back without another word.
I stand there for a moment, staring at the violet-stained gauze in my hands, listening to the muffled chaos of the streets overhead and the sputtering whine of a generator that wants to die.
After washing my hands, I pull on fresh gloves and go back to work.
I’m halfway through stitching a dockworker’s palm, a deep laceration from a cargo hook that’s going to leave an ugly imperfection no matter how neat I make the sutures, when the front door bangs open, as subtle as a flash grenade.
"Cass! Hey—Cass!"
Junia Vext crashes into the clinic like a human wrecking ball, copper-orange hair wild around her shaved temples, silver piercings catching the flickering overhead light.
She's hauling a canvas sack over one shoulder that clanks with stolen tech parts, and her patched scavenger gear is streaked with tunnel grime and darker streaks.
One of her boots is held together with electrical tape.
She looks like she crawled out of a pummeled building, which, knowing Junia, she probably did.
"You can't just—" I start.
"Yeah, yeah, indoor voice, sacred healing space, I know." She dumps the sack on my counter with zero ceremony and grabs my arm, hauling me sideways. "Sorry, sir, medical emergency. It’s a doctor-to-doctor consult. It’s very important."
"Wen, finish his stitches, three more along the deepest part, and keep them tight." I call over my shoulder as Junia drags me toward the narrow supply closet off the main corridor.
Wen materializes from behind the curtain with a look of weary resignation and takes over the dockworker's hand without missing a stitch.
Junia shoves me into the closet, barely big enough for the two of us between shelves of salvaged tubing and half-empty disinfectant bottles, pulling the door shut behind her.
Glancing around once, as if someone might be crouching between the gauze rolls, she speaks almost seriously.
“Listen, I was down in the lower market tunnels tonight pulling a circuit haul. It was a standard run, same as always. Except it turned anything but standard, because half the stalls down there are moving military-grade hardware I’ve only ever seen in Kraaj armory shipments.”
I stare at her, letting her give me all the details.
"Targeting modules and encrypted power cells.
The kind of stuff that shows up right before something really, really bad happens.
" Junia's green eyes, sharp and restless, always darting, always watchful, lock onto mine.
"I'm talking syndicate-level ordnance running through black-market tunnels in our district, Cass.
Somebody's arming up, and it's far beyond the usual small-time crews. "
A cold knot forms in the pit of my stomach.
I think back to the malfunctioning droids, the patrols, and the rising violence pressing down on District Seventeen for weeks now.
Tomek said the droid attacks looked coordinated.
And if military-grade tech is flowing through the district at the same time the machines are going haywire, that's a pattern ugly enough to make my hands want to shake.
"Did you see who was running the shipments?"
"Couple of faces I recognized from the syndicates operating out near the old refinery.
Mixed crew—humans and Kraaj working together, which is weird enough on its own down here.
" Rummaging through the sack, she pulls out a singed circuit board trailing severed wires.
"I grabbed what I could. Figured you'd want to know since your little humanitarian operation sits right in the middle of the blast radius if things go sideways. "
Taking the circuit board from her, I turn it over. The markings on the casing are Kraaj military designations. I recognize the script from labels on medical supply crates I've bartered for on the black market. Those crates held bandages and analgesic patches; these hold weapons components.
Before I can respond, the world splits apart.
The explosion hits like a fist from God, a massive concussive wave that slams me into the closet shelving.
Glass bottles shatter. The lights die instantly, plunging everything into absolute blackness before the backup generator kicks on with a sputtering, anemic whine that barely illuminates anything.
Screaming carries from the waiting area through the closet door—Wen shouting orders, patients scrambling over each other to find the walls.
Junia grabs me by the collar and wrenches the door open. "That wasn't small!"
Dust and debris rain from the ceiling in thick sheets, chunks of old concrete crumbling loose from the foundation above.
The generator light flickers, fading before sparking to life again.
Emergency power is failing across the building, and from the muted sounds overhead—or rather, the absence of them—the outage stretches far beyond my clinic. Ash Alley has gone dark.
I shove into the main room. "Everyone into the back corridor, now! Wen, move them!"
Wen is already herding patients through the partition—the dock worker clutching his half-stitched hand, along with the woman cradling a feverish toddler and two bleeding laborers.
They shuffle past in a dazed, frightened line, disappearing into the back hallway where the walls are thicker and the ceiling still holds.
Within seconds, the main room empties out, leaving only me and Junia standing in the flickering half-dark, surrounded by scattered equipment and settling dust.
Then a huge force hits the roof.
An enormous, grinding, tearing crash of weight punches through the weakened structure, reinforced plaster shrieking as it gives way, metal warping around collapsing stone.
The impact comes from the storage alcove on the opposite side of the curtain, and the whole building shudders as if struck by a wrecking ball.
Dust and debris blast through the partition fabric, and the exam table in that room splinters apart, the crack echoing through the walls.
I'm already moving, shoving through the drapes with Junia on my heels.
A Kraaj male lies in the wreckage. He’s massive—easily over seven feet of dense, brutal muscle crumpled across the destroyed remains of my secondary exam table.
Dark crimson skin covered in black, scale-like markings that ripple across enormous shoulders and down a spine half-buried in debris.
Huge wings, torn and charred at the edges, splay outward at broken angles across the floor of the alcove.
Curved obsidian horns jut from a skull matted with dark blood.
Energy burns sear across his left flank and torso in angry, blistered streaks, and gunshot wounds puncture his upper chest and shoulder, leaking blood so dark it looks almost black in the dim light.
The air around his hands hums with residual heat, baking the surrounding dust until my eyes water.
Smaller cuts and scrapes from the fall mark his arms and face—surface damage, the kind that'll close on its own.
The burns and the bullets are what's killing him.
I know him.
Everyone in District Seventeen knows him.
This is Rhykor, our district’s infamous 'Dragon,' Kraaj enforcer, and syndicate weapon. The monster parents invoke to frighten children into obedience and scavengers whisper about in the tunnels like a curse word and a prayer tangled together.
He's dying on my floor.
I automatically catalog his injuries as I spot severe energy burns across the left flank and torso, along with two gunshot entry wounds in the upper chest and one in the shoulder, all actively bleeding.
It’s critical, possibly fatal, without immediate intervention.
Yet a darker part of me, the part that grew up hearing what creatures like him did to my people, whispers, Let him die.
His eyes crack open, showing ember-red, glazed with agony and unfocused. Blood bubbles at the corner of a mouth full of razor-edged fangs. After trying to move, he collapses back against the wreckage, a sound grinding out of him closer to a dying engine than anything a living creature should make.
I grab my emergency kit.
"Cass," Junia's voice comes from behind me, barely above a whisper. "Cass, do you know who that is?"
"I know who he is."
"Then you know what happens if people find out he's here. If anyone saw?—"
"Nobody saw anything." Dropping to my knees beside him, I rip open a pressure pack. "Wen moved everyone to the back before he came through. It's just us."
Junia is quiet for a dangerous second. I can practically hear her weighing her options as she considers the immense risk of harboring a Kraaj enforcer bleeding out in an underground human clinic.
When she speaks again, her tone has that careful, measured quality she uses when she's about to make a stupid decision and wants it clear that this wasn't her idea.
"What do you need me to do?"
"You need to leave." Clamping the pack against the worst of the chest wounds, I feel his whole body seize under my hands.
The heat pouring from his skin is intense, almost scalding through my gloves.
"Take your bag and go out the service tunnel.
You were never here tonight, Juno. You didn't see this. "
"Cass—"
"I mean it." I glance up at her, and whatever she sees in my face makes the argument die on her tongue. "If this goes wrong, the consequences fall solely on me. You stay clear. Your role is simple because you arrived to drop off salvage, found me absent, and departed. That is the story."