2. Rhykor #2
"I've survived worse."
"That wasn't what I asked." As she positions the forceps to brace the lip of the shoulder wound, she meets my eyes with an unwavering look that somehow manages to be both clinical and defiant. "Can you stay still?"
I bare my fangs at her. She keeps her eyes on me, unblinking. "Get it over with," I rasp. "What do I call the woman digging around in my shoulder?"
"Cassia," she says, her focus returning to the wound. "Cassia Ward."
She digs in, and the pain whites out everything else for a few merciful seconds.
When it recedes, I hear voices filtering through the walls, muffled and human, coming from somewhere beyond the curtain partition separating this alcove from the other sections of the clinic.
I focus on the words, letting them anchor me against the undertow of instinct.
"—can't believe she's still back there with that thing?—"
"—heard it was Kraaj, one of the big ones, you know what they do to districts that harbor?—"
"—always been a sympathizer, Ward has, treating them like they're the same as us?—"
The voices are soft with hatred that ferments for generations inside occupied populations.
They're talking about her, the woman with her hands inside my shoulder, the one who lied to armed men to protect me.
I remember that now, fragments surfacing through the haze; her words are sharp, and even as boots stomp through the room beyond the curtain, they're calling her a traitor for keeping me alive.
I memorize the voices of three distinct speakers, two male and one female. I memorize the cadence of each one, the exact pitch and rhythm that will let me pick them out of a crowd later. Isolating and committing them to memory, I use the same targeting sequence I run on a battlefield.
The realization of what I’m doing—preparing to hunt down humans who insulted a woman I barely know—unsettles me more than any wound I’m carrying.
The medic pulls the third bullet free with a grunt of effort and holds it up in the flickering light.
It is mangled, dark with my blood. After examining it briefly, she drops it into the tray before reaching for gauze and a cauterizing tool.
"Three bullets, two of them fragmented. You're lucky none of them hit anything unpatchable.
" She begins packing the shoulder wound with deft, skillful motions.
"The burns are going to take longer. I can treat the surface damage, but whatever that energy is that you people generate, it complicates the healing process.
The tissue responds differently from human tissue. "
"You've treated Kraaj before."
"I treat everyone." The answer comes automatic and rehearsed—three words she's clearly wielded a thousand times before.
The clinic's front door slams open. Heavy boots and readied weapons carry through the walls. They are scavengers, from the sound of them. The same breed of vulture that picks through combat wreckage looking for wounded targets to finish off and loot.
My body moves on pure instinct, off the floor before I've decided to move, burns and bullet wounds screaming as wings flare against the cramped walls of the alcove.
Heat rushes to my hands hard enough to make the air around my knuckles waver like desert asphalt, and the world shrinks until there is only the curtain between this room and the men out there.
I can take four, maybe five, even in this condition.
The first one through this curtain gets a fist through his chest. The second eats a blast of thermal energy hot enough to liquify bone.
After that, it's improvisation; but I've improvised my way through worse odds with fewer functioning limbs.
The medic actually grabs my arm, wrapping both hands around my wrist to pull—and for one deranged moment, I'm so shocked by the audacity of it that I let her.
"Don't move—don't even breathe," she hisses in a voice that is nothing more than a whisper, yet heavy with the command that I be the one to handle this.
"They're scavengers. They're here to finish what started at the market."
"I’m aware of their nature. That's why I'm going out there, and you're staying behind this curtain.
" Her fingers tighten on my wrist. My skin must be searing against her palms, but she continues to hold on.
"You go out there, people die. My patients and maybe even me.
So sit down, shut up, and let me do what I do. "
Releasing me, she strips off the blood-crusted apron to bundle it under the rubble beside me, then slips through the curtain, cutting off any hope of protest.
I stand there with murder seeping from my pores, fists clenched, a blistering pressure building under my skin and baking the small room, and I listen.
My hearing, sharpened by adrenaline and evolved Kraaj biology, picks up each word with brutal clarity.
The scavengers are aggressive and demanding, tearing through the main room.
And she meets them head-on, spine straight, lying with a fluency that would impress career criminals.
Claiming the ceiling buckled, she insists she has been treating patients all night.
With a contempt so convincing that I almost believe there is nothing behind the curtain worth finding, she orders them to either help or get out.
They leave, and the door slams. Silence settles over the clinic like dust after a detonation.
As she comes back through the drapes, she finds me standing, one hand bracing the wall, adrenaline still flooding my veins and murder still etched across my face.
Our eyes meet in the dim generator light, and neither of us speaks.
Her hands tremble now—the adrenaline crash hitting hard—and still her chin stays up, her gaze unchanging and on mine.
This woman lied to armed scavengers twice for me. A Kraaj enforcer who crashed through her ceiling uninvited, destroyed her clinic, and put everyone in this building at risk simply by existing inside it.
The logic behind her actions eludes me.
She unnerves me far more than the men with guns.
I stay only because movement would reopen the wounds she recently closed.
She works on my burns in terse silence, applying salvaged salve and bandaging the worst of the damage, her hands gradually stopping their shaking as the adrenaline fades.
Words die before they can form. The quiet is dense, packed with admissions we refuse to make, and underneath the antiseptic and old blood, her scent keeps threading through my awareness like smoke I can't wave away.
Hours pass and the generator coughs and sputters.
The sounds from the streets above shift from chaos to an exhausted, wary stillness.
Through the walls I hear her assistant murmuring to patients in the back corridor while a feverish child cries over the shuffle of bodies trying to find comfortable positions on concrete floors.
The medic finishes wrapping the last of my burns and sits back on her heels.
Dark circles hollow out the eyes themselves, bruising the skin around them.
Her braid loses its form, dark curls falling across her shoulders and framing a face tight with exhaustion.
She looks like she hasn't slept in days, and for some reason, the sight of it—the vulnerability of it, the stubborn endurance written into her body’s makeup—creates a pressure behind my ribs I can't blame on bullet wounds.
I stand, but the movement is slow, agonizing, all of my injuries protesting in chorus. My wings graze the low ceiling, and I fold them tight against my back, ignoring the grinding pain where burned membrane catches against scale.
She looks up at me. "You shouldn't be standing."
"I shouldn't be here."
"On that, we agree."
I stare down at her—this small, exhausted, impossibly defiant human crouching on the floor of her ruined clinic—and a thrum builds behind my rib cage with a ferocity that frightens me, a gravitational pull I have no framework for and no defense against. I want to stay.
The wanting is irrational and overwhelming, a compulsion that wraps around my spine and sinks hooks into my skull.
My instincts scream at me to remain in this room, positioning myself between this woman and the door so I can bare my fangs at anything that comes close.
Which is exactly why I have to leave.
I turn without a word, moving toward the gap in the ceiling, the hole my body tore through hours ago.
The edges are torn and ragged, sparking faintly where severed wires dangle into the room.
I can smell the surface air filtering down through the opening, cold and acrid with smoke from whatever is still burning above.
"You're welcome, by the way," she calls after me with exhaustion and sarcasm wounding together and fraying at the edges. "For the bullets I pulled out of you, not to mention the lies and the complete destruction of my professional reputation."
I pause at the opening. I should say something, gratitude maybe, or at least acknowledgment.
But the words refuse to form, crowded out by the roar of instincts that have no business existing inside a warrior who's answered to no one for decades.
If I open my mouth, I'm afraid of what will come out, and it won't be thank you.
Spreading my damaged wings, I bite back the snarl of pain to launch myself upward through the shattered ceiling, passing straight through the gutted surface building above and into the dark sky over Ash Alley.
The cold air hits my burns like a blade, and I welcome it, desperate for anything that drowns out the phantom warmth of her hands still lingering on my skin.
As I fly, I force myself to keep my gaze on the horizon, refusing to look back at the rundown clinic below—because I want to look back entirely too much, and that is a problem I cannot afford.