3. Cassia
CASSIA
The morning after I pull the bullets out of Rhykor and lie to armed scavengers to save his life, I learn that all of those scavengers are dead.
The bodies turn up in the alley behind the south market three hours after sunrise.
Wen brings me the news while I'm checking what's left of my supply shelves, which takes about forty-five seconds, because there's almost nothing left.
She stands in the doorway, arms across her chest, watching me with that look she wears when evaluating how much information I can ingest before my blood pressure crosses the line into a liability.
"Four men burned," she says. "This was a targeted act, separate from the explosion last night. Someone hunted them through the alleys and cooked them alive."
My hands cease moving on the shelf. The bottle of expired analgesic I'm holding suddenly feels very heavy.
"The scavengers," I manage. "From last night?"
"The same ones who came through our door with pulse rifles.
" Wen watches me with those tired, knowing eyes that miss absolutely nothing.
"Every single one of them. The one with the neck tattoos and the scar across his eyebrow—witnesses say they found what was left of him propped against a dumpster behind the noodle stand on Fourth still smoking. "
My stomach turns, and I set the bottle down with exaggerated care, focusing on the mechanical act of placing glass on metal to avoid thinking too hard about the horrific fate of those men. The image forms anyway, ember-red eyes and obsidian horns.
"Nobody's saying his name out loud," Wen continues, lowering her tone to barely above a murmur, "but everyone's thinking it. The Dragon permits no loose ends. And four armed humans who tracked a wounded Kraaj enforcer through Ash Alley?" She shakes her head. "That's the definition of a loose end."
I lean against the shelf and place my palms even against the cold metal, grounding myself.
"We don't know it was him. He could barely stand when he left.
Three bullet wounds, burns across half his torso; the Kraaj heal fast, sure, but not that fast. He probably crawled into a hole somewhere to sleep it off. "
"Cassia."
"I'm serious, Wen."
Wen gives me a look that says she's too old and too tired to argue with someone determined to lie to herself and walks back to the main room to prep for the morning patients.
I stand alone in my half-destroyed alcove. The ceiling still gapes open above me, rubble littering the floor where the Kraaj enforcer bled all over my concrete, and I try to convince myself the knot in my stomach stems from horror.
Over the next few days, the rumors metastasize through District Seventeen like a plague, each version more elaborate than the last. Rhykor tore them apart with his bare hands, according to one version.
According to another, he melted their weapons into slag and made them watch.
Supposedly, he left one alive long enough to deliver a message: anyone who touches the clinic on Ash Alley answers to the Dragon.
That last part terrifies me more than the violence itself.
I hear it whispered in the market stalls I pass on my supply runs.
Vendors who've sold me expired antibiotics for years now shoot me sideways glances, their eyes pointedly averted, watching me with a mixture of fear and fascination.
A woman selling salvaged bandages from a blanket on the ground actually flinches when I approach her stall, treating me like a contained explosive about to trigger.
I'm halfway through negotiating a trade for surgical thread—three doses of painkillers for a spool that should cost a fraction of that, but I'm in no position to haggle—when a familiar voice cuts through the crowd behind me.
"You absolute idiot."
Junia grabs my elbow and spins me around.
She's furious, her hair practically crackling with static and her silver piercings catching the weak overhead lights strung between market stalls.
Having avoided me since the night of the explosion, her presence here now tells me she's spent those days building up a head of steam.
"Juno—"
"Don't Juno me." She hauls me sideways between two vendor stalls, wedging us into a gap barely wide enough for our shoulders, and drops her volume to a vicious hiss.
"You need to understand the situation, because four scavengers have been burned alive, and the entire district is already tying those deaths directly to your clinic and your own actions. "
"I didn't ask him to?—"
"What you asked is irrelevant! You saved the Dragon's life, Cass.
You pulled bullets out of the most dangerous Kraaj enforcer operating in these outer settlements and sent him on his merry way, and now he's out there incinerating people who looked at you wrong.
" She jabs a finger into my sternum hard enough to bruise.
"You've painted a target on yourself the size of a landing pad.
The anti-Kraaj crews in the district are going to hear about this.
The syndicate bosses who want leverage on Rhykor are going to know your name and your address by sundown. "
The worst part is she's right. I know she is right, having accepted the risks when I chose to hide him and lied to armed men with pulse rifles pressed against my skin. Still, I never expected the consequences to arrive charred and smoking in an alley before breakfast.
"What was I supposed to do?" My tone hardens against my better judgment, transforming the question into something sharp and unforgiving. "Let him bleed out on my floor? Let those scavengers put a bullet in his skull while he was unconscious?"
"Yes!" Junia throws her hands up. "That is exactly what a normal, self-preserving human being would do when the most feared Kraaj killer in the district crashes through her ceiling!"
"Then I guess I'm unusual."
"Oh, trust me, I'm painfully aware." She scrubs both hands through her hair, sending strands in all directions, and exhales through her teeth.
The anger is already softening into exhaustion.
Junia burns hot and fast, always has, with fury and loyalty tangled together so tightly you can never separate one from the other.
"Just…please be careful, Cass. Whatever this is, whatever you think you're doing, be careful. Because the attention you’ve attracted never goes away.
It follows you home, and it watches you sleep. "
She squeezes my arm once, tight, desperate, fingers digging in like she's afraid I'll dissolve if she lets go, and disappears back into the market crowd, the ghost of her grip still fading on my arm.
I finish my supply run with Junia's warning rattling through my skull and a spool of overpriced surgical thread in my bag.
The market thins out as the afternoon wears on, vendors packing up early as the unreliable power grid flickers on and off since the explosion, and nobody wants to be caught in the open when the lights fail.
I'm cutting through the east corridor toward Ash Alley when I hear shouting.
Aggressive shouting erupts from adult voices, male and thick with menace. Underneath those shouts, smaller sounds of high-pitched, frightened crying carry the exhaustion of children who've already learned that screaming rarely brings aid.
I follow the noise around a crumbling partition wall and into a narrow service alley behind the food distribution point.
Three men, humans, armed with pipe wrenches and modified stun batons, corner a cluster of kids against the back wall.
Five children, maybe six, range from barely old enough to walk to a scrawny ten-year-old girl standing in front of the smaller ones with her fists up and her chin trembling.
They're filthy and severely underfed—street orphans with hollow faces.
They are the kind District Seventeen produces in abundance and forgets about immediately.
One of the men has a canvas sack slung over his shoulder that clinks with the unmistakable sound of stolen ration packs. He's yanking a bundle of food bars from the oldest girl's hands while she screams and claws at his wrists with broken fingernails.
"Let go, you little rat?—"
"Those are ours!" The girl's voice cracks with rage and terror. "We found them! They fell off the?—"
The man backhands her across the face. She hits the ground hard, and the smaller children wail.
I reach for the pulse pistol hidden inside my jacket. My fingers close around the grip, and I'm already determining angles—three targets, a narrow corridor, children in the crossfire, and terrible odds—when the air temperature spikes.
The change is sudden and absolute, like stepping from shade into the open mouth of a furnace.
Overhead lights flicker and pop as heat distortion ripples through the alley, warping the air into shimmering curtains.
A shadow falls across the three men from above, enormous and winged, blotting out the weak light from the corridor beyond.
Rhykor drops from the rooftop like a falling building.
He lands between the extortionists and the children with an impact, his feet cracking the concrete.
Standing, he's even more terrifying than I remember, his massive frame blocking the weak light of the alleyway and his horns nearly scraping the low-hanging cables.
His wings spread wide behind him, filling the alley from wall to wall, singed and marred with fresh blood seeping through the bandages where the half-healed membrane has torn open again from the strain of carrying his weight off rooftops.
The bandages I wrapped around his torso and shoulder are visible through the tears in his tactical vest, already seeping through with dark blood.
His being upright at all borders on miraculous.
Launching himself off buildings pushes him into insanity.
The men freeze. The one holding the stolen ration packs drops the bag like it's caught fire.