3. Cassia #2
Rhykor moves without warning or preamble.
He lifts the nearest extortionist by the throat with one hand and slams him into the alley wall hard enough to leave a body-shaped crater in the crumbling stone.
The man's stun baton clatters to the ground.
Rhykor kicks it away, his attention never wavering, his eyes on the remaining two with a predator's calm, methodical focus, deciding which limb to tear off first.
"Wait—" one of them stammers. "We didn't know they were—we weren't?—"
Rhykor hurls the first man into the second.
They collide in a tangle of limbs and crash against the far wall, sprawling across the filthy ground in a heap of groaning, bleeding panic.
The third tries to run. Rhykor drags him backward by the back of the neck and forces him to his knees in front of the children.
The air around Rhykor’s hands shows in visible waves, and the man's collar begins to smolder where his fingers grip the fabric.
"The food stays, but you leave." Rhykor's tone is low-pitched and rough, a grinding avalanche of sound that reverberates through the narrow alley and settles into my bones. "If I see any of you in this sector again, the conversation ends before it starts."
He releases the man. All three scramble over each other to flee, tripping and stumbling through the alleyway until their footsteps fade into nothing.
Rhykor stands there, the sharp smell of roasting dust hanging heavy around his fists, wings half-spread, his posture radiating violence so potent it leaves an almost physical concussion against the air.
Then he turns toward the children, and his posture changes.
The shift is subtle—a fractional relaxation of the massive shoulders, a dimming of the reddish distortion around his hands.
He crouches down, and the oldest girl, still sprawled on the ground with a red welt rising across her cheek, stares up at him with wide, terrified eyes.
He picks up the canvas sack of stolen ration packs and sets it on the ground in front of her carefully. Acting gently even, or as much as hands that size can manage gentleness.
"Eat," he rumbles. "Then get off the street before dark."
The girl grabs the sack and scrambles backward, pulling the smaller children with her. They disappear around the corner in a huddle of bony limbs and frightened breathing, and Rhykor straightens up, rolling the shoulder I stitched back together days ago.
That's when he sees me.
Our eyes lock across the service alley—his ember-red, mine probably wide enough to advertise my conflicting thoughts ricocheting through my skull—and the air between us pulls taut like a wire about to snap.
He goes very still, caught, almost, like a predator frozen mid-act by an unexpected audience.
Recognition flashes through those burning eyes, though the following emotions are harder to pin down, shifting between traces of irritation and a distinct sense of discomfort.
"You shouldn't be out here." The grinding authority is still there, but an edge runs underneath it now, a roughness that surfaces the moment he recognizes me.
"I go where I need to go." I straighten my spine and refuse to step backward, even though my survival instincts scream that this alley is too small and he is too close and the heat exhaling from his skin is making the air hard to breathe. "This is my district too."
The hard set of those eyes shifts, a flicker of what might almost be amusement, entombed beneath layers of aggression.
"Your district is burning, medic. The power grid is failing, and the men I just pulled off those children will come back with friends.
" He takes a step closer, and his sheer physical presence forces me to crane my neck to hold his gaze.
"You walk around out here with a stolen pistol and a bag of surgical thread, and you think that makes you safe? "
“I think nothing makes me safe. That’s the whole point of living here.”
The truth of it sinks into the space between us, and for a moment, we are both held in absolute stillness.
He's close enough that I spot the bandages peeking out from his vest, the dark stains spreading through the gauze where my careful work is already coming undone.
The fact that he's been throwing grown men into walls with wounds that should have kept him bedridden for a week astounds me.
"Your shoulder is bleeding again," I observe.
"It'll hold."
"It definitely won't. I see the gauze saturating from here." I clench my teeth against the impulse to reach for him and do the thing my hands are trained to do regardless of who's bleeding. “You’ve ripped at least two of the sutures I put in. Those wounds are still far from healed.”
He stares down at me, and the intensity of that stare anchors in the center of my chest, a tension hot and heavy that makes my grip on the med-kit tighten.
Turning abruptly, the enforcer launches himself upward, those massive damaged wings catching the air with a sound like canvas snapping in a storm.
His form dissolves into the rooftops and the haze of smoke still lingering over District Seventeen, leaving me alone in the sudden silence.
Long after, I’m still standing in the alley, fixed on the scorch marks on the concrete and that body-shaped crater in the wall.
Silence reclaims the area. Ration packs, children, and extortionists—everything is gone.
All of the recent events feel unreal, but the residual heat in the ground and the smell of burning keep dragging it back into reality.
I make it back to the clinic as the natural light fades from the ventilation shafts above Ash Alley. Wen has the generator running on borrowed fuel, and a handful of patients are waiting in the corridor. After cleaning my hands, I slide on gloves and get to work.
Two hours later, I hear a heavy force land on the roof.
Wen and I both freeze. The patients in the corridor go silent.
Massive, measured footsteps cross the ceiling above us, and then a shadow fills the gaping hole in the alcove ceiling that I still haven't figured out how to repair.
A crate drops through the opening and hits the floor with a reverberating thud that shakes the remaining bottles on my shelves.
I approach it like an unexploded munition, slowly, carefully, one hand resting on my pulse pistol. The crate is military-grade, sealed with Kraaj lock bolts. I pop the seal and lift the lid.
Medical supplies enter my line of sight.
These are real ones with sterile bandages, vacuum-sealed in individual packs.
Analgesic injectors are still factory-charged.
I spot antiseptic concentrate potent enough to make the stuff I've been rationing for weeks look like tinted water.
There are also surgical tools in protective film, burn salve, and antibiotics with unpassed expiration dates.
There's enough in this crate to run my clinic for a month.
I look up at the hole in the ceiling. A pair of predatory eyes looks back at me from the darkness above, there and gone in a single breath.
"Stay inside after dark, medic." The command drifts down through the opening, rough and quiet, leaving a residue that is indecipherable. "The district isn't safe tonight."
Then the footsteps move over the roof again and disappear.
I stand there with my hands on the crate of stolen medical supplies—because they're obviously stolen, ripped from some Kraaj military stockpile or supply convoy by the most dangerous enforcer in District Seventeen and delivered to an underground human clinic through a hole in the ceiling—and I try to reconcile what I know with what I've seen.
The crimes of the Kraaj against my world are etched into my memory.
They are the stories my mother whispered to me as a child—tales of soldiers with horns and wings who burned cities, crushed resistance, and left entire generations traumatized.
Rhykor is simply the living embodiment of those horrors, a weapon forged by the same machine that chewed up Luvon and spat out a population that flinches at shadows.
A weapon remains a cold, inanimate object, yet he crouches in the alleys to share stolen food with starving children.
These instruments of war prioritize destruction, but he defies that purpose by delivering medical supplies to the very clinics they ruined.
Such tools offer only harm, though his warnings to stay inside after dark echo with the desperate, protective intent of someone who has run out of other ways to say be careful.
I close the crate and carry the supplies to my shelves, beginning the slow process of restocking my depleted inventory.
While my hands remain perfectly steady in their practiced movements, my thoughts are a chaotic tangle, trying to reconcile the monster of childhood stories with the man who just dropped a lifeline through my ceiling.