7. Cassia #2
The woman offers a withered, bruised apple toward Rhykor with a shaking hand. It is a pathetic offering, yet it’s likely the only thing she has left to give. Ignoring the offering, he reaches into his pack to pull out a second canister and a brick of protein rations for the table.
"Keep the door locked," he grinds out, his approach sounding like crushing gravel. He turns and walks back into the hall, leaving her thanks to hang in the empty air.
We spend the next several hours navigating the labyrinth of Sector Four.
In every damp room and dark corner, the story is the same.
We find an elderly man clutching an eroded oxygen tank that ran dry days ago; we find a mother trying to soothe three children at once while her own lungs rattle with fluid.
In each room, Rhykor stands as the silent, terrifying guardian while I work.
I see the way the civilians look at him; predator-fear is there, but so is the frantic, desperate hope of people forgotten by everyone else.
They cling to the warmth he radiates, a promise that the cold will spare them tonight.
We finish just as the sun dips below the jagged horizon, leaving us standing on the roof of a dilapidated administrative building.
The district stretches out below us, a landscape of broken glass and flickering fires.
Rhykor sits on the parapet’s edge, his wings flaring slightly to catch the dying heat of the day.
He looks exhausted, the tension in his face more prominent in the moonlight.
The lethal grace he usually carries softens into a weary human-like slouch.
"They look at you like a weapon they found in the dirt.
" His gaze remains on the horizon, watching the distant, candescent lights of the Kraaj command ships.
Quiet hangs between us while he says nothing.
The silence lingers on the rooftops and the smoke, and I almost think that's all I'm going to get—one cryptic sentence, and then the wall goes back up.
But the skin at his temple twitches, stretching over scarred tissue, and when he speaks again, his tone drops quieter, rawer.
"The Kraaj military raises children into weapons.
It strips away everything soft until only the edges remain, and it points those edges at whatever needs killing.
" He pauses while his claws scrape absently against the concrete ledge.
"You learn quickly because fear is the only currency worth carrying. Fear them, and they don’t test you.
Survive another rotation, and the cycle continues. "
He rolls the damaged shoulder—the one I've stitched twice now—and the motion reads less like a stretch and more like shrugging off a weight deep in his chest. "I grew up in the pits after the first uprising.
There were no barracks, no instructors with a training manual.
Just older warriors who hit you until you hit back hard enough to make them stop.
Only the fast learners made it out." He stops and swallows.
An expression flickers behind those eyes that looks uncomfortably like shame.
"There were no medics there. Only the heat and the iron. "
There is a desperate need to bridge the gap between his brutal history and my own.
I want him to understand why I do this—why I continue to work when it feels like emptying the ocean with a thimble.
More than anything, he needs to know that I recognize the true cost of being considered an 'acceptable loss. '
I owe him nothing. That’s what I tell myself as the silence settles back over us—he has no claim on my grief or the parts of me long smothered by years of detachment and a refusal to look backward.
But he cracks himself open on this rooftop and lets me see what's underneath, and something about that—about the shame in his voice when he said no medics—makes the lock on my own chest turn.
"I lost my father during the Legion outbreak on the frontier when I was sixteen," I say steadily.
"We had already lost our home years before when Kraaj soldiers destroyed everything we built during the frontier expansions. Then, the human government, the Trident Alliance, flagged the sector as volatile during their retreat, and the Kraaj High Command decided we were an acceptable loss to contain the spread. They simply stopped sending food. Stopped sending filters. The ships were ordered to stay in orbit and watch us burn. My father was a doctor who died from toxic atmospheric fallout because the emergency aid never arrived, spending his last days trying to manufacture makeshift respirators out of scrap metal. My mother succumbed to the same lung-rot years later, mostly from the poverty and lack of filters that followed the war. As a teenager, I watched a city turn into ghosts because it was convenient for the people in power. I decided then that I wouldn’t wait for a government to tell me who was worth saving.
If I have the medicine, I give it. The signature on the manifest means nothing to me. "
My words drift into the cooling air, and the urge to snatch them back is immediate.
Keeping quiet feels safer. Navigating this world means avoiding Kraaj-patrolled rooftops and never unpacking the worst years of my life, as if they were nothing more than casual war stories shared over drinks.
But the confession is already loose, already between us, and the expression on his face holds a razor-sharp recognition rather than pity.
He knows what it feels like to watch the people in charge decide you’re expendable.