8. Rhykor
RHYKOR
The blood on my claws is still warm when I land on the rooftop beside her.
Cassia huddles on her stomach behind the parapet where I shoved her, grinding gravel into her palms, dust coating the scarf around her neck.
She pushes herself upright the moment my boots crack the concrete, and her eyes find mine through the haze of smoke drifting between the buildings.
Her amber-brown eyes are wide, searching my face for a trace even she might be afraid to label.
I killed three men in under a minute. The last one tried to crawl toward the fire escape, dragging a shattered leg behind him, and I caught him by the collar and slammed him into the ventilation housing so hard the metal buckled inward around his body.
Their rifles are still warm on the far roof, long-range models, military surplus, modified with aftermarket scopes that cost more than most families in this district earn in a year.
They were professionals. Somebody paid good credits to put bullets in us tonight.
"We're leaving now."
Cassia opens her mouth to argue, probably because arguing with me is apparently a biological imperative for this woman, but the raw intensity in my face shuts the words down before they form.
She grabs her canvas bag from behind the parapet and slings it over her shoulder with a single, tight gesture of agreement.
I scoop her off the rooftop before she can protest.
Her breath punches out of her when my arm locks around her waist as my wings catch the air, instantly dropping the ground away.
The membrane screams in protest. The tears from the tunnel collapse are barely healed, the new flesh still thin and fragile, but adrenaline drowns the pain in a roar of primal focus that narrows my entire existence to one objective—get her underground and get her somewhere nothing with a scope can reach.
She grips my reinforced vest with both fists and buries her face against my chest, holding on with a ferocity that shatters my composure.
We land outside the clinic entrance in Ash Alley twenty minutes later.
The flight is grueling. My wings shudder and fail, dragging us lower again and again, each desperate beat a violent gamble against the damaged membrane, which threatens to tear apart with every pulse of speed.
Searing pain lances through my back every time we catch a crosswind.
By the time my boots crack the concrete outside the clinic doors, I am running on fumes.
I set her down. She stumbles, palms slamming against the wall, and stares up at me; in her eyes, fear, fury, and desperate relief coil together, indistinguishable.
"Get inside," I tell her. "Lock the corridor access. Only open it for Wen or Junia."
"Rhykor—"
"Inside, Cassia."
She flinches at my tone, a sharp, involuntary jerk that travels from her shoulders to her fingertips. Then her spine straightens. She walks through the clinic door with her eyes staying firmly forward.
I wait until I hear the lock engage before spreading my wings—the torn membrane protesting with a flare of white-hot pain—and drag myself into the smoke-filled sky above District Seventeen.
The hunt takes me four hours, each one harder on the wings than the last.
Those modified Hask-7 rifles were human-made, long-range platforms frequently used by anti-Kraaj militias.
Because the aftermarket scopes are Kraaj-manufactured, the shooter had to source from human black markets and alien military surplus simultaneously.
This hybrid configuration narrows the supplier list to a handful of operators in the contested zones of Sectors Six and Nine.
I start with the weapons dealers and work outward.
The first one, a wiry human male who runs a stall out of a converted shipping container near the south market, gives up the name of his distributor after I melt the lock on his front door and let the heat from my palms warp the barrel of the pulse rifle he tries to point at me.
The distributor—a Kraaj woman based in a Sector Seven basement—provides two more names after I hang her associate off the side of a building by his ankle and ask politely.
Each name leads to another, each thread pulling me closer to the cell that funded tonight's attack.
I find them in a bombed-out water processing plant on the western edge of the district.
Six humans cluster around a comm terminal, arguing over the display while weapons caches and propaganda posters emblazoned with anti-Kraaj slogans crowd the room.
They've been tracking Cassia's movements since I first showed up at her clinic, including her supply runs and the routes she walks through the market.
Photographs of her clinic entrance stick to a makeshift board alongside surveillance images of me entering and leaving through the ceiling.
One of the photographs shows us on the rooftop earlier tonight. Cassia is sitting on the parapet ledge with my wing brushing her arm.
Cold, razor-sharp fury seizes me. It sheds all spectacle, sharpening itself into a focus lethal enough to cut bone. I disable their communications first, following with the lights. Kicking the door in comes next.
When it's over, I leave the cell's leader zip-tied to the comm terminal with a message burned into the wall beside his head in carved letters, the concrete still glowing at the edges: The clinic is mine. Touch it again.
The others I leave alive. They are broken and terrified, divested of their conviction but left alive. Dead extremists become martyrs. Survivors become warnings.
I make it back to Ash Alley before dawn, landing on the roof above the clinic with enough care to avoid punching another hole through the ceiling.
From the hole I punched in her ceiling—still unrepaired, still mine—the generator casts its light across the room below.
Cassia slumps in a chair beside Elias's recovery pallet, head tipping sideways, and asleep.
One hand rests on the pulse pistol in her lap.
The other curls loosely around the hem of the blanket covering the boy's legs.
I crouch on the roof, watching her breathe until the sky begins to lighten. My next move is posting two of my crew at the corridor entrances and returning to my territory to wash the blood off my hands.
Daxos arrives at midday.
I'm in the freight bay reviewing supply logistics with Varrik when the outer sentries ping my comm with a priority alert.
A Kraaj military transport, a single vehicle, lands in the cleared zone south of the old refinery, with official markings and command-level clearance codes, an arrival that assumes compliance before it touches the ground
Varrik catches the alert on his own comm and shoots me a look heavy with meaning. "Wonderful, company from the tower."
My grip tightens convulsively on the data-pad, my reaction pre-empting conscious thought; I force my fingers to relax before the casing cracks.
Daxos marches into the freight bay as if he owns the concrete beneath him, while his two armored guards freeze at the entrance, their movements clockwork perfect.
He's massive, shorter than me by half a head but broader through the chest and shoulders, built like a siege engine wrapped in polished composite armor, still unmarked by real combat.
Gray skin stretches over dense muscle, mottled with darker patches at his neck and jaw.
His horns are jagged and thicker than mine, looking crudely shaped, as if hacked from volcanic rock rather than grown, jutting from his skull at aggressive angles.
Dark ink sleeves his arms from wrist to shoulder—oil-black layers of Kraaj military iconography, kill tallies, and unit designations that seem to soak into the stone of his skin.
His wings are wrong; the left one folds naturally against his back, but the right is partially cybernetic, the organic membrane replaced from the mid-joint outward with articulated metal plating that clicks and whirs when he moves.
It is an old combat injury he turned into vanity.
The metalwork is polished to a mirror shine and is decorative rather than functional, a trophy of survival he wears like a medal.
His eyes are the color of tarnished brass, dull and calculating, and they sweep the freight bay with an appraisal that takes in everything—my crew, my supplies, my territory—and deems it all worthless.
"Rhykor," my name rings out, barren and impassive, functioning less as a greeting than a cold inventory check of a piece of gear still in the field. "You look like you've been sleeping in ditches."
"Daxos," I fold my arms. Varrik shifts his weight beside me—subtle with the muscle memory of decades spent standing beside officers right before conversations turn into altercations. "Long way from Central Command for a social visit."
"Nothing social about this." He stops near enough to me to assert dominance, yet safely outside my striking range.
An intended distance. Daxos has always been a master of metrics.
"Do you want to explain to me why half the intelligence feeds out of District Seventeen are reporting that the Dragon—my former subordinate, my most effective territorial enforcer—has been seen distributing stolen military supplies to human civilians?
Escorting a human female through contested zones?
Perching on rooftops with her like some lovesick hatchling while the entire district watches? "
The word lovesick arrives like a slap. Behind me, I feel Varrik freeze.
"I manage my territory as I see fit," I answer in monotone. "The civilians in this district are part of that territory. Keeping them alive keeps the infrastructure functional."