10. Rhykor #3
"Then protect her better than you've protected yourself." She turns to walk away, her wings collapsing against her back with a whisper of pierced metal. "Because if Daxos gets what he wants, she'll be the first casualty."
The statement follows me through the compound for the rest of the evening, burrowing into the marrow where the thought of Cassia has taken permanent residence.
Late that night, after the perimeter reports are filed and the compound has settled into a skeleton crew quiet, I find Cassia in her med bay.
She's cleaning instruments by lamplight; the portable generator casts warm light across the workbench and her hands as she scrubs blood from a scalpel with methodical precision.
Her braid unraveled hours ago, dark curls falling across her shoulders and framing a face tight with exhaustion.
Antiseptic and metal hang thick in the med bay air, and underneath everything, the quiet gravity of her presence threads through my awareness and makes my blood sing.
"You need to sit down." She points at the medical pallet, eyes lost in her reports. "I saw you favoring your left side during the corridor incident. You've torn something."
"It's only minor."
"Sit down."
So I sit. The pallet groans under my weight.
Popping the magnetic wing-clasps at my shoulders, I strip the armored vest away, peeling damaged fabric from a gash along my ribs, fresh and earned this morning when a corroded support beam gave way inside the Sector Six vault and caught me across the right side.
I barely registered it at the time, blaming it on adrenaline and focus, along with the usual excuses.
But dark blood seeps from the edges now, and the skin around the wound is hot and tight.
Pulling on fresh gloves, Cassia goes over to me with her med-kit.
She crouches beside the pallet, and her fingers touch the edges of the wound with diligent focus that makes my grip on the pallet tighten.
Her cool gloves against my overheated skin.
Precise pressure follows, accompanied by the faint brush of her breath against my ribs as she leans closer to examine the depth of the tear.
"Hold still." She reaches for antiseptic and begins cleaning the wound, her hands quick and practiced. "When did this happen?"
"This morning in Sector Six."
"And you've been walking around bleeding for—" She checks the wound depth and exhales through her nose. "Twelve hours? Fourteen? Without mentioning it to anyone?"
"I've been busy."
"You've been reckless." She dabs the antiseptic along the tear, and the sting barely registers. I focus on her proximity and the warmth of her breath, ignoring the brush of her fingers against the markings’ edge, carved into the skin above my ribs.
She pauses, and her hand hovers over the ridgeline of a marking that crosses from my sternum to my shoulder, ancient Kraaj script carved deep into the skin and healed into raised, keloid patterns that map my chest and arms in overlapping layers.
"I've seen these before." The question comes softer and more curiously, with the analytical edge giving way to personal curiosity.
"Every time I've treated you, I've noticed them.
They're different from the battle scars.
More deliberate and structured." Her gloved finger traces the marking without quite touching it, hovering a centimeter above the raised skin. "What are they?"
The question cracks open a vulnerability inside my chest that I'm unprepared for.
My crew knows better than to ask about the markings.
Kraaj soldiers recognize them on sight, their significance immediately understood.
Cassia is the first person in years—maybe ever—to look at the ceremonial script carved into my body and ask me to translate it.
"Blood markings from a traditional Kraaj ceremony. Each one represents a trial survived or a battle won, sometimes indicating a debt honored. The carving is done by an elder or a war priest while the warrior remains conscious. Pain is part of the ritual. The scars are meant to last forever."
Her finger traces along the line that curves from my collarbone to the center of my chest—still hovering, still a hair's breadth from contact—following the script as if she's reading a language she's teaching herself to decode.
"What does this one mean?"
"That one marks my first kill." The admission sounds unvarying and factual, history carved into bone and skin and delivered to a woman whose hands are gentle enough to make me forget what those hands are touching. "I was fifteen. The ceremony lasted three hours."
An expression passes across her face—grief, maybe, or horror—masking the visceral ache that comes from understanding exactly how much violence a body has absorbed to carry this many marks.
Dropping down, her finger makes contact.
The touch is featherlight, the pad of her gloved finger against the raised edge of the cicatrix, and the effect is catastrophic.
Heat detonates through my nervous system from the point of contact, rolling outward in a wave that makes my vision narrow and my hands clench against the pallet’s edge.
The marking is old and healed, long since numb to casual sensation, but her touch bypasses the thick layers of fused tissue to ignite a primal instinct within.
It strikes a chord deep in my gut—that relentless, maddening pull, a frantic instinct beating in time with her own.
I exhale sharply, and she freezes. "Did I hurt you?"
"No, the opposite."
Her eyes lift to mine across the sliver of charged, impossible space. The sterile detachment in her face fractures, hairline cracks spreading outward from the center, revealing the heat she's been burying behind professionalism and sarcasm.
Her finger moves again. Tracing the marking from my chest to my shoulder, she follows the raised ridgeline with a firmness that shifts from medical examination to intentional possession.
My breathing destabilizes. The space around my hands shimmers, and I grip the pallet's edge hard enough to hear the metal creak.
"These markings," she murmurs, her gaze tracking her own finger as it maps the scar tissue across my shoulder. "They're beautiful; horrifying and beautiful."
"They're records." The explanation drops into registers I can barely control—rough, vibrating with the sheer force of willing my body to stay still while her finger traces lines across skin that has never known tenderness. "A warrior's history written in pain."
"And this one?" Her finger reaches the marking that covers my left pectoral—the largest and deepest, representing the one carved during a ceremony that lasted six hours and nearly killed me.
The tissue is thicker here, the ridges more pronounced, and when her finger grazes the groove, I feel her caress in the bottom of my skull.
"That one—" The response stalls in my throat, and I force air through my lungs before trying again. My palms’ heat climbs past safe thresholds, and the pallet's metal frame begins to discolor in my grip.
"That one marks the day I earned my territory.
The carving represents the district—its borders and its people, encompassing everything I swore to protect. "
She traces the deepest part of the scar, her voice a soft, disarming thread. "Such a heavy oath." The pressure of her finger against that mark feels like a hand brushing the center of my identity. "Including the people Daxos ordered you to abandon?"
"Yes, including them."
Taut pressure replaces the initial trace.
A palm flattens against my chest, fingers spreading across the glove that already absorbs my warmth.
The contact overwhelms me, pulling a guttural, involuntary groan from my throat that makes the lamplight shudder and the metal frame in my grip pulse with an orange glow.
Bracketing me with a second hand, she finds the matching mark on my opposite shoulder. Those palms anchor against my two deepest disfigurements, and the bond roars to life, blurring my vision and fracturing my breath into ragged, desperate gasps.