13. Cassia #3
"He chose to keep it private," the old war captain mutters, pitching the words low enough that the nearest crew member remains unaware.
"Picked up the signal on a private channel, pulled Dessik and two others from the night watch, and went out through the maintenance tunnels.
Told the rest of us to hold position on the perimeter and maintain discretion. "
I stare at him. "He snuck out of his own compound to rescue civilians."
"Been doing it." Varrik scrubs a hand over his jaw, the sound like sandpaper over rough wood.
"Three times this month, maybe four. Sector Nine, Sector Twelve, and the housing corridor south of the old rail depot.
When a distress ping comes through from a human zone, he intercepts it before taking a skeleton crew to help.
Brings them back for medical treatment, then moves them before sunrise. "
"Moves them where?"
"Sublevel bunker complex, about two miles east." He shifts his weight off the bad leg.
"Old civilian shelter from the first occupation, sealed off and structurally sound.
He's been running supply drops out there for months.
Food, water, blankets, and portable heating units.
Keeping civilians inside the compound perimeter is a death sentence for all of them.
Too many eyes on us after that stunt at Kor-Viir, and Daxos has surveillance drones sweeping our airspace every seventy-two hours.
If command found out he's been harboring human refugees inside a Kraaj military installation—" Varrik lets the sentence die, but the implication lands hard enough.
It would mean court-martial at best or execution at worst, giving Daxos everything he is already salivating for.
"So he treats them and relocates them before anyone can build a case."
Varrik dips his head, slow and heavy. "Keeps the bunker off all official channels. Dessik runs the supply logistics while Britt handles transport security."
"Why did he start doing this?" I ask, my voice barely above a whisper. "He was their weapon."
"He was," Varrik agrees quietly. "But a few years ago, after the first civilian purges were quietly covered up by High Command, something in him snapped.
The monster they built him to be was no longer a role he could stomach, so he began pulling human refugees out of the crossfire long before you crashed into his life.
Someone had to push back against the slaughter, and he chose to be the one to do it, even if it meant working in the dark.
" The old captain fixes me with a look packed with the hard-won perspective of decades spent watching soldiers make choices that history would judge harshly from either direction.
"I'm telling you because you deserve to know what kind of man is giving you space right now.
What you do with that information is your business. "
Pushing off the workstation, Varrik limps to the loading dock, barking orders at a crew member to help prep a transport crate for the elderly woman.
The loading dock comes alive with quiet, methodical purpose.
Britt arrives with a battered cargo sled; Dessik loads thermal blankets and packaged ration kits into waterproof containers.
Two more crew members rig portable stretchers for the patients too injured to walk.
The operation runs on whispered commands and practiced choreography, all movement honed to its essentials, and the whole thing feels unmistakably like a procedure rehearsed many times before.
Across the bay, Rhykor lifts the sleeping girl from the crate and carries her toward the transport staging area, his wings curving forward around the child to form a warm shelter against the processed air.
The mother follows, clutching her other two children, and when Rhykor transfers the girl into the woman's arms, his claws retract fully, pulling his sharp edges back to make his hands as harmless as a body built for war can manage.
The mother's lip trembles. She mouths syllables lost to the distance between us, and Rhykor dips his chin, a small, barely visible nod, before stepping back to let Britt guide the family toward the maintenance tunnel entrance.
Fifteen survivors, treated and loaded onto cargo sleds, disappear through the tunnel access in groups of three and four.
Rhykor walks the last group out himself, the old man who wept against his knuckles now leaning into his side, one fragile arm hooked through the crook of Rhykor's elbow while the Dragon matches his stride to the slow, shuffling pace an eighty-year-old human manages in an underground tunnel at three in the morning.
Standing in the emptying loading dock, I place my palm on the workstation where the old man's tears dried on the steel surface. The fracture behind my sternum splits deeper, cracking open rather than apart.
The monster who signed those orders and the man walking that old man through the dark share the same body and the same marked hands. Reconciling them feels beyond reach tonight, and maybe tomorrow will bring a clearer path where I find a way to manage it, but I saw what I saw, and it matters.