17. Cassia
CASSIA
The first infected droid hits the eastern barricade six hours after Rhykor's broadcast.
By hour eight, three more sectors have gone dark.
By hour ten, the coordinated attacks start—waves of vicious construction bots and hijacked security units pouring through breached infrastructure like water through cracked stone.
I couldn't just sit behind the compound's fortified walls while the outer sectors tore themselves apart; the clinic is closer to the civilian corridors, and it's the only place the refugees will know to run to.
The distant percussion of explosions rolls across the district rooftops as I sprint down the stairs to my clinic.
Hauling two supply crates from the freight bay right before Rhykor's crew seals the perimeter, I find Wen waiting at the doors.
Gripping a canvas sack full of salvaged medical scraps, she had hurried over from her own safehouse, refusing to let me face the influx alone.
The clinic looks worse than I left it. The ceiling still gapes open from the night Rhykor crashed through it all those weeks ago.
We never found the time or materials to properly seal it before the evacuation.
A scavenged generator Wen somehow found and dragged in coughs and rattles in the corner, throwing uneven light across the rows of cots I set up during the last outbreak.
A heavy mix of damp concrete and old antiseptic permeates the air down here, an atmosphere I used to find suffocating and now find almost comforting, because it means I'm home.
"Start pulling everything from the back storage," I order, sliding the supply crate onto the main examination table and ripping the lid free.
The crate holds essential medical supplies and two bags of saline solution Rhykor's crew liberated from a Kraaj military depot three days ago.
It's enough for maybe forty patients if I'm careful and sixty if I cut the dosages and pray.
Wen moves through the clinic on practiced urgency alone; she survived the occupation and the ugliness that came after, and her body remembers how to work inside chaos.
She catalogs inventory as she goes, counting cots, checking water reserves, dragging extra pallets from the storage closet, and lining them along the wall where the ceiling leak has finally stopped dripping.
"How many are we expecting?" she calls from behind the partition.
"Everyone we can fit."
"So the whole district, then." She lets out a dry, humorless sound that is barely a laugh. "Good thing I mopped."
The first patients arrive twenty minutes later.
They come in clusters, like a family of four from the residential blocks near the rail depot, the father carrying his youngest on his back while the mother herds two older children through the narrow stairwell.
Behind them, a pair of Kraaj laborers, young and green-skinned, with markings barely visible in layers of ash and dried blood.
One of them has a piece of rebar in his thigh.
The other keeps his shattered wing folded against his back at an angle that makes my stomach turn.
After pointing the family toward Wen, I steer the Kraaj laborer with the rebar onto the examination table.
"This is going to hurt," I warn him, pulling on gloves.
He stares at me—confused, wary, his eyes tracking between my face and the pulse pistol on my hip. "You're human."
"And you've got two inches of metal in your leg, so hold still."
A combination of clamps and leverage works the rebar free, the process drawing a roar from him that rattles the supply shelves.
Behind me, his partner hovers with a good wing half-raised in a protective arc until a sharp bark from me sends him to the floor before he can pass out from blood loss.
While he sits, I treat his wounds and apply bandages, leaving Wen to handle the family.
The stream becomes a flood.
Within two hours, people and aliens fill every cot.
Patients line the hallways, sitting on the floor with their backs against the damp concrete walls as they clutch shrapnel wounds or broken bones from the collapsing infrastructure.
Human and Kraaj gather together in my underground clinic, too exhausted and frightened to bother with the hatred that would normally keep them on opposite sides of the district.
A Kraaj woman with slate-blue skin and a cracked horn cradles a human toddler while the child's mother gets a gash across her ribs stitched shut.
An elderly human man shares his water ration with a young Kraaj soldier whose arm hangs useless at his side.
Nobody asks permission, and nobody objects.
Autopilot takes over as I clean wounds and talk patients through procedures that normally require anesthesia without any pain blockers.
Surgical instruments feel like extensions of my cramping hands.
Every time I bend over the low-slung cots, my back screams in protest. The bruise above my eyebrow throbs when I lean forward, but pushing past the pain is easier than acknowledging the voices in my head reminding me that I'm one medic running an illegal clinic during what might be the end of the world.
Every thirty minutes, Rhykor’s voice crackles through the comm unit clipped to my belt.
Between bursts of sustained combat, he delivers short updates regarding the fallen sectors and where he is redirecting civilian evacuations.
Apparently, his broadcast threw High Command into such chaos that Daxos’s orbital strike authorization remains stalled in bureaucratic red tape.
But Daxos will bypass waiting for the sky to burn us; he's using the machines to do it from the ground up.
He organizes the retreat like a man born to it, pulling survivors out of collapsing neighborhoods and funneling them toward protected shelters instead of launching counterattacks.
The impulses the Kraaj military drilled into him say to fight, and instead he's choosing to save.
"Sector Four is gone," he reports during one burst, and I hear the grinding undertone of someone clenching fangs through physical pain. "Expect thirty to forty survivors—mostly families—to arrive at your position within the hour as I redirect them south."
I've already been eyeing the shared wall at the back of the clinic, the one that separates my space from the condemned storage building next door.
The structure has been vacant for years, its upper floors gutted by fire, but the ground level is still structurally sound.
It features thick concrete walls from the occupation era and enough square footage to triple my capacity if I can get through.
"Dessik," I call into the comm on a secondary channel. "I need a breach team at the clinic. Back wall, east side. There's an abandoned storage building on the that side—intact ground floor, solid roof. Bring cutting tools and two of Rhykor's enforcers."
"Copy, I will have them there in twenty minutes."
I turn to Wen. "Clear everything away from the east wall. We're expanding."
Wen's eyebrows climb. "Into the condemned building? That place has been sealed since before I started here."
"It offers a secure roof and floor space we desperately need. We’ll run power lines from the generator and set up water stations from the main supply.
It's rough, but it's shelter." I start hauling cots away from the east wall, stacking supply bins to clear the workspace.
"Once Dessik's team punches through, we will lay tarps over the flooring and use the old storage alcoves as triage bays. "
"You're turning a ruin into a hospital ward."
"Wouldn't be the first time."
Wen shakes her head but moves, because Wen always moves. She's already clearing instrument trays from the wall before Dessik's team arrives, her curt voice barking at patients to shift their cots westward.
The breach takes fifteen minutes. Dessik's enforcers cut through the concrete with industrial plasma torches, causing the wall to crumble inward to reveal a dusty ground floor with rows of empty shelving and enough ceiling clearance that even a Kraaj with a full wingspan can stand upright.
Stale air rolls out, thick with plaster dust but breathable.
Wen and I enter through the threshold before the dust settles, mapping the space and dragging tarps across the rough flooring.
The next hours blur into a sequence of bloody bodies and borrowed time.
The families from Sector Four pour in with crying children and a grandmother clutching a bag of dried grain like it's the last possession she owns on this planet.
Guiding them through the breached wall into the new wing, I assign cots while treating the worst injuries and send the walking wounded to Wen's station in the original clinic.
Garrow appears at some point, his granddaughter against him, both of them covered in plaster dust. Taking one look at the chaos, he sets the girl down safely before distributing water rations with the quiet purpose of someone who has survived enough disasters to know their role.
By hour eleven, I've treated too many patients to keep count.
With automated turrets and rogue droids ravaging the upper levels, and the other neighborhood clinics either abandoned or destroyed, we're the only viable medical shelter left in three sectors.
The line of wounded snakes entirely out of the clinic and down the alleyways—breaking down that storage building's wall was the only way to get them out of the crossfire and safely behind our barricades. The blood has long since saturated my gloves, heavy and warm. I stopped trying to wipe it away ages ago; it’s just another part of the uniform now.
The pain blockers ran out an hour ago, and I've been substituting with a topical numbing agent Wen cooked up from antiseptic concentrate and whatever she found in the storage closet.
It works well enough if you're generous and the patient is brave.