by DJ Molles
As Perry and Teran wheeled the cart around the corner, he heard Stuber’s voice, barking at someone: “That’s not a real injury! Get the fuck out of here and quit clogging up the works with your bullshit!”
They reached the back of the clinic. It used to back up to another set of buildings, with a narrow lane between. Now a large section of those buildings looked like it’d been scooped up. A big, jagged, crescent shape taken right out of the middle of them. It made Perry wonder if this was where the Guardian had come blasting in like an asteroid.
Teran swore as she maneuvered the cart around to face the bullet-pocked back door. He started to look to see if there was something wrong, but something at the belly of that crescent-shaped gouge in the buildings caught his eye. He did a double-take, and felt recognition and an unstoppable sense of premonition strike him.
It was that same woman. The one that had stared and smiled at him in the temple square. She stood there like an eerie statue, one lone figure in all the destruction. Looking right back at him, with that very same smile on her face.
“You gonna help me or what?” Teran grunted, as Perry’s grip left the cart handle.
He took a step towards the woman, his ears beginning to hum again.
The woman spun and slipped away.
The sense of premonition became something darker. The curiosity curdling into suspicion.
“Perry?” Teran was watching him.
Perry thrust his hand under the tarpaulin and seized his longstaff where he’d lain it next to Mala and her own. The blanketed demigod murmured something listless that Perry didn’t catch. The hum in his ears was stronger now. Not dissipating like last time.
“What are you doing?” Teran demanded.
Perry felt his longstaff. The vibration of it. He connected to it instantly and ripped it out of the cart, no longer caring who saw him with it. He needed a weapon. Because he was about to plunge into a possible trap.
“Get Mala inside,” Perry said, his feet already churning for the hole in the building across from them.
“Where are you going?” Teran shouted at his back.
“Don’t follow me!” He tossed over his shoulder. “Get Mala inside!”
There was a brief moment, as he hurdled what was left of a mudbrick wall, that Perry realized he was doing the same stupid shit that had gotten him into trouble so many times before. Running off, trying to face down the dangers on his own. This is what had put his friends in danger before…
And then the thought was covered up by a certainty—there was no other way to explain it, he just became infinitely sure in that moment—that if he did not find out who this woman was, everything he ever hoped to accomplish would fall to pieces.
It made no sense. He recognized that in the logical part of him.
But something far deeper than his consciousness knew a different truth, and it drove him.
He swept through the ruins of the building he’d just clambered into, his longstaff in both hands, scanning the dark crevices and finding no one there. The mysterious woman had appeared to be standing on the street when he’d seen her, so that’s where he headed.
He shot out into the street. It was, surprisingly enough, abandoned. Which was a good thing, seeing as he had a paladin’s longstaff in his hand, and that didn’t seem to be a popular thing to possess.
He looked up and down the street.
There, just entering the alley—the flash of the dark cloak the woman wore. A glimpse of sunset-red hair.
He charged down the street after her.
You’re never going to live this down if Stuber and Teran have to come rescue your ass again.
“Hey! Lady!” Perry shouted. “Stop!”
He stumbled to the corner, breathless. Held up before plunging in. His heart hammered, certain that he’d be facing overwhelming odds when he turned down that alley.
He put a little of himself into the longstaff, and the muzzle of it began to glow. He was connected—as always—to his shield, and he prepared to slam it out in front of him.
He cut the corner hard, longstaff held before him.
Nothing. There was no one in the alley.
His feet began moving as though of their own accord. Drawing him down that alley. It doglegged at the end, to the left. He began angling for that, moving with less surety now. Almost trying to restrain his feet…but not quite.
Something had lassoed him, and it was drawing him ever closer.
The hum in his ears was almost painful. That hum that had something to do with Confluence, though how, he couldn’t quite place. The only thing he knew about the hum and its relationship to Confluence, was that he seemed to hear it when he was nearing someone—or something—that was vastly stronger in Confluence than he.
That little fact almost made him stop. Almost.
The suspicion curdled to dread. Gods in the skies, what was he doing? Was this fear that he felt in him just a product of knowing how many shitty decisions he’d made, and that this was probably another one? Or was the fear somehow tied to the thing that he knew but couldn’t put his finger on?
No. The fear was its own entity. And he stamped it down, not letting it interfere with his connection to Confluence.
He reached the dogleg and this time didn’t stop. He swerved around it.
And halted.
The woman was not there, but this little section of alley was not abandoned.
An old man stood there, rather close to the corner, and Perry nearly unleashed the burgeoning bolt of energy at the tip of his longstaff, but held back at the last microsecond, perceiving that the old man’s hands were raised up, palms showing.
“I mean you no harm,” the old man spoke in a rickety voice, as old and sun-bleached as the bricks and timbers that formed the desecrated buildings around them.
Perry’s eyes shot past the old man. This alley was a dead end. The woman should be here.
“Where’d she go?” Perry demanded. “The woman with the red hair?”
“Will you listen to me?” the old man asked softly.
Perry’s eyes kept trying to find the woman in the dead end. Surely she had to be there. In that dark corner? No. That was only rubble. How was she not here now? Unless…
His ears were still ringing. The sense of someone who possessed Confluence in levels that set Perry’s brain afire like an overloaded circuit. She had to be a demigod, and a strong one. She had flown out of this dead end, just like Mala could. A skill Perry still had yet to learn.
That was the only explanation.
The old man cleared his throat. “Will you listen?”
Perry dragged his eyes back to the old man. The expression on his weathered face was familiar. A small smirk. Knowing. Perry frowned, tensed. His sweaty grip worked on the shaft of the humming longstaff.
Perry glanced behind him, for a moment certain that there would be others coming in behind him, a trap being tightened around him like a noose around the neck of one of those flamens.
“There’s no one else coming, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
Perry snapped his attention back. “The fuck do you want?” he growled. “You better start saying some shit that makes a whole lot of sense, or I’m going to turn you to ashes.”
Rather than laugh at Perry, or become defensive, the old man simply nodded, as though he expected this response.
“Well, if I have your attention finally, then listen to my words: Your ploy to sneak the paladin into the clinic didn’t work. People have sharp eyes when they want to. And they talk. Even now, the rumors are like a grassfire. And the people are angry. They know that a wounded paladin is now under the care of that doctor, and they intend to kill her.”
Perry’s frown deepened. “How the hell do you know that?”
The old man shrugged. “You’ll want to go to your friends now. The second that the paladin is able to be moved again, get her out of the Old Section. Legatus Mordicus may give you some grief, but I believe you can convince h
im to give you sanctuary.”
And then the old man turned away from Perry, and began walking.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Perry demanded. “I’m not done talking to you!”
It was a dead end. The old man couldn’t go anywhere.
And yet he did.
He walked right into a wall, and then simply vanished.
CHAPTER EIGHT
OLD FRIENDS, NEW ENEMIES
“Where’s Perry?” Petra demanded, as she and Teran wrestled Mala’s half-conscious form onto the Surgeon’s table.
Teran hoisted Mala’s booted feet up with a grunt, feeling an anger that can only come from when your friend does something incredibly stupid…that they’ve promised not to do anymore. “He ran off.”
“He ran off?” Petra’s eyes widened. “To do what?”
“Who the hell knows?” Teran almost yelled. “I’m sure we’ll find out in about twenty minutes when we have to go save his life.”
Mala lifted her head, the cords of her neck straining. Her skin looked washed out and glistened with an unhealthy sweat. “You gotta be kidding me.”
“No,” Teran growled. “I’m not kidding you.”
Mala blinked a few times as though warding off an incoming darkness. “You should have…should have gone after him.”
“Well, I was busy carting your body to the doctor! And he said not to follow him!”
Mala’s head fell back. “You can’t listen to that little bastard.”
“Excellent point from the half-dead lady,” Teran snarled. “How about you shut up so the doctor can work on you?”
Petra, perhaps realizing that Teran wasn’t going to be the greatest surgical assistant, hiked a thumb behind her. “Go swap out with Franklin and send him in here. If I need any help from you I’ll let you know.”
The dismissal didn’t do much for Teran’s mood. She glared at the tall doctor and then marched around the room. The door opened before she reached it and Stuber slipped through, careful not to let anyone outside see who they were operating on.
His eyes shot through the room. “Oh, no.”
Teran nodded. “Oh, yes. Your Halfbreed ran off.”
“My Halfbreed?”
Teran waved a hand and grabbed the doorknob. “I refuse to take ownership of him.”
“He’s not my Halfbreed,” Stuber seemed to take the development in stride. As though such things were to be expected. Perhaps they were at this point. He jerked a head towards the sounds of moaning wounded outside. “Are you taking over?”
“Looks like it.”
“Here.” He dropped a lump of burned wood into her hand. “People worth treating have one charcoal line on their forehead. People that are already about dead have an X. Everyone else I told to get lost.”
Teran grumbled a wordless affirmative and stepped out of the room, the piece of burned wood squeezed in her hand. The smells of the dying hit her again in that tight space. Worsened as she moved down the narrow hall of the clinic and into the crowd of bodies.
“Please,” someone murmured at her feet. “I’m dying, I need help.”
It was an older woman. Stuber had already given her an X on the forehead.
Yes, it seems like you are. But Teran didn’t say that. Couldn’t bring herself to say anything to the woman. The entire lower half of her body was drenched in blood. How she’d survived this long was a mystery. Maybe she would survive longer. But that wasn’t Teran’s call.
She moved on as the woman’s feeble fingers tried to clutch at her pants legs.
She scanned the waiting room, her anger deflating in the face of human misery. There were at least twenty people jammed in here—which was less than before, but still too many. As she looked at their desolate faces, she saw that they all bore marks. Many of them were X’s.
She ignored their pleas and moved outside, where the river of humanity continued. Here, the evidence of Stuber’s marks continued, about ten yards from the door of the clinic. She picked up where he had left off, stuffing down any semblance of compassion and simply deciding who she thought could be saved, and who she thought was a lost cause.
Many had already died. No one had bothered to move their corpses from the line. Teran found herself stooping and checking pulses. Sometimes the next in line would notify her that they were dead, and she would wonder if they were simply saying that so they could get treated faster. She didn’t put much past people.
She thrust her finger under the jaw of a man with a burned and bloody face. She half-expected his skin to be cold. But it was hot to the touch. His pulse was strong.
He jerked when she touched him, and Teran nearly cried out.
Consciousness swam rapidly into his eyes.
Confusion. And then…recognition.
“Teran?” the man murmured.
She was already halfway into marking him with a single line—she saw no other wound besides the burn. She froze when he said her name, her brain shooting through many different possibilities as to how he might know her name.
He leaned up off the wall he’d passed out against. “Teran?” he said, his voice stronger. “Is that you?”
The left side of his face was blackened and crusted, swollen and monstrous. His eye was a bloodshot mess, possibly ruined. But the right side of his face…
It took her a moment to see past the injury.
“Gods in the skies,” she whispered. “Lucky? Is that you?”
Lucky’s trembling hands crawled up Teran’s arms and seized her shoulders. “Yes! It’s me! I can’t believe you’re still alive! After the praetors hit the caves, I thought you were dead.”
It was still hard for Teran to recognize him somehow. The burned side of his face gave him the appearance of being older than he was. But Lucky wasn’t that much older than her. And the rest of him looked just like it had the night he and Sagum and the others had found them in the hills and taken them to the caves where the other Outsiders were hiding.
Teran shook her head. “We got out through the Underground.” She felt her throat constricting, her thoughts becoming a tumble, torn out of the present and thrust back into the caves where she’d grown up. The people that were her people. “Did anyone else make it out?”
Lucky’s expression—what Teran could see of it, anyways—looked briefly stricken. He shook his head. “I don’t think so. The praetors…they blocked us down in that exit. It wasn’t big enough for all of us to get through and everyone just jammed together. They panicked. The praetors mowed us all down. Like fucking vermin.”
His voice was rising, shaking.
Teran touched the good side of his face. “Ssh. It’s okay. You made it out. Let’s not relive it.”
Lucky managed a nod. “I got out,” he said, and left it at that, though she could only imagine the horrors that those three words held. “I linked up with the Southerlies, down towards the flatlands.”
Teran nodded. The Southerlies were another group of Outsiders. They did not mingle, each clan believing they had the market cornered on staying hidden from the demigods. But they wouldn’t turn another Outsider away if they needed help.
“Have you been with them the whole time?” Teran asked, and realized that she was thinking of this as though it was in the dreary, distant past. But it had been less than a month. “And why are you here in Karapalida?”
“Me and three others made a trip in for supplies,” he said. His eyes jagged about, as though seeing the ragged city as it had been only a day before. “We were here when the…the things hit. The other three…they didn’t make it.” He stopped and looked at her. The left side corner of his mouth had cracked and begun weeping from the movement of his lips. “Was it him? I never found out. We had to run before I found out.”
Teran became acutely aware that several people in the line were paying attention to her. Maybe because they were waiting for her to take them in or triage them. But still. People had big ears.
“Come on.” She reached down and took Lu
cky by the arm, helping him to his feet. “Let’s get you inside.”
He seemed steady and strong enough and didn’t need her support, but she held onto him anyways, like if she let go he might just burst into smoke and float away on a breeze.
“So it wasn’t him?” Lucky pressed.
“Not here,” Teran mumbled. “Hang on a minute.”
A few of the badly wounded gave her incredulous looks as she led Lucky—a man with only a burn wound—towards the back room. As she approached the door she wondered if this was a great idea, but she needed to talk to Lucky, and she didn’t want any strangers to overhear. It was the only place of privacy she could come up with in the moment.
She thrust the door open and ushered Lucky in, closing it behind him.
Stuber looked up, hands bloodily occupied with Mala’s wound. “Hey! Whoa! Get him the fuck out of here!”
“Stuber, it’s fine. He’s a friend.”
Petra looked over her shoulder. She looked even more exhausted, and didn’t seem to have the energy to care about a stranger in their midst. She went back to work.
“Is that…” Lucky stepped sideways to see clearly the body on the table. “Oh shit. Is that a demigod?”
Stuber’s face darkened. “See? He’s not fine.”
Lucky’s whole body looked like it was going to start shaking. “You can’t…Why is…Who let a demigod in here? And why are you even trying to heal her?” He jolted forward, reaching for Petra as though he intended to force her to stop treating Mala’s wound.
Teran intercepted him, checking him with an arm across the chest. “Stop. Lucky, listen to me. It’s complicated.”
“Great,” Stuber growled. “I’m gonna have to kill him now.”
“No one’s killing anyone,” Teran hissed. “Stuber, you remember Lucky, don’t you?”
“No. I don’t.”
“He was one of the guys that found us in the hills and led us to my clan.”
