ENFORCER CHIEF REVINSON

One hell of a mess.

Chief Revinson knew it was a thought inadequate to describe the death and carnage on display, but he couldn't help himself. Most of his thoughts weren't adequate right now. His thoughts were spinning through the clattering machinery of a mind accustomed to panic processing fresh worry. Eight more months. All they'd needed was eight months. And now they were here cleaning up the mess because they didn't know what else to do. And because of him.

The Chief faced the stark truth that this was almost certainly his fault. He'd been belligerent, abusive, and evasive. When it was all over he'd realized the villagers would have been crazy to get on a transport after the way he acted. In their position he wouldn't have trusted him either.

Eight more months.

The battlefield was littered with bloody bodies. If they'd realized sooner there was going to be a battle they could have come in, stopped it, gotten the villagers out maybe, some nonlethal way of protecting him. It didn't matter now. The field outside the town was sea of blood and gore, and damned if Revinson wasn't a little proud of them. They were citizens of his world after all, and alright they'd had the knights to back them up but by god they'd made the bandits pay, and if the situation had been different he'd have had no qualms calling them all heroes.

Screw it. They were heroes, knights and villagers alike. They didn't know, because they hadn't been told, and given what they did know what they'd done was spectacular. If only they'd waited eight more months.

They were taking...he didn't know the names. The knight with the darker skin and the short hair, and the creepy yellow eyes, not that the unconscious knight's eyes were open. Besides, the really creepy one was the big guy with the scales on his face, not because he was half alien but because he'd grown roots. They sprouted from his shoulder and one of his calves, one snaking out from his cheek, a tangle more emerging from his fingers and burying into the dirt. Revinson had no idea what that was about. Was that normal for somebody with his species? What even was that guy's species?

Complicating things further were the razor sharp crystals lying all over the battlefield. If they'd been made of auram they'd have disappeared when their creator went down, but apparently the Slug Regalia did something to the world to create them instead of just conjuring them up. And at the middle of the erratic web of crystals was the obese corpse of their creator, Jurgo lying where Fann had left him face down in a pool of congealing blood.

“You fat fucking idiot,” Revinson snarled at the corpse. “Why'd you have to come to my planet and wreck shit up? How many billion trillion planets in the universe, and you had to come here? Why in the hell? And then you go and get your self killed and make it everybody else's mess, you fucking moron!”

With his last furious yell the Chief kicked Jurgoz in the side, rocking the bandit on his belly fat. He felt immensely stupid after he did it. At least nobody was close enough anymore to see what he'd done. He was forcing himself to calm down when a bloody hand gripped the leg of his pants.

“Holy~!” he yelped, trying to pull away. But the fat fingers clung tight to the fabric.

“Gradfadder...” a muffled voice gurgled, and with immense effort Jurgo raised his head off the ground. His nose was sliced open, the halves sticking out at different angles. One half of his bisected jaw hanging lower than the other. When he opened his mouth to try and talk the chief could see that behind his shattered teeth the front two inches of his tongue had been sliced open, forking it like a snake's. But he was moving, and he was managing to talk, just barely. “I want...to talk...to my Grandfather...”

“Your grandpa?” Chief Revinson said, scrambling for the communicator on his belt. “Yeah. Yeah! Hell yeah! You bet your ass! Hey I need a medic! I need a medic over here right now!”

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AURINA

Aurina didn't know whether to be more horrified or confused. There was plenty of both to go around.

When Andry and Tyram and the others had been brought to the infirmary she'd been sure horrified had the contest locked down. Every one of the knights had horrible wounds, deep cuts and horrible bruises and broken bones. And others she didn't even know how to describe, like the crystals ripping out through Fann and J'vann's skin. None of which even touched on all the dead and mutilated villagers, some of them she'd know almost her entire life.

And then with Horrified in a seemingly untouchable lead the enforcers had arrived, led by Ms. Fadden, and from nowhere confusion started pulling ahead.

“I don't get it,” her father told her as the enforcer medics started bringing wounded in and working on him. “They're here, they're offering to help us rebuild...they're even collecting the prisoners and arresting them. I don't know what to make of it, it's so....I mean, this how you'd expect them to act right? This is what they're supposed to do. So why weren't they doing it before?”

And why are they acting like this now? Aurina added to herself. Her father had left a while ago, he and Chaddim were meeting with some enforcers to figure out how to organize cleanup. Aurina focused on what she could do, helping the doctors (which now included Enforcer medics) with whatever they needed to care for the injured. When she found a moment to herself she went to sit by her brother's bed. All their beds, really. The knights had been given a room to themselves.

That's where she was when Ms. Fadden walked in. Before she had seemed stiff, cold. Now she was like a live electrical wire, a lit firework. Energy hummed through her. Not vital energy, panic energy. Spiky and jagged and erratic.

“Are any of them awake?” she demanded. “Can any of them talk?”

“No they're not,” Aurina said. “They're all injured. Very badly injured. Because they were busy fighting the bandits you wouldn't protect us from.”

“We were too late,” Ms. Fadden said. Aurina wasn't sure if she'd even been listening. “We moved as soon as it looked like there was going to be another battle, but it just happened too fast. It all happened too fast.”

“On your way to back up the bandits?” Aurina spat.

“No!” Ms Fadden...said. It was hard to describe her tone. It wasn't a shout, or even a bark. It was as if a heavy book had been dropped onto a table, and the impact formed a word. “No. Never. I know what you must think of me, but grabbing you to prolong the stalemate was as far as I was willing to go. I would never have supported the bandits against you. Never.”

There was so much conviction in the agent's voice Aurina couldn't bring herself to argue. They lapsed into silence for a moment, a silence so uncomfortable Aurina had to say something.

“Dad says you guys are going to help us rebuild the village,” she tried.

“Hah!” It was a very complicated noise, even if it wasn't much of a laugh. It had undertones of sob and scream inside it. “I'm sure we are. I mean why the hell not? You want the walls on that new village diamond, platinum, or uritonium plated? Gold toilet seats maybe? Why not splurge, it's a fire sale! Everything must go!”

“Are you saying you won't really...”

“I'm saying we won't have time,” Ms. Fadden said. “I'm sure we mean whatever we've been promising, but pretty soon it isn't going to matter.”

“You're talking like it's the end of the world,” Aurina said.

Unnervingly, that prompted another prolonged silence. This time, it was Ms. Fadden who broke it.

“I'd gotten authorization, you know,” she said. “To tell you. Well, I don't know if you were included. I was authorized to tell your leaders and the knights what was going on. All of it. And if it took telling the entire town to get you all to back down, to relocate, to anything but what actually happened...I was authorized to do that too. I hope you believe me when I say I fought for that. Because you were right. You did deserve to know.”

“Know what?” Aurina asked. Ms. Fadden opened her mouth to reply, but then her communicator beeped.

“What?” she asked, pressing the device to her head. “Are you sure? Positive?” mumbling from the other side of the communicator. “No! Don't bring him in here, the villagers will tear him apart. I want him on a transport to the Dome immediately. Yes of course a medical transport! Just hurry up and go!”

She closed the comm and pressed it to her chest like precious treasure, leaning back against the wall. No, collapsing. For once there was nothing stiff about her, nothing jagged, and suddenly she wasn't Ms. Fadden mysterious agent of the government. She was a very frightened woman who had just been told that maybe, just maybe, things were going to be okay after all.

“He's alive,” she said in a voice that sounded half prayer. “God, oh thank god. He's alive.”

“Who?” Aurina asked. “Who's alive?”

“Jurgo,” Ms. Fadden said, tears streaming down her face. “Jurgo's alive.”

And in the deepest places of Aurina's mind and heart, confusion won a decisive victory.