A man could get used to this political asylum thing. Not one person today has asked me to risk my life for anything at all. I haven’t even been asked to do my own dishes. Yes indeed, this is the life. I should have thought to find an excuse to escape sooner.

Though the house is enormous, apparently the Troo who lives here isn’t as forward thinking as he claims to be. Trooaris will happily go slumming across the lake to attend human events or try to recruit his collaborators with promises of fair pay and safety from future relocation demands. But he does not let humans live in his enormous human-built residence. No, the collaborators’ barracks are a long row of platform tents behind the building. They cannot mar the pristine scenic vistas of the lake view.

They’re not terrible as far as tents go. I haven’t found a single scorpion in my shoes yet, and the Troo are so intense about the whole duty to provide for those beneath them that the food here is really excellent. Unfortunately though they have rather blindly configured everything as it ought to be to take care of their own people rather than humans. I don’t find myself needing the heating pad in my bed, and at some point I’m going to have to jump in the lake because dry shampoo just isn’t cutting it.

My position is rather unique, and while they are deciding what to do with me, I have plenty of freedom to pursue my own desires.

Chief among them, right now, is napping. Have hammock will snooze.

That my chosen placement of said hammock overlooks the compound gates is mere coincidence. I am definitely not observing the comings and goings of anyone at the compound. I am napping.

There is an enormous white tent painted with green stripes sitting squat and ugly near the entrance gates. Intellectually, I know that this is where Tromeo has been deposited, but I have neither the desire nor duty to investigate after his health. There is not much traffic in that general direction, so I do not believe that there are many patients at all in this medical tent.

It is in this general haze of comfort with my feet propped up in a hammock strung between two trees that I hear a single gunshot ring out across the still afternoon. It strikes me immediately that this was a loud snap of a sound. It was not the soft electric thump of a Troo energy weapon. Someone brought a human-made firearm into this compound and fired it somewhere not far from me.

My personal experience has dropped me out of the hammock and onto the crumbly red dirt before I cognitively recognize the action. The soft blanket tangles in my legs while my hands clasp over the back of my head. I am not calm, confident, or aggressive right in this specific moment.

It takes a few heartbeats for me to realize where I am in relation to the comfortable hammock I was in before. In those heartbeats I realize that there are no following shots. This was but a single gunshot, not an exchange of fire. I can relax a tiny amount.

Except that I do not. Something nags at the back of my brain and the concern there chews away at my nerves until I claw myself up from the position of assumed safety and stand.

My hearing is not perfect and with no following shots, it is very hard to determine where the single gunshot possibly came from. But I can make some guesses. It was not a clear sound, which suggests that there was some amount of distance and possibly soft objects between it and my location. There was not a lot of echo, which is how I assume soft obstruction. And there are not a lot of options for where it could have come from within visible range considering those factors.

I am certain that it should have come either from the tent barracks, something near the gate, or the medical tent. By the volume, it must have come from the nearer of these options.

It is not my job. It is not my duty. I do not have any obligation to care about the Troo that I transported here in search of asylum. But I realize that if he somehow hid a gun on his person from the rebel’s subterranean fortress, then it would be me seeing the blame for any acts of deliberate violence.

I sigh heavily, and drag my unwilling self away from the cozy comfort of the hillside hammock and stumble down in the direction of the green striped tent.

Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

I am not the only person headed in that direction. There are several purple-clad security personnel headed there at a dead run. I must not be wrong in my auditory assessment.

My feet increase pace so that I might look like I am acting with urgency and fit in with those people who are obligated to do so.

Would that I had never been so soft-hearted as to have supported that unnatural union. Would that I had never been so soft hearted as to fall for that crimson fool of a parrot myself. But here I am, and here we go.

I skid when slowing down to turn the corner into the curtained doorway for the medical tent. A young woman with a Troo energy rifle and a frightening attitude nearly checks me into the wall.

“What happened?” I demand, expecting that someone accustomed to following orders will be able to respond to a barked command better than a polite request.

“Someone hit the physician with a bedpan.” She doesn’t even slow down to talk, still hurrying through the narrow hallway at a pace that is swift enough to be difficult to follow.

“I thought I heard a gunshot.” I rub my forehead clear of worry lines. “Is the doctor still alive?”

“Physician,” she corrects. “Situation unclear.”

And with that the soldier is gone, hurrying ahead of me like she actually knows her way around this confounded white maze.

I follow, doing the best I can to keep up without also running and calling too much attention to myself when I know full well that I do not belong here and will only get in the way. I reach a section of the hospital that has a long, straight hallway lined with patient rooms. All are dark except one.

Toward the end of the hallway, one clear plastic curtain is being held open by a Troo in riot gear. He is significantly overdressed for the position of official doorstop. Several men and women in collaborator purple move in and out of the room. I spot the woman soldier stepping out of the room with an expression that I can only describe as green.

She ducks into a different patient room and I hear the unmistakable sound of retching as she vomits.

There aren’t any patients here at all?

Shouldn’t Tromeo be here somewhere?

My heart falls. I realize that I’m absolutely doomed if it was Tromeo who hit the medic with a bedpan hard enough to sound like a gunshot from a distance. I cannot stay away now. I have to go look.

The doorstop looks me over with a grim expression that is hard to read through his mask. The expressive Troo eyes are all I have to go on, and he is unable to meet mine.

But he doesn’t stop me. And he doesn’t speak to me.

I should have considered that some kind of ill omen.

Inside the room there are several people I do not recognize and one that I do. On the hospital bed, Tromeo lies in a crumpled heap of flesh and feathers. Blood stains the white blanket that covers his lower half. I knew that his face was a wreck when I brought him here but I did not think it looked fatal from my entirely unprofessional opinion.

Tromeo’s mouth glows green and it hangs open with his limp tongue dangling out of it in a cartoonish visage of a death mask.

Half on his lap and half kneeling at the bed side is the unrecognizable body of a human woman. It takes me longer that I could ever admit to any of my friends from my life before this moment to recognize July. The back of her head is almost completely missing, and that is the side that faces the door.

I step closer to the corpses, and nobody in the room moves to stop me. Glass crunches under my feet and I do not hear the words they are speaking to each other. All I know and see and hear is the pair of newlyweds entangled in death’s eternal embrace.

What could possibly have motivated this outcome? What could they have possibly encountered that would leave this as the best choice for the two of them? And what on earth kind of poison actually glows such a terrible shade of green?

It does not matter. Not now, and not to me. I come to the conclusion that I absolutely cannot stay where I am now. This is supremely unhealthy.

I gently close Tromeo’s mouth, hiding his glowing tongue within.

And I step away from the corpses. They are not the first I have seen, nor the worst mangled. But in this war of ours I do not want to see any more death. I do not want to be here with the corpses at all.

Time to make my getaway while nobody remembers I am here.

I walk purposefully out of the room and find the young soldier who I had followed into the medical tent. She looks paler than is natural, and is trying to clean her face with a lump of bandages from a supply cart.

It doesn’t take much work for me to help her tidy herself. I read her name from the badge on her arm and make a decision quickly.

“Anna, I need to use a phone.” Statements, not requests, are how to get the desired outcome. “You can listen, but I need to make the call. Give me the access.”

“Dirk, right?”

I nod.

She agrees to the demand.