I wake with a presence in the room. The physician pushes buttons on various monitoring devices with significant aggression. I don’t know what they did, but she’s clearly angry at them.

This time when I try to sit up I do not immediately feel unstable. The room stays put and I get a good look around. My tablet is still on my lap. The little glowing vial rolls into the indentation my torso has left on the soft mattress. I shuffle the thin blankets to hide it better.

Two drones sit on the ground flanking either side of the bed like honor guards. I don’t know how long they’ve been here. The curtain walls of the elaborate tent that makes up this field hospital have wrinkles around their bottom hems. Grass stains on the tarp that covers the floor give evidence of how the drones were able to use their little clawed feet to walk into the room from outside.

It takes me a minute to recognize that the physician is disconnecting the monitors that are watching my vitals. Her angry prodding is to silence their alarms when they squeal about their lack of data.

“What’s going on?” If my words are slurred then I blame the medication and hope that the person who pushed it on me understands the side effects well enough to forgive.

She huffs an exasperated sigh. Her dark feathers puff and then flatten as she kills off an emotional response before it escapes.

“My supplies keep disappearing,” she complains, “and patients keep appearing. I just need to confirm a suspicion and I’ll bring them right back. You’re very nearly in stable enough shape for the surgery now. I just need to keep an eye on your vitals while you’re so heavily medicated.”

That feels like such extremely good news for my own health and safety.

“I’m feeling much better now.” I nod gently to avoid jostling the eye patch.

“That’s promising,” she mutters as if talking to the hanging wall instead of to me. “Too bad the prince hasn’t given a clear answer on whether you should get continued treatment or not.”

“What?” I blink repeatedly, not entirely understanding such a statement.

“Your asylum request is still pending. I’m not supposed to spend any resources to treat you.”

She puts a heavy monitor on a little wheeled cart and sighs deeply.

“What does that mean?” Despair nibbles at my soul.

“Trooaris doesn’t want to waste anything that could be better spent elsewhere in the war effort on a traitor.”

“But I’m not-”

“It doesn’t matter what you are,” she cuts me off while moving another device onto the cart with a rattle and a thud. “It matters what he perceives you to be. You showed up with a human rebel and asked for asylum as if you’d committed a crime and needed to be hidden. He isn’t going to hide a criminal without finding out what the crime was. It’s just a matter of time before he makes up his mind.”

“Then why did you help me at all?”

“The humans have this concept called ‘medical ethics’ and according to those I cannot deny you treatment.”

My head hurts and it has nothing to do with the injury at all.

“If I want the collaborators to trust me, and trust me I do because I have no other assistants in this backwater dump site, then they have to believe that I abide by the oaths their own physicians swear.” She continues the work while grumbling to herself instead of toward me.

“What should I do?” Taking advice from the nearest potentially trustworthy individual is a risky proposition when I don’t even know their name.

“Keep your head down and hope you’re forgotten.” She wheels the cart to the clear plastic curtain that forms the door to this little patch of privacy. “Or you’ll end up like this human that caught his attention. This far from the rest of high society, he has no motivation toward maintaining the pretense of being a decent person.”

Is she referring to Dirk? I don’t have a chance to ask before she’s gone and the curtain falls with a sense of finality that I cannot shake off immediately.

My unfocused gaze falls on the drones by my side. I have a tool. I can find out what she meant.

And I still have to find July. I don’t know how much time has passed or how long it should take for her to cross that lake. I hope that the boat has not arrived yet. It would be terrible for me to fail to stop her from her terrible plan because of a timing issue.

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I start with the drone attached to the little boat’s engine. It’s still right where it was parked, but the boat has been scuttled on the opposite shore from where I had seen it last. I’ve failed completely. I have no idea how to follow where she could have gone from there. But I do know where she is likely going to have to have gone.

Grabbing a different drone, I try to approach the house. It is longer than it is wide, probably to get as much of the picturesque lake view as possible. The drone gets just close enough to see that there are windows when the camera witnesses a terrible flash of light and then turns all to black.

I do not expect to be targeted by our own anti-aircraft defenses. But I do imagine that this is exactly what it would look like for my drone to be destroyed by one.

Frustrated, I pick up the one from the boat again and try to sneak it up the shoreline to the windows by staying low. It buzzes over several shrubs and my decreased reaction times are the difference between managing to perfect its landing on the second floor balcony and ramming it straight into the back of the head of a human walking a patrol route. I cannot win.

This drone too goes dark. The damage taken in the collision is enough that it will need significant repairs, and the human it hit will likely also need significant repairs. I hope the physician does not immediately blame me for adding to her workload.

I am going about this the wrong way. There are two drones already in this enormous tent complex. I can use them.

I set the two to a follow the leader pattern and get to crawling them under the curtain to trace the hallway and find out whether the human the physician referenced was Dirk or not. Because if not, there is a chance that it is instead July.

It is hard to make a drone with a whining electric motor to do anything stealthy. Thankfully, they are not large enough to be so loud that they would be heard over normal conversations or through too many layers of thick tent cloth.

The drone makes its way through the hallway, and I dare not let it fly, so its speed is not the swiftest. The tent is a labyrinth of corridors between small contained spaces for patient care. Some are zipped closed and I cannot force an entry within. Others have similar clear plastic curtains to my own, but sit vacant and dark.

Following the direction the physician likely took seems to be the most helpful way to find anyone here. The drones are still deaf, even in a pair, for they require a still smooth surface for their paired inputs to read vibration patterns into sound. Heat sensors are their next best bet. The warm spots left by the physician’s feet are faint, but they are detectable.

There is a sign on the room to which they lead. It’s in the human language, English.

Morgue.

I’ve been studying their language for a while, so I can read the word, but its impact is significantly less than the glyphs below it. This is the house of death. The physician’s new patient is a corpse.

The room is larger than the one I am in. The physician is garbed in bright green contamination protective gear, and she waves to shoo the drone away. But I cannot be deterred.

I have to see.

Engaging the rotors is a noisy and hazardous affair if the physician is concerned about airborne contaminants. But the drone has nothing useful to climb in here. It lifts off into the air and engages in a careful hover toward the table where a pale white naked body lies stiff and still.

Her skin is almost gray, having lost its warm glow of health. Her hair lies in damp coils around her head. There isn’t a single mark of violence upon her. Beads of water dot her smooth skin, and a few suds still leave bubbles on her throat. Her face is without any expression at all.

She is dead. And she is, most definitely, July.

My July, the one to whom I swore the vow.

My July, the kiss of summertime in the bleak winter of my heart.

My July, who I have already sacrificed comfort and safety for the sake of my wholly shaken world view.

My heart shatters. Without her, I don’t know what the next five minutes will look like. Without her, I cannot imagine limping back to Mother with my head low to admit a failure. Without her, my days are numbered without purpose.

I cannot unglue my eyes from the screen. The drone’s passionless eye fixes on her face.

Something large and heavy slams into the drone and its broken rotors abruptly lose lift. The drone falls to the floor and a dented bedpan drops beside it.

The camera focuses on the bedpan automatically.

“I don’t know who you are, but you’re an idiot.” The voice of the physician sounds like it’s being interpreted by speakers made of tinfoil. She leaves the drone where it is and walks out of view again. The drone picks up the sounds of water washing the corpse.

I collapse back into the bed.

The little vial of poison presses into my spinal ridge. I fumble for it while my head screams protests at the sudden movement.

I hold it up and look into the brightly glowing substance within. I’m wanted dead. I have no future and I’m wanted dead.

My claw squeaks against the glass as I break the seal.

Do I need the syringe or can I just swallow it? The article was about ingested fireflies. Maybe I can just swallow it. I don’t have the needle anymore.

The stopper is easy to twist off.

It’s such a small amount of liquid. Could it really be enough?

I press my good eye closed and make one last wish.

I wish we could have lived in peace.

The poison burns all the way down, hot and horrible. It tastes savory, like chicken soup, but with an alcoholic bite.

I clamp both hands around my jaw to stop myself from sputtering and spitting any of it out as I cough and cough. It burns in my stomach, with pain that spreads until it feels like my every nerve is on fire. Dying is the intent, yes, so I curl around my burning gut as my heart races. And the terrible sensation of loss traps me in this moment.

“What the-” The tinny speaker picks up the physician’s voice again. The last thing I hear is a crashing sound from the speakers on the tablet. My heart misses a beat. And then two. And then it beats no more.