Nicholas finished his work with the bandages without much of a flourish. One moment he was continuing to poke and prod at Alexander, the next he was simply shrugging and moving off. Though Alexander had only the most basic of first aid training he could see the skill behind the claws that had run against his skin. Though they were razor sharp the boy never feared that they would pierce him, even as they had been used to cut away some of the bandages that covered him. The hands that had guided them had been slow and methodical. And though the creature made sure to look distinctly bored Alexander could see the care Nicholas put into his work.

Alexander had also caught glimpses of the wounds underneath the gauze. Though the worst of it was on his back many of the scrapes and cuts that crisscrossed his form were visible. The wounds looked ragged, but the stitch work was well done. Each one must have taken some time to complete and the more Alexander looked the more he realized that. Nicholas must have spent hours tending to him.

Alexander wasn’t sure if that meant anything at all. Maybe it was part of the deal. Maybe his life meant something to the creature. Or maybe Nicholas was just a perfectionist. It was in that moment that Alexander realized he knew next to nothing about his saviour. He couldn’t read or predict the creature at all. He only picked up the obvious reactions, the clicking of laughter or the wide sharp toothed smiles. The golden eyes that peered at him were unreadable. The mind they broadcast was alien, foreign and strange to the boy.

Alexander couldn’t even operate off his past knowledge. He had no idea if the rules or patterns he had learned would even apply here. Which things did this creature have in common with humans? Where did it differ? Every interaction seemed only to add to his list of questions. Every twitch or expression on the creatures face only added to his confusion. And even the things he did recognize hardly helped at all. The creature would laugh or smile at weird times. Every hiss or utterance of pain that escaped Alexander’s mouth made Nicholas’s twitch into a grin.

It wasn’t that he enjoyed causing pain to the boy, though that couldn’t be ruled out, because he seemed to be avoiding that. His hands were gentle, calm, and measured in every action they took. Eventually Alexander gave up trying to read the face tending to him and just let it do its work.

Of course that meant by the time Nicholas had finished Alexander was incredibly bored. Humming a wordless tune he had to be reminded multiple times to stop moving. Despite his wounded and tired state he wanted out from the room. He wanted to do something, to see something other than the cold metal that surrounded him.

So when Nicholas gestured towards the door prompting the thrall beside him to move towards it, Alexander opened his mouth to speak. “I’m leaving too,” he simply stated, voice hard as though it was more akin to a command than a request. He wasn’t sure what the arrangement between him and Nicholas was in that moment. He was certainly some sort of prisoner, but he wasn’t sure the specifics of his containment.

Nicholas simply shrugged, his wide mouth growing into a yawn as he gestured towards the door. “Be my guest it isn’t locked, and it’s not as if I can put you to work until you’re healed. Just make sure you don’t wander far from the camp, I won’t be going out to save you a second time.”

Hesitantly Alexander nodded, sure that something was going to follow that statement. This was going to be a trick of some sort, or another excuse to make him sit through another long list of rules. When neither came from the Nicholas, Alexander immediately made his way to the door. He didn’t wait for any further compensation, making it to the doorway before anybody in the room could make another noise.

Swinging the door wide he made his way into the hallway, slamming it home beside him with purposeful force. That little act of rebellion cheered the boy up considerably, though it did remind him of his missing arm. It was a bitter sweet sensation, the act itself enjoyable but the loss of some strength preventing the slam from truly being satisfying. His new injury became even more apparent at he found himself in front of the second doorway.

The door required him to twist his body strangely, pressing the handle with his one hand and slamming his shoulder against the door to get it moving. With a hiss the door slowly slid open and bathed the hallway in dim light. The crack grew as Alexander shouldered onwards, the warmth of the sunlight fueling him as he took his steps back into the world. He left the calm, cool indoors behind him as he entered the chaos of the camp.

Alexander’s first glimpse of his new home was chaotic. Humans scrambling everywhere in numbers the boy struggled to comprehend. Alexander had always thought the small village he had been brought up in was the largest society could support in its current state. Though it was only a small gathering of a dozen families, already the infighting and family politics had split the community multiple times. Alexander’s old village couldn’t be compared to what he saw now.

Instead of small squat scrap metal hovels, the very ancient towers that had always surrounded him looked to be inhabited. Clothing and fabric hung from lines above his head, coloring and filtering the sunlight that reached him in the dusty street. He could see pale faces peering at him from smashed windows, children with dirt streaked cheeks smiling at him from above.

He couldn’t even see the wall that must protect the settlement. There seemed to be no concern for space, something that had dominated the boy’s life up until this point. The walls were the only thing that protected the humans that lived within them come nightfall. Everything important had to exist within the walls, or come morning it would be torn apart. The walls restricted everything the humans within them could do, protected them and hampered them. Every night most of the village would take turns guarding them, making sure nothing would tear them apart without some kind of warning beforehand.

Walls to Alexander held an incredible importance. From the day he had been old enough to leave them he had learned their importance. Thousands of times he had been drilled on their maintenance. His survival depended on them, and slowly an obsession with them had been formed. It wasn’t a strange occurrence in the current age as it was born from something incredibly useful. Paranoia and concern for the walls was something that every village needed to foster. Much of their lives needed to be spent defending them, maintaining them, and building them. Each human born into the wastes needed to learn the importance of the structures that surrounded them or they would perish.

Stolen novel; please report.

So when Alexander peered about and saw an absence of walls, his anxiety spiked to levels he had never experienced. The safety of the walls was something he had learned to rely on every time he had left them behind. Even as he was stumbling through the tunnels, he knew that if he could just make it to the walls he would be safe. They could and would protect him, Alexander just needed to stumble into their embrace. Without the knowledge of their existence Alexander found himself feeling exposed. That any danger could take him immediately and there was nothing he could do about it.

The safety of the walls had been drilled so deeply into his mind, that even the number of humans surrounding him did nothing to alleviate the paranoia that began to grip him.

What he didn’t know was the settlement had something better than walls. The camp was one of the smaller gatherings of humans in the area, but still it didn’t need the protection that the walls could provide. All human settlements needed something to protect them from the terrors in the night, but this wasn’t a human settlement. Though the majority of the people that walked about the boy were as human as Alexander was, no one would consider them the true owners of the territory.

But Alexander wasn’t aware of that fact, all he saw was the empty stretches of cleared road that seemed to lead in every direction. He saw every way a mutant could slip into the territory, and already his mind was fixating on how exposed he was. He began to look for danger everywhere, his eyes seeing nothing but other mindless sets as the humans around him scurried around and did their work.

The door behind him creaked open as Nicholas stepped through, grunting as the light hit his pale skin. He grumbled under his breath before jabbing Alexander in the back harshly shunting him forwards and out of his way. “Stop ruining the looks of my clinic,” the creature grumbled before slipping past the boy and stepping onto the dirty path.

Blearily Alexander caught a hold of himself. The brief but torturous pain the creature had inflicted on him by applying pressure to his back had cleared his mind for a brief moment. It had allowed his mind to catch up on the rapidly ramping up paranoia and calm it, reining it in. He still didn’t trust the safety of the settlement surrounding him, but at least he was now able to take a few steps into it.

When a rabid mutant didn’t immediately charge from a darkened alleyway and finish him off, he grew much more confident his bare feet digging into the dirt as he began to jog. First he was simply drinking in his surroundings, but soon he was moving with a singular purpose.

The more humans he saw, the more he became unnerved. It wasn’t just the number of them that astounded him, though the improbability of it was very apparent. It was the look in their eyes. The empty, mindless way that they looked at him as he passed by. They didn’t regard the running boy with any curiosity or thought. Their eyes were dull and their focus was always towards whatever work they were performing. All around Alexander humans could be doing menial tasks of some sort. Some were cleaning the roads and building all around him, using ancient brooms or brushes and tugging at the wastes as though it would achieve anything. Others were repairing structures or building others, teams working in perfect unison to lift heavy objects or to hammer in nails. Not every eye that he caught was like that, though the exceptions were always notable. They were either incredibly young, the children that peered at him showing no signs of the affliction, or they seemed incredibly busy. Those that he saw were always guiding others, or working at more complex tasks. The ones that he noted avoided his gaze, either by turning their focus back to whatever they were working on, or blatantly just turning their gaze away. When they did catch his eye the fear that he caught was palpable. They looked terrified, completely and utterly terrified of him.

Alexander at first thought it was something about his clothing, but when he checked the gown that was covering him and the bandages that wrapped his body he didn’t find anything out of place. The gown was a light blue, the bandages recently swapped so they were completely white, but they were looking at him as though he was covered in blood. All he could do was meet those fearful eyes with a frown as he jogged by them, intent on reaching his goal.

He had smelt it early into his jaunt into the fresh air. A taint of oil and grime, and the closer he got to it the noises that reached his ears picked up dramatically in volume. Loud saws and grinders chopped away at metal, hammers pounding, and the ever present rumbling of engines. The location of his family had been told to him only once, but he had made sure to memorize each of the little details. He knew those noises off by heart, he had heard them enough in his short life.

Sure enough when his soft bare feet padded into the shop, he saw her almost immediately. His mother for the most part wasn’t a woman that stood out, nor was she one that ever wished to do so. She was shorter than her son even at his young age, and the dark hair that covered her head seemed to camouflage her in the grease and smoke of the areas where she worked. A thin layer of dirt seemed to cover every inch of her body constantly, but Alexander instantly picked her out of the crowd of other humans.

He did so easily, for she was his mother and though the animosity towards his father had grown in the past few hours, his love for her hadn’t faded one bit. She was burned into his memory, much like his father was. Despite his feelings towards the man in the current moment, Alexander would have had the same reaction upon seeing him.

Alexander spotted her tool in hand, hair pulled tightly behind her head as she fiddled with something deep within the body of a machine. The hood loomed over her head, keeping her in the shadows, but he could see the expression she would have in his minds eye. That slight frown, the careful look in her eyes as she regarded a problem had been a common occurrence in his household.

Alexander sprinted towards her, his feet slapping against the hard ground and the noise echoing in the enclosed space. Before she could even react his arm would wrap around her waist, his body pulling her from her concentration into a hug. All the emotional turmoil, all the anxiety and fear that had gripped him since he had left his father’s presence, melted away instantly. The warmth of her calmed his wounds, her very presence fixing all the problems that had been building up in his mind.

She’d always had this effect on him, and though the boy spent most of the time hunting with his father, it had truly been his mother who held sway over his heart and mind. All the growth pains of his age never seemed to target her. His angst, his fears, his rages, all seemed targeted at the man at her side. And in that moment Alexander was happier than he had been in months. A great weight had been lifted from his soul, strangling chains that had hobbled his worldview until he had wrapped his arm around her.

When she turned, and the smile upon her face lit up his vision, his only grew a few more degrees. The few moments that she allowed him to hold her were more healing to the boy than any medicine Nicholas had given him.

When she swore and shoved him backwards a few moments later, his heart sang with joy just to see the happiness in her eyes before she began to berate him. Alexander had gotten his rage and hatred from somewhere, and the cool and calm collected man that was his father had only ever tried to stymy that aspect. The inferno of maternal rage above him, hissing about his stupidity, was much more his style.