“You should heed words spoken by a Seer, Killian.”

Lucina’s voice was small and quiet in the darkness, nearly swallowed by the stillness. The orange glow of the fire had long disappeared behind them after they had taken a turn towards the kitchens. The corridors here were plain and unadorned, a spartan and dead silent stretch of hallways that were usually filled with light and staff. Abandoned room service carts, some with food on them, lay scattered about, and had to be stepped around. “They speak the truth, even if it isn’t to your liking.” Killian didn’t reply, nabbing a piece of bread from an untouched tray, nibbling at its thick crust. “So you hate the Children after all. You don’t want to see them revolt,” Lucina pressed.

“You got it wrong,” said the Captain, finally. “I don’t hate the Children. I hate revolution. Never accomplishes what it sets out to. People die by the scores. Innocent people. Good people. Bad people. They end up corpses by the roadside. I seen it and hate it. Anyway, ends up that the most evil men step into places of power after revolution.”

That gave Lucina pause. “But the Children are slaves. They deserve to be free.”

“Maybe. But humans are scared to be usurped from a throne they’ve sat on for millennia. They are, at heart, survivalists. War-like, violent. And the Children are, after all, the children of Man. The evil apple doesn’t fall far from the evil tree; evil begettin’ evil.” His torch-lamp flickered their silhouettes wildly on the walls, crazed, insane distortions of their forms running over the steel and plaster, the sealed doors, the benighted ceiling.

“I don’t believe that. Oppression needs to be removed, shackles need breaking, and all the subjugated should rise and take control. We’d do a better job.” Lucina tried to keep her voice light, the statement a faint jab, but there was spite in her voice. “We’re not evil like your kind. As it is the place of a child to usurp and take over for the parents when they are old and enfeebled, so it is with the Children and the old humanity. That’s what we Children should fight and die for.” She felt free in speaking to the Wildsman in this fashion. Maybe she would pay for it later, if he spoke to the higher-ups, but she doubted he’d be inclined to do so. He seemed very removed from the politics and rhetoric of the Tower.

“I believe there’s very little to actually die for, Lucina. There’s very little to risk yourself in the line of fire. Keep your head down and keep your neck clear a’ the headman’s ax.” He smiled flatly, the cold light of the electric torches giving the expression an otherworldly quality. “I am human, after. And, like I said, humans are survivors.” He stared down the hallway, chewing his lip for a moment, thinking. “‘sides, from my experience, when someone who ain’t had power suddenly gets it, they don’t handle it well at all. Same’s true for money, actually,” he mused, though mostly to himself.

“You’re walking into a battle that’s not really yours, for a cause you don’t believe in, for money and a warm bed. You don’t even believe your own words. You call that ‘keeping your head down’?”

He said nothing in response, his face shadowed in the dim light. She didn’t push him.

They walked a few more feet in silence. “Don’t die, Killian,” came her voice, suddenly small, but there was a strength behind the comment, a hard plea, almost a command.

He paused to stare at her forehead, this strange girl walking by his side, with her odd eyes and aberrant DNA. “Ain’t my call, is it? And why do you care, anyway? I know you would join a revolution in a heartbeat. And I’m the enemy, in the end, right? You’d have my head on a platter, ma’am.” He chuckled.

Lucina punched him as hard as she could in the arm. It caught him off guard and he stepped back, clutching his arm, raising a brow at her. Her small hands formed tight little balls at her sides, her posture and demeanor of a frustrated toddler. “Don’t presume to know what I’d do, Wildsman,” she snapped at him, then looked down the corridor, embarrassed by her little outburst.

He simply raised his hands in a helpless gesture. “Alright, alright! Gāisǐ, girl, my arm...”

At that moment, Lucina froze, holding up her hand, and felt the surrounding area. There. Chaotic, panicked emotion, pulsing like a rapid heartbeat, from down the hallway. In the dimness of the corridor, a sliver of flickering light could be seen far off, and the faintest sound of electronic alarms.

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“Is it him?” he whispered, but she only shook her head. He drew his pistol from his thigh-holster, checked the chambered round, then pushed forward to investigate. The sliver of light was coming from a half open clinic door, and the sound of blaring alarms screamed into the grave-like stillness of the Tower corridor. The smell of blood, like copper and iron, was sharp in the air, as well as the unpleasant scent of defecation.

Approaching the door, they kept their movements silent, and Killian touched sign at the door. “Interico,” he murmured, before looking at the bootprints leading out the door and in the opposite direction. The same bootprints seen near Arriques. Crouching, he touched the blood and found it tacky, not dry. He instinctively began to head away from the clinic, with the prints, feeling that single-minded drive to hunt, but Lucina caught his sleeve.

“She’s still alive,” she whispered, fractal eyes wide, staring into the clinic. “I can feel her.”

He nodded, and they stepped, ducking, into the clinic. Lucina instantly gasped, covering her mouth and nose with her sleeve. The presumed Dr Interico hung from the wall, pinned like an insect to the steel behind him. His corpse was pale, bled dry from a thousand wounds, stiff with rigor mortis. The wall beneath him was smeared and there was a spattered red-brown halo around the body, suggesting he slammed into it at considerable speed. Killian holstered the gun, standing in the pool of blood below the doctor, craning his neck to get a better look. The back of the head had been slightly flattened against the wall, and his arms and legs appeared to have been fractured in several places, bent at odd angles, though riddled with shrapnel holes and protruding metal debris. All around the body, embedded into the wall, glittered metal in the flickering lights of the room, a haphazard circle of syringes, shredded metal canisters, IV poles, wheels. He stared at the scene impassively, before turning to Lucina, half expecting her to be dry heaving in a corner.

She wasn’t. In fact, she barely glanced at the body. Horrific, shocking, stomach-turning, yes, but in the end, it was the raw emotion pouring off the patient in the back of the room that nauseated her. Moving beside the still woman on the ventilator, she watched her eyes, panicked, rolling in her skull, finally centering on Lucina’s. The probe was fast, instinctive, thorough. While true visualization through an empathic connection was difficult, strong enough emotion and sense memory could collaborate to form a dream-like scene. She watched and listened as if through water to the muffled conversation of the physician with 23, the cloudy vision of his face, speckled with red, hovering into the patient’s view, the sadistic sneer of his voice. She felt abject, feral terror, and her breathing quickened, her body trembling as she broke the connection by screwing her eyes shut, squeezing tears out from between her lids. The Empath set a hand on the poor woman’s arm, rubbing gently, pushing a sense of calm and peace through the Empathic connection. “He’s gone, he’s gone. We’ll help you.” The patient grew more still, her breathing more regular, but the fear was still there, burning like a small bonfire in Lucina’s mind.

Killian walked carefully through the drying blood, picking up a discarded wrapper, water bottle, before flicking them away. Glancing through the medicine cabinets, it was impossible to tell what was taken, as the destruction was total. Opening a small medication fridge, though, he noted that there were several vials of narcotics missing. Hopefully the fool would overdose on some of it. Glancing up, he noticed Lucina grabbing whatever medical supplies weren’t totally destroyed. “What are you doing?”

The girl put the equipment down on a table near the patient, a new IV bag, a new drip feed bottle. “I’ll just set her up for now, until someone else can come by and tend to her. Maybe on the way back, we can…” She trailed off, glancing at Killian through a dark curtain of hair. She was deeply affected, not just by the woman’s plight, but by the murder. Her eyes kept sliding back towards the wall, then flicking away as she worked. Her hands moved with uncertainty, setting up the equipment she was no doubt unfamiliar with. But it distracted her for the moment, took her mind off the grisly scene. For several minutes, she was silent, and the security captain just watched her, before she finally spoke. “This was evil, Killian.” Her voice was soft and gentle, eyes half-lidded, watching her hands as they primed an IV line. “I could feel it, from her perspective. It radiated off him.” There was an implicit undercurrent of sorrow in the statement.

Shifting to sit in a chair, Killian just watched her for the moment, not saying anything, his long body bent, elbows on knees, hands dangling between. He considered her, watching her carefully as her long, deft fingers completed the work, her brow furrowed, her mouth frowned. A myriad of small emotions passed over her, and he could not really tell what she was feeling. Fear, sorrow, pain, longing, nostalgia? “You didn’t get that after seeing Arriques?”

Her dark hair fluttered as she shook her head fiercely. “That was escape, and a necessity, probably. But this was…” she went to stand before the corpse, regarding it with those strange eyes, fingers pressed to her lips, brow furrowed. “This feels like malice.” She looked back at Killian, but at the last moment, slid her eyes away from his as a courtesy.

He came up behind her, though, setting his large hands on her shoulders, steadying her as they both stood in the pool of drying blood, looking as unflinchingly as they could at the grisly scene. She instinctively reached up to cup his hand with hers, but he slid his hands away, and that momentary human comfort and warmth was sharply and bitterly missed as soon as it was pulled back. Lucina had a sudden urge to reach for his hands again, to feel them in her own, but drew back instead. It wouldn’t be proper, after all.

“Let’s keep moving,” came his voice as he moved away, tight and curt.