“Shit, she’s injured. The back of her head’s bleeding. Shit.”
“Use my jacket. Put pressure on it.”
“Hey, do you hear that? Oh my God. It's coming back.”
“Go get the others. Get them out of here.”
***
Mari isn’t here.
Mari isn’t here.
This isn’t her.
The thoughts cut into Cora’s heart, even as she limps behind Liam, bracing herself against the dull throbs and aches of her creaky muscles. She’s treated to a full view of his back and the person draped over his shoulder. A girl, if she had pointy ears, a longer head, and armor-like plates on her scalp sprouting glossy black hair.
Liam powers his way through the forest, maintaining a constant speed despite the extra weight dragging him down. Cora struggles to keep pace, stopping often to massage her bruised, scabbed-over shin.
He doesn’t turn around to see if she’s following, and nor does she want him to.
God, she’s stupid. For thinking getting Mari back would be that easy. For ignoring Liam and almost getting herself killed.
Stupid, stupid, Cora, you’ve always been like that, Mari taunts, smug despite being a brain echo. Can’t you listen to others? Like me.
Cora clenches her hand until every bone hurts. You’re not real! The real Mari isn’t here. But Liam is. And she ignored him. Forced him to act, putting his life on the line alongside hers.
Small wonder his shoulders are drawn back and he towers at his full height. No slouch or interruption to his stride. She pictures the frown lines on his face, the set jaw and narrowed eyes she saw too often with Mari.
Disappointment.
They reach the tiny clearing where they’d rested before Cora took off. Gently, Liam deposits the girl against the same tree he’d leaned against. Her head lolls to the side. When she wakes–if she wakes–she’ll have one nasty sore neck.
Good. The thought comes unbidden before Cora can suppress it. She studies the girl. She’s wearing a stained black uniform, sleeves reaching to her wrists and leggings down to her ankles, baggy and wrinkled. A few sizes too big.
A red crescent moon is stitched on the sleeve, and again on her back, though the red midsection is pressed to the bark.
Cora glances at the canopy. From her position, the vegetation is too thick, but she easily pictures the eerie red moon hanging above the world.
Perfect match.
The girl’s face is bloodied and bruised. Her matted black hair is chopped, some sections longer than others. Her ebony skin looks sickly in the weak moonlight.
She was on the run. It’s the only explanation Cora can produce, but more than that, it means whatever she ran from could come here.
To them.
Ding, ding, ding! Mari says.
Liam probes over the girl’s arms, frowning. “Help me.”
Cora scowls. He’s mad at her, that much is obvious. She might as well stop trying to pretend that everything’s okay. “With what?”
“Keep her sitting up while I tie her hands.”
There’s something about handling the girl while she’s unconscious that rubs Cora wrong as she pulls the girl free from the tree. With her leg and arm keeping the girl upright, Cora watches Liam take the damp cloth from her backpack and wrap it around the girl’s hands.
Scratched up and calloused, she notices. A long cut winds from her pinkie finger’s first knuckle to the wrist. Unlike Cora’s leg, this cut is scabbed over, some sections fallen off, revealing a long, pale scar.
The girl groans. Liam freezes, seconds away from finishing the knot. Another low, guttural groan later, the girl’s head lolls to the side again, chin pressed into her shoulder.
“She went through hell,” Liam comments as he finishes the knot. He leans over the girl, forehead creased in worry. “You can’t tell, but her wrists are too bony.”
“She’s not like us. Maybe it runs in her species.”
He holds back a grimace. Still, his nose crinkles and he shoots her a quick glare. “Tell me, do you know any non-human species back home that are this bony?” He rolls up the girl’s sleeves. Cora blanches at the criss-crossing grid of dried cuts marking both of the girl’s skinny wrists.
The bones, they’re human enough, but the bone protrudes, all knobby, skin stretched tight, dried cuts set at even intervals. They form a grid pattern, not unlike a waffle maker or chain-link fence.
Cora can’t stop staring. “Oh.”
“There’s that, too. She got these somewhere else. That might be why she’s here. She fought and ran away, or something bad happened to her and she snapped, fled here.”
The girl must’ve been so afraid. And then Cora blunders into sight like an idiot, and of course the girl lashed out. Self-defense. She’d been through unspeakable horror and assumed Cora meant to hurt her.
The girl had been screaming, too. Either somebody injured her or she injured herself.
Or maybe the girl was venting her frustrations, her grief, her rage.
Suddenly, Cora feels a lot smaller and insignificant. A jerk. More than a jerk, judging by how violently the girl responded.
It was supposed to be Mari. And it isn’t. And it won’t be, at least for a good while, as far as Cora can tell. They have other pressing matters. Like the complete stranger who is not human, and yet human in so many aspects, knocked out and a few days away from death.
“Her eyes glowed right before she attacked me,” Cora says.
“Glowed?”
“Her pupils, I think. They glowed purple, and then her claws came out.”
She bites her lip as she stares at the crisscrossing wounds. She wonders what the girl hides under the layers of fabric. If what they’ll find will make Cora’s own injuries look tame in comparison.
“Better keep that in mind, then.”
“When she wakes up, what are you gonna do?”
Liam heaves a great sigh. His eyes never leave the girl. Her chest rises and falls. It’s subtle, but Cora hears a rattling noise as well. “I don’t know.”
The girl’s eyelids flutter. Under the skin, her eyeballs rove around. Cora backs away and Liam crouches into a defensive stance, one hand on the handle of his knife.
Her eyes never open.
“Dreaming?” Cora says. She vaguely remembers her psychology class talking about the REM stages. Eyeball movements were part of the stage where dreaming occurred.
Whatever irritation he holds toward her vanishes. His shoulders droop. Suddenly, he looks like he’s crawled miles through the dense underbrush. The bags under his eyes speak volumes about just how long they’ve stayed awake.
“I don’t know.”
***
Callista slams her fist into the nearest wall. It caves beneath the force of the blow, cracks spider webbing from the impact, brickwork shattering and chunks spraying out.
“We can’t leave without him!” she shouts, the thrumming of power in her body amplifying her voice until it bounces off the remaining brick walls.
Rhodes, seasoned from too many instances of her bad temper, keeps well away from the room, positioned at the doorway. His dark eyes level on hers.
“We can’t go back.” He’s a good actor. Callista hadn’t spent years protected in his basement due to sheer luck. His mannerisms, down to his micro-expressions, are under his complete control. “He understood the risks.”
To the outside world, he is as normal as the Transients want their people to be. Smile and wave. Show no fear. Show indifference to the Transients patrolling the streets day and night for their own “safety.”
And yet, the tremor in his voice betrays years of calculated placidity. The tension between them is drawn-out, and she hates it. Hates what they’ve become, what she’s become. What the Transients made them become.
Because Ravi is bleeding, unconscious, wrists and ankles pinned under bands of clay. Four Transients guard him. The others are scouring the badlands, working their way into the abandoned Mestessite communities on the weathered slopes.
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“We still have to do something,” she hisses.
“Yes. Leave, while we have time.”
Boots scrape on rock outside. Callista presses her lips tight and slams her back into the nearest wall, away from the musty sunlight seeping through the gaping hole she left.
Rhodes dematerializes. From his head downward, a translucent veil ripples like a silky sheet, and he too melts into the walls. Not even a glimmer exposes him.
Moments later, the sunlight vanishes. She holds her breath, straining to listen to the sound of somebody clambering through the hole, boots thumping in the same room they’re hiding in.
The Transient runs a hand over the remains of a crib. He pauses by a shocked tuft of fur, what remains of a stuffed bear, half of its stuffing torn out. Whatever Mestessite baby loved it is long gone.
He mumbles something. Too low to understand, but she thinks she catches a hint of disdain. Something about weakness. His gloved hand guides him along the brick walls. He touches the cracks, mumbling to himself. He strolls past Rhodes, or where she thinks Rhodes is.
Then he pivots and heads toward Callista. She ducks behind the wall, gathering wisps of energy from the sun-baked roof and outside sand. She weaves their power into her body, fortifying herself, muscles compacting and tissues temporarily strengthening.
That’s all Transients are. Enslavers of worlds, conquerors and tyrants, sitting on a throne built out of untold trillions of suffering people spread out all over the grid.
This one is no different. They’re all the same. She wouldn’t be surprised if this Transient was part of the military force that conquered the Mestessines and enslaved the survivors for refusing to join their Empire.
She’s going to rip this Transient apart, like she did to the ones that tried to stop her.
“I see you.”
That’s the only warning she gets before she hears the unmistakable roar of fire. Plumes of fire shatter the wall and slam into her. She transfers some strength into her legs and leaps across the room, breaking through a window and landing outside.
Immediately, sand worms its way through her feet, sucking her down. She growls and tries to push away, but the sand is quick, and strong, its suction burying her to her knees.
She spots the second Transient, eyes blazing blue, burying her. The first stomps toward her, flames blowing out the window. They curl over her head, where she would’ve been if the sand hadn’t sucked her down.
“Callista, catch!”
From another house, Rhodes tosses a brick. She snatches it mid-air and crushes it to rubble, takes a handful, and throws it at the second Transient. The suction stops, sand slackening, as a new wall of compacted sand erupts between the Transient and the projectiles.
Too late–brick punches through the sand and through his body. He jerks like a puppet, limbs twisting and chest heaving, body armor caved in, before he drops to the sand, twitching, bleeding out.
The first Transient breaks through the window, flames whirling around his lithe figure, but she’s ready. She throws the remaining pieces of brick at him.
He collapses in a twitching, bloodied ruin of flesh. Rhodes materializes and stabs him with his knife.
“We need to go,” he says, before dematerializing again and dragging her away from the body. “Now.”
“Ravi’s out there and he needs our help,” she growls.
“We can’t go back. You’re going to kill yourself if you keep pushing your gift like that. Do you want to be gridshocked?”
“That won’t happen.”
“Then why are your muscles still out of proportion?”
She doesn’t have to look to know. Her arms and shoulders are bulging, and her thighs and calves are, too, while her abdomen is normal-sized. Only because she refuses to dissipate the energy she withdrew.
“Ravi–”
“Is gone.”
“No.” Quitting was never an option. Even as Callista’s pushing herself to her limits, she’s piecing together a rough map of the abandoned neighborhood and a route toward Ravi they can take without exposing themselves too much.
“Rhodes, if you distract them, I can take them out. It’ll be quick. I’m a good thrower.”
“Callista.” She doesn’t have to see him to know the hesitance, the disapproval.
“I’ll do it myself.”
“I can’t lose you, too.” The voice is raw, choked out more than anything. His arms materialize as they wrap around her chest. She sprawls to the ground, trying to break his grip, but she’s held up by the disembodied hands and the translucent rippling contour of the body they’re attached to.
“Let me go!” Callista snarls, bucking wildly. Rhodes’s grip tightens, as if he’s the one with the gift of strength and she is nothing more than an angry child.
“I can’t let you kill yourself. He’s gone. We knew the risks. We knew what would happen when we ran away.”
“But we can fight them off. They’re not as strong as they pretend to be.”
Rhodes’s body spasms. He drops her, gasping. His body materializes. And so, too, does the glistening shaft of a metal arrow sticking out of his back.
“Rhodes!” she screams, but the sounds don’t register in her ears. Neither does his ragged cry of pain. A second arrow impales itself on his suddenly outstretched arm. Over where her heart is.
She scoops him over her shoulder and throws herself into the nearest building. A third arrow whizzes past her ear, impaling itself on the door. She slams it shut and runs deeper into the house, depositing Rhodes on a ratty couch.
“I can fix this, I promise, you’ll be okay,” Callista says, resisting the tearful burning of her eyes. She wipes away the moisture and hesitates, fingers paused over the arrow sticking out his back. “Did it… Are you…”
“I’m going to die.” Rhodes screws his eyes shut and curls into himself. “It hit my heart, or lungs, I don’t know.”
“There has to be a way. Something, anything. I can carry you!”
He groans. “I’ll only slow you down. You have to leave me.” Callista shakes her head, balling her hands into fists, but he presses a hand to her lips, smiling weakly. “If you can make it out, that’s enough for me. We knew the risks. If at least one of us makes it out, then we beat them.”
“Rhodes–”
“Callie.” Despite his bleeding wounds, he manages to keep his voice soft, kind, level. “Do it. You have the rest of your life to live, don’t you? Don’t waste it on me. Go.”
She claps her hands to her mouth. “I love you,” she chokes out. Her vision is blurry. Yet, she can tell his eyes are glazing over, his life leaching out drop by drop, dribbling into the couch.
She grits her teeth, pressing her forehead to his.
“Go.”
His voice is tinny, barely a whisper, the last she’ll ever hear from him. It still comes out like the crack of thunder, like he poured every bit of himself into that final command. I love you, he might have said in the echo.
The world flashes white, retinas bleaching out.
Then nothing.
***
The girl’s screams pierce through the silence.
Cora stands. The girl screams and thrashes against her bindings. Purple peers through her half-lidded eyes as she strains against the cloth binding. Threads snap under her bulging muscles, animated life where there had been nothing but skin and bones before.
Liam crouches into a fighting stance, knife held out, waiting. The girl bashes the back of her head into the tree. Rather than concuss her, wood sprays everywhere, embedding into surrounding trees like tiny daggers.
“I’ll kill you all!” she howls, tearing the cloth like tissue paper.
He lunges, knife slicing through the air. She snarls, one hand pushing his arm aside, the other slamming into his chest. He flies several feet back, crashing into a tree, toppling down.
He doesn’t get back up.
Cora stares at his slumped form. Stares at the heaving, hulking girl, whose eyes are ringed purple and who definitely didn’t have the size and mass of a professional bodybuilder before.
“Stop!” Cora shouts, pouring every trace of strength she can find into her shout. The girl pauses, those purple-ringed pupils of her dilating and contracting. Repeating over and over.
Predator. And Cora will be the prey. Her heart thunders. “We don’t want to hurt you,” she says, gesturing at her half-opened backpack, medical supplies peeking out of the rumpled top. “You tried to attack us, and we thought it was better if we talked to you first. Not like this, though.”
“He tried to kill me.”
“He was defending me from you. I’m sorry.” Cora’s voice wavers. “You’ve been through a lot, haven’t you? Lost and alone.”
“Don’t patronize me.”
“I’m not. But I haven’t seen other people except him, and I know we were both lost and alone before we found each other. I’m guessing you are, too.”
The girl makes no move to attack. She doesn’t back down, though. They’re stuck in a staring contest, her unnatural purple eyes triggering some ancient instinct to flee. Cora gulps and holds her ground, because she can’t be weak.
“Why? Why are you acting like this?” The girl flexes her hands. Claws protrude, gleaming black. “Why didn’t you kill me while you had the chance?”
“Why didn’t you kill me after taking my friend out?” Liam is still unresponsive, but his chest is moving. Oh, thank goodness. “I’m not exactly in fighting shape.”
The girl narrows her eyes. “Stop mimicking me.”
Cora sighs. “I thought you were another friend I had.” She rubs her sling, thumb tracing over the edge so it bites into the skin. “But you weren’t. Then you tried to attack me and my friend knocked out. We wanted to help you because you…” Cora finally breaks eye-contact. She gestures at the backpack, then at her arm. “You looked like you needed help. Like us.”
What would Mari say, seeing this new version of Cora? She might say she’s putting up a mask. Which Cora might as well be doing, but damn if she isn’t trying her best to be authentic about it and adopt it as part of her identity.
“I don’t need help. I can keep myself alive with my gift and do whatever I want with it,” the girl says. The conviction isn’t there, though.
For the first time, the purple in her pupils dulls.
Cora offers her hand out. “Please,” she says. “It’s okay to accept help. I used to be like you. I thought I knew what I was doing, but I made a lot of mistakes.”
More than you know, Mari says.
“I want to get to know you. I want to help you.”
“Fuck,” the girl says. The purple fades completely. What’s left is the darkness of the night, the darkest corners of a poorly lit room, the forest canopy itself with the slightest hint of dried brown leaves.
“That’s all I’m good for, right?” Cora glances at the girl. “I act without thinking. You only tried to help, and I… and I–” The girl shouts and places a hand on the nearest tree.
It’s a purple one, and the sizzling starts before her pupils flash purple and she crushes a handful of tree bark into powder.
“I fucked up!” She swings her fist into the fist-sized cavity. The muffled thump leaves gouges deeper into the wood, but the girl shakes her hand as well, bits of wood falling off her bloodied knuckles.
“Stop,” Cora says, wincing at the second blow. The purple in the girl’s eyes goes out, though, so she recoils, shaking her hand while tears stream down her face.
“They’re gone,” she chokes out. “Ravi… Rhodes… I left them to die. I’m a monster.”
“What would’ve happened if you didn’t leave them?”
The girl stares at her bloodied knuckles, rotating her hands and holding them up to a shaft of moonlight. “Then I might’ve been able to save them. Even if it was almost impossible.”
“You’re not a monster.”
“You don’t know me! You don’t know what happened!”
“If you wanted to go back, but you couldn’t, then that doesn’t make you a monster. It's not your fault.”
The girl stares at the hole she blew out of the trunk. She retracts her claws and flexes her hands. Her sleeves droop, and Cora glimpses the criss-crossing scars on her bony wrists.
“How can you be so nice when I attacked you and your friend?”
Liam groans, one arm drifting over his chest. That’s a good sign. The girl traces a finger over her bloodied knuckles. Some of the blood smears on the back of her hand. The rest stains her fingers bright red, but she doesn’t seem to care, running them over the wounds again and again.
“I want to help,” she says. “You look like you need it, and besides, I care.” Care! Sure, Mari says, but Cora tunes her out. Not real, just a product of her trauma, though she’s starting to get concerned about how frequent the voice is getting. “I don’t know about Liam, though. Liam?”
Upon hearing his name, he staggers to his feet, spreading his hand wide over his sternum. He winces, testing different areas of his chest with two fingers.
“That will leave one hell of a bruise,” he says casually, like he hasn’t just been struck with the type of strength that can crush trees into powder. “You’re strong, alright. Yes, I want to help, too. We’re all in this together.”
The girl recoils. Briefly, her pupils glow before Cora shakes her head and the light dies down.
“Meet my friend, Liam. Liam, meet…?”
The girl sniffles. Her eyes look bloodshot more than anything, like she hasn’t slept well the past week or two.
“Callista.” She presses her bloodied hand to her uniform, over her collarbones. A salute, if Cora had to guess. Or a greeting. “My name is Callista cio rei Tersanova.”