He turned his back to me and headed toward his ship, judged more by himself than by me. My silence hurt as much as if I had said something - not because my opinion mattered, but because, to him, anyone's did, imbued with what he thought everybody was thinking. I remained silent and followed him to where the collectors were concentrated.
After rummaging through the trash, we smelled like rejection - the scent of camouflage. I was trying not to think about the layer of hungry interstellar germs that covered us, expecting the least mistake of our immune system to feast on us. Maybe it would at least be better than to be devoured by the collectors.
We hid our faces in the rags, but our hands didn't deny our kind.
When we crossed the landfill, some groups of collectors were completely indifferent to us, chatting absently about what they had found in the junk. But some focused on our footsteps with special attention... Until the conversations around us fell completly silent.
When the screams exploded around us in languages I couldn't understand, I knew we were in danger.
All those dangerous creatures rushed towards us and ripped off our disguises, surrounding us on all sides. We raised our hands in surrender, but something told me the collectors would have no mercy. Their screams around us were pure cacophony, since my translator could only catch one word or another:
"Throw them in the sun like the garbage" Some suggested. "No! We need their organs!" Others screamed. "I want the skin!" And then they started fighting over our parts.
The translator was heating up in my head, not knowing which language I should use... And so I spoke in the only one that seemed to make sense at that time: hers.
My tongue replicated the sounds and, without the human beside me being able to understand me, I yelled:
"We are iatrics!" A half-lie. "We came here to help you!" A whole lie. And then silence took the platform.
Every mortal was cursed by its finitude; and all wanted the salvation that beings like the iatrics promised to bring. We just needed to build the illusion that we had it... As we always did.
"We brought supplies. Check it out." I nodded at my bag on the floor and watched it get attacked by claws and thorns, until its contents were scattered across the dirt on the floor.
"What's happening?" The stranger muttered.
"They think we've come to heal them..." I whispered in our language, our secret.
"Cure them of what?!"
"Of anything!"
He nodded and looked at me like he knew what to do... At least one of us seemed to have a plan.
The beings surrounding us opened the circle, allowing me to run and, kneeling in the mud that covered the platform, collect the scattered iatric supplies - what I did until a shadow came over me.
I raised my eyes slowly to the being in front, an upright centipede, with countless sharp legs reaching from his trunk to dangle before me. His "face" was made up of overlapping pieces that looked like nothing I'd ever seen before, as if he'd tried to be a bug and got distracted by a few additions.
"Follow me." He demanded in the language I shouted, and I obeyed.
I sent a look over my shoulder at the stranger. He could just as easily take his ship and leave me behind, to be dissected by the collectors after my services were no longer needed - it wasn't like I was the only iatric in the galaxy who could help them, after all... But when his gaze met mine, I believed for a brief moment that a human was capable of not abandon another... That maybe it was possible for me to trust him.
"Why do you collectors live here?" I asked the centipede as we walked toward something, trying to keep my voice steady. "Wouldn't it be better to live on some planet? Where you could get... Jobs?"
The creature squeaked, perhaps finding me irritating... Or stupid. Still, he did me the courtesy of replying:
"In our worlds there is only slavery. Each and every grain we plant is to feed the Aulic's soldiers... Each metallic nugget we pluck from the ground is to strengthen their armor... Each of our children is to increase their numbers. Why would we give our blood if they would use it just to grow stronger?"
"Maybe the Aulics need these soldiers..." I stammered. "Maybe they're fighting an important war."
"Whatever war it is, it's not ours."
I followed the creature to a cave in one of the rubbish mountains supported by metal beams, and I crossed a thin fabric curtain, tied with unusual care to separate what was hid there from the brutality outside. Behind the curtains, plunged into a darkness broken only by few lights, hundreds of makeshift stretchers were distributed, with beings laid down and tied up.
My feet stopped, but the centipede pushed me inside. I heard the creatures agonize, whispering and begging to be released as if the ties made them feverish. That was painfull to see even after I had been warned about that - I wasn't prepared to see it; I would never be.
One of the beings near the entrance had soft eyes and the low cry of an abandoned puppy, as if he had never felt he was enough to not be lonely... And I understood his pain as mine.
"The rebels passed through here a few noxdiems ago." The centipede being said, attracting my attention. "They killed some of us, took others, and the ones we didn't let them take became like this..." I looked at all of them.
"Why are they tied up?"
The centipede started to respond, but, before it could, the trapped closer creature muttered in the same language we talked, an ancient and corrupted one, so low I had to lean over to hear him:
"The Queen is calling me..." Queen... I wish I didn't know what he was talking about - Itopis was ruled by Aulics, not kings, after all - but I had read enough about the Queen to know I should fear her. "I need to reach her... Help me, please... Help me escape from the descendants of beasts..." His pupils dilated and his claws took my arm, which had come too close.
I tried to pull away, but when I faced the horrors and screams that exploded in the darkness of his eyes, calling me inside like a black hole, I froze. His emptiness was like glue to my attention and I could no longer hear anything but what was emerging from him, words digging paths from my ears to my mind: "The Gods of Andromeda are coming..." Gods... Nobody spoke about gods since the Empire abolished religions, on the grounds that they only prevented their faithful from understanding what death really was... But when this new belief came to explain it, it probaby became too hard for these creatures not to believe. "They will burn our bodies and our ashes will feed their lands... But those of us who become their children will be spared..."
Spared? From what?! Was that what I was thinking abo-
When the deafening sound of engines came to life outside, I broke free from the creature's influence, staggering backward as if waking up from a nightmare.
I ran out of the cave, and, when I pulled back the curtain, I was blinded by a light that I didn't know if it came from the sun or the stranger's ship. I blinked until my eyes adjusted to the brightness and noticed the vehicle take off and circle around the platform, causing chaos below among the collectors.
"You didn't come to help us, did you?" The centipede grunted at my back.
"No." I muttered. "But I will".
"Not everyone has the luxury to have hope, iatric... And I wouldn't put mine on a human."
Then he turned to the darkness of the cave and disappeared into it.
The stranger's ship descended in a dive to the platform, driving the collectors away with the power of its engines. I ran towards it, and, as I crossed the path, those beings exploded behind me. I could hear their teeth opening and snaping with me in the crosshairs, claws scraping the floor and threatening to pull me into the depths below the trash.
I tried to run even faster, but it didn't matter how hard I tried, because the beasts would always be faster. My muscles burned, sweat running down the valley of my spine, my heart beating so hard that I thought I'd never be able to get back to normal, and all I could see was the ship's door open with that hand held out to me.
When the beasts flew over me, my fingers wrapped around the stranger's and then he pulled me up to salvation... Or to demise.