I walked silently through the dark corridors towards the parking lot with Judin following me closely, when I came across the bright beam of a fageine's flashlight on the floor. I hid behind the rocks at a corner and pulled Judin into the darkness, before they saw him.
Beyond the rocks there was an unconscious body, swallowed up to the neck by the gelatinous surface of the fageine, while the creature's weapon also laid abandoned on the floor.
A smell hit my nostrils... Blood... Human blood.
Kadi.
The fageine then engulfed his head, penetrating the skin with those toxic enzymes that woke him up in pure agony. Kadi's lungs heaved for air, but only the acid entered his body, as the blood leaked from his abdomen and painted the inside of the fageine red. Kadi was dying.
There was no explanation for the urge to save him that exploded in me, but the self-destructive human nature didn't need to be explained in the attempt to make it stop.
When my feet were about to take me to him, Judin muttered behind me:
"If you go, you won't come back." I stared at him. "And if I'm not dead yet, it must be because you guys need me alive... Then get me out of here NOW!"
I raised an eyebrow.
"Remind me why should I save you."
"Because I am... Useful."
Yes... He was.
So I yelled at the top of my lungs at the fageine, getting his attention. The creature sped forward towards me and I evaded his attack, while Judin didn't.
The fageine slammed with colossal force against the rock I'd been hiding in, and the stones crashed down on the remaining human, burying him like a fly that shouldn't be in the way... And killing him.
Because of me.
I covered my mouth to muffle my gasping breath, not able to believe what I'd done, while my other hand gripped the rocks of the wall just as I still held on to the hopes that I wasn't what I was struggling so hard not to be. I gulped in the dark, staring at where the shadows turned to monsters... And there I saw only my own.
But now that Kadi was dying, there was no time for remorse.
With the distraction I could reach the fageine's weapon left behind on the ground and I immediatly took it. I fired at the enemy, grazing him. The creature roared and flinched as my second shot hit him closer to the eye, but before I could fire a third, the creature's body grew as more fageines merged with him and became a mega-fageine.
The enemy reached over me and threw projections around, cornering my body.
I squeezed the trigger once more, but the gun choked in my hands, unloaded. I tried to dodge through the creature's projections, his acidic body almost touching my face, but I couldn't escape his embrace and my body was trapped between the enemy and the cold stones of the wall. I could see the enzymes behind the barrier of his skin rushing to dissolve me, while Kadi's scream was frozen in the depths of that fageine ocean. In front of me was that eye, the darkness of the enemy's pupil engulfing me... My target.
I felt the courage burst inside me to the point that, with a battle cry, I plunged my right arm into the acidic body of the mega-fageine, letting the corrosive liquid inside him envelop me up to the elbow.
I roared in pain, feeling the enzymes seeping through my pores like snakes digging tunnels of venom into my body. I was being torn apart and remade in a way that shouldn't exist in this universe, my body from the fingertips to the elbow turning into a crime against the laws of nature. I simply wanted to bite it off, but contained myself with all my strength.
I reached inside the creature with a strength I didn't know I had, my palm burning like a supernova and my arm threatening to fall out. I locked my teeth, cupped the fageine's eye between my fingers and, burning as if in the depths of a blue sun, I tightened my knuckles around the sphere.
And, when the creature roared around me, I plucked his eye out.
The mega-fageine immediately dissolved into an opaque mud, releasing Kadi onto the red-stained stone.
I ran to Kadi and collapsed beside him, not having the strength to stay up a second longer. I stared at him through the tears in my eyes, covered from head to toe with pale lines carved beneath the skin by the fageine enzymes, as his blood drained through the pierced abdomen. My right arm was also covered up to the elbow by those pale lines, in an organic design as clear as a white lace glove forever imprinted on me. The memory of that pain had been branded on me, so that every time I looked at it, I would see how close to death I had come; and how easy I could come again.
My mortality had been proven. And immortalized.
I tried to get up and pull Kadi with me, but I couldn't, after my strength had been sucked through my fingers. I stumbled back to the ground, but then my body was lifted and enveloped in a warm hug I let envelop me.
I was laying on the back of a beast, his speed taking me far away from there.
"Kadi..." I growled.
"He's with Korrok and Deinos." Lupan replied, carrying me across Venerna. "Where's Judin? Didn't you have to rescue him?"
"They killed him..." I whispered, each word a pang of pain in my conscience. "I couldn't save him..." The canouro turned his head slightly towards me and sniffed my thoughts.
"I can smell your lie from here, Donecea..." The canouro hissed. "He's dead because of you, isn't he?"
My fists clenched, gathering the strength I was slowly regaining.
"It was him or Kadi."
"I never said you were wrong." Lupan joked, disarming me until a seriousness settled into his tone: "Just... Don't become like us."
Perhaps it was already too late for that warning.
"Don't tell Korrok... Please." I asked softly and Lupan slowly confirmed with his head.
"I saw nothing."
• • • ֍ • • •
The revolution's leaders led us to the Venerna parking lot, filled with a chaos of ships, screams and running. By the time Lupan stopped, I had regained enough strength to be able to stand up. Kadi, however, was emerging and sinking into unconsciousness, followed by a trail of blood.
We ran to the Hasta and placed Kadi on the ship's floor. I grabbed my bag of iatric supplies and rummaged through it, looking for a silvery goo that I spilled across the crater in Kadi's abdomen. The substance molded to his cut and stopped the bleeding.
But he had already lost too much blood...
Kadi let out a last breath, and when I rested my fingers on his neck, I didn't feel a pulse.
He had gone into shock.
Shit. Shit. SHIT.
My hands landed on his chest and I pressed him with a force I didn't know I still had, releasing in a timed rhythm in an attempt to mimic his natural heartbeat. I counted the impulses, 1 to 30, then did a rescue breath, 1 to 30, breath, 1 to 30, breath... My arms burned, my knees against the floor creaked, and every muscle of mine asked me to stop, but I just couldn't... Or else Kadi would never come back.
His life was in my hands - tired, aching, bruised and scarred hands... But hands that would never let him die as long as they could fight for him.
"What are you doing?" I heard Lupan ask.
"If his heart stops, I beat it for him..." I whispered, panting. "That's what iatrics do... That's what humans do."
1 to 30, breath, 1 to 30, breath, 1 to 30, breath...
He wasn't going to die on my hands!
There was no way of knowing how much blood he'd lost, and I couldn't give him mine, since I didn't know if Kadi had, at some point, become contaminated with the aericosis. I couldn't risk it.
I kept my hands beating his heart, the one he'd once told me was capable of making his ship explode if it stopped.
I couldn't stop.
"Donecea..." Deinos's whisper reached me. "He won't wake up..."
1 to 30, breath, 1 to 30, breath, 1 to 30, breath...
"It's not working..." Lupan muttered, under the sound of my sweat dripping.
1 to 30, breath, 1 to 30, breath, 1 to 30, breath...
"He's dead, sapiens... Not everyone comes back."
No. No. NO!
I felt them trying to pull me away, but I couldn't go.
"He's not dead yet..." The incoherent whispers escaped me as my eyes pleaded him to open his. "He can't be..."
Kadi couldn't have been rescued from so close to death only to slip back into it just after... The universe couldn't be so cruel to the point of letting that happen... Or could it? I sighed. There was no pity to look at us from afar and spare us from our mistakes; there was no incomprehensible force that, among all the species of Itopis, chose us to escape the consequences of our failures.
There was no mercy if not from us.
I roared, the world shaking around me, and I no longer knew if it was really falling apart or if it was just me. I blinked at the tears that mingled with sweat in my eyes, and cringed beneath the ache in my muscles that mixed with the pain in my heart.
Kadi was gone.
But I still had so many questions... About who he was, what he dreamed of, what he had lost... All the answers now buried in his silence; and everything I once wanted to tell him now impossible to be heard.
I felt the absence of him digging into me like a knife, making a scar so deep that I felt it cross my chest, letting the darkness spill and pour over him in the tears I cried.
I couldn't say goodbye anymore...
I wondered if his eye color would fade from my memories, however hard I tried to keep them intact; just as I would have forgotten the color of my mother's eyes if it wasn't the same one that stared at me in the mirror.
"There's nothing else to do..." Some of the beings around me whispered, so far away now that I plunged into that opening, with no strength to return to the surface.
No... There was one more thing I could do...
Something I didn't even know if it would work...
A terrible idea...
But my last one.
I let go of Kadi's chest with my reluctant fingers, lowered myself shakily to his ear and let the word out through my lips, a plea, an invocation:
"Kitten."
• • • ֍ • • •
When the fevine exploded out of Kadi's husk and lunged at me, I knew I was dead.
The beast pinned me to the ground with his claws like a cage of razors, a terrifying roar ripping through his throat to reach my ears. One movement of his jaw and my head would be severed; one press from his paws and my ribs would pierce the lungs below; one choice of his, and I would no longer exist... So none of the beings around - Deinos, Lupan or Korrok - dared challenge him.
"You know what I would do if you called me by that name again..." The beast whispered, his saliva dripping onto my face, his breath searing my courage. "And yet you did it... For him."
I couldn't stray from hope and stammered:
"Is he still alive... In there?
The fevine showed me his teeth, maybe smiling, maybe considering ripping me apart with those blades.
"I was going to let him die..." The beast hissed. Was? So he didn't? The fevino had enough time to recreate himself inside Kadi, if he wanted to emerge when the human was dead; but now I wondered if he'd surfaced before it was too late for Kadi... "Because no one seemed to care about his fate... Not even him. But then you called me, even knowing that I would come to kill you." I stopped breathing. "Perhaps a human for whom someone sacrifices themselves like this is worth saving..."
I swallowed hard, working up the courage to let the words stumble out of my mouth:
"Why didn't you kill him before? When he set foot in your world? When you let him share your control?"
The creature studied me for a moment, surprised that I was smart enough to know that a fevino that had missed the opportunity to chew a human's spine hadn't done so by accident.
"I once knew that a being from the revolution was going to my world... And that he was a human." The fevino told me, stepping back just enough so I could breathe, but not run away. "I was so exhausted from everything the Aulics were doing to my world that there was nothing I wanted more than to melt that damned palace. So I decided to infiltrate the revolution through that human, sparing him." I wondered if, deep down, Kadi knew about that... "But now tell me, Donecea, why should I spare you?"
I couldn't think of a reason.
"I don't care if you spare me... All I want is for you to keep protecting Kadi."
The fevino considered me for a moment that could have lasted the rest of my life. And, at the end, he growled:
"So different from the last time... Maybe this I can respect."
So the beast tore itself in half and peeled to the ground, leaving Kadi in his place like an unbreakable pillar, without scars, pain or death.
I collapsed sobbing onto his chest and he hugged me like it was the first and last time.
• • • ֍ • • •
Korrok ordered Lupan and Deinos to get out of the ship and rush the rest of the people, when the fageines burst through the parking lot wall. Chaos exploded all around. Screams echoed through the cave, so loud it was almost impossible to hear anything but fear. The shots of the fageine soldiers rocked and crushed the ships, getting closer and closer to blowing holes in their walls.
"How did they find Venerna?!" Korrok roared.
"It was the metriona. He forced Judin to send our coordinates to the Aulics." I said softly and saw the vorrampe punch the wall of the Hasta. "The metriona won."
Korrok's blood pooled in his head.
"Not for long." He growled and then opened the ship's door, letting the sounds invade our ears so intense I stumbled back. "They can take this entire city down... BUT THEY WON'T TAKE US WITH IT!" Even immersed in chaos, his roar was all I heard.
Korrok pulled a glowing cartridge from his pocket and, with all the strength of his vorrampe muscles, he hurled it against the stone wall that separated the cave from the unforgivable ocean outside.
And the explosiostrengthn let the black tsunami in.
"You're drowning Venerna!" Kadi roared.
"Venerna is already DEAD!"
Deinos and Lupan jumped into the Hasta and we all ran to the front window, where we saw that the water was already half-filling the parking lot, rising higher and higher as the forces of the ocean crashed through the cavern wall with each wave.
The entire slope roared and shook, over its frail bases, and Korrok steered the ship at full speed against the current. The Hasta struggled but went foward, followed by the other revolution's ships, and, shivering as if it would break apart at any moment, it emerged into the dark expanse of the ocean.
We took off beyond the surface of that world. Ahead of us, the emptiness of an unforgivable universe; behind, the slope collapsing in on itself and disappearing into the ravening waves of the dark sea below.