Page 28 of Command

“He needs a doctor,” the first voice formed into something recognizable. “And blood. You want him to live, don’t you?”

The second time Threxin woke, it was to banging and swearing in a foreign tongue. Something shook underneath him.

“Holy shit…” Another human, male this time.

“I know. Just hurry.”

“The donor?”

“Here,” Renza said, and he was close, so it was safe. Threxin let blackness take him once more.

There was commotion, some pain, and the feeling of something burrowing under his skin with a sharp bite.

“Wait, what are you—” A human female, high-pitched, alarmed.

Then something exploded. Clattered to the floor. Heat splattered across his face.

“Shit,” the female swore. “Shit!”

“What was this?” an invisible Renza had asked from behind Threxin’s closed eyelids.

“Air… He tried to inject him with air. Fuck.”

Air was good… All living things required air. It seemed such an unimportant thing to panic over.

“Clean him.”

“Y-yes.”

Was he dirty? Warm, wet pressure on his neck lulled him back to sleep.

Alina

After all the blood, the stitches, and watching Renza break the neck of the doctor performing Threxin’s blood transfusion and then tried to take a stab at killing the invaderagain, Alina was spent. Somehow seeing another death didn’t hit her quite the same way as everything she’d already witnessed, though the way Renza killed the man right before her eyes with quick efficiency was arguably the most intimately disturbing of the bunch. Or it should’ve been.

When after all that Renza told her to “dampen” the uhyre’s “apertures,” Alina didn’t think much of it and was even glad for another task. But when she actually got a bucket of warm water from her shower ration and kneeled at the bed with a hand towel under Renza’s watchful gaze, the situation suddenly felt much more awkward than she had expected.

He looked slightly ridiculous, sitting in her comparatively tiny plastic desk chair, feet splayed and talons kneading into the rainbow throw pillow in his lap. She hoped he wasn’t gonna shred it. Her dad had given her that pillow before his Upload.

Alina had dampened the corner of the towel and then,with some trepidation, dabbed the fabric to the grayish-blue slit nearest to her—a gash as wide as her pointer finger located along Threxin’s mid-rib. She’d caught the excess stream of water as it ran down his skin, sliding it back up the dimly glowing opening. The edges of the aperture had softened before her eyes even though the crevice itself tightened in response, and she could’ve sworn it glowed more brightly.

A wave of nausea passed over her as Alina realized anew that these were literalholesin the alien’s body. How deep did they go? How far inside was that blue radiance? If she went too deep with the towel, would she hit bone? Or was the light just beneath the surface, another layer of luminescent skin? She could probably just stick her finger in there and…

“Continue.” Renza’s voice brought her out of her morbid curiosity.

Alina forced herself through the awkward intimacy of the act. She focused on the more innocuous parts of him first. The splayed ribs, the striated shoulders, the dips and valleys of carved arms. That was when she noticed the comms patch attached to his inner wrist. It was biometrically locked, of course, but Renza saw her hesitate there. Without a word, he leaned over to peel the patch from his brother’s wrist and tuck it into his pocket.

Then she moved to the neck and face, tracing the aperture running up one side of his throat. Before she even registered the bone-conducting earpiece behind his ear, Renza was there, snatching that away as well.

“You know they’re genelocked,” Alina muttered. Renza grunted.

She’d left the expanse of the alien’s chest for last. At that point she worked her way through the apertures around the wound. By the time Alina reached the jagged ladder of his abdomen, she had shaped the process into a routine in her head. There was nothing awkward here. Not a big deal. She was just taking care of a wounded patient. The fact that shehad to gently trail her hands down the lines of his obliques until they disappeared beneath the blanket low on his hips was nothing special. Alina was mentally steeling herself to peel back the fabric when Renza rose in her peripheral vision.

“Good,” he grunted. “Do this five times each day.”

“That’s it? Just the… torso?”

Please say it’s just the torso.

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