He woke, as if after a fever, with aches in his joints and hollow pang in his gut. Lifting his head only disoriented him further, because he didn’t recognize the hall he was in.
There were bodies on the floor, leading all the way to where the corridor turned. And blood. So much blood.
He flattened his palm on the floor so he could push himself upright, and his hand was the same color as the dried puddle around it. His arm was caked in red, like a glove, all the way up past his elbow. The other arm was no better. He stared at his hands and began to tremble, wings twitching against the floor. Bits of memory flaked off in his head, mimicking the ones floating off his bent wrists. The Surgeon warning them. Tsonet’s exhortations. The thrill of sweeping through the halls in search of their oppressors, freed finally to do something about them. The feel of his first kill.
Living flesh was softer than the bodies of the dead. It had felt too easy. And the catharsis of it had been like a drug, flooding him with rage and hunger, until it had blotted everything else out.
He forced himself to sit upright. His memories of the past… day? Hours? Were spotty. He didn’t remember collapsing here, even. What had happened while he’d been passed out? Where were the other servants? And Tsonet?
He closed his eyes and started to press his face into his hands. The color of his palms stopped him, and the stink.
No time for mourning yet. Maybe not ever. He needed to know what had happened. Who’d won—had anyone? And then… his head dipped. What else, but cleaning? Who would if they didn’t?
Nothing changed. Not really. Or at least, not until someone discovered he’d been one of the castrates responsible for the carnage. Then, perhaps, he would die. Maybe today would be the day. Until then… if they came for him, they would find him on his knees, doing something necessary.
Like all the servants, he’d been born with a name. Unlike many of them, he’d known his dam for long enough to remember the name she’d been dubbed: Shell, because her hide had been reminiscent of the inside of an oyster, the same shimmery iron gray. Shell had cared for them in the nursery until one day she hadn’t come back, the victim of some male’s entertainment. That had been during his sixth revolution, but he still vividly remembered her violet eyes because he had inherited them.
His father was some guard, he guessed, because most of the servants were born of the liaisons of the guards with the females provided to them. Those males never descended to the servants’ quarters. It was beneath them to interact with menials, beyond the service those menials could provide them.
He’d been nine revolutions when he’d seen what that service entailed, because he’d been sent with a meal and arrived to find those entertainments in progress. The males had assigned him to the door, and used him for the next half a day to go back and forth from the kitchens with their demands. And when it was done, only six of the seven females walked away. The seventh was cooling on the floor, and he had realized… that must have been his dam’s fate. To lie like this, forgotten, even her name stripped from her in death.
For a long time, he’d stared at her corpse, his heart beating too hard and his throat closed. What had inspired him to look for something to wrap her in? He didn’t know. Only that she deserved to be covered, so that no one would gawk at her broken limbs and twisted body. The sheet on the bed… that had served. Served admirably, because no one had bothered to use the bed. And since he had been put to work cleaning the day he could stand upright, it felt natural to fetch water and a sponge and set to work putting her to rights.
The wrapping on that first body had been awkward. He’d struggled with his poorly coordinated limbs, and he’d been so much smaller than her; even a female had more heft and height than a stripling who’d already been neutered. And after that, he’d set her shoulders on the tiny float he’d used to tow the cleaning supplies into the room and pulled her by the legs, all the way back to the servants’ quarters, where the adults had assembled to stare at his offering.
And then, silently, they’d fixed the poor work he’d done of it, tightening the sheet and strapping it with the thin cloths he’d seen in their closet all his life without knowing they had a purpose. One of the adults vanished, returned with a sprig of sweetly scented flowers. They’d tucked it alongside her shrouded face.
Later, after sunrise, they’d burned her: before the court woke, and when the sunlight would make the fire harder to see.
“And because,” one of the watchers said, a male who never smiled, “where they go, it is ever dawn. That’s why they receive the everdawn flowers. As symbol of that promise.”
“Whose promise is that?” he’d asked.
“The Living Air’s.”
He hadn’t asked who or what the Living Air was. He hadn’t had to, standing timidly on the lawn in the cold, feeling the breeze off the nearby sea push past his slight body to tease the pyre’s flames into snapping like banners. How easy it would be, to fly on that updraft to glory. That some glory might be permitted them was shocking. That it came to them only after death, Fitting. Their lives didn’t matter.
Maybe in some ways, the dead were luckier than the living. Maybe in most ways.
He learned the art of preparing bodies for the pyre. There were plenty to practice on, and since he was old enough to clean, and good enough at it to be sent often, he was often the first to find the bodies. He became deft at it. He couldn’t say he enjoyed the work, but he felt compelled to do it well: to wipe them clean of filth, to straighten mangled limbs, to send them to the fire with as much dignity and care as possible. And he became the one who picked the flowers; who knew where they grew, and who dried them so they’d be available all year. Fresh was sweetest, and he loved the silky petals when they were newly picked, and the way his fingers grew damp when he squeezed the cut stem. But dried they had a powerful poignancy when set against a face that would never again open its eyes, and their perfume then was like a secret.
It was Oviin who called him Everdawn first.
Oviin, who’d seen things so clearly. Whose gentleness had not been resignation, or exhaustion, the way Everdawn’s was. Who had loved, despite their grotesque lives. Who had moderated all their excesses, whether those excesses had been anger, grief, or apathy.
“You are like these flowers,” Oviin had said to him. “You are a reminder of hope.”
“I am a reminder of nothing but endings,” he’d replied, but it had been so hard, so hard not to believe Oviin when Oviin said anything.
“You are beautiful and kind,” Oviin had said. “And one day, you will know it.” And had followed the words with an embrace that had left Everdawn speechless; speechless and named something more meaningful than the handful of sounds he’d been assigned at birth.
He’d never told anyone that name, and yet, that day was the last day anyone had called him anything else. Oviin was irresistible: a source of goodness against which none of them had defense, even the most cynical among them. That he’d inspired such devotion had been fortunate, for had anyone dared speak a word against him, they would have had to answer to his nestbrother… and Tsonet was everything Oviin wasn’t: angry, aggressive, unforgiving. Protecting Oviin had given Tsonet an outlet for his rage; loving him, a relief from it. They’d been inseparable, until the alien came.
But his loss had been obvious and expected. The rest of them suffered in silence, and never knew what light they were missing because they couldn’t allow themselves to name it, and know it gone.
The cleaning supplies were in the closet, and the mundanity struck Everdawn as absurd, and painful. Of course, some things never changed. The palace might writhe in the throes of revolt, bodies might litter the halls like the detritus after a celebration, and still, someone must clean and put things neatly where they belonged. Towing the float behind him, Everdawn wondered where the remaining servants were. He had a vague memory of Tsonet leading a large group out of the palace—had they left completely then? And what had happened? Was happening still, possibly?
Did it matter? There was work to do, and someone had to do it. Already the miasma rising through the halls was worse than anything he’d ever smelled. Fortunately most of the bodies were fit only for disposal. Victims, Everdawn would prepare for the pyre. Those who’d assaulted them he did not scruple to assign to disposal. He’d seen males fling their enemies from the balconies and leave the bodies to rot on the ground, so it wasn’t as if they treated one another any better.
It would be a very, very long job with no one to help him. But the only servants he saw as he began inching his way down the first hall were dead.
Everdawn was on his fourth corridor when he lifted his head and saw a living being. For several moments he could only stare blankly at the male, and then he returned to work, because the limbs torn from this body were scattered all over the hall and he wanted to pile them all on the corpse before towing it to the disposal.
“What are you doing?” the male asked.
This felt like an incredibly stupid question, and being asked it exhausted him. The elite of the palace had castrated him and every other male born to the females they put to work servicing their guards, specifically so those castrates could do all the menial chores their betters felt beneath them. What else would Everdawn be doing, except this? “I’m cleaning,” he said. And remembered to finish, “my-better.”
“Have you been… how long…” The male frowned. “Stay here.”
As if he would be done with the work in this corridor anytime soon. Everdawn’s reply was mechanical—“Yes, my-better”—and he continued collecting pieces. The male strode past him, vanishing around the turn; probably gone for good, once he found something better to do than trouble a servant doing the necessary work of making the palace habitable again. Everdawn dragged the newest body against the wall and pushed the teethbroom over the floor, watching the dried blood feather away. Usually a walking pass with a teethbroom was enough to clean a floor. These corridors required him to stand in place and wait for it to eat through the layers. He’d heard there were more powerful cleaning implements, but they would never have been given to the palace servants. Anything that strong might have been disassembled for parts that could become weapons.
It made cleaning time-consuming, but what else did he have to do?
Everdawn had made it to the next body when the male reappeared. “You!”
He halted and went to his knees, on the grime because stepping forward onto the cleaned floor could have been construed as insolence. Everdawn had killed people, but that had been… some dream that had ended, where he’d acted like a maddened animal, drunk on the hope of freedom and retribution. This was the life he recognized.
The other male strode to him. “You wrapped the body?”
Of course he’d found one of the only servants Everdawn had uncovered amid the carnage. “Yes, my-better.”
Silence for so long, Everdawn almost looked up. Then the male snapped, “Come with me.”
Rising, Everdawn rested the broom against the wall and followed, no doubt to his end.
But the male did not kill him. Instead, he led Everdawn to a part of the palace he’d never seen. The mosaics framing its door announced it as an important place, because the tiles were so small and the detail so exquisite, and the scenes depicted formed not just a ring around the door but took up the entirety of the wall. They were also astonishingly explicit. Everdawn stared at the many macabre injuries glorified on that wall and revised his opinion. He was not being taken to be killed, but to be tortured. What else, when the servants had so much to answer for? And he had killed, so of course he would pay for it.
As they entered the antechamber past the door, the male called, “I have recruited help.”
Help…?
An irritated voice Everdawn didn’t recognize yelled, “Well, send them back! We’ve got people dying here!”
“Go that way,” the male said, pointing Everdawn to another hall. “And do what they tell you.”
Mystified, Everdawn did as commanded, and passed into a large room where many corpses were on the floor—no, not corpses, because they were twitching and moving, so they were still alive. They’d been set on the floor nearly elbow-to-elbow, crowding up to the edges of the enormous tanks in which several people were floating. Startled, Everdawn hesitated, only to hear in clipped Chatcaavan: “Well? Can you tie a bandage? /Speaker-singer/ save me, we’re using actual bandages. This is a travesty.”
Everdawn gaped at the alien, the actual, living, clothed and uncollared alien, who bared his teeth in a ferocious scowl when Everdawn didn’t move.
“Well?”
“I… I can wrap bandages, yes.”
“Then stop staring like an idiot and help me with this newest gushing wound.”
“Y-yes my-better.”
“And stop that my-bettering, it’s going to make communicating take too long. Press here. Good. ANDREA, BRING MORE OF THESE STONE AGE MATERIALS PLEASE!”
“Coming!”
Fortunately, Everdawn’s only task was to push his palms against the padding the alien had guided his hands onto, or the eruption of this newest alien—also clothed, and female!—would have paralyzed him. Did, because… that was a female, wasn’t it? He’d heard that alien females had fewer arms, but still had breasts, and this felt nonsensical and yet the evidence was in front of him.
The alien female dropped a box beside them and started stripping the packing tape. Like the male, her Chatcaavan was fluent; unlike him, she didn’t bite the words as if trying to tear out their throats. “Thank God they had these in the back somewhere. No idea why, either. No word on when we’ll get more materials, since they’re still fighting up there and the hospital is just as overloaded as we are.”
“What a mess,” the first alien growled, his hands flying over the body. As Everdawn watched, disbelieving, the male ripped the uniform tunic beneath him apart with a laser scalpel, addressed the source of the worst of the bleeding gashes, then used the same scalpel to slice the dying flesh off a horrifying burn. “Get me the gel—thanks, Andrea. All right, you, we’re ready for wrapping. Do I have to teach you how?”
“I… no.”
The alien nodded, a weird, quick head jerk similar to the Chatcaavan but too fast. “Be quick.” He went to the next body, leaving Everdawn to apply himself to this newest form of work. It was… different. Wrapping a living body. The male under him was not conscious, but he flinched and whimpered when Everdawn started tightening the fabric. Nervously, he glanced at the face, but the male hadn’t woken.
He would think of it as just another corpse. One that needed tenderness, and care as to its dignity. And… and speed, because the minute twitches were beginning to dislodge the gel-soaked bandage over the burn. Everdawn lunged for it and strapped it to the thigh, and his fingers remembered even as his mind gibbered in terror that he was doing something wrong, killing someone by accident. Bad enough to kill in a terrible rage—had he truly been angry enough to do it?—but to kill by accident?
“Over here,” the alien said when Everdawn straightened.
So Everdawn went.
With each body he tended, he grew faster, more confident, until soon he was applying himself to each wound as the alien finished with them, and they were bent over the victims together. Because these were victims, and of some skirmish unrelated to the palace. Everdawn had seen many kinds of trauma, but these males had been hurt by weapons he couldn’t identify. So many burns! Nor were these palace guards, for they wore uniforms unfamiliar to him. Strangers, then, for whom he could safely feel something. Compassion, maybe. Oviin would have urged it.
He thought often of Oviin while working. Oviin, who had been gentle with everyone, who had suffered their lot quietly. Oviin would have done this work, had he been here. Had he not been murdered.
Oviin had held Everdawn once, when Everdawn had been thinking about ending himself. How the other castrate had guessed, Everdawn would never know, because he hadn’t allowed even a whisper of his intention to escape him. But he’d gone to his rude pallet and found Oviin waiting there, and the other castrate had gathered him close and stroked his mane and said nothing, because… what could have been comforting? To them?
But the touch had drained the madness from him, and the following day he woke knowing he would keep going. He hadn’t thought of that as kindness, because what was their life but an endless string of cruelties? But that touch… that touch had reminded him of the breeze he’d felt on the lawn during that first rite. The one that had made him suck in a cold, bright breath and feel, briefly, the shocking openness of the sky, and the thought that one day he might be allowed to rise into it. To experience that again… he would have done anything. Even live.
And then there were no bodies left to tend. The alien leaned back on his knees, pressing his hands into his lower back and stretching. “Is that it?”
“For now,” the female said. She’d been moving around the room, checking the other bodies, when she hadn’t been at their sides. “The stable ones are stable. The ones we’re going to lose are… probably going to die, but we can’t do anything about it without the tools.”
“Surgeons still in the theater?”
“And an hour late, too. Both of them.” The female sighed. “Triage says we’re not going to get another raft for a while, but no one knows when. They didn’t expect the fighting to go on this long after we took the palace.” She looked around. “We should eat while we’re able. I’ll get something.”
“All right. Thanks.” The male looked at Everdawn, and Everdawn returned that gaze. Had the luxury now, of being able to stare without having to dive for some failing body. The castrate had not yet seen an alien, not this closely. His face was strangely flat, and the eyes small, to also be so expressive—maybe because the brow ridges appeared more mobile? And he was covered with gray fur, and had enormous ears. He looked like prey that would have been immobilized for a courtier’s meal. Except more frightening somehow, because of the obvious sentience in his eyes. “So. What should I call you?”
“I… I’m known as Everdawn, my-be—” He stopped himself abruptly. Was an alien truly his-better? Even a castrate might surely be excused from groveling to an alien. Except this alien did the work of a surgeon, and that was a profession reserved to males Outside, highly-trained and highly-valued.
But then, if the aliens did speak and think and have their own civilizations, then they must surely need physicians…?
“Everdawn,” he repeated, more steadily, and chanced an honorific reserved to military and professionals. “Sir.”
“One of the castrates, I’m guessing?” When Everdawn inclined his head, the alien huffed. “What an outrage that is. And no time to fix it.”
“I beg… beg your pardon?” Everdawn stammered.
“You haven’t asked him if he wants to be fixed.” The female had a tray in her hands. “We should eat somewhere else. Go wash up.”
The male alien sighed. “Right. What she said. Come on, then.”
Staggered, Everdawn followed the male to a room reserved to washing, and a very serious room for washing it was, with a cube for full-body sterilization, and a separate set of machines for tools and clothes.
“Everything goes,” the male alien said, pulling off his tunic to reveal a wiry body, scraped with scars. “Laundry in there. Us in the stand-up shower. New clothes come out of that slot.”
Everdawn opened his mouth to protest that he was not allowed to wear anything but the palace servants’ simple uniform, but fighting with this alien felt fruitless. He was already in a place he wasn’t supposed to be in, doing things he shouldn’t, alongside creatures who would normally have been collared slaves. If punishment for these infractions was due him, adding clean clothing to the list would not make that punishment any less harsh. And confronting the immaculate white room, he became far too aware of the stiff, grimy creases of his pants and tabard. He’d killed people wearing this outfit, and then fallen asleep in a pool of other people’s blood in it.
With frantic haste, he stripped and discarded the livery and changed.
After that, the alien led him to a separate room to eat, and the food was so much better than anything he was used to that he ignored them to savor it, bite by slow bite. The two were talking about something—a coup? An Emperor, but which he didn’t know. A fight in space. About where to put the wounded, to make room for new wounded. They were still discussing the latter when a voice at the door said wearily, “We can move them to the adjunct facility.”
“I didn’t know there was an adjunct facility,” the male alien said.
“That’s because it isn’t a clinic.” The new speaker joined them, plucking one of the meat knots off the tray. “It’s an adjacent hall I appropriated. It’s low enough in the palace that no one wants it, but there are too many windows for it to be appropriate for the servants’ use, so it was empty.”
This male Everdawn recognized as the Surgeon who’d come to their quarters twice. Once to examine Oviin’s body, and again to warn them that their world was coming apart. Everdawn stared at him, perhaps too obviously, because the male twisted his head over his shoulder to peer at him. “I’m not the only one appropriating, apparently. Who is this?”
“My assistant,” the male alien said, and despite being an alien Everdawn could hear the wry amusement in the tone. “Brought to me by Triage, who found him somewhere.”
“I know you,” the Surgeon said, shocking Everdawn. “You were the one who said that having a foot pressed to your neck was your lot.”
“I… yes, my-better. This one said so.”
“And also that it wasn’t the way of every world, though it was the way of this one.”
The male alien interrupted. “You recognize him?”
“One of the servants.” The Surgeon’s smile was crooked. “Last seen in the halls attacking the Usurper’s males.”
“Oh!” the female exclaimed. “So he’s on our side.”
The male alien was doing that too-quick nod again. “Right. I think I saw him with the group killing the guards.” To Everdawn, “Good job. Saved us some trouble.”
“W-what!” They could not possibly… they knew? He’d been killing? And they were not beating him?
The Surgeon was examining him with interest. “You find that strange?”
“Yes!” he blurted before he could check himself.
“Ah well,” the Surgeon said. “You happened to be on the right side of the conflict. The very right side, because any other Chatcaavan Emperor in history would have had you executed, and every other servant he could find, for having the temerity to act like males. Congratulations. So, what were you doing that Triage decided to pluck you up?”
He scrambled to piece together his composure, and it was hard, very hard. He hadn’t realized until this moment that he’d built that composure out of apathy and resignation, and neither was in great supply at the moment. “I was…” What could he say? “Cleaning. And tending the dead.” Oviin’s eyes, glassy and empty of that gentle spirit. “I have always tended the dead.”
“He’s good at tending the living too,” the alien male said. “Very handy.”
“You,” the Surgeon said. “You were responsible for Oviin’s body.”
“No, my-better,” Everdawn whispered. “The strong and cruel were responsible for Oviin’s body. I… I only wrapped it.”
The male alien made a whistling sound, both brow ridges up. “Look at that. He has real opinions.”
The Surgeon eyed the alien. “Everyone has opinions.”
“I meant opinions he shouldn’t have, that also haven’t been beaten out of him by your useless system.”
Everdawn’s shoulders drew in. Shocked, he waited for the Surgeon to cuff the alien, but… the Surgeon scrubbed his face with a hand, irritated. “Yes, I know. You don’t have to tell me again.” Turning his gaze back to Everdawn, he said, “And how did he do?”
“My-better?” Everdawn stammered.
But the alien male was replying. “Excellently. Didn’t throw up once. Very steady hands. Good sense for the work. You could do worse.”
The female made a noise. “He deserves better than a ‘you could do worse.’ He’s very deft.”
“Another castrate who’s good with bodies.” The Surgeon wrinkled his nose. “The chances of this feel astronomical.”
“I don’t think so.” The female again. “Slaves and servants often have to deal with messes. You probably didn’t show up in their area to treat them for medical issues, even.”
The Surgeon’s pause was slight, but Everdawn was surprised to see it. To be spoken to so, by an alien, and a female!
“If I were you,” the male alien continued. “I’d snap him up before someone else does. Because unless I’m mistaken, the new-old Emperor’s going to start changing things, and a lot of the people who used to have no choices in their lives are going to be given them. At which point, you’re going to lose your opportunity to make offers to the talent.”
At last, Everdawn could no longer keep silent. “W-what are you saying! Talent? I am no one to be talented!”
The alien’s incredulous look was magnified by the dark swatches of fur over his eyes. “With some training I’d take you in my surgery any day. You watched me debride a third degree burn with a scalpel!” He snorted. “Even I got queasy the first time I saw that done.”
The Surgeon was studying him again. “That is rare.”
It was not rare. Their lives had desensitized them to the sight of broken bodies. And if the others in the servants’ quarters had preferred not to deal with them, still, they would have, had they had no choice. Everdawn preferred to handle those bodies himself only because he knew he would do it well, and with respect.
“You don’t know what to say.” The alien female reached to him, took his hands, and it shocked him: that she might touch him, and that her hands would be careful of his, and so soft. She had no talons, only short, blunt nails, and no hide, only skin the silky gold of river silt. It reminded him of flower petals, and of Oviin. “I understand. I was a slave in the harem of the Apex-East Worldlord for revolutions. It was hard enough for me to know what to do with freedom, and I was born free.” She squeezed his hands, soft. “But the Surgeon and the Healer are right. The Emperor will not allow his servants to suffer as unpaid drudges anymore. I know this because he freed me, and many like me, and he’s not done liberating the oppressed yet. No one expects you to believe that, or to be able to make choices that affect your future immediately. But you do have those choices, and will from now on.”
“She’s right,” the Surgeon said. He sounded… surly? Tired? Resigned? But he was not posturing like an angered or thwarted male, as any male should have on hearing such an incredible speech, and from the mouth of an alien. “You said yourself that the court’s was not the way of every world. Someone must have taught you differently. Who was it?”
It escaped him before he could stop himself, but… what could anyone do to him now? “It was Oviin. It was always Oviin.”
To his surprise, the Surgeon cursed softly.
“Someone you knew?” the male alien said to the Surgeon.
“The first castrate that tended the alien in the gel tank,” the Surgeon said. “He was...” He stopped. “He shouldn’t have died. If the Usurper had been anyone else, he wouldn’t have. But to control your peer, the Usurper shot him in the back.”
“He loved the alien,” Everdawn whispered.
All of them looked at him then.
“He did,” Everdawn said. “He came back from tending him… glowing. But he was like that. He found meaning in things… and I don’t know how.”
“The way you have, by preparing the dead?” the female alien said, startling him. “I saw how you looked at the patients, Everdawn.”
He wanted to hide his face, but what good would it do?
“All right, that’s enough.” The male alien rose. “We have work to do, moving the bodies to your adjunct facility. And then we have to sterilize the floor. And if that facility’s large enough, Surgeon, we should set up there instead of receiving the bodies here. We don’t want anything between us and those tanks if we can help it, because /Speaker-Singer/ alone knows how they work but if they start alarming we need to have immediate access to them to fix whatever’s going wrong.”
“Yes,” the Surgeon said. “My peer should be out of surgery as soon as he’s done stitching a rubber body part into the cavity for some future surgeon to discover. Then we can re-evaluate the casualties.”
As they rose to leave, the female alien paused alongside Everdawn, and her small eyes were gentle with compassion. “You can stay here if you need time.”
“No. I…” He stood, because being idle when confronted with so many hopes was too hard. “I’ll help.”
“I’m telling you,” the male alien said to the Surgeon, “grab him now before someone else gets their claws on him.”
“I will take your suggestion under advisement.”
To Everdawn’s shock, not only did all of them move the patients—including the missing surgeon who appeared halfway through their efforts—but all of them cleaned the tank room as well. Even the physicians.
“You found help, and useful help!” The second surgeon beamed at him. “Should we put him on rounds?”
“Assign him to me,” the female alien said. “I can tell him what we’re looking for when we’re on shift. If…” She turned to him, “you’d like to learn?”
“How to be… a… a physician’s assistant?” Everdawn guessed, wide-eyed. “But that is work for a male Outside, and whole.”
“I don’t see how your body parts have anything to do with whether you can do a good job,” the male alien said as he walked past. “But if it’s that big a problem, we can restore them.”
“What!” Everdawn squeaked.
“I don’t know if anyone’s ever reconstructed a castrate’s missing parts,” the second surgeon mused, rubbing his jaw. “But we’ve regrown more vital parts and stuffed them in people’s bodies. And for stupider reasons.”
“With or without the rubber toys?” the female human asked, and that expression was… humor? He thought so, through his numb disbelief.
“Oh, I always leave a foreign object in a body. It’s a habit.”
“That way he always knows a former patient,” the Surgeon quipped, dry.
“Plus it means they come back,” the other agreed, grinning. “Keeps me busy.”
“Anyone can be a physician’s assistant,” the female human said, once she’d mastered her laughter, and as she spoke she sobered. “If a former alien slave can be, why not you?”
“You’d get paid,” the male alien said, showing some teeth.
“No one pays servants,” Everdawn protested. “Especially castrates.”
The Surgeon snorted. “A female upended the worlds. We will have to rearrange our perceptions of the capabilities of our disregarded populations.” He canted his head. “You can do the work. And you could have it. Work that is respected. I imagine even you believe that would be better than the alternative.”
“Who will wash the floors?” Everdawn asked, incredulous.
“A robot, I would hope,” the male alien said. “Who wastes labor on mopping? You people are crazy.”
He thought of Oviin’s mutilated body, and something in his chest tightened. “But… who would prepare the dead?”
“The point would be to stop them from becoming dead.” The male alien folded his arms. “That’s better than mourning them for being unnecessary casualties. And yes, you can do that. Why not you? There’s no reason you couldn’t end up a surgeon yourself. And then one day some Emperor might be grateful to you.”
The words felt like blows, and he staggered. Someone caught his arm—soft flesh, and respectful, so the female? “Me?”
“The unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit,” the female alien said, in a tone that sounded like a quotation. “That’s what’s of great worth to God. Your Living Air. You are not despised, Everdawn. And hope is in your name!”
“All right, that’s enough,” the male alien said. “Let him process. We’ve got some time, we should put it to use.”
The second surgeon tapped his hands together, excited. “Absolutely! Let’s analyze those samples further! I am eager to delve deeper into your species’s unexpected foray into biological weaponry!”
The male alien sighed deeply and grasped that male by the arm, towing him to the door. “First of all, he’s not my species. And second of all, I highly doubt that’s what they were intending…”
“And yet how they have achieved! Only imagine what they might do if they plan!”
And then they were out the door, leaving Everdawn with the Surgeon and the female.
“Rest here,” the Surgeon said as he left. “If you wander off someone might put you to different work, and you’re needed here.”
Needed here! How could he possibly be needed anywhere, much less somewhere like this?
And yet, the work had felt easy.
The alien female had been watching his face, and something in her gaze reminded him of Oviin. He glanced at her, then away, embarrassed and not sure why.
“It’s all right,” she said. “It took me time to stop the bad voices in my head. But… you have good voices in there too. Listen to them instead.” She smiled… he thought. Yes, that was a smile, just stretched wide across the face without a proper nose to curve it. “Should I wake you up for my shift? I’d enjoy sharing it with you.”
“Yes,” he said, without planning to, and then it was too late to say anything else and… he didn’t want to.
“All right.” She smiled again. “Get some rest, we’re on duty in six hours.”
He didn’t even know what time it was, but he dipped his head in agreement, and she left.
They’d scattered, he discovered when he stepped outside the room. He could just hear the voices of the physicians, a murmur transported by the echoing hall; the female had vanished, perhaps into one of the rooms with a closed door. To sleep maybe? She’d suggested rest. No one called him to task for wandering the length of the clinic… when he paused near the entrance, the male sitting near the door glanced up from his display, then resumed reading.
Shaken, Everdawn returned to the tank room. The lights had been dimmed, and the height and color of the illumination made the tiles glisten as if under one full moon. The tanks themselves gave off a greenish glow, and in four of them a Chatcaavan male hung, recuperating from ghastly-looking wounds. The fifth tank held an alien of a kind Everdawn didn’t recognize. But he heard the Surgeon’s voice, suddenly and sharply, in his mind: The first castrate that tended the alien in the gel tank.
This was Oviin’s alien.
Everdawn drew close, close enough to see the creature’s face. Saw the wounds closing over the cheek, knew them for claw swipes; he’d seen them often enough. These had festered, though. Examining the rest of the alien revealed another set of scars over the ribs… so the alien had been in more than one fight, and lived through it. Everdawn peered at the body, finding it unlikely. Had he been confronted with the alien, clothed, he would have assumed that aliens also castrated their unwanted males, because what else would create such delicacy in limb?
But this male—obviously whole—had fought Chatcaava, and lived. And Oviin had loved him.
“Do you dream of anything?” he had asked Oviin once. He’d been desperate for proof that the other castrate was related to them somehow. Had normal emotions. Had frustrations and hopes that had been destroyed by their lot in life, because if so, then… maybe Everdawn too could one day be so whole in spirit, and his body be damned. “Something you long for that you can’t have?”
“I do,” Oviin had confessed, shy. “I hope one day—”
To fly, Everdawn assumed, because all of the castrates longed to fly and were forbidden.
But Oviin finished, “to learn to shift shape. As in the oldest stories. The ones that say… we might be more.”
Startled, Everdawn had asked, “Why? Do you believe that if you shift shape, it will heal your body of our mutilation?”
But Oviin had only looked at him, confused. “No. I want to learn because then I will be more free than anyone we know. Even the Emperor.”
To this day, Everdawn didn’t know what Oviin had meant. Only that the desire, and whatever beliefs had prompted it, had made Oviin who he was and… Everdawn wanted that. To be like Oviin, who had had a kind word for everyone, and a gentle hand, and whose response to injustice was to bend but not break, and not rage, and not spend himself in meaningless savagery in the halls when at last freed to strike back against his oppressors. Everdawn should have been proud of that, and he wasn’t, and he didn’t know why. And he didn’t know what to do. Not with the offer made by the Surgeon. Not with his life. Lost amid the turmoil of too many changes and too many choices, he found a single thread to guide his face toward the sky.
Oviin had wanted to learn the Change… and he had never had the chance.
“I will do that for you,” he whispered. “Because you comforted me when I was hopeless.”
Silence. But something in him eased. He stared at the alien in the tank and tried to imagine an Everdawn who looked like something else. Who was not trapped in this body, and this life. Who knew things he didn’t know, but could learn. It felt dangerous to hope, and dangerous not to. But he thought he had spent too much of his life preparing the dead, until he himself had ceased to live. It had kept his body breathing, and given him nothing else.
“I will learn for you,” he whispered, and tightened his wings, lifted his chin.
The Surgeon, passing through, said, “Do you need to be shown a place you can sleep? There’s a room down the hall with a cot.”
“Thank you, my-b—sir. I will do that.”
“Good,” the Surgeon said, and kept going, as if Everdawn belonged here. And maybe he could. If aliens did, why not him?
The cot in the room down the hall smelled of the Surgeon. It made Everdawn think, briefly, that he should change the sheets. A menial job, but he’d seen all of the clinic’s personnel cleaning, so why not? And when he woke, he would join the alien female, and see what it was like, to tend to the living. He closed his eyes, feeling the ghost of a hand on his, and slept.