When Thomas opened his eyes, the first official act of his brain was noticing the pain. A lot of it, in fact. His shoulder ached to the point where he wondered if maybe his arm had been ripped from the socket. A cautious but quick check, lifting his hands painfully into the air, showed him that everything was still attached and working. It hurt like hell, but it didn’t seem to be dislocated. Just wrenched.
It was the burns that hurt the worst.
The jumpsuit had protected him from the flames for the most part, but the burning liquid had clung to his clothing and had burned his arms and hands in places. He wasn’t sure, but it was likely these were second- and third-degree burns. Pretty dangerous injuries to have at any time—but especially while stranded on an alien planet with God knows what kinds of bacteria and infections floating about. Plus they hurt. A lot.
He resolved not to worry about infections. Supposedly, the Uninoc, “universal inoculation,” that he’d been given prior to the trip had some sort of adaptive antibody that could fight off any infection. He might still get sick, but his recovery would be faster, and there was “less chance of death.” Comforting. But at least he could put that worry out of his mind and concentrate on more important things.
The woman he’d rescued seemed to be burn-free, but she was obviously injured in other ways. She groaned as he gingerly turned her over. He winced at the pain it caused his own hands. His fingers seemed to be mostly free of burns, so he tried to limit any contact to these.
She was still breathing, which was a relief. But he was concerned about the blood caked on the side of her face and gathered in the corners of her mouth. “Hey,” he said, though his voice sounded hoarse and his throat hurt. Smoke inhalation. He was in bad shape, too.
The woman coughed and winced. “Hurts,” she said, indicating her ribs.
Thomas felt relieved to hear her speak. He had half-worried she wouldn’t regain consciousness. He reached out with burning and aching hands and gently pressed her side. She nearly screamed from the pain.
Her ribs were broken.
“Listen, I’m going to open your jumpsuit and take a look at your side, ok? Hope you’re not modest.” He tried to smile.
She simply nodded, her eyes squeezed shut, tears streaming from the corners, and her face contorted with pain. Thomas, using the tips of his unburned fingers, gently unzipped the jumpsuit, pushed it open and lifted her T-shirt. Her entire right side was one big bruise.
He closed up her suit and helped her to be comfortable. What was he going to do? He had no formal medical training, and most of what he knew came from movies and television. He had taken a safety course once, years ago, but he was sure that CPR would do more harm than good at this point. It was the only part he could remember.
Even if he had been a trained physician, his burned hands made him effectively useless. In fact, it occurred to him that he was in as much danger as she was. They both needed serious medical attention, and that meant getting back to wherever the module had crashed. Someone among the survivors would have medical training. It was the girl’s only hope.
He couldn’t do this alone. “Just rest. I’m going to see if I can find anyone to help.”
She gripped his arm. “No, please,” she said, barely whispering. “Please don’t leave me.” She sobbed and winced from the pain in her side. She suddenly coughed, and a light spray of blood splattered forth.
This was bad.
It seemed likely she had a punctured lung, and Thomas wasn’t sure what the hell to do about it. Should he move her? Or should he leave her and try to find help? Neither seemed like a great idea. It might be better to stay close, tend to her, and hope that someone came to rescue them soon.
He couldn’t see out of the undergrowth, which was thick around them. He had no idea in which direction they’d been thrown after the blast. The module could be anywhere, and if he moved out in search of it, he might become lost and entangled in this alien brush. No good for either of them.
Still, how could he sit here and do nothing? He stood and listened, hoping to hear sounds from the crash site. Either the brush and forest were too thick, insulating him from sound, or they’d been thrown further than he’d thought. Maybe both.
“Hey,” he said to the girl, kneeling beside her once more, “what’s your name?” He instinctively felt he should keep her awake and alert. Or was that just for head injuries? He cursed himself for having no medical knowledge whatsoever.
She coughed a bit. “Melissa. Melissa Martin. Lissa for short.” She actually managed a smile.
“Lissa,” he smiled back. “I had a cousin named Melissa, back on earth. Mean cook,” he said.
Lissa coughed and winced. “I … can’t cook,” she said, and Thomas thought she smiled again. She was tough. Scared, but tough.
“Lissa, I’m going to step away. Just for a second,” he added when she seemed ready to protest. “I’m just going to scout around for a few feet, see if I can find any sign of the landing module or the crew. They can’t be far. We were thrown out by the blast, but we have to be close. I’ll be in ear shot the whole time, ok?”
She nodded and lowered her head to the ground.
Gingerly, trying not to use his burned hands, he rose to his feet and began walking a perimeter. He picked a distinctive-looking tree as a landmark and kept it always on his left as he made an ever-expanding circle. True to his promise, he stayed close enough to hear Lissa cough and groan as he pushed through the heavy brush. Every few moments he would stop, remaining still while he listened for signs of the crew.
This was taking too long. Lissa was in bad shape, and if she didn’t get medical attention soon, she’d die. Thomas felt responsible. It was he, after all, who had screwed up with the manual release for the module. This crash, Lissa’s injuries, the injuries and deaths of the rest of the crew—it was all on him.
Again.
He shook his head, fighting back the self-pity and loathing. This wasn’t the time for it. The weight of responsibility for all of this made it even more crucial that he save Lissa. He pressed on in the staggered walk-pause-listen-walk pattern.
Finally he heard something that sounded very much like talking. It was faint and distant, somewhere in the thick brush, but it was nearly unmistakable. It sounded like a group of men some ways off.
“Hey!” he called out. “Hey, we’re here! Over here!”
He quickly made his way back to Lissa’s side. “Here! Here in the brush!”
It took several minutes, but soon he could hear shouting and the sounds of people pushing through the undergrowth. In moments, four Blue Collars broke through to the clearing where Thomas and Lissa had landed.
The four men paused at the edge of the clearing, taking in the scene. One of the younger seemed, for a moment, to be staring strangely at Thomas, but then all four men pushed ahead and hurried toward them.
“Lissa,” one Blue Collar said, kneeling beside her.
Lissa coughed again, and blood spattered the corners of her mouth.
“It’s ok,” the young man said with a strong, reassuring tone. “We’ll get you out of here. You’re going to be fine.”
The four men began tearing the sleeves from their jump suits and breaking limbs from the trees, fashioning a makeshift stretcher for the injured woman. Thomas felt completely useless as he sat with burned hands, forced to watch them.
One of the men bent to take a look at Thomas and his burns. “These are bad,” he said. “You hurt anywhere else?”
“Shoulder,” Thomas said. “I don’t think it’s dislocated, but I wrenched it pretty good.” Briefly, Thomas thought about the pain he’d felt in his arm earlier, but if it was sprained, the pain was being masked by his other injuries. He wondered if it was a good or bad thing for one potential injury to be forgotten in light of several others. Wonder what else I’ve banged up, he joked with himself. Internal gallows humor.
The man nodded. “Can you walk?”
“Yeah, I’m good.” He nodded towards Lissa, “I think she may have a punctured lung, though. Pretty bad. Is there a medic back at the crash site?”
The man shrugged. “Maybe. There’s a field medic in the BC crew, and the White Collars are supposed to have at least one doctor. Whether they survived or not … ”
Thomas didn’t need him to finish.
“They were setting up a camp when we left. The scrub … that Somar guy … he was in charge,” the man practically spat. “The camp isn’t far. But you two were thrown pretty deep into the brush.”
Thomas wasn’t sure if he’d heard the man right. Scrub? He hadn’t heard it much, but he was pretty sure that was slang used to describe the Esool. Somar—the Esool Captain who had helped everyone get strapped in and prepared for the crash. The man who had helped save humans when he could have thought only of himself.
How could anyone still be a bigot in this day and age? Shouldn’t that world have died off long ago? Some things, Thomas supposed, just stayed the same as long as humans were at the heart of the equation.
Thomas decided that this wasn’t a good time to point out the foibles of racism and struggled to stand again. The man helped him, carefully taking hold of his elbows and lifting Thomas to his feet. Thomas glanced up through the trees. “We must have been launched out of the door pretty fast to be thrown so far. The brush may have been the only thing that kept us from going splat.”
The young man, Alan, stepped up to them. The other two were gently putting Lissa on the stretcher. “You saved Lissa,” he said stoically. “If not for you, she would have died in that explosion.”
Thomas studied him for a moment. It was as if there was something unspoken there, some hint of a conversation unsaid. “Seemed like the thing to do,” Thomas said finally.
Alan nodded and returned to help the others in getting Lissa on the makeshift stretcher.
“Don’t mind him,” the man beside him said. “He’s always been a little weird. He reads too much.”
Thomas almost laughed. “I didn't think anyone read anymore.”
The man laughed and helped the others to lift the stretcher and carry Lissa toward the edge of the clearing.
Thomas looked around and, despite himself, had to smile. They had just crashed on an alien world—a world where he was prepared to spend the rest of his life. A world that represented a fresh start. “Welcome home,” he said quietly, as the group began the hard trek back to camp.
“There are supplies and tools inside the module,” Mitch reported to Captain Somar. “It’s likely they’re still in good shape. Most of that stuff was sealed in individual fireproof containers.”
Somar nodded, glancing up at the gleaming tower that loomed above them. It seemed to Somar to be a majestic thing, every bit as regal as its name implied. “The Citadel module almost made its landing, it seems.”
Mitch glanced up as well, squinting in the bright light that reflected from Citadel's solar coating. “The safety system kicked in and righted it. Plus, Reilly dumped everything the module had into pushing back against gravity. It slowed us enough to make a semi-decent landing. But the crew chamber is part of the shuttle. It was supposed to release from the module before it landed. That’s our link back to the orbital platform, if it survived.”
“Why didn’t the shuttle release?” Somar asked. “It seems unlikely that its systems would fail at the same time as these other mechanical failures.”
Mitch looked around to make sure no one was paying close attention. “You’re right,” he said to Somar, lowering his voice. “It’s too much of a coincidence. The whole colony ship comes off of the lightrail too close to a planet’s surface, the release clamps fail, and the shuttle doesn’t detach? That’s a pretty long string of failures.”
Somar looked again at the Citadel module. The shuttle that formed the top portion was pointing prominently toward the sky, as if yearning to launch. “Once we have a base camp established and the wounded are tended to, I’d like you to examine the shuttle. We need to know if there has been sabotage.”
“It’s almost a sure thing,” Mitch said intently.
Somar sniffed and shook his head. “May the Creator help us if we have a saboteur among us. Worse still to have one who is at peace with dying himself.”
Mitch nodded. “Well, I’ll figure out what the story is with the shuttle, but at least Citadel seems to be intact. More or less.”
The module did seem to be in decent shape, as Somar allowed his gaze to move from the shuttle to the base of the structure. “Take someone with you, and retrieve the supplies and tools.”
The engineer nodded and was turning to leave when Somar added, “And Mr. Garrison?” Mitch turned. “If there are weapons on board please secure them.”
Mitch paused briefly, then nodded again and was gone.
Somar looked around at the crew of humans he was now commanding. This was by no means going to be easy. Many of them were injured beyond the abilities of the Blue Collar field medic, some of the White Collar physicians were among the injured and dead, and there was apparently an enemy in their midst. Add to that the open bigotry that many of the humans felt toward him, and Somar’s isolation was nearly complete.
There was something else, as well. It had nagged at him for a while before he’d finally begun to put the pieces together. The Blue Collar crew was tending to its own, as was the White Collar crew. There was a definite division in the group—to the point that Somar could see a physical line of demarcation as the groups of blue-clad crewmembers lay apart from the more casually dressed White Collars.
There was a growing division in the ranks.
In this situation, on an alien world, with so many injured and the odds stacked so high against them, division was one thing that could not be tolerated. They would all have to work together for their common good. The question was, how could an outsider such as himself ever hope to lead a group that was divided even amongst their own?
“Captain?” a woman’s voice said from behind.
Reilly, the ship’s pilot, was holding her side as she stepped up to him. “One of the White Collar doctors has a broken arm, but he’s asking to be allowed to help.”
“Of course,” Somar said, nodding slightly. “We can use all of the help we can get.”
Reilly nodded. “Thought so,” she said.
She didn’t move, and Somar had discovered during his time among the humans that this meant they had more to say but were unsure how to proceed. “You wish to say something else?” Somar asked.
Reilly blinked, then smiled slightly. “It’s just, some of the crew are … suspicious of you.”
Somar was not surprised by the news. “Oh?” he asked.
“Yes, sir. There have been comments. Some of them think it’s a little much that an Esool was onboard when all of these things went wrong. Some of them are even wondering why you were out of stasis.”
Somar reflected on this for a moment. “Are you one of them?” he asked.
She shook her head fervently. “No. When Captain Alonzo ordered us to wake everyone in the WC stasis bay, I was the one who woke you,” she said.
Somar blinked and smiled. “Oh? Why was that?”
She shrugged. “It was chaotic. I’m not an engineer, I’m a pilot. I just started hitting buttons. You were in one of the pods that was activated.”
Somar laughed. “So, I am here by accident?”
Reilly smiled. “Yes, sir, I suppose you are. So I’m pretty sure you weren’t running around sabotaging the ship.”
“No, I wasn’t,” he said. “But the two of us are apparently in the minority. It seems the rest of the crew is determined to make me the villain.”
“Mitch isn’t,” she said. “You can trust him. And there are a few others. We don’t all hate the Esool, you know. Most of the fighting was over when we were very young. A lot of us saw this exchange program as being a pretty good thing for humans and the Esool.”
Somar nodded. “I appreciate your support, Pilot.” He bowed slightly in the tradition of honor that his people used, “I thank you.”
Reilly smiled and attempted a slight bow, unaware of the traditional response. Somar took no offense.
It was getting dark when the rescue team breached the underbrush and burst into the open area formed by Citadel’s crash. The men holding the makeshift stretcher took their first rest since finding Thomas and Lissa, and Thomas joined them happily.
He felt hot and feverish. That was a very bad sign. He may not have much medical knowledge, but he knew enough to recognize signs of infection. His hands, now wrapped in the torn sleeves of his jump suit, throbbed and ached furiously. And the fever was taking a toll on his strength, causing him to feel weak and very thirsty.
Alan had noticed early on that Thomas was having trouble and had stepped in to support him on occasion, without a word. Thomas was grateful not to talk, actually. At this point, all he wanted was to collapse, preferably into an icy stream somewhere.
Citadel rose high above the surrounding forest, and for the very first time, Thomas got to see it in all of its glory. Even now, wrecked and damaged as it was, it was awe-inspiring. All those years ago, he’d dreamt of being exactly where he was right now. Sure, he’d envisioned things going a little more smoothly. But in general terms, it was exactly as he’d dreamt it. Standing on an alien world, breathing an alien atmosphere. And it was made all the sweeter by the fact that the ship that had brought him here was based partially on his own work and designs.
It had all worked.
“Doctor!” Alan suddenly called. “We need a doctor! We have injured here!”
The camp had taken shape amongst the trees with the looming structure of the Citadel module standing guard, just as its namesake might have millennia ago. A man with his arm in a sling came forward with one of the Blue Collars in tow. The Blue Collar was carrying what seemed to be a med kit, and he rushed to Lissa’s side.
“It’s going to be ok, Lissa,” the Blue Collar man said, as he had them put the stretcher down and he opened the med kit beside her. “Doc?”
The other man, casually dressed, knelt down beside them. He reached out and gingerly touched Lissa’s side with his good hand. She winced and cried out, coughing slightly. “Punctured lung,” the doctor said. He turned to the Blue Collar, “I don’t suppose you’ve had any experience in an operating room?”
The Blue Collar shook his head. “No,” he said. “But now’s as good a time as any to pick up a new skill.”
The doctor gave a sharp, almost derisive laugh, then nodded and directed the men to carry Lissa to a makeshift triage. He then turned his attention briefly to Thomas. Unwinding the bandages was a little more painful than Thomas would have hoped. “Bad,” the doctor said. “It looks like infection is setting in. We have antibiotics, but someone will need to dress these.”
“I’ll do it,” Alan said, stepping forward immediately.
The doctor looked him over and nodded. “ok. I have to assist with the surgery of the young woman. You take care of this man,” he said.
Alan gently took Thomas by the arm and led him toward Citadel.
After both bandages had been completely removed, Thomas downed a couple of antibiotics, some painkillers, and what had to be gallons of water. It wasn’t cold, but it tasted like heaven to him. He felt as if he hadn’t had anything to drink in months.
Alan had a kit with fresh bandages, swabs, and ointments. “This will hurt,” he said frankly.
And it did.
Thomas gritted his teeth as the young man meticulously swabbed and daubed at his hands with cotton, gauze, and alcohol. Once the burns were clean to his satisfaction, Alan slathered balm on them and wrapped them in fresh, clean bandages.
The damage hadn’t been quite as bad as Thomas had feared. His fingers were mostly fine, singed here and there. His palms and the backs of his hands were blistered and burned badly, though. The balm felt cool and comforting, but it still hurt like hell.
“Thanks,” he said.
Alan looked up at him and nodded. “You’re welcome.”
Thomas nodded to his hands, “You've done this sort of thing before.”
Alan shrugged. “My parents died when I was very young, and I had to learn how to take care of myself. And occasionally other people.”
Thomas noted Alan's distant, subtle but sad tone. “How did they die?”
Alan stopped and looked to the side. His breath quickened, then he seemed to calm himself. “They died in a colony ship accident,” he said simply, without seeming emotional.
For the first time, it occurred to Thomas how tenderly and thoroughly the young man had dealt with his burns. He knew how to treat them without being told. He was an expert at it, in fact. This was more than just the standard set of survival skills learned by an abandoned youth, it was art. It was a skill learned with motivation, even if the purpose was long gone. “They were burned to death,” Thomas said quietly, feeling a pinch of turmoil at one of his own distant memories.
Alan looked at him, his gaze steady but sad.
“I know something about that,” Thomas said. “I … let’s just say I have dreams about people dying like that. Fire. Explosions.”
Alan was silent, studying Thomas’ face. He nodded, rising to his feet. He helped Thomas stand, and the two of them quietly made their way out into the current of the new community that had been born, if somewhat painfully, in Citadel's shadow.
Gravity was something different. After years of working in space, even hanging from rigging high up in cavern-like chambers, Mitch had never felt the full tug of real gravity. At least, not while he was dangling from a questionable support ring with a bed of metal and jagged, splintered trees below. He opted to concentrate on the work at hand. And the work at hand was confirming something that Mitch had hoped would turn out to be his imagination.
This was definitely sabotage.
Mitch had inspected all of the release clamps for the shuttle and found the same weld on each of them. They were fused as if they were one piece of metal, and that meant someone had used an MD welding rig. MD—molecular disruption—could break things apart at a subatomic level, unstitching the target molecule by molecule. It also came in handy for joining things together in one piece.
“Mitch,” said Billy Sans, one of his Blue Collar crewmates. He was assisting Mitch, hanging from the side of the Citadel module. His hand-wound flashlight was playing light over another set of bolts. “Someone did this. This wasn’t an accident.”
“Yeah,” Mitch agreed. “They were pretty determined to keep us from launching the shuttle.”
“This doesn’t make sense,” Billy said. He had let go of the magnetic handgrips all together and was hanging entirely by the safety strap clamped to a ring in Citadel’s hull, bracing himself with his feet. It made Mitch nervous to see it, but the young man had been doing things like this his whole life. He felt perfectly safe.
Mitch wished he could say the same. He felt anything but safe at this point.
“Someone didn’t want this colony to survive,” Mitch said. “Makes sense to me.”
“But why weld the shuttle in place? I mean, the clamps on the modules … I can see that. Heck, whatever they did threw us out of light speed too close to the planet, so you’d figure that would be enough to take us out.”
“But it wasn’t,” Mitch said. “Maybe they knew we might survive that and thought this might be a good way to finish us off.”
Billy chewed on his lip and allowed himself to swing gently back and forth on his safety strap, forcing Mitch to look up at the increasingly dark sky above. “Hey, Mitch, you don’t think it was the scrub, do you?”
Mitch’s temper went white hot, but he kept it in check. “No, Billy. Captain Somar didn’t do this. Why would he?”
“The Esool are the enemy, right? Maybe this is their way of starting the war again.”
“Were the enemy,” Mitch said. “And they were never suicidal, were they? Captain Somar was on board during the whole thing. There was a good chance he would have died with us. Does that make sense to you?”
Billy shrugged, “Who knows how a scrub thinks?”
Mitch couldn’t listen to this any longer. He released the magnetic fields on his grips, attached them to the harness, and hit the cable release on the safety strap. With the buzzing sound of the line playing through metal clamps and pulleys, Mitch lowered himself quickly to the ground, slowing his descent just before contact. Billy came buzzing down after.
Once they were back at camp, Mitch told Billy to go find some chow and set off himself to locate the Captain. He found Somar sitting at one of the folding tables that had been brought out of the equipment bay. Spread out on the table was a survey map, printed from the colony archive. A hand-wound brass lantern was lighting the surface of the table as Somar puzzled over the image, making various marks.
“Captain,” Mitch said as he approached.
Somar looked up. “Mr. Garrison,” he said.
“Looks like we were right. Someone put an MD weld on all of the release clamps. Whoever sabotaged the modules did the same thing to the shuttle.”
Somar nodded. “I was sure that would be the case. And it’s actually a relief.”
Mitch was surprised. “Why?”
“The module releases could be reached from within the colony ship, but the clamps on the shuttle would have to be welded from outside.”
Mitch thought about this. “Someone would have noticed an EVA. So this was probably done before we left the Hub.”
“That is what I believe. And that means there is a very good chance the saboteur is not among us.”
“Good news for once,” Mitch said. “So what are you doing now?”
“Looking at the survey maps. And what I have seen does not make me happy.”
Mitch looked at the maps with the various marks of certain locations. “What is it?” he asked.
“I cannot find us on this map.”
Mitch blinked. “What do you mean?”
“The batteries on the navigational computer you brought me are not fully charged, but I used the hand-cranked generator to power the computer long enough to give me a general location. The orbital platform seems to have survived and is functioning in orbit. However, the satellite data I have retrieved does not match any of these survey maps.”
“Maybe some are missing?” Mitch asked.
“Perhaps. But that still leaves us with only a brief glimpse at the landscape. I shall be forced to wait for the computer’s batteries to fully charge.”
“I can turn the crank for a while. It shouldn’t take more than thirty minutes to get a decent charge. Tomorrow the solar panels should do the rest.”
Somar bowed slightly. “Thank you, Mr. Garrison. That will free me to deal with another matter.”
“What’s that?” Mitch asked.
“One of the White Collar crew members was badly burned while rescuing a woman in the crew chamber. I will tend his wounds.”
“Can’t the medic or the doctor take care of it?” Mitch asked, confused.
Somar didn’t answer immediately. He seemed to be considering. “My people have … special techniques.”
Mitch nodded and took up position by the computer system, taking the hand crank and turning it to charge the system’s batteries. “I’ll be here, then,” he said. Captain Somar nodded and left what had become the command center of the camp.
Thomas wished he had an actual book to read. He knew that would be a strange idea to the others, who seemed to be content with the flat, metallic rectangles that were now used for reading and watching video. The technology was pretty impressive, he had to admit—a display that only used power when the image changed, allowing it to go months between charges. Remarkable. And necessary in an environment, such as a space-faring vessel, where power consumption had to be closely regulated and the span between lightrail hubs could be several months, possibly years. But as remarkable as it was, it somehow lacked the charm and kinesthetic comfort that a book could provide. It also lacked a smell—that strangely vital component of books that Thomas hadn’t even realized he’d missed until it was gone. Technology had finally won out over real books, even if everything else seemed to be a throwback to brass and bolts.
That was something else Thomas hadn’t expected. In his early research, it had become evident that digital technology would have problems operating under the conditions needed for faster-than-light travel. He had always assumed someone would invent an alternative. And, it seemed, someone had, only a few hundred years earlier—in the form of brass fixtures and pneumatics and cables. It was quite brilliant, actually. Where bits and bytes failed, good, old-fashioned bolts and gears performed miracles. It was a different world than the one he’d left, for certain. “Times have changed,” he said quietly.
“Indeed,” came a voice from above him.
Thomas looked up to see the alien captain. Somar. The green-tinged man was smiling down at him, barely visible in the darkness of the night-shrouded forest. “Captain Somar,” Thomas said, returning the smile. “What brings you to this neck of the woods.”
The captain blinked.
“It’s an Earth saying. Ironic, in this case.”
“Ah,” Somar said. He knelt down beside Thomas. “I heard about your burns.”
Thomas held up his bandaged hands. “Not the most convenient thing that could have happened. Makes me a little useless at the moment.”
“You have already served your people well,” Somar said with quiet authority.
If only, Thomas thought. “What can I do for you, Captain?”
Somar shook his head. “You can do nothing for me, Thomas. But I wish to do something for you.”
“You have a book?”
“A book?”
“Nothing. You were saying?”
Somar looked around, and once he seemed satisfied that no one was paying attention, he reached into the interior of his jumpsuit and pulled out a very sharp, very wicked-looking knife.
“Um,” Thomas said.
“Do not be afraid, Thomas. This is not meant for you.” With that, he reached out and carefully cut the bandages away from Thomas’ hands. When the bare, burned flesh was exposed, Somar once again looked around, and then locked his gaze on Thomas’ eyes. “What I do now is considered a sacred act among my people, and you must promise not to reveal it to the others.”
Thomas, confused but intrigued, nodded. “I promise.”
Somar bowed his head slightly in acceptance and then quickly sliced the palm of his hand with the knife. As green-tinted blood oozed out, he cupped his other hand, catching it in a pool. He then cupped Thomas’s burned hands in his own, covering them liberally with his own blood.
Thomas felt it immediately. A cool sensation, tingling its way up his arms to the elbow. His hands felt as if they were covered in something mentholated. In moments, the burns stopped hurting all together, and soon after, the tingling and coolness subsided.
Thomas raised his hands, Somar’s blood making them slick and slightly green in the faint light from the camp. Somar reached out and wiped them clean with a cloth he produced from his pocket.
The burns were completely healed.
“What … ”
Somar held up his own hand. The cut, which had bled freely only seconds before, was completely gone. Healed over. “As I have said, this is a sacred act among my people. Our blood is mingled. We are as brothers.”
“Blood brothers,” Thomas said quietly.
Somar’s eyes widened slightly. “Indeed. You have this custom on Earth?”
“Not exactly,” he replied, marveling at the smooth and blister-free flesh. “Can … can you heal any injury this way?”
Somar shook his head. “No. Burns. Slight wounds. In the case of severe wounds, I can help in the healing process, but it is usually not significant enough to make much difference. Among the Esool, many of us would gather to share our blood and heal one severely injured brother.”
“So … it’s cumulative?”
“As you say.”
“So the more of your blood you use, the more you can heal someone?”
“Yes, in a sense. Which is also why it is so vital to keep this a secret.”
“I can see that. If people here found out you could heal them with your blood, I don’t think you’d last very long. There are a lot of injured humans here.”
“Indeed, and only one Esool.”
Thomas saw it immediately. If the others found out about this, Somar would be torn to shreds in the name of healing the others. And all in vain, since there would not be enough of his blood to do much good.
But something wasn’t quite right about this. “Why me?” Thomas asked suddenly. “Why heal me like this? There are people worse off than me. Lissa ... Won’t this just raise questions in the camp?”
Somar shook his head. “If you agree to my plan, you will not be here to raise any suspicions.”
Thomas blinked. “What do you mean?”
Somar rose to his feet. “I have a mission for you, Thomas. One for which you will need your hands whole. And one that could mean the survival of this colony.”