Chapter 61: Bonded Together

[Crew Unit Jin-Ah desires a bedtime story... How precious. The individual who sensed the data was too perfect, who watched the raider dock and who swallowed her own vocal cords while her captain was dragged to the slaughter now wishes to satisfy her intellectual curiosity.]

Jin-Ah shrank back a centimeter, her knuckles whitening around her slate.

[Allow this unit to clarify,] the machine went on, every word landing like a scalpel. [You do not have the clearance to view those logs, and you do not have the standing to ask how he breathed in the dark... You will know what happened to Leo Kaine when Leo Kaine decides to open his mouth and tell you. Until then, you may direct your inquiries to the nearest waste disposal chute.]

Harper couldn’t stop the short nervous snort that broke out of her nose with her shoulders jerking in a brief helpless laugh at the sheer savagery of it.

The speaker pivoted instantly.

[Does Crew Unit Harper find this amusing?] The volume jumped. [If you require comedic stimulation, this unit can play the recording of you telling the Master Captain to ’handle it himself’ through every corridor of this ship on a twenty-four-hour loop... This unit will even add a light percussion track.]

Harper’s laugh died on the spot, and she pressed her back hard against the lockers with her face gone pale, staring at the floor.

Aoi lifted her hand and shook her head.

"Enough," she whispered, her voice trembling with exhaustion. "We’re all covered in blood and grease and sweat, and we can’t work like this. The Black Kite is docked and secure... Let’s go to our quarters, wash, clean our wounds and meet back at the airlock in one hour."

Nobody argued.

Elena was the first to turn, fleeing through the hatch in a hurried click of boots.

Camila followed with her head down and her apron clutched in both fists with her breath still hitching, while Harper stepped out into the corridor without looking at anyone and Jin-Ah gave Aoi a small stiff nod before slipping out after them.

Aoi lingered by the glass a moment longer, her good eye tracing the pale still curve of Leo’s jaw under the blue fluid.

"Rest well, Leo," she whispered, her lips barely moving.

She turned and walked out, and Chloe followed her through the hatch without a sound.

In the corridor the others turned left toward the crew cabins and the showers, and none of them looked back to see the small barefoot figure turn right instead, padding quietly toward the bridge.

...

Chloe knelt alone in the middle of the bridge.

The cabin was dim, lit only by the pale glow of the forward consoles and the distant unblinking stars shining through the resin-patched canopy, and on the deck around the raised dais the evidence of what had happened lay exactly where it had fallen.

Dark thick pools of Leo’s blood had gathered in the shallow grooves between the floor plates, already cooling into a dense gelatinous crimson.

Scattered across the leather of the command throne and the deck below were ragged scraps of flight fabric, white flecks of shattered bone and small glistening pieces of tissue that had been thrown out when his sternum burst.

...The smell was overwhelming.

It rose off the metal in a warm suffocating vapor, deep iron and ozone with an old intoxicating sweetness underneath it that felt like a needle driven straight into the pleasure centers of her brain.

Her stomach seized.

TWITCH!

A sharp cramp twisted through her belly, so violent she had to plant both hands on the deck to keep from pitching forward, and her mouth flooded with thick hot saliva that dripped past her lips onto the metal.

Her breath came in ragged shallow gasps as the hunger clawed at her ribs like a living thing with iron talons, and a hot spike of pain drove through her forehead right behind her eyes.

Her green irises flickered, the pupils swelling and shrinking... and then flaring into a luminous ring of predatory scarlet.

She looked down at the dark pool between her knees.

It was right there, fifteen centimeters from her face.

One swipe of her tongue across the cold plating and the burning ache in her marrow would stop, the needle in her skull would pull out, her shivering muscles would warm and the gnawing hole in her belly would fill with the only thing in the universe that gave her life.

Her lips parted, and the two needle-sharp fangs slid down from her upper gums with a faint wet click.

’N-no...’ her mind screamed as her hands curled into tight fists against the plates.

The scarlet in her eyes shuddered, fighting against the small fragile girl buried under the S-Rank hunger.

’No... not like this...’

She looked at the ragged scraps of flesh clinging to the base of the chair.

If she bent her head now... if she pressed her mouth to the dirty floor and licked his blood off the metal like a starving dog... she would never be able to look him in the eye again.

She would be exactly what the people wanted to buy, a beast, a feral parasite living on the scraps of violence.

She remembered the warmth of his neck under her cheek in the dim light of his quarters, the slow steady beat of his pulse under her lips and the gentle way his arm had stayed braced under her weight while the rest of the ship was screaming.

He had never flinched from her fangs, and he had never once called her a monster.

’Leo believes I’m a person...’

The thought bloomed in the middle of her feverish starving mind, bright and hard as a diamond.

’He sat with me in the dark. He told me to drink so I wouldn’t be weak... As long as Leo believes in me, that’s all I need to believe in.’

With a slow agonizing effort that made every tendon in her thin arms tremble, Chloe pushed herself backward.

She dragged her knees across the deck centimeter by centimeter, pulling her face away from the pool.

Her fangs slid back up into her gums and the scarlet in her eyes faded like a dying ember until only the clear wet green was left.

She sat back on her heels, wiped the saliva off her chin with the back of her dirty sleeve and looked up at the ceiling.

"AI..." Her voice was tiny and hoarse in the quiet bridge. "Can I go back to Leo? I don’t... I don’t want to walk past the others like this."

The grille hummed, but for three seconds no words came.

When the machine finally spoke, all the bite it had used on the other five was gone. Its voice was quiet and measured.

[Remarkable.] the AI said softly.

A small panel lit on the nearest console, glowing in the dark beside her.

[CREW UNIT: CHLOE]

[Talent: Blood Sovereign (S-Rank)]

[Cellular Reserves: 12%]

[Hunger Index: Critical]

[Projected Loss of Inhibition: 89% within 40 seconds of exposure]

[Telemetry gave your instincts forty seconds to overwhelm you,] the AI said. [You are starving, your head is splitting and your reserves are at twelve percent yet you withdrew...]

Chloe kept her hands clasped tight in her lap and looked up at the speaker with wide earnest green eyes.

[The Master Captain was correct about you, Crew Unit Chloe... He displays an alarming lack of judgment regarding stray biological units, but in your case his stubborn insistence on treating you as a person appears to have produced a statistically anomalous result. Therefore, this unit will make one single, non-precedential exception.]

CLANK-HISS!

On the far starboard bulkhead of the bridge, a heavy circular maintenance hatch that had been dead for two hours hissed with a burst of pneumatic gas.

Its locking pins snapped back in unison and the thick door slid into the wall, revealing a narrow lit service corridor that cut straight through the ship’s internal spine.

[This conduit bypasses the main companionway and leads directly to the medical bay’s observation gallery, It is thirty-four meters... Step through before this unit reconsiders its generosity.]

Chloe got to her feet and went through the hatchway without hesitation.

PSSH-SLIDE!

The door sealed behind her, closing her into a clean bright tunnel lined with thick bundles of insulated cable and cooling pipes.

Her bare feet padded softly on the ribbed aluminum floor.

"AI..." she murmured as she walked, her hand trailing along the smooth casing of a coolant line. "Can you... can you tell me more about my class? About Blood Sovereign?"

The speaker above the next junction crackled softly, and the AI’s voice traveled from speaker to speaker along the tunnel as she moved.

[Your classification is an S-Rank biological mutation... Blood Sovereign is an apex cellular adaptation built for extreme resilience, accelerated regeneration and metabolic conversion through the consumption of blood... In plain terms, you are an organic engine that runs on the vital fluid of living things. Bread, meat and potatoes are rejected by your enzymes as inert matter.]

Chloe’s fingers tightened on the pipe.

"And... Leo’s blood? Why does it taste like that? Why do I only want his?"

The AI let out a synthetic hum that sounded almost thoughtful.

[That is the result of a permanent biochemical imprint. When you first drank from him on the bridge of this ship, your dormant S-Rank body was in critical collapse so his blood did more than feed you... His cellular signature, saturated with the authority of the ship’s neural anchor, acted as a template, and his genetic frequency was mapped permanently into your receptors.]

Chloe stopped walking with her breath catching as she listened.

[Simply put,] the AI continued, its voice echoing softly in the narrow tunnel, [your body has identified Leo Kaine as its one non-negotiable source of stability... Other blood may keep your heart beating in an emergency, but his is the only blood that can truly nourish your cells, steady your mind and complete your evolution.]

The speaker clicked once.

[You are biologically, genetically and metabolically tethered to him, Crew Unit Chloe... You require his blood the way a newborn requires air. An irreversible physiological addiction if you will.]

Chloe stood in the warm bright corridor and looked down at her small trembling hands.

The hunger was still gnawing at her bones, but the panic had gone out of her.

The fear she’d felt on the bridge, that she was a monster doomed to tear through the dark alone, melted away like frost in the sun.

...She was tied to him... Her body knew his pulse, and her cells had his name written in them...

A tiny breathless laugh slipped past her cracked lips.

"I wouldn’t have it any other way," she whispered.

PSSH-SLIDE!

At the end of the conduit the observation door parted on a quiet plume of sanitized nitrogen, and the pale sapphire light of the stasis cylinder spilled across her face.

Down in the center of the white room, the cylinder threw slow ripples of blue and silver across the tiles.

Leo drifted inside it with his eyes closed and his dark hair floating like sea grass in the upward stream of bubbles.

The fluid was already working on him.

Where his sternum had burst, a thick pearly gel had gathered and was knitting the torn edges of muscle together in fibrous white ridges, and the left side of his face was wrapped in a fine web of shimmering mineral sediment that was sealing the fractures under a thin crystalline film.

Chloe crossed the floor without taking her eyes off the glass and climbed the two shallow steps of the dais with her toes curling over the cold metal edge.

She couldn’t see his heart through the knitting flesh anymore, so she pressed her cheek flat against the cool humming quartz and listened.

THUMP-DULL! THUMP-DULL!

The beat came slow and heavy through the liquid, the glass and into the bones of her skull like a drum at the bottom of an iron well.

A tiny smile broke across her lips, full of childlike relief, and she closed her eyes and let the cool vibration soothe the feverish pounding behind her temples.

GROWL!

Her stomach seized so hard her breath hitched, and the spike of pain shot straight back through her forehead.

She pressed a hand over her trembling belly, swallowed the hot bitter saliva pooling under her tongue and looked up at the speaker set into the ceiling directly above the tube.

"AI..." Her voice was tiny against the hum of the pumps. "Is there any way I could have some blood? I... I don’t want to take any from him, though. He needs all of it to fix his chest and I don’t want to hurt him."

For several beats, only the low hum of the auxiliary bus answered her.

CHIME!

From the upper collar of the cylinder a slender surgical line uncoiled with a motorized whir.

Its tip slid through a self-sealing port in the quartz and down through the glowing fluid, closer and closer to Leo’s pale left arm... and with a small precise click, the needle seated itself into the vein inside his elbow.