The Chancellor was doing everything he could to refrain from putting a bullet in her.

  “I’ve got one dead soldier, two in critical condition, and a goddamn freak dead in the middle of the district.” Hardy kept the barrel of his pistol aimed at Jin, his eyes cold and unwavering. “All this because you snuck in here. I’m going to ask you one more time who the hell you are or what you’re doing here, and if you answer wrong or not at all, you get three to the goddamn fucking head.”

  Jin had two guards on either side of her, seizing her by her arms, and other guards on either end of the hallway in the infirmary, ready to stop her if she somehow attempted to make a run for it. Hardy stood just in front of her, right outside the door where Lucas, Chloe, and Aiden were. Next to Hardy stood Jon, face sunken and horribly bruised, one arm in a sling.

  “I saved your life,” Jin said slowly and coldly. “I killed the invaders.”

  “And almost killed my sister,” Jon spoke, his voice hoarse. There was an unforgiving look in his eyes.

  “Your sister was dying.” Jin cast her glance at him. “She still is. Her body continues to fight the infection because of what you guys are, but she’s in far too critical condition to fight it off much longer. She will turn.”

  “Shut up.” Jon took a threatening step toward Jin.

  Jin didn’t flinch. “I can save her,” she declared. “I can save them.”

  “Do I look stupid to you?” Hardy demanded, his finger inching ever close to the trigger of his pistol. The soulless look in his eyes was an indicator that he had absolutely no intention of rethinking things. Either he got what she wanted, or she ended up dead.

  Of course, the pistol wouldn’t kill her. The bullets wouldn’t even touch her. But the Chancellor didn’t know that, nor did the boy standing next to him.

  “Do you want your sister to live or not?” Jin looked to Jon, ignoring Hardy entirely. “I can waste my time and hers, telling you exactly what you want to know, after which you probably would still try to kill me. Or I can go in there right now, save her life, and earn some of your trust since, apparently, killing the invaders wasn’t enough.”

  Behind Hardy, the door opened, and something sped out of the room. In a blur, Jin was pinned to the wall by a firm grip, her feet dangling a couple of feet off the ground. Lucas’s eyes, swollen as they were, still looked frightening, filled with rage.

  “Should have talked when they asked,” Lucas growled.

  “Please,” Jin choked out.

  “That won’t work again,” Lucas said. He tightened his grip around her throat. “Spike’s dead because those things came. And they’re here for you, aren’t they? You’re not who you said you were. You certainly seem to be better with your words right now.”

  “Lucas,” Jon called tenderly, stepping forward. “Let her go.”

  “My fault she’s here.” Lucas kept his eyes locked onto hers. “My fault Spike’s dead. That Chloe’s dying. Why shouldn’t I kill her right now?!” His voice quivered, his hand trembling around Jin’s throat.

  Jin’s expression shifted from pleading to one seriousness. She reached for the hand wrapped around her throat and pried it off with ease. Her feet found the ground again, and she looked into Lucas’s stunned eyes.

  “You can’t kill me.” Her voice was soft when she spoke. “And I will tell you what you want to know,” she said, looking at Hardy and Jon. “But we’re running out of time. Let me save her now.”

  “How?” Jon asked, eyeing Jin with distrust.

  Jin moved quickly, then grabbed a knife from one of the guards next to her, startling everyone. Hardy looked prepared to shoot, but Jon’s hand shot toward Hardy’s pistol, and he gave the Chancellor a calm look that meant: Not yet.

  Jin held the knife up for everyone to see, and then, with all of her strength, she shoved the tip of it right into her palm. The knife only barely pierced her, the blade shattering right after. Jon’s eyes shifted with a mixture of surprise and curiosity, and then they darkened with something else. Hunger, induced by the sight of the blood already trickling out of the minuscule wound on her palm.

  “I hoped your weapons would be more advanced than that.” Jin sounded disappointed. “But I suppose this will have to do.”

  She made to head into the room, but Hardy blocked her off, growling at her.

  Jin looked up at his face and met his eyes. “Chancellor. I don’t have very long until this wound heals. Might you step out of my way?”

  “Why should we trust you? We don’t know what you are or what your blood will do to her,” Hardy responded.

  “I need her alive as much as her brother does,” Jin said. “I need all of them alive.”

  “Why?” Hardy demanded.

  “Because I need soldiers too.” Jin narrowed her eyes. “Step out of my way now, please. I will not ask again.”

  Hardy growled again, but after a moment of consideration and after a nod from Jon, he stepped aside. Jin gave him a nod, then continued into the room, the others following behind her.

  Aiden looked fairly stabilized now, a bandage wrapped firmly around his throat, and a blood bag tapped in a way that the contents were trickling into his mouth. In enough time, he would heal.

  Chloe, however, looked much worse. She was writhing in the bed, eyes squeezed shut, face drenched in sweat, clothes clinging to her skin. Next to her bed was a small bucket filled with darkened blood. Some of it had gotten onto the floor too. Like with Aiden, a blood bag had been tapped to feed her, to speed up her regeneration.

  Jin shook her head. “Bitten by the hounds and the Servants. Human blood won’t be enough to aid her regeneration. Especially not human blood so substandard.”

  “Uhm, that’s my blood,” said one of the guards behind her.

  Jin looked to the guard and scoffed. “You should have more fruits.”

  Jin moved toward Chloe and then got rid of the blood bag she was drinking from. As soon as she did, Chloe groaned, and Jon took a sharp, instinctive step forward but halted when Jin held a hand out to him.

  “Relax.”

  Jin held her cut palm over Chloe’s mouth and squeezed hard with her other hand. Droplets of her blood fell from her palm, trickling into Chloe’s just barely open mouth. Jin watched as Chloe’s face shifted slightly at the taste of the blood and noted the way she clutched the sheets of her bed with her hand. Her legs jerked awkwardly.

  “I swear to God, if she dies—” Jon began.

  “She won’t,” Jin reassured.

  A minute later, she stopped feeding Chloe her blood and moved toward Chloe’s legs. She pulled up her pant leg to examine the spot on her ankle where she’d been bitten. Jon, Lucas, and Hardy moved forward, all three of them watching as slowly as the bite closed up, foaming at the edges as it did before healing entirely.

  Chloe’s other wounds did the same, starting to close up, although the healing was slower on the wounds from the hounds than it’d been with the Servant bite.

  “She should be awake in thirty of your minutes,” Jin said to the others. “And I take it I will have your trust when that happens?”

  “Not a chance,” Hardy growled. “You fed her your blood, she’s healing. Now’s the part where you tell us what the hell’s going on.”

  “When she wakes,” Jin said, gesturing toward Chloe. “I have no intention of repeating myself, and when I tell the truth, I’d like for there to at least be someone who won’t want to kill me.”

  “And you think she won’t kill you?”

  “I trust she won’t,” Jin said, looking at Chloe. “I’ve watched her. Watched all of you. Her, I know I can trust.”

  Jon folded his arms. “Fine,” he said. “We wait. But if there’s anything wrong with her when she wakes, everything even remotely different—”

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  “I promised she’d survive.” Jin narrowed her gaze at Jon. “I delivered on that. I promise nothing else.”

  ***

  When Chloe came to, she was confused for a moment.

  Jon was sat in a chair placed by her bed, head resting on one hand. He was asleep too, but he slept less noisily than Aiden, nodding off slightly, cute spit bubbles at the left corner of his lip.

  She wasn’t in any pain when she woke. There was no ache, no dull throb, no sting, no sharp, biting sensations, none of what she’d felt before. Her eyes didn’t even need to adjust to the sunlight. In fact, she felt the exact opposite of pain. She felt oddly strong, renewed, and felt a tingling within her, something akin to adrenaline but not quite. It didn’t feel as though any of what she remembered had happened, didn’t feel as though she’d been bitten by a Servant or like there’d been crazed dog-like creatures that had torn into her or even an angry god that had sent her flying.

  In fact, the only things that made it believable that all of those things had indeed happened were Aiden asleep in the bed next to hers, badly bruised, and Jon, in the chair, with one arm in a sling.

  There was something about the sight of Jon like that, asleep and with the little spit bubbling at a corner of his mouth, that made her feel an odd, bittersweet tug within her, made her feel an odd tightening around her heart, and brought a slight sting to her eyes. She’d always known, of course, how much time and circumstances had changed him, how much it’d changed them both.

  But it was in the moments like these, fleeting as they’d been recently, when he looked to be even just slightly at peace, that she saw the shadow of what he’d once been. In that moment and for just a fraction of a second, she glimpsed past the uptight superhuman soldier and saw the freckled, curly-haired, mischievous, and overly playful teenager who’d constantly poked fun at her for being whiny and who stuck his tongue out at her whenever he had something swing his way.

  She saw the dark-eyed boy who’d beaten someone for putting a dead snake in her locker at school and had seemed without remorse even when he’d been suspended for doing so. She saw her brother, as he’d been before disease and angry gods and Servants had taken everything from them before the need to survive had driven them into altering themselves forever.

  She realized with a start that her mouth had gone dry, and there was a single tear rolling out of her left eye and down her cheek. She cleared her throat, wiped the tear, and sat upright in the bed.

  As soon as she did, Jon’s eyes opened. They widened at the sight of her awake, and he quickly sat up in the chair, brushing the back of his hand across his mouth, eliminating the spit bubble.

  “Chlo.” He sounded relieved. “It worked.”

  “Why do you look rougher than I do?” Chloe asked, her voice steady, calm.

  “Forget how I look,” Jon said, reaching out and taking her hand in his. “How do you feel?”

  Chloe shrugged. “Dunno,” she said. “Great, I think. No, I do feel great. Which is weird, right? I don’t think I’ve felt like this in like…ever.”

  “But no pain?” Jon raised one eyebrow over the other. “Nothing feels off at all?”

  “Should something?” Chloe eyed him curiously. “What happened here? How did you save me?”

  “I didn’t.” Jon shook his head and sighed. “Can you walk?”

  “I feel like I could fly.”

  To this, Jon chuckled. “That’s great. Come on then, there’s someon…I don’t know, maybe something…that you need to see.”

  “What is it?” Chloe frowned as she rose to her feet, Jon watching her with concern as she did. She caught the look of concern on his face and sighed. “I’m fine. Really.” Once the two of them were out of the room and out of the infirmary, she saw yet another confirmation that everything really had happened as she remembered.

  Not too far away from them, collapsed between brick buildings that had almost themselves collapsed entirely, the corpse of an angry god, around which most had gathered and now stood gawking, ignoring the barked orders from guards attempting to establish a perimeter around the corpse.

  “Holy shit.” Her mouth dropped open. “Did we do that?”

  “No.” Jon shook his head. “You’ll see soon enough.”

  Jon led her to the Chancellor’s Hall. Outside, sat on the steps, holding in his hand a hoodie Chloe was pretty sure belonged to Spike was Lucas. As soon as they arrived, he looked up from the hoodie at them. His eyes looked bloodshot with rage.

  “You’re here,” he said. His voice was cold, lifeless almost. “Good. She can get whatever she wants to say out of the way, and then I can kill her.”

  Lucas rose to his feet and without saying anything else to them, started walking in the direction of the Hall’s entrance.

  “Who’s he talking about?” Chloe queried.

  Jon didn’t answer, simply gestured for her to follow them, and so she did. Inside the Chancellor’s Hall, they didn’t head toward Hardy’s office. Instead, they moved through the wide hallway to a small door at the rear of the Hall, a door that opened onto a dimly lit stairwell that led straight down.

  They followed the stairs down onto the Hall’s lower level, emerged onto a narrow hallway illuminated by flickering fluorescent strips. There were windows down there, or glass doors rather that led into cells. Most of the cells were empty, of course, since there were very few things left these days to get thrown into prison for. There were some however, occupied by people who’d stolen or killed or deserted.

  At the end of the hall, Hardy was standing outside one of the cells with his arms crossed. They joined him outside the cell, and Chloe’s face shifted when she saw who was in it.

  A girl, clad in a sleeveless white top and ill-fitting dark gray pants, completely barefoot. On one hand, she sported a tattoo—a crow.

  “You.” Chloe’s voice was cold. “You’re the stowaway.”

  “My name is Jin,” the girl introduced herself to Chloe alone, a hint that the others had already gotten familiar with her.

  Chloe looked to the others, a little confused, clearly out of the loop. “What is this?”

  “She saved your life,” Jon answered. “Fed you her blood, and it healed you almost immediately. Brought you back from the brink of death.”

  “That’s impossible,” Chloe said. She turned to the girl. “How?”

  “That’s what we’d all like to know,” Hardy said gruffly. “How, why, whole lot of questions we’ve got for her. But she refused to speak until you were here.”

  “Buying herself time.” Lucas’s voice remained lifeless, but the rage in his eyes seemed much more fiery now that he had Jin within his sights. He had one fist clenched, the veins on it bulging intensely. Chloe thought she could almost hear the blood rushing within him.

  “I am not buying myself time.” Jin walked right up to the glass then. “I have no need to buy myself time. My life is in no danger. It is you, and the rest of the humans who are in danger and you who need all the time in the world. Unfortunately, you do not have it.”

  Lucas scoffed and inched slightly closer to the glass.

  “Humans?” Chloe repeated, frowning at the girl. “What do you mean by that? Are you not human?”

  Jin smiled and said nothing.

  “You can’t be serious.” Hardy rolled his eyes. “You really expect us to believe that you’re an alien.”

  “I come from a race known as the Neren,” Jin said. “The closest translation in your English language is Other. And it is my people who have visited this plague and ruin upon your world and who currently engineer methods to claim it entirely for themselves. The diseased and the frail specimens you’ve laughably called angry gods, all a part of their machinations.”

  “That’s enough.” Lucas growled. “You think we’re going to believe this rubbish? Aliens?”

  “Are there alternatives easier for you to believe, Lucas?” Jin asked, her voice softening while she spoke to him. “Would all of this be more believable for you if I said it was all an act of divine intervention? An act of your God?”

  Lucas said nothing.

  “Tell me what you noticed today,” Jin said. “Out there. With the Servants and the angry God.” She said, angry God, as though she was doing everything she could not to burst into laughter.

  “They were hungrier than usual,” Jon said. “More aggressive, more ferocious. More—”

  “Determined,” Chloe said. “Coordinated. Like—,”

  “Soldiers?” Jin raised one eyebrow over the other.

  “And what about the dogs?”

  “Nighthounds,” Jin corrected. “Personal pets of Ravan, one of the many lunatics in my father’s employ. No doubt the specimen I killed was another of his machinations, sent to sniff me out and retrieve me.”

  “You’re the reason they were here,” Chloe murmured. “Why?”

  “Are we actually doing this?” Lucas demanded. “We’re buying this? We have no evidence of what she’s saying. Aliens? Do any of you remember seeing spaceships arrive on here? Was there some report we all missed?”

  “The evidence you need lies within the dead specimen,” Jin said. “You call them gods; we call them failures of Neren bio-robotics. They’re programmed for specific purposes, mostly to keep you all afraid, to keep you in your little districts, to keep you busy. The one here was programmed for something else. When we’re done here, I can cut it open and show you evidence. And if that’s not enough, then I suppose I’ll have to leave you to your fates and seek out others who might be more motivated to protect their world. But you would be wise to listen—as it stands, this district is marked for death. My father will suspect that you know too much, and he will not take any risks or leave any loose ends.”

  Hardy took a step back from the cell, an expression on his face that indicated this was all too much for him to process.

  “Fine.” Jon moved closer to the cell. “Say we believe you, say you’re an alien…you still haven’t told us why you came here, still haven’t told us why we have no time left. Who’s your father?”

  “Tarran.” Jin shuddered as she said his name, and Chloe noticed a flash of fear in her eyes. “He’s Commander of the Neren fleet that came to this world, and his orchestrations have led to much of your sorrow thus far.”

  “So you’re an alien,” Lucas said, “And your dad’s the big bad who pretty much ended human civilization and left a bunch of bloodthirsty monsters running around…he’s the one who destroyed all of our families, our homes…and the reason why I need to feed on blood to survive. And you knew that the whole time, right? Knew what was going on, what he was doing? Why the change of heart now? Why are you here?”

  “I sympathize with your plight.” Jin looked at Lucas and sounded as though she meant it. “The Neren expedition was here to collect information on your species, on your habitat, your world. The ways through which we achieve that are never…painless. But it has long been our way. And we have also often helped with rebuilding.”

  “How fucking generous,” Lucas snarled.

  “But my father has no intention of rebuilding this world,” Jin continued. “He wishes to claim it entirely and has spent a great deal of time building the weapons that will aid him in that goal. His plan was to colonize this world, break away from the rest of the Neren empire, and eventually go after them. He thinks of them as failures and thinks of himself as a Messiah. My mother found out what he wished to do and, in trying to stop him, met her end.” Jin’s voice quivered. “When I found out what had happened, what he’d done…I ran.”

  Lucas went quiet then, but the anger in his eyes did not wane.

  “So that’s what this is?” Hardy asked, turning to face Jin again. “He just wants his daughter back? We hand you over to him, and he leaves us alone?”

  “It’s not that easy.” Jin shook her head.

  Jon sighed. “Never is.”

  “When I ran, I did so with something he needed for his weapons. A power source. Without it, he cannot complete his plans.”

  Hardy’s expression shifted then. “So that’s it? And where’s this core now?”

  Jin pointed to her stomach, tapping against it gently. Chloe’s eyes widened.

  “Fuck.” Hardy shook his head.

  “So he gets you, kills you to get his power source, and then the rest of us are dead?” Chloe asked.

  “Pretty much, yes,” Jin said. “He will continue to send more after me until he gets what he wants. Eventually, he will come himself. And when he does, none of you will survive. Not even your ashes will remain.”