The Superiors (29 page)

The man looked at his pad and scrolled through to the next screen. He studied it and then turned it to Draven. “She’s in one of the houses now. This one right here. Go out through the far doors, take a right, past the shower areas. She’s the eighth house on the left.”

“Thank you.”

He followed the guard’s directions and came upon the structure Cali called a house. Like all the houses, it was nothing more than a collection of trash piled into some semblance of a shelter. He didn’t know why anyone would prefer that to the protected bunks in the barracks. He paused in front of the house, taking in the smell. He caught Cali’s scent and a few other smells, one of them sickening and putrid.

He found himself wondering if she lived there with her new partner or if she’d moved into her family’s dwelling. He hadn’t thought to ask the door guard who else lived in the house. Draven tapped on the door once to alert the sapiens inside, an unnecessary act. None of the other Superiors did this kind of thing, but he had found in his work with homo-sapiens that they appreciated little gestures of kindness.

He pulled the twisted piece of rusty tin away and entered the dwelling. The fetid smell permeated the place. Draven counted four adult sapiens and a small one. Her family’s house then. He made his way across the flimsy plastic strips that covered the old tires to make up the floor. The place was only about three meters long, and the mat on the floor took up two thirds of the space. The place offered very little other than a sleeping area. The walls, like the rest of the place, looked salvaged from a dump of worn-out materials. The few makeshift shelves held more of what looked to Draven like junk.

The sapien houses didn’t contain clothing or food. Those things stayed in the communal area in the big building. They would have molded in the damp environment of the shelters anyway. He couldn’t make out the faces as well as he could have outside, but he could smell distinctly where Cali lay. He knelt and shook her leg. One of the other figures sat up.

“Cali’s sick,” the female said. “Take me instead. Please, Master Superior. She’s real weak.”

“What’s wrong with her?”

“I don’t know, Master, sir. She was complaining about her arm hurting and we thought she just didn’t want to work. Y’know? But then she stopped getting up at all. Our mama died, and maybe she got the thing from her, I don’t know. You can take me.”

Draven could tell now that the putrid smell originated from Cali. “Has she married? Why is she in this diseased place if she could have a mate?”

“Cali don’t want a mate. She just wants to be left alone.”

“Cali, awaken and talk with me,” he said, shaking her again. She moaned but didn’t move. The sister protested while Draven dug Cali from under the thin blanket. The baby started to wail, a terrible sound. “I will take her to the garden,” Draven said. He gathered up the limp body and stood.

“Tend to your child,” he said, and left the stinking shanty through the tin door. Outside the smell wasn’t so cloistering, and he breathed in deeply of the clean air when the wind blew. The scent of sickness hugged the air around Cali, and now him. He carried her to the edge of the garden and found the stack of hoses and sat with his bundle.

“Am I dying?” Cali asked, her voice thin.

Draven brushed the hair from her face. Her skin scalded him, like it had the night she’d been sunburned. But tonight the heat went all the way through her, a sick kind of clotted heat. He could hardly bear to touch her with such pervasive heat, worse even than her usual animal warmth.

She sat quiet for a minute, her breathing quick and shallow. Her head rested against his chest, and he thought she slept. Then she said, “I don’t care. You can look at it. But it’s gross.”

He slid her around and turned her arm over to look at the wound. The heat radiated from the black center, spreading with the infection from a purple color inside her elbow to red streaks along her arm.

“Oh, hell. Cali.”

“Mmm?”

“I will take you to the clinic. You might have blood poisoning. Your arm is infected, probably from the bites.
Merde.
Why didn’t you go earlier? You might lose an arm, or worse.”

“I don’t like you.”

“I don’t give a damn if you like me. You’re a stupid girl, too willful for your own good. Dammit, Cali. I shouldn’t have listened to you. I should have come back to see you.”

He stood and pressed his lips to her hot forehead. “My dear little pet, my
jaani
,” he said, carrying her out of the garden and towards the clinic. The doctors worked all night, so they could tend to her. Draven carried her in, and she lay still and silent while he said soothing words to her and waited for a doctor.

After an hour or so a doctor came to take her into an exam room. He gave Draven a curious look but didn’t comment further. He probably thought Draven worked at the Confinement, and Draven didn’t correct him. He knew most of the workers at the Confinement wouldn’t have come into the hospital room with a sapien, but he wanted to know if she’d live. He sat quietly while the doctor examined her.

“You get to recognize this smell after a while,” the doctor said. “She’s got an infection, like you suspected. And her blood is poisoned.”

“So she’s going to die?”

“Not yet. The infection isn’t what’s poisoning her. We can put leeches on her to draw out the infection and the poison, but it may be too late. She should have been brought in earlier.” He gave Draven a reproachful look. “The infection may still spread and kill her. It’s hard to know if leeches are strong enough to get it all out. We can make some small incisions in her arm to let more of the infection out, but there’s no way to know if it will all come out in time to save her. This is a waste of a human, Mister…guard.”

“Yes, I smell it.” The smell sickened him, but the thought of losing her sickened him more. “Is it possible? I know it would be unpleasant, but if it could save her…I have much more strength than your leeches.”

“That’s true…” The doctor looked at Draven in a calculating way. “I don’t know that it’s ever been done. But she’ll probably die anyway, so I’d be willing to let you try it out.”

“Good. Then get me a basin to spit into.”

The doctor came back ten minutes later with three basins, and three other doctors. Two doctors-in-training trailed behind them. “We’ve never seen this before,” Cali’s doctor explained. “Everyone is curious to see if it will work. And to see your reaction, honestly.”

“Fine. Give me a basin and let’s get started.”

Draven took Cali’s arm and took one last breath. He knew he wouldn’t be able to breathe so close to her wound while he drew on it. In the light of the hospital room it looked much worse. The whole arm had swollen and discolored, and despite the heat, the blood behind it sounded slower than it should. He bent to his work, prepared for the taste, and bit into the center.

He thought he’d readied himself, but there was no way to prepare for what came into his mouth. The fluid tasted worse than bitter, sickening and salty and thick, and he pulled back, gagging into the bowl a string of red and yellow and dark colored slime. No one spoke while he gagged for a few minutes. Fluid coursed from the marks he’d made in her skin. He squeezed her arm gently, not sure he could stand to put it back to his mouth. The brackish liquid flowed out for a few minutes and then slowed and stopped.

Draven looked at the group of doctors and then back at the arm. He didn’t want to give up yet, in front of all those people, so he brought Cali’s arm back to his mouth and put his teeth into her again. This time she woke, and screamed, and her whole body convulsed in pain. He clamped his teeth down on her arm for purchase, and she shrieked and pounded his face with her other fist. Two of the doctors held her writhing body down while Draven drew as hard as he could. When his mouth filled with the stuff he spit and gagged for minutes, steeled himself, and repeated the process. After the second mouthful, Cali stopped shrieking abruptly, and he could only hope she’d lost consciousness and was lost to the pain.

He wished he could be lost to the horror of what he was doing. If it didn’t work, it would be the worst thing he’d ever done. After every pull on the infected area, his body heaved with retching, and instead of getting used to it, he seemed to grow more sensitive to it. Finally he couldn’t bring himself to do it even one more time. Her sap looked more like it should, although it still tasted off. He spit the last mouthful into the basin of slime. It came out the usual color.

He wiped his mouth on a towel one of the practicing doctors had given him, and then slumped back in the chair, drawing breath after ragged breath and looking at the group of solemn doctors who stood watching him.

“What was it like?” one of the trainees asked.

“Like it looked,” Draven said, wiping his face and his mouth again. “Can I have a glass of water, please?” He couldn’t move. He didn’t think morning had come while he worked, but the horrifying task had exhausted him.

The trainee brought him water and he rinsed his mouth over and over and then got himself another glass and drank this one. Then he sat shuddering at the taste he couldn’t seem to get out of his mouth or his mind. The doctors drifted away, except Cali’s doctor, who went to get an antibiotic and leeches to remove what remained in her arm, leaving Draven alone with the human girl.

He scooted to the edge of her bed and put his forehead down on her arm. “I’m sorry, my
jaani
. I’m so sorry,” he whispered.

She didn’t respond.

“I’m so sorry, Aspen, my
jaan
. I’m so sorry,” he repeated. Then he grew quiet and rested his cool forehead on the inflamed and offensive arm.

Chapter Forty

When morning approached, the doctor came in to check on Cali. He took the leeches away and returned to check her vital signs. Draven watched with the fascination of someone who has forgotten such things after so long without them.

“Will she live?” he asked the doctor.

“I think so. Can’t say for sure, but I think she’s better than last night. Could be all that draining helped her out. No way to know for sure.”

“Thank you, doctor.”

“Maybe I should be the one thanking you. You want to see what happened?”

Draven approached and the doctor held Cali’s arm and pointed to the raised welts. “You see these here? These are the result of unclosed draw-points. Someone who owned her must not’ve liked her much.”

“She worked in the restaurants.”

“That explains the sheer volume of the bites. Anyhow, you see, a sapien body is a tricky thing. We forget what it was like. It’s fragile in a way you and I aren’t ever going to be again, but at the same time it’s resilient and adaptable. It protects itself when it can. And here we’ve got a miniscule drop of poison goes in, and when you close properly your saliva it draws it right out and closes up the wound. But when you don’t finish, that little drop of poison stays right there.”

The doctor poked one of the bumps and Cali twitched. “Hurts them a little, I imagine. Not so bad, though. They don’t hurt as much as we do.”

Draven remembered the pebble-like scars, and he knew it wasn’t any little pain, but he kept it to himself. His hand unconsciously drifted to his back. He scratched, then let his hand fall away.

“Anyhow, these little bumps are where the human body has developed a way to make some sort of protective shell around the poison, like a clam makes a pearl out of a grain of sand. Except these are softer, but not much. You see, what happened here to this sap is that someone nicked one of those little pearls and the poison got out into her bloodstream or the tissue around the area anyway. So her body attacked it, like it attacks any foreign substance. No way of knowing if that caused the infection or if something just got in one of her open marks. The way I figure it, she’s pretty lucky you sucked all that gunk out.”