Endosymbiosis

13. Hemorrhage

I couldn't stay there another minute.

There was no guarantee they wouldn't kill me once they got what they wanted from Arkadi. And, even if they believed in my bone marrow and decided to keep me alive, there was no guarantee that at some other time I would be able to escape.

There was no guarantee that I could get away now.

But I wouldn't accept that without trying.

I swung my leg until the scalpel I'd kept in my pocket fell out and picked it up off the ground after a lot of contortion. I guided the blade to the ropes that held me and tore them with the friction. When other humans worked at the Oasis with me they said I was paranoid about always keeping a scalpel with the blade mounted; what would they say now?

I felt along the walls through the dark to the door Arkadi had come out of and opened it just enough to see something outside... And kept seeing nothing. I wandered through the dark until I reached a dim yellow light, thinking how visible in the middle of the hallway I probably was to the vorrampes... But the fact that I was still alive told me otherwise.

In that corridor, the ceiling was so high that it looked like a dark sky without stars. Countless containers were piled along its entire length next to the wall, leaving in the center a path for the traffic of the vorrampes. I squeezed between the containers and the wall, trying to move forward while my injured ankle slowed me down. I staggered down the narrow path as fast as I could and ducked behind the rusting metal when I saw vorrampes pass. I held my breath so they wouldn't hear me and begged them not to smell my blood, so pungent that even I could smell it. I heard their footsteps approaching, their claws scraping the floor, their growls becoming more audible... But then they went straight down the hall. I peered past the container, not understanding how I was still alive, and saw the vorrampes rushing down the path, not having time to investigate the source of that smell and heading straight for... Something.

They carried guns bigger than my head, all dressed in a stained red suit, as if they'd taken the Empire's white army uniform and dyed it in blood... To make it their own. Clothes already bled... So no one would know when they were bleeding.

Something was happening...

And I could only hope it was enough so I could get out of there.

I passed a half-open box of cartridges and remembered the ones we had lost. Maybe if I could stretch myself a little...

But then the vorrampes saw me.

They darted in my direction, and I stumbled away through the containers they crushed, peering through the metal inches from their claws and bloodied eyes. Every step I took triggered a shock of pain that invaded my leg and mind. I ran my eyes over my shoulder and, before I could stop myself, I stumbled into the dark corridor beyond the containers, falling straight into Korrok's clutches.

I shuddered as I found myself unable to escape, surrounded by red and pain.

"We need you more now than ever, sapiens..." He hissed, violence in his voice.

"No..." I growled. "This war is not mine!"

Then I ripped the air with the scalpel, hitting his third eye.

A roar exploded from the creature's throat and its claws on my arms loosened just enough for me to break free.

I stumbled through the darkness toward a distant light, the only thing that gave me hope of a way out.

Then the floor disappeared below my feet and I slipped down a ramp into a black void below, until I realized it was seized by a heavy liquid, coming closer as gravity pulled me to it. And, when I fell, I plunged into the scarlet river in a violent baptism.

Welcome to the Empire.

I was enveloped in the embrace of darkness, my pupils drowning in the ruby. I tried to swim back to the surface, but I didn't know where it was. Pain exploded in my ankle with every movement, my skin impregnated with the essence of death and my lungs began to burn until I could no longer hold my breath and let red bubbles escape me on a trail to the surface. I inched upward, grunting and trying not to let that foreign blood enter me, to the point where I thought it was impossible to survive that distance... But then I broke the red layer of the surface, gasping as gooey trails ran in front of my eyes.

I remembered then that now I was on display. I looked back to the top of the ramp where I had fallen, but there were no vorrampes there as I had imagined. Maybe they thought I had drowned... They had already expected less of me.

I swam to a bank and dug my nails into it, dragging myself out of the river. I lay down, breathless, and surrendered to the throbbing pain in my ankle, contaminated with blood of another species. I needed to take care of it right away, or who knows what interstellar infection I would get.

On the wall of the shed a long vertical ladder led to a door surrounded by light. I staggered toward it and, like a moth drawn to the brightness, climbed the metal bars with pain with every touch of my injured leg and burning arms, until I reached the door and collapsed to the ground outside beneath an ocean of sunlight.

As I rose, dripping distilled red in an alley between the sheds of the rebel compound, my eyes met Arkadi's, returning with a strange motorcycle, hand wrapped around his abdomen and face contorting with each step.

He stared at me, a creature too crimson to go unnoticed, and stumbled toward me.

"How..." He muttered.

"I'm learning to improvise..." I shrugged and stumbled towards him. "Let's get out of here."

"The motorcycle is unloaded..." Korrok had probably only loaded it enough for what he wanted Arkadi to do. "And if we walk back to the ship, they'll smell us..." Then I noticed the red stain on his abdomen, partially hidden behind his arm as if he were holding the world inside him, a slip before he dumped all his mistakes on the floor.

I reached into my pocket and held one of the cartridges I'd managed to steal, a smile breaking across our faces.

"I like you better improvising."

• • • ֍ • • •

"What did you do for the rebels?" I asked Arkadi, stumbling as he ran to the ship's control panel to get us out of there.

From the heights, the constructions of that urban center looked like little white cubes, like dice that always fall into misfortune. They encircled the unmistakable solid state of the palace, its ruby ​​towers reflecting the sunlight like jewels embedded in the ground... The only place in this world where there was still plenty.

"I poisoned the palace's blood reservoir..." He whispered, not looking at me.

I turned my eyes to where his were, beyond the window, where the palace's tallest tower stretched out in the sunshine with that secret.

And then the tower exploded into a million pieces of stone.

The debris flew and collapsed the walls that protected the palace, spilling the blood stored along the city streets in a crimson chaos.

The Empire was bleeding.

The soldiers of the rebellion emerged from the shadows and rushed to the tear in the palace wall, destroying everything they saw related to the Aulics. The gleam of their blades and projectiles reached our eyes from afar, in an army so gigantic it stretched almost beyond the city limits, marching over the bloody rubble of the power that had once ruled that world...

But not anymore.

That attack had been planned...

"It wasn't poison..." He growled. "It was a bomb."

Arkadi turned to me, the flames of chaos below glinting in his eyes; betrayed, confused, angry, and I wondered which battle was worse: the one on the surface of the Blood District or in the depths of his mind.

"You want to fix this, don't you?! The war?!" He roared. "That's why you want to go to the galaxy's core?!

"Yea..."

His head confirmed with a heavier weight than it had been and then his lips, dry and determined, twitched at the words:

"You're not the only one anymore."