Endosymbiosis

41. Healing

I left the tent to discard Deinos's member and leaned against the piles of boxes outside, in an attempt to regain the composure I felt I was losing. Arkadi had nearly passed out inside and I didn't feel much different, even though I tried not to show it. Someone there needed to pretend that everything was under control, in hopes that something eventually was.

Out there, in the purity of the snow, I saw a furious pione being led into one of the iatric tents, covered in dust and thrashing like a wild beast... The first contaminated enemy I saw, and one terribly dissatisfied with being on our side.

How would the aericose bring him to our side? I couldn't stop myself from following him, curious for that answer. The rebel soldiers tied him to a pale gurney and left him with wounds that drained him on the ground. I approached slowly to assess his cut, but the pione flailed violently, wriggling his stinger in an attempt to drive it into me. I considered going back to those who really wanted my help, when a thought crossed my mind...

The contamination was just a suggestion – which he clearly hadn't accepted – so maybe I could use my blood to heal him... And maybe I could do that for all the infected on the rebellion, until freeing the entire Empire of that plague that my mother had warned me so much about.

I turned to the pione. I had to start somewhere.

I lifted my scalpel and jabbed it into my own arm, looking for an artery that, when I hit, sprayed my blood out. I poured it into a shallow glass until it was full enough for a sip and brought it closer to the creature. The pione tried to get away even more, as if I had liquid death on my hands, but the bonds wouldn't let him get away and my blood eventually trickled down his throat. The scarlet spilled over the sides of his mouth, painting everything red as he more and more calmed down and stopped fighting, now that he was free of those invading ideas in his mind...

It was working...

But then I realized the pione wasn't breathing...

Inert... Still... Static...

I approached the edges of the improvised bed and clung to it like in a shipwreck, unable to believe what my own eyes were seeing.

He was dead.

But... How?!

This was not supposed to happen...

My blood should have healed him... Freed him!

Why was he dead?!

I immediately ran outside the tent. My legs gave out and I collapsed into the snow on my hands and knees, unable to find the strength to lift myself once more.

That soldier had been killed by the "cure" in my blood... A poison that invaded his contaminated cells and destroyed everything that had apparently been programmed to destroy, until turning his body into a desolate land. I believed with all my heart that the cure in me would bring freedom to those manipulated minds, but, in fact, my mother had injected me with distilled death, to reap the lives of those I once dreamed of saving...

I was the weapon of the Empire... Armed with a "cure" that was never meant to save, but to destroy those who rose up against the Aulics.

I remembered when, on the ship Bleine had provided us to reach the galaxy's core, the fageine soldiers had died touching my blood... Contaminated. And to think that I had believed when the metriona said he had rescued us from an Aulic attack, while in reality he had planned it all just to gain our trust.

I staggered back to the bed and stared at the corpse of that pione as if it were my own...

But then he opened his eyes.