Aetheral Space

“They’ll be back,” said Dian, patting Dragan on the back. “Don’t worry about it.”

They sat in the medical tent, looking down at Bruno and Serena in their bed. They’d been thrashing around at first, so they’d ended up sedated up to their eyeballs. Dragan doubted anything short of a cocktail of stimulants and a solar explosion would wake them now.

Dragan chuckled weakly. “I’m not worried about them coming back. If you ask me, I’m better off without them bothering me all the time.”

“You don’t really think that.”

“Oh yeah?” he laughed. “What makes you say that? You have any evidence?”

Dian smirked. “Your face when they left. It was like an abandoned puppy.”

Dragan rolled his eyes. “That’s subjective. I’ll need at least three witnesses before I accept that testimony, yeah?”

It was Dian’s turn to laugh as he got up. “There you go. Got you to make a joke at least. Try and get some sleep. It’s pretty much morning already.”

“I will, I guess,” Dragan nodded. “Mila said they’d need another booster around now, so I’ll head out as soon as that’s done.”

Another pat on the back, and Dian made his way out of the tent. Dragan heard his footsteps fading into the distance.

Dragan tried not to look at Bruno and Serena's face as he applied the injection.

It wasn't that he didn't want to make eye contact - their eyes were closed, and they were definitely unconscious - it was just that it seemed a little awkward to look someone in the face while you stuck a syringe in them. The dark green fluid in the syringe drained away, relocating into the unconscious person's bloodstream. Their body shook slightly with a mute half-cough.

Mila had decided it would be infeasible to move Bruno and Serena any further in their condition, and Dragan was inclined to agree. He'd taken only basic first aid training during his time in the AdminCorps, but even he could tell that Bruno and Serena's body was one harsh wind away from falling apart. Probably even a breeze could do it.

Mila had headed off to sleep an hour or two ago. To be honest, with her perpetually exhausted eyes, Dragan was surprised she hadn't already collapsed herself. The dilation in her pupils had explained that, though - she used some kind of stimulant to work longer hours.

A pick-me-up like that was nothing like the stuff that had infested Crestpoole, but it still left a bad taste in Dragan's mouth.

Dragan glanced down at Bruno and Serena, tried to ignore the twitching of their face. The injection he'd given them wasn't a cure, of course - they were still waiting on Skipper and Ruth for that - but it would at least slow the symptoms down. Buy them some time.

His eyes moved over to Bruno and Serena's thin wrist, still in Dragan's hand. He'd just injected them there, right underneath the glove they always wore. An unkind curiosity drifted up in Dragan's mind. He'd been wondering about this.

It was an invasion of privacy, sure, but with the way Bruno had been treating him he didn't really feel too bad.

Hesitantly, Dragan peeled the glove away - and curiosity was instantly replaced with guilt.

The hand was crooked beyond crooked, recognizable only by vague shape and the number of fingers. It was as if someone had smashed the hand with a hammer, waited for it to heal, and then smashed it again, over and over, countless times. It was a dull red, blood visible through the skin. Clearly useless.

It made sense, Dragan supposed, looking at the hand. Every time he'd seen Bruno or Serena grasp something - or even use their hands at all - there'd been the telltale spark of Aether. So they needed Aether to do something as simple as moving their fingers.

Gingerly, he put the glove back on, the shame turning his face red.

"You shouldn't stare, you know," said a soft voice from behind him. Dragan almost jumped out of his skin - who the hell had snuck up on him?!

He whirled around, only to find Helga stood behind him, looking down at Bruno and Serena as well.

"Shit," he panted. "You scared me."

Helga smiled. "Sorry," she said. "I guess I was a little quiet. How're they doing?"

Dragan waved a hand towards them, lying there in their bed, clearly suffering. "You can see for yourself, I think. They're hanging in there, but it won't last forever. If we used a stimulant, they could probably walk around for a little while, but they'd probably crash even harder afterwards."

Helga clicked her tongue, sat down in an available chair. "Shame." Her eyes drifted down to Bruno and Serena's gloved hands. "Like I said, though, you shouldn't stare. They wouldn't appreciate it."

Dragan gulped. She was right, of course, but he was a contrarian by nature. "Well," he said, the words dull in his mouth, oddly heavy. "How do you know what they'd appreciate?"

She held up one of her own hands, clad in a white glove. "I know I wouldn't appreciate it."

For the second time, shame ran through Dragan's body like fire. It seemed he really was intent on putting his foot in his mouth as much as possible.

"Sorry!" he said, then quietened down a little when he remembered where he was. "Sorry. I didn't - is it, um, a similar, uh, situation, then? For you, I mean."

"Not exactly," said Helga, unbuckling the wrist of her glove. "How much do you know about Scurrants?"

Dragan bit his lip. He could feel an awkward conversation coming on here, but he couldn't yet tell from which angle. "They're one of the five human subspecies," he said, playing it as safe as he could.

"Technically," said Helga.

"Yeah, technically." Dragan conceded. "If we're, um, being as accurate as possible, Scurrants are more like a broad category of subspecies that don't fit into the other four. Not Cogitant, not Pugnant, not Umbrant, not Crownless."

"You really do know a lot, Mr. Hadrien," said Helga, smiling joylessly. "You're exactly right. The other subspecies were created for a purpose or just left alone like the Crownless."

She was quiet for a moment, and when she continued her voice was full of bitter resignation: "Us Scurrants were created just because some Gene Tyrant had a funny idea, or they wanted something to stand around and look pretty."

It was true. Dragan has seen many Scurrants during his life - mostly in passing, in crowds - but he'd very rarely seen the same kind twice. He couldn't see any abnormality with Helga's body at first glance, save for the white hair, so it had to be something easily concealed -

Helga took off her glove, and Dragan had to stop himself from gasping in surprise.

The skin of her arm was translucent, all the way up to the elbow - completely see-through. Through the thin, pale-blue surface, Dragan could see the insides of the arm doing their work. Muscles flexing and straining, blood pumping through veins, and pale-white bones holding the whole thing together.

Helga turned her arm back and forth, and Dragan could see the blood sloshing around the inside of the limb as she did. An awful nausea rose up in his throat, but he suppressed it. If gasping was a social faux pas, he didn't want to imagine what outright vomiting would be.

"That's…" he said, swallowing, not really knowing what to say.

"Scurrant-A-193," Helga said, still looking wistfully at her arm. "The A means Aesthetic-type. I'm like this because some Gene Tyrant thousands of years ago thought see-through skin would look pretty. There's only a few hundred of us, so I guess they got bored of the idea fast." She looked at him. "What do you think?"

He couldn't think of anything to say. He wasn't the one with see-through hands, so it wasn't really like he had the right to comment. Still, he felt like he had to say something.

Eventually, words came out: "Does it … does it hurt?"

She looked at her arm, looked through it, as if the notion had never even occurred to her. But it had. It definitely had. "Not usually," she said, after a moment.

Dragan cocked his head. "Not usually?"

"It's the same with a lot of Scurrants," explained Helga, gingerly maneuvering her glove back onto her arm. "If I don't take specific medicine, my body starts to break down. The skin starts to peel away like old wallpaper, the blood leaks out like built-up sewage. Eventually the arms just lose all cohesion and … collapse. Messily."

Her eyes were far away as she spoke. This was something she'd seen personally.

Dragan looked away. "I'm … sorry to hear that."

"Mm," said Helga. "Unfortunately, the god that made me didn't put much effort in. So I found one that wasn't quite as lazy."

"That's why you became a Humilist?"

She nodded. "I know firsthand how bad things get when people just keep making whatever they want. After they get bored and move on, you get leftovers like me." Her eyes flicked to Bruno and Serena, unconscious in bed. "When you get down to it," she said quietly. "I feel like we're all someone else's leftovers. So don't rub it in."

Those last words were laced with anger - anger at him invading Bruno and Serena's privacy. And with them, she stood up and began to walk out of the tent.

"Helga," said Dragan, turning in his seat to call after her. He felt awful for dragging this interaction out, but curiosity clawed at him.

She glanced back, facing the cloth wall next to her more than Dragan. "Yeah?"

"You said there were a few hundred people like, uh, like you," he said, then paused. Screw it, there was no easy way to ask. "Are you, um .. alone, or? Is it just you?"

"Do I have a family, you mean?" she said, giving voice to his thoughts.

Dragan nodded.

She blinked a second too long, like she was watching an old, pleasant memory through the inside of her eyelids. "Yeah," she said softly. "Here and elsewhere. We were separated a - a long time ago, but I'll see them again."

Helga paused.

"I have to believe that," she said, and left. The tent was silent, save for the tweeting of a far-away bird.

Dragan sighed, feeling the tension drain from his body. That had been unbearably uncomfortable, but he'd honestly brought it on himself. He should have just left well enough alone.

He glanced down at the patient, and his heart almost stopped.

Bruno del Sed was glaring up at him, eyes wide with feral hatred. His pupils were tiny pinpricks, dilated as far as they would go in delirium and fury. Whatever he was seeing, it wasn't what was in front of him.

Dragan opened his mouth to say something, to maybe offer some kind of reassurance - but no words came out of his mouth. Instead, there was only a hollow choking sound.

Bruno's hand was wrapped firmly around Dragan's throat, angry violet Aether sparking and swirling like a thunderstorm. Dragan tried to peel the hand off his neck, pulling with all his might, but Bruno was too strong. His grip was like a vise.

"Cott," he growled, slurring his words, speaking to a phantom. "I'll gut you. I'll gut you."

Even as the edges of his vision began to turn black, Dragan did his best to force words out of his mouth. "Not...Cott…" he said, his strangled voice like cracking ice. "You're...sick…"

Bruno faltered for a moment, his grip loosening and allowing a breath of sweet air - before the hatred returned twofold, Bruno's teeth clenched in an expression of murderous fury. "Cott!" he snarled, renewing his assault. "Cott!"

What could he do? Bruno would seriously kill him. Whoever he was seeing Dragan as, it was someone he hated more than anyone else in the world - and with the toxin messing with Bruno's head, Dragan wouldn't get anywhere by appealing to reason. Reason had gone out for a walk.

And the grip was getting tighter.

To hell with it, then. He didn't much want to assault a sick person, but he wanted his neck snapped even less. Dragan closed his eyes, aligned his mind -

- and felt a rush of energy go through him as he brought out his Aether.

He had the Aether concentrate around his throat, where Bruno was squeezing - that was where it was most needed. The violet coating Bruno's hand clashed against Dragan's blue, creating a miniature lightshow in the medical tent. He heard footsteps in the grass, rushing closer. Someone had noticed, then. Good.

Bruno's grip didn't weaken in the least, but Dragan found it much easier to breathe as his Aether strengthened and enhanced his throat. Before long, he was breathing steadily - looking down as Bruno futilely kept trying to strangle him -

- and as Mila ran into the tent, Dragan jerked backwards and broke free.

Bruno grasped for a moment at empty air, growling something incoherent, before slumping back down into unconsciousness. Without his quarry right in front of his eyes, the waking world seemingly wasn't interesting enough for him.

"What happened?!" Mila gaped, as.Dragan massaged his throat.

"H-Hallucinating, I guess," he panted, taking a few safe steps away from the bed. "Thought I was someone else. Tried to strangle me."

Mila swept her hair back. "Those tranquilizers should have had them out cold for hours," she said. "Shit."

Dragan shrugged far more casually than he felt, one hand still making absolutely sure that Bruno hadn't snapped his neck like a twig and that this wasn't just his dying hallucination. "Guess…I guess the del Sed's disagreed with that."

"It's the Aether stuff," said Mila, thumping her fist against a worktop. She was already shifting modes from panic to complaint. "You can't be sure anything works with that bullshit, because it's different for everyone. Gimme a break."

"I'm fine, by the way," said Dragan, collapsing back into his chair. "Totally didn't almost get turned into a tube of toothpaste."

"Right, right," Mila gave Dragan's throat a cursory glance, before nodding in relief. "The Aether stuff's a godsend for you too, apparently. Should heal up nicely. You're made of sterner stuff anyway, right? You're part of that Skipper's crew."

"For about two weeks."

"Oh," Mila faltered slightly. "Well, anyway, you're not dead. Congrats."

Her bedside manner was truly incredible. Dragan glanced back towards Bruno, now sleeping soundly in the bed again as if nothing had happened.

Cott, huh? So there's someone you hate more than me. Useful to know.

Dragan opened his mouth to say something else - but the second that he did, there was a distant sound like an explosion and the air shook.

Nearly everything in the tent rattled - the bed, the tables, the chairs. Vials and jars rolled off shelves with a chorus of smashing sounds. The tent vibrated intensely as if being pushed by a strong wind.

Dragan pulled himself out of the chair, unconscious tendrils of Aether already drifting around his hands. "The hell was that?!" he yelped, forgetting to check his blasphemy.

Mila's eyes were wide, a quiet kind of shock in them. "Something just entered the atmosphere," she muttered. "Not gently, either. They wanted us to know."

The flap of the tent opened, and the heterochromic boy that Dragan had seen earlier rushed in, almost falling over himself in his haste. When he looked up at them, his face was as red as the coat he was wearing.

"Ms. Mila!" he said, eyes just as wide as hers. "There's a ship! There's a ship!"

Mila squeezed her eyes shut and nodded, bringing a forced calm upon herself. "I see," she said, clearly struggling to keep her voice steady. "Aiden, fetch Helga and tell her -"

"No!" The boy - Aiden, apparently - interrupted in a panic. "You don't get it! You don't get it, ma'am! I scanned the ship - I, I used one of the scanners! It's a Supremacy ship!"

Dragan's heart sank.

"It's a Special Officer!"