14. Maya

"Do you think it's over?" Tia asks. The tears streaming down the kid's cheeks carve canyons in the mud that cakes her face.

My gaze drifts from the teenage girl to her parents and then to the other humans hunkered down with me.

It's quiet. The shooting seems to have stopped, but that doesn't mean it won't start again at any moment. I've seen too many people get gunned down for venturing out too early after a firefight.

Steeling myself, I poke my head up and take a peek. The village is little more than rubble. Corpses lie broken in the detritus of buildings that used to be our homes and workplaces, dropped haphazardly like dolls abandoned by children called in for dinner.

It looks clear. I don't see any Coalition or Alliance soldiers picking through the debris. They were probably called to destroy a village somewhere else.

"What do you think, Maya?" Ray says. He's an older man, a former soldier too badly scarred to fight, but still knowledgeable enough to keep us all alive.

"I'll give it five minutes and then go out and check if it's really all clear," I reply.

The others all look relieved. Going out there is the last thing any sane person would want to do, but soldiers are often equipped with weapons, ammunition, emergency medkits, and ration bars, and we're low on all these supplies. The ration bars are especially important because just one is filling enough to satisfy you for a full day.

Even after all this time, it still feels a little dirty to loot a corpse, but it's better to feel dirty than weak from starvation or sick from infection. Dirty keeps you alive. Weak is what gets you killed.

Once the five minutes have passed, Ray offers a gun. "Remember, stay low and –"

"Move unpredictably," I reply, forcing a smile as I take the weapon and sling an empty bag over my shoulder.

He smiles back. "And the most important rule?"

"Don't die."

He clasps my arm. "Good girl. Now go before they come back."

Staying low to the ground, I zigzag through the battlefield until I reach the nearest corpse. It's a Vakutan man – no, not a man. A boy. He's just a kid, and he died alone. Yet I don"t know right now which one of us has drawn the short straw.

His daily ration bar has been eaten, the wrapper still in his pocket, but in his hands is a half-used medkit. He must have tried to patch himself up, but his wounds were too severe, and he succumbed before he could do anything. The pain medication is gone, at least, so his passing wasn't as agonizing as it could have been.

"Thank you," I whisper to him the same way I do to all the corpses I come across.

I spot a Kreet'u soldier fallen on the outer edge of what had once been a garden. My eyes dart around in search of trouble, I scamper over the debris like the Yips, a species of small rodent that we used to consider vermin. Now, though, they're our best source of fresh meat.

I reach the Kreet'u and search his body, finding double the ration bars, and a full ammunition cartridge. Bingo.

Glancing over my shoulder, I see that I'm almost out of sight from our hiding spot. Ray won't like it, but there've been disappointingly few fatalities in this skirmish.

Fuck. When did I start getting disappointed by the lack of dead bodies?

I'm so distracted by this moment of existential horror over the state of my own soul that I trip over the body of an Odex soldier I hadn't noticed before.

"Shit," I whisper, biting back a cry. If I make too much noise, I could get caught by any soldiers still in the area. And if I'm caught by the Coalition, I'm dead. With a hiss, I push myself back up and brush the broken debris from my scraped hands.

I shoot a glare at the corpse. "Fucking dingleberry."

But there's something familiar about this dingleberry. Where do I know him from?

The Coalition has been around for a while, so maybe I saw him before shit really hit the fan. Maybe we talked, exchanging pleasantries before I understood what he was really here to do.

But I would remember that. It's not like the Coalition soldiers and humans interact all that much. Most of the time, we're only this close to one another when we're trying to kill each other.

It's going to drive me crazy trying to remember. His face will be like a melody whose name and words escape me but is still inexorably stuck in my head. What does it even really matter in the end? He's dead, and I'll never have to see his admittedly rather handsome mug ever again.

I lift his jacket to take what I can from him. His eyes shoot open, and I fall backward with a yelp. I know those eyes. They've haunted my dreams for as long as I can remember.

But in them, he wasn't Odex. He was Ishani, with the most beautiful golden wings I had ever seen. We were in love. But then we died. We always die.

There's nothing about him that looks like the man from my dreams, a man whose name would be on my lips as I woke with tears streaming down my cheeks. A man whose name I could never recall after returning to full consciousness.

Kar…

Karv…

The Odex coughs, blood flecking at the corners of his mouth. The sight jolts me from my reverie.

"You're alive," I say.

He shoots me a look of mild annoyance over the way I just stated the obvious. It should not be as familiar as it is, but I know that expression. I know it just like I know that he hates small talk about the weather and secretly loves romance stories.

I know him.

But I don't know how. "Do you have a medkit on you?" I ask, surprising myself.

His bushy eyebrows shoot up. Apparently, he's surprised that I would help him, too. "Gave it away," he mumbles.

I blink. "You gave it away?"

He coughs again, and more blood trickles out of his mouth. Does he have a punctured lung? "Yesterday. There was a kid caught in the crossfire. He needed it more than I did, and Ataxia willed it so."

"Bullshit," I retort.

He lets out a stuttering sigh. "Believe what you want."

I squint suspiciously at him. The logical corner of my brain tells me that he's the enemy. There's no way an Odex would show compassion like that to anyone. But then there's the irrational part of me, the part that knows him. It says he's telling the truth.

"Stay here," I say, ignoring the irritated look he shoots at me and getting to my feet to scan for the nearest dead body. The half-used medkit is basically useless with wounds like his.

He scoffs at the way I've stated the obvious again. "Not like I'm going anywhere," he grumbles.

Finally, I spot a fallen Shorcru nearby and sprint to it, ignoring everything that Ray has ever taught me. This time, I poke the corpse to make sure he's really dead before raiding his body. He is, so I store the rations and ammunition in my bag and search for a complete medkit.

Finally, I find it, and I get to my feet. I'm about to go back to him, but then I hesitate. Am I really going to waste an intact medkit on Coalition scum?

I feel like a traitor. A traitor to my village. A traitor to my species. A traitor to my world. Sure, he says he gave his medkit away to help someone in need, but how can I trust the word of the enemy? How can I know that this isn't some kind of trick?

I'm reminded of an old Earth fable my mother used to tell me about a scorpion and a frog. A scorpion asks a frog to carry it across the river, and the frog says no because it will sting him, killing them both. The scorpion promises not to, and the frog lets it on his back, but sure enough, halfway across, the scorpion stings the frog and they both die.

It"s in the scorpion's nature to sting even to its own destruction, and the frog was foolish to hope otherwise.

And now here I am with a medkit about to treat the scorpion and pray he doesn't sting me.

And even if it isn't a trick or a trap, what do I do with him after? It's not like I can walk into the village hand in hand with one of our invaders. They hate him. Hell, I should hate him, too.

Why don't I hate him?

I think about running back to the rest of the humans and pretending that I never saw him. But I can't bring myself to do that. It may be in the scorpion's nature to sting, but it's in the frog's nature to help, even if we both end up sinking.