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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.
CHAPTER 15
REVNAN
“Why are you doing this?” I ask as she uses the stitcher to close my wounds. It stings, but that’s nothing compared to the plasma that shot through my chest. “Why help the enemy? Are you stupid?”
“We’re not enemies,” the girl retorts as she ties off the last of the stitches.
And she’s right. I don’t know how or why, but I know she’s not my enemy. It’s something that I feel deep in my soul, as deep as my faith in Ataxia.
But if I tell her that, she might take advantage of me. Instead, I scoff. “So, stupid it is, then.”
With swift hands and deft fingers, she wraps the first of the plasma bullet wounds in clean gauze. Unfortunately, there are plenty more wounds where that came from.
“Well, maybe,” she retorts, pulling out the disinfectant spray. “But who do you think is stupider? The person with enough ammunition to kill you before you can think to insult me again or the person who insults someone trying to save his life?”
