The Unknown

FOUR | blood.

The soldiers were in the apartment. The woman in the kitchen let out an ear-piercing scream.

"The emergency button on your communicator," Kyle said with desperate urgency in his eyes. "Press it."

Tess sunk her hand into a hidden pocket in her dress and hesitantly drew the device out. "What does it do?" she asked.

"I don't know," Kyle said, his thumb hovering over the button on his own communicator.

A soldier silently appeared in the doorway, weapon raised. At the same time, Tess and Kyle slammed the buttons down.

There was a surge of electricity in the air and a flash of blinding light. Tess threw her hands over her eyes, feeling the pulse of energy rip through her body. The sound of dozens of rapid heavy thumps outside the bedroom met her ears.

The soldier before them collapsed immediately to the floor. As the soldier's gun fell, their finger nudged the trigger, unleashing a deafening gunshot.

The following silence was pierced only by rapid breaths. Tess's grew ragged as she felt pain spread in her calf and a warm trickle of blood roll down her skin.

It took a moment for her mind to connect the noise and the pain, but then she knew without looking that she'd been shot and that the bullet had torn clean through the flesh of her shin. There was a sense of something missing, of cold air rushing where it shouldn't be. And, of course, pain—distorted by the warped lens of shock—throbbing and scorching along the torn pathways of her nerves.

At the same time, intellectually, Tess knew it was only a flesh wound, something she could heal in a few days at most. But at the moment, it was a flame eating up her consciousness, reducing rational thought to charred, irretrievable fragments, lost behind her tongue. She could not speak, even though Kyle was staring, frightened, at the corner of her vision. Instead, her knees buckled and she clutched at her wound to quench the blood flow, even though touching it caused a more immediate searing pain.

Kyle snapped into action, tearing a long strip of fabric from the bed's sheets and securing it around her leg to halt the free flow of blood. The speed with which brilliant scarlet bloomed through the white fabric made her heart jump. She'd been hurt before, many times, but had never lost this much blood.

Kyle peered out the door as if checking whether the coast was clear, then, without hesitation, scooped her up against his chest, one arm under her folded knees and the other supporting her shoulders.

"You don't have to—" she started.

"But I will," he insisted, lips stretched into a strained smile.

She gave up protesting, turning her head to hide her own smile from him. His jacket smelled of rich leather, with a hint of the earthy scent after a rain.

In his arms, she could assess the entire apartment. There were a dozen unmoving soldiers on the floor. The woman who lived there had collapsed, too. Tess stared hard at her, waiting to see the rise and fall of her chest with breath, but it didn't come before Kyle swept her out the door. An uneasy feeling crept into Tess's bones, and she wondered what exactly the buttons had done. This thought was fleeting, as she could feel the pain in her leg breaking past the shock of being shot, ebbing and flowing like the tide with each beat of her heart.

Once in the empty hallway, Kyle whirled around, seeming unsure of where to go next.

"Maybe we should find Jade," Tess suggested in a tired whisper.

"Good idea."

Kyle shifted her weight, pulling out his communicator. He quickly sent a message explaining their situation.

"Jade says to meet her at the roof," Kyle relayed.

At first, they tried to be furtive, staying silent and inching cautiously around corners. But the more floors they ascended, the more motionless bodies they saw, as if everyone in the entire building had collapsed at the press of their buttons. In fact, they didn't encounter anyone conscious until they met Jade at the rooftop.

"You pressed the emergency buttons," Jade said disapprovingly. It was a statement, not a question, yet she stared at them as if waiting for a response or an explanation.

"We'd been cornered," Kyle stated. "Dozens of soldiers descending upon us. It seemed appropriate."

"It's fine," Jade said, nodding slowly. "It'll just attract a lot of attention." Jade seemed suddenly eager to change the topic, eyeing Tess. "What happened to her?"

"Shot," Tess replied.

"I see. It was necessary, then." Jade paused, her thick black hair whipping wildly in the wind. Something about her presence felt imposing, unforgiving. "But now we need to get out of here, and we can't go downstairs. The military will know something big happened from the lack of communication. You can bet more troops will be rushing inside, surrounding the area and swarming the building."

"So what's the plan?" Tess asked impatiently. Jade was clearly withholding something.

"We go up," she replied evenly.

Tess felt her eyes involuntarily widen, stealing a glance at the sky, filled with a wispy cloud cover. Jade smiled self-indulgently. Somewhere above was a vessel containing a number of the Species. It was where they'd all been converted, but Tess had no memory of the location, only the sensation of terrible pain and fading consciousness before waking up on Earth.

"Yes," Jade said. "We'll go up. They're our kind, after all. It'll be a much smoother ride than taking a pure human. Tess, they can heal you much faster than you can yourself."

Tess felt Jade had phrased this as a strange insult, but she was too stunned to take offense.

She and Kyle gazed at each other wordlessly. They'd never dealt directly with the Species outside of a human host. The thought sent an ominous chill down her spine, but also a burst of hot excitement through her veins. She tried to shove the apprehension away, dismissing it as a human response, an artifact of how the old Tess would have felt.

Jade had pulled out her communicator and was rapidly pressing buttons. Tess awaited the return to her kind with a full heart, forgetting the burn in her calf as she pondered what was to come.