Chapter Seven
Maxim tucked his arms under Zyyr’s and ran backwards with all of the strength and energy that he could build in his muscles. The sun was beating down on his back with vicious intensity and he could feel it searing through the fabric of his shirt painfully. The heat brought sweat down his face that stung in his eyes and mixed with the blood on his arms and chest. He could feel Zyyr trying to help him get him across the deep, stinging sand. The warrior’s heels dug into the sand, forcing him backwards a few inches for every step that Maxim took.
He could still hear the voices of the hybrids that were marching away from the site of the brief but intense battle that they had just waged. The few that had survived were carrying the wounded, but Maxim hadn’t seen any compassion in the assistance that they gave. It was almost as though they were already dead and their fellow hybrids were merely bringing them back to wherever they had been sleeping on the planet. Maxim got through the gate to the inner compound and released Zyyr so that he lay back on a cushion on the floor.
“Are you alright?” he asked.
The warrior nodded.
“I’ll be fine. Thank you for getting me in here.”
“What hurts? What did they do to you?”
“My leg,” Zyyr answered. “I think it might be broken. One of them had a club that they hit me with. It brought me to the ground and took the wind out of me, but I don’t think that there’s anything serious but the bone. That will heal.”
“But it will take time,” Maxim said. “We need to stabilize the bone and then you’re going to have to rest. You aren’t going to be able to fight anymore.”
Zyyr struggled to sit back up, an almost frantic look on his face.
“I have to,” he said. “Nylek, Kyven, and Athan are already gone. There aren’t enough of us left to help you if there’s another attack. You can stabilize the bone, but I have to fight.”
“Zyyr,” Maxim said. “You can’t. There’s no way that you can safely go back out onto the battlefield. You will be an easy target. I know that you want to fight, and I appreciate your dedication, but I have to make sure that you stay safe as well. Ryan wants to destroy all of us. We can’t give him the satisfaction of making that easy for him by putting ourselves in danger. The others are coming. We just have to stay strong and resist the hybrids until they get here.”
Finally, the warrior seemed to relent. He rested back, his eyes closing and the color draining from his face as if the pain of the injury to his leg was settling in. Maxim rushed further into the building to get the bag of supplies that they had kept from the ship when the others left. He brought it back into the front room and called out to Lynx and Elise. When they came into the room, he gestured for them to come closer. He knew that speaking too loudly would only make the warrior feel more anxious, which could worsen his pain and even make it more difficult for his body to heal properly.
“I need you to find something that I can use to stabilize his leg,” he told them. “Then find me as many rags as possible. If you can’t find them, bring anything that you can. We need to get the bone in place and secure it so that it can start to heal. I’m going to give him some of Ciyrs’s serum to relax him and ease the pain, but it will only last for so long, so we need to hurry.”
Lynx and Elise both nodded and hurried out of the room. He knew that both were still struggling being away from their mates and he hoped that helping him care for Zyyr would distract them and help them to keep moving forward. He was particularly concerned about Elise. This was not her world, not the life that she ever thought that she was going to live. She had already been away from Azra for longer than any of them had been separated from their partners, but she had also been thrust into a war that she didn’t understand. As they had said when they arrived on Penthos, however, she was the mate of a Denynso warrior. It had been her decision to give her heart to him, and when she made that choice, she was also choosing to give over her life to the Denynso way. By being with them on the journey and having the strong connection with Azra that all Denynso had with their mates, she had made herself a part of the conflict and she had little choice but to go along with it.
Maxim could see the fear and worry in her eyes, but he also knew that she was stronger than she thought. She had already proven herself in the ship and during the first battle with the hybrids. Though he knew that she wasn’t going to be like Eden, Leia, or Zuri, or even like Ivy, anything that she could do for them would benefit them and would make Azra proud. All she needed to do was believe in herself and what she was capable of doing.
Reaching into the bag again, Maxim withdrew a small battle of the calming serum that Ciyrs had created and opened it. They had very little to last them for as long as they were on Penthos, so using it had to be cautious and thoughtful. The pain that Zyyr was clearly in, however, justified the use of as much as he needed, at least through the challenging and potentially excruciating process of putting the bone back into place.
“Are you ready?” he asked.
“Is Lila here?” Zyyr asked.
“I don’t think that she should be here to see this,” Maxim said. “Drink this.”
His eyes moved down to Zyyr’s leg, drawing in a breath as he looked at the bleeding wound created by the shard of bone sticking through the warrior’s leg. The fact that Zyyr didn’t know the severity of the injury was a benefit, and he didn’t want his mate to see it and make the situation any more anxious. Zyyr nodded his agreement and allowed Maxim to pour the serum into his mouth before he settled back against the mat. His eyes were still closed and he seemed to tighten them as if squeezing them harder would prevent some of the pain that he knew was coming.
“Just relax,” Maxim said. “You’ll sleep for a while.”
Even as he spoke the mixture of herbs seemed to be taking effect. Zyyr’s breathing had become deeper and more even and the tension in his face was releasing. Maxim immediately went to work cutting away the bloodied fabric of Zyyr’s pants to provide better access to the injury. He took a cloth and splashed as little water onto it from his canteen as he could while still dampening the surface. He didn’t want to waste any of the precious and limited water that they had, but he knew that he had to get the wound clean. He was finishing wiping the skin around the injury when Elise and Lynx came back into the room. Lynx was carrying an armful of pieces of wood and Elise held long rags that appeared to be made out of one of the blankets that they had brought with them from the ship.
“You’re going to want to pack that wound with some of the herbs,” Lynx said when he saw the full extent of Zyyr’s injury. “That will help prevent infection and get it to heal faster.”
Maxim nodded and took a container of herbs from the bag.
“We don’t have many supplies left,” he said. “Maybe we should have kept more before the ship left.”
“We’ll have to make do for as long as we can,” Lynx said. “Ciyrs will be here soon. Hopefully he’ll be able to help.”
“Hopefully he won’t have a reason to.”
Lynx and Maxim met eyes and then Maxim looked away, concentrating on spreading the herbs into Zyyr’s leg. He couldn’t let himself keep going along that train of thought. In this moment, he needed to concentrate only on what he needed to do for Zyyr.
Lynx handed him the first piece of wood and Maxim looked down at it. It appeared to come from one of the pieces of furniture that they had found in the building. Maxim placed the piece beneath Zyyr’s leg, then accepted one of the rags from Elise. They worked as quickly as they could and soon Zyyr’s leg was fully bound and properly supported. Elise left the room and came back a few moments later with Lila. She held another blanket in her arms and Maxim could see the streaks of tears still on her cheeks. Lila approached her mate’s side and carefully knelt down beside him. She draped the blanket over Zyyr and tucked it around him. She had begun to cry again, but the tears fell quietly and she said nothing as she reached forward and ran her fingertips across his forehead, brushing a lock of his thick white hair out of the way.
Maxim stood and walked out of the building. Lila needed this time alone with Zyyr as much as he needed to have her with him as he tried to recover from his injury. Evening was falling outside by the time that he stepped out into the air and the intensity of the sun had dissipated so he didn’t feel the pain of it on his back any longer. It was a relief, but at the same time it meant the darkness was growing around the compound that they had claimed for themselves. The darkness was the most dangerous time. When the night came, they could hear the hybrids swarming to the walls of the compound, standing outside with their drums, taunting them, but never trying to get in where they were.
Maxim almost wished that they would. This was not what he had expected when it came to warfare with the hybrids. They knew that these creatures had been bred specifically for the purpose of fighting, and Maxim expected that the clash would be fierce and continuous once it began, but that wasn’t what happened. Instead, there were long quiet stretches in between the battles, and when the battles did occur, they were brief. They would descend on them and clash, but within moments they were leaving, dragging their wounded with them. There had been few casualties, and when there were, the survivors often left them lying in the sand until the next battle, then brought them with them much like they did the wounded.
Maxim couldn’t help but wonder about this approach to the war. When they had first arrived on the shuttle and Ryan confronted them, the hybrid army had appeared on the horizon. Their numbers had been expansive and Maxim had assumed that they would send as many of them as they could with each encounter. As soon as the fighting had begun, however, the army has dissipated, leaving only a few behind to engage with them. It was almost as though they were toying with them, tormenting them to make the conflict difficult beyond the physical fighting. With each wave of battle, they were breaking them down further, sending in fresh soldiers to replace the dead and wounded so that they were always at their strongest while Maxim and the rest of the group were growing more tired and worn with each passing hour. He wondered if this was the way that Ryan had planned it, knowing that if there was one tremendous battle the hybrids may not be able to withstand the tactics of the Denynso, but that if they simply kept pushing, kept attacking in brief but intense waves they would be able to break them down until they were completely vulnerable.
The thought was infuriating. It only illuminated who Ryan was, demonstrating that he was cruel and weak in everything that he did. Maxim had to remind himself that the others were coming. It didn’t matter what the hybrids did. Soon those who had gone back to Uoria would return with supplies and a bigger army, and those who had been on Earth would join them, bringing with them the most powerful of the warriors and new insights into Ryan and what he was capable of doing. All Maxim and those still in the compound on Penthos had to do was survive. They just had to linger on, keeping the hybrids back long enough for the reinforcements to arrive so that they could battle them face-to-face.
As Maxim thought, he found himself wandering deeper into the compound than they had been. When they moved into the compound after the ship had left, they chose the first large building that they found to be their shelter. It seemed that it had once been living quarters, filled with aging furniture and dilapidated remnants of those who had once lived on Penthos before Nyx 23 arrived. Now that he was moving further into the compound, however, Maxim was seeing more of what Rain had described to them. Her memories of the space that they had infiltrated in an effort to free the prisoners and eliminate those who had built the illegal, vile prison colony had been vibrant and detailed, and Maxim could see the skeletons of those memories now. After the more than one hundred years that had passed since they had walked this ground, the abandoned buildings had begun to dissolve away under the power of the sun and the stinging of the sand that rose up when the rare but powerful wind blew.
The memories that Rain had shared were on the very edge of his mind as he walked through the rows of buildings. Part of him wished that he could have seen what she did, had been there to witness the colony as it had been. Maybe he would have been able to see something that the others didn’t when they arrived. Maybe he could have changed what happened. If he had, though, Nyx 23 never would have ended up on Uoria, the Denynso wouldn’t have started the exchange program with Earth, and he never would have had Ivy. Nothing would have been the same. This was his chance. This was the time to resolve the past and protect the future.
A large building rose up in front of Maxim and he stepped up to the door. The wood was old and dry from the heat and the sun, but a thick lock was still in place, preventing him from being able to open it. Maxim took a step back and aimed a hard kick right beside the latch. The wood cracked and another kick splintered it, enabling him to push the door the rest of the way open. Stale, hot air rushed out and Maxim took a step back to let the years flow out and rejoin the breath of the planet. When he stepped inside he saw that he was in a building that was far more elaborate than the other buildings he had seen. The furniture was larger and held faded padding that was absent from the furniture in the other locations, and the walls of the front room held massive frames with what looked like the remains of artwork. Time, heat, and brutally dry air had shriveled the art, leaving only shrunken pieces of paper that became powder beneath Maxim’s fingertips when he touched them.
Maxim continued through the building, moving toward a door on the far end of the room. When he stepped through it he found himself in what he could only guess was the office that Rain had described. Unlike anything that Maxim had seen before, this space seemed like a small fortress of its own. The furniture here was more severe, including the heavy desk that sat toward the far wall. Maxim approached it cautiously, unsure of whether the office was truly still slumbering like the rest of the compound or if there were traps just waiting to lure him in. Finally, he reached the side of the desk and touched his hand to the surface. It felt warm beneath his fingertips and it was almost as though he was able to feel the energy of the creature who once sat behind it. Maxim walked around to the back of the desk and pushed the large chair behind it out of the way, not willing to sit in the same place that once held one of the Valdicians that had been the root of all the horror that they were now facing. He crouched down to examine the desk more closely, discovering a large drawer along the front.
Remaining cautious, Maxim took hold of the pull at the front of the drawer and eased the drawer open. There were stacks of papers, files, and books inside, seemingly protected from the severe environment of the planet by the desk. Unlike the art that once decorated the walls, the papers inside the drawer were still in good condition, the words on them clear and legible. Maxim pulled everything out of the drawer, placing it on top of the desk so that he could look deeper into the drawer. He ran his hand along the piece of wood at the bottom and felt his fingertips hit something hard in the back corner.
Drawing the object out, Maxim looked down into his palm. The faint light streaming through the single window wasn’t enough for him to clearly see what it was and he was beginning to feel strangely vulnerable and exposed in the building, as if there was someone there watching him even though he couldn’t see them. He stood and gathered all of the papers from the drawer into his arms, then went back through the front room of the building and out into the night. The uncomfortable feeling immediately dissipated and he looked up at the sky, scanning the expanse to see any sign of the ships coming back. The stretch of stars was still. He would have to continue to wait, at least for now, for the others to come.
Maxim made his way back across the open expanse of the compound quickly. He couldn’t hear the hybrids outside of the stone wall of the compound, but the silence was nearly as unsettling as the sound of the drums that had become their constant companion. When he arrived back to the building where they had settled, he could see a slight glow around the edges of the windows on the side. He hurried inside and found Zyyr sitting up, his back leaned against Lila behind him as she cradled his head against her chest and ran her fingertips through his white hair. His face was still paler than it usually was, but there was a slight smile on his lips as his mate comforted him. Lynx sat on the floor a few feet away with Elise leaning against the wall across from him.
Tucking the papers and journals in his arms closer to him, Maxim reached up to adjust the makeshift curtains that they had created to block the windows. Though the hybrids hadn’t yet stepped inside the boundary of the compound, he didn’t put it past them, and if they did he didn’t want for them to be able to see the light that would betray their location.
“What’s all that?” Lynx asked when Maxim turned around.
“I’m not sure,” he answered. “Where’s Avery?”
“He’s in the back room,” Lynx replied. “I think he may be sleeping.”
Maxim nodded and settled onto the floor. He wasn’t sure why, but he didn’t feel ready to share the information that he had discovered with the human pilot of the ship that had brought them to Penthos. Though Avery had offered his assistance to the rest of the crew when they confronted him, he had still hidden in the panic room when he knew that the ship was going down. It was what he had been taught when preparing to pilot what he thought was a leisure trip, but the fact that he had done it, leaving those who were aboard at the mercy of the Valdicians that took over the ship soon after they left Uoria made it difficult for Maxim to trust the man completely. Avery had promised his service to them, and even commanded Elon, the human medic from the ship, to cooperate with the crew after the women found them hiding away, and Maxim had accepted it willingly. Despite this, though, he couldn’t just consider this man one of them, a true part of what they were going through. The other two men had gone to Uoria with the others to make sure that the injured handled the journey safely. For now, Avery would have to remain on the outskirts of those who had remained behind. He would share with him what he could, but there were things that Maxim knew that he needed to keep close until he felt ready to make them known to the still-unfamiliar man. Even he didn’t know what these papers held and he would wait until he did to make decisions about how to move forward with them.
Maxim placed the stack in his arms onto the floor and divided it into loose papers, files, and journals. The division was primarily arbitrary, achieving little but giving him some sense that he was doing something. The truth was he didn’t know what he should do with what he found in the drawer in the office. Finding them had made him feel as though he were in a strange position. He was still in a moment of potential, not knowing what discoveries might be contained within those papers. As long as that potential remained intact, there was still the chance that he would be able to use it to make a difference in what was happening around them. As long as he left the papers unread and the journals unopened, he still had the hope that he had found some form of valuable information tucked away in the desk, waiting as the decades slipped by to be found so that he could use it to resolve the chaos that had befallen the planet again.
Everything would change the moment that he opened the journals, rifled through the files, or read the papers. Once he delved into them, he would know what he had found and if they made any difference. The potential would be gone and he would have to face whatever it was that he found hidden away in those words, even if they meant nothing to him. Even if they meant nothing to the planet, or the war, or the people who had already suffered so much on the dusty, searing surface of Penthos had had returned for vindication.
Maxim took one of the loose papers first, scanning his eyes over what looked like a list of names. He picked up one of the journals and opened it. He had flipped through several pages when he slammed his hand to the open page, his heartrate increasingly slightly at what he saw.