Page 1 of Thexan

Chapter One

Brynn

The wound should have closed hours ago.

I pressed the folded cloth more firmly against his side and watched the blood seep through it anyway, darkening the fabric in slow, stubborn saturation. It didn’t surge the way a fresh injury might. It didn’t pulse cleanly with his heartbeat. It simply continued, steady and unrelenting, as though his body had forgotten how to stop.

“Stay with me,” I said quietly, more out of habit than expectation.

He didn’t respond.

His head rested at an angle that would have been uncomfortable if he were fully aware, the ridged structure of it catching the overhead light in hard lines that made it impossible to mistake him for anything human. There was no hair, no softness to obscure the underlying shape, only smooth, scaled surfaces broken by subtle plating that shifted slightly as his body fought to maintain control. Even now, even injured, there was nothing fragile about him.

A heavy tail lay partly off the side of the cot, scaled like the rest of him and still except for the occasional faint twitch when pain moved through him. I had been careful not to step on it while treating him, though the absurdity of that thought had nearly broken through my concentration more than once.

Alien warrior bleeding out on my cot, and I was worried about where to put his tail.

I shifted closer and set the soaked cloth aside, reaching for a clean one from the tray. The basin beside me had long since gone cloudy, tinged pink from repeated use. I dipped the cloth, wrung it out, and went back to the wound, working carefully to clear away what I could.

It wasn’t clean damage.

The edges were wrong—too precise in some places, too irregular in others—and whatever had caused it had burned and torn at the same time, leaving tissue that resisted every instinct I had built through years of treating injuries that made sense. The structure beneath my hands was denser than it should have been, the muscle layered differently, the heat of him running higher than any human baseline I had ever recorded.

Not human. Even his scent was different. It was a combination of mild-scented herbs and wet earth after rain—not unpleasant, just different.

That he was not human wasn’t a problem. It was just a fact I needed to work around. I had never treated his kind before.

The infirmary had been a school after the war and before my time. That war had changed everything into something else. Now this building held four cots in the old front classroom, a storage room I had turned into a supply closet, a second classroom we used when someone needed isolation or recovery, and a kitchen that still worked when the water lines cooperated. Behind it all was the narrow room I had claimed for myself, just large enough for a bed, a table, and the kind of privacy a settlement medic rarely got to use.

It served the entire settlement—small enough that I knew most of them by name, large enough that there was always someone needing something.

We were not equipped for this kind of trauma.

I exhaled slowly and reached for the coagulant, applying it with careful precision. His body reacted immediately, not with sound but with tension that moved through him all at once, a tightening beneath my hands that told me he was closer to awareness than I had assumed.

“Easy,” I said, lowering my voice without thinking.

For a moment, nothing changed. Then the tension eased—not fully, but enough that I could continue without fighting him.

I worked in silence, packing the wound and securing the bandage as best I could. It held. Not perfectly, but enough to give him a chance.

When I leaned back, I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding and wiped my hands on a clean cloth, my mind already moving ahead to the next step.

He shouldn’t have made it this far. He hadn’t collapsed out in the settlement. He had reached the one place that might keep him alive—and then he’d stopped.

He hadn’t come through the central yard. Later, I would realize he must have followed the old drainage path behind the school, the one most people avoided because the ground dipped sharply and the brush grew thick against the rear wall. Injured or not, he had chosen the one route that kept him out of sight until he reached my door.

I could still see the way I’d found him when I closed my eyes—the heavy line of blood across the packed dirt outside the infirmary door, the way his body had been braced against the frame as if he had refused to fall until he had reached it. He hadn’t been fully conscious, but he hadn’t been gone either. When I’d told him to move, he had.

Barely.

Just enough that I could guide him.

Step by step, shifting his weight, forcing him to stay upright long enough to cross the threshold and reach the nearest cot before his body finally gave out under him. It hadn’t been strength that got him inside. It had been refusal—his and mine—to stop before it was accomplished.

I looked at him now, at the controlled stillness that had replaced that last effort, and wondered what had driven him to my door in the first place.

Then I stepped back to the cot and set my fingers lightly against his pulse.