Exiled Guide Tamed the Beasts novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Wreck

She frees the beast from a wire trap, follows it to a crashed freighter with a spring, finds her water is three days and not a month, and finds crates of calm-drug dumped marked expired. HOOK: Cinderhold lights red with a rage alarm.

A faint gold light came off my palm where it touched the beast's skull.

I stared at it.

The light ran down my fingers and into the grey fur, and the beast let out a long, shaking breath.

I had not known that I could do that.

The woman whose body I was wearing had known, I guessed, and she had used it on four angry men in a prison.

"Okay," I told the beast. "Okay, big one. Let me look at you."

It lifted its back leg and showed me.

A loop of black wire had cut into the leg above the knee, deep enough that the fur around it was stiff with old blood.

The skin there was hot and swollen.

I had spent six years on a hospice ward, and I knew an infection when I saw one.

My pack had a field kit in it, and the kit had cutters.

"This is going to hurt," I said. "Please don't bite my head off."

The beast set its jaw on the dust, an inch from my knee, and held still.

I cut the wire in two places and pulled it out in one long, careful draw.

It shuddered, and the gold light flared again, and the shaking stopped.

I flushed the wound with water from the pack, packed it with gauze, and wrapped it tight.

It took a long time, and the whole time the beast watched my hands.

When I stood up, the beast stood too, and I saw the damage on the other side of it.

Old scars crossed its flank, six or seven of them, all the same short length.

Someone had been hurting this animal on purpose for a long time.

"I'm sorry," I said, and meant it.

The beast turned, limped a few paces, and stopped to look back at me.

I followed it.

We walked through the dark for an hour, over ridges of ash that crunched under my boots, until a long black shape rose out of the ground in front of us.

It was a ship, a big cargo hauler, nose down in the dust with its back half torn open.

A thin line of water ran out of a crack in its hull and gathered in a basin of twisted metal.

I pulled off my mask and sniffed it.

It smelled of rust and nothing worse.

I cupped a handful and drank, and it was cold and clean.

Then I laughed, a short cracked laugh, because I was alive and thirsty and somebody had shown me where the water was.

The beast lay down in the mouth of the cargo bay with its injured leg stretched out and went to sleep.

I took the pack inside, sat on a crate, and went through it, one item at a time.

A blanket.

A sealed ration brick, the size of my hand.

A flare.

A water pouch.

Six one-litre bottles of water, in a row, each stamped with a date.

I checked them twice.

The Warden had said water for the month.

Six litres was three days, if I was careful, and a lot less if I was not.

I thought about her kind voice.

I thought, maybe she miscounted, and then I thought, maybe the shuttle really would come.

I put the bottles back and zipped the pack shut.

The crate I was sitting on had writing on its side.

I got up and shone the flare's pale light along the wall.

There were dozens of them, stacked to the roof of the hold, all the same grey steel with the same black stencil.

CINDERHOLD MEDICAL. CALM-7. WEEKLY DOSE, ONE PER SENTINEL.

Under that, in red: EXPIRED. DISPOSE.

I pried the lid off the nearest crate with my cutters.

It was full of tiny glass ampoules, packed in foam, each filled with a clear liquid and sealed in wax.

I turned one over in the light.

The date on it was last month.

It was not expired at all.

Someone had stamped it that way, driven it out here, and dumped it in a wreck where nobody would ever count it.

I put the ampoule in my pocket next to the steel dish with the three black beads, which clinked against the glass.

Two things in my pocket that did not belong to me, and I had no idea what either one was for.

I walked back out into the cargo bay and sat down next to the sleeping beast.

It opened one eye, found me, and shut it again.

I put my hand on its flank and felt its heart beating, slow and enormous.

For the first time since I had woken up, I was not afraid.

Then, far out across the plain, the horizon turned red.

It was the dome, Cinderhold, a long way off, with every window in it glowing red.

A thin wail followed a few seconds after, so faint I almost missed it, rising and falling.

I knew that sound from every hospital I had ever worked in.

Someone had pulled an alarm, and somewhere inside that black dome, the men I had left behind were losing their minds.

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