The Girl Who Fell From The Sky - Rebecca Royce Page 0,2

took a pack from his bag. All of this, it felt almost dreamlike, as though it couldn’t possibly be happening. From his bag, he removed a green scarf and wrapped it once, then twice, around my face, covering my mouth and nose. It was the same color as the one he wore.

Once again, he went into his bag, this time producing a jug. He set it down next to him before he stared at me one more time. With fast hands, he tore at my pants. I gasped. What was he doing? The air hit my skin there like an assault. I was burned on my legs? Well, of course I was. That’s where I’d been on fire.

He poured some of the liquid from the jug on my injury. It was a red color, and as it hit the burned skin, the pain immediately cooled. Seconds later, he did the same with my hands. Sweet relief. Tears fell from my eyes.

“Thank you,” I spoke through the muffled scarf.

“Your tissue will regenerate in time, but only if I remove you from the scouring effects of the sand.” He hesitated, as if he were having some kind of internal argument with himself, and then finally looked down at me. “You require shelter, but if you have fractured bones, movement could worsen the injury. May I ascertain your condition?”

Okay, one, his accent was bizarre, soothing and lilted, like it ought to be reciting classical poetry all the time. And two, no curriculum in the Union taught kids vocabulary like that. He almost had to be a nerd. Looking like he did, with a jug of magical healing goo at the ready, a voice that rubbed the air like Iolian silk, and a general air of nerdishness? Clearly, I’d been almost right to begin with—I had died, but far from being sentenced to everlasting punishment, it seemed I was now receiving some sort of bespoke karmic reward. Go me. I closed my eyes, leaned back on my blissfully painless elbows, and said, “Sure. Knock yourself out.”

He frowned. “I must…put my hands upon your person.”

Was he serious? Doctors had been poking me my whole life. I had no sense of personal privacy left. “Please do.”

“You are a female.”

“Ah, yes?” Was that a trick question? And was he blushing behind that face-scarf?

“But you’re… No matter. If you grant permission, I shall be swift and circumspect.”

“I, uh, grant permission?” I meant it as a statement, but it kind of did sound like a question. I wasn’t sure anyone had ever asked me for permission before for anything. Most people told me what to do and expected me to do it.

His frown deepened, but he leaned in to the examination. Clearly, he had some medical or military field training. First the long bones—legs and arms and the odd “press against my hand” or “can you move this extremity?” When he checked my ribs, he managed to find every single ticklish spot, which was funny to me but seemed to embarrass him a lot. His hands were gentle but applied firm pressure, and when he moved them up through my singed hair to check my skull, it was everything I could manage not to sigh.

He might have been a trained medic, but if he weren’t also a masseuse, he’d missed his calling.

He cleared his throat, and I sighed. “Do you think you can walk, or shall I carry you?”

I could probably walk, but being carried like a sand-glass doll sounded really good. Although the magical goo had taken away the most immediate pain, I still felt vaguely sore, like I’d just taken a pretty bad fall. Which…yikes. If I wasn’t in the karmic afterworld, and if that was a real planet beneath my ass, I must in fact have fallen. From the sky. In a burning wreck of a starship.

“I can walk,” I said, scrambling to my feet. My entire body felt like one giant bruise, and there were patches of still-red skin—tissue, he’d called it, which would heal—but somehow, I was still functional. “My name’s Bianca, by the way.”

We started picking our way free of the debris field, and I wobbled a little. He caught my elbow. Steadied me.

“I am called Nox.” He bowed his head for a second. “We need to hurry. Your transport fell from the sky. As we are in war season, others are out scouting for the best location to create our battlefronts. Our City-State will win this year and take most of the