He knows finding her again won’t be difficult. He’s not sure how he knows this, but it’s a certain truth that has alighted itself somewhere deep in his chest, as guaranteed as the rising of the sun, and so he wakes each day and journeys to the river to gather water or sit with Ada and waits patiently.

When it happens at last, he’s sitting cross-legged on the river bank, watching Ada as she drags a stick through the dirt over a fire line. His back is to the water, but he still feels her approach. Can feel her pause, her stare. When he deigns to glance behind him, he sees her staring curiously, arms at her side, not yet in a defensive posture, but ready. Just like last time, she doesn’t retreat. He almost feels some admiration for her courage.

Ada stops and clutches at her stick, mouth open. Then she surges forward without fear, only stopping midway on the bridge. He doesn’t bother to stop her this time, wanting to see the other’s reaction. Ada bounces on her heels.

“Hello, again.”

The other looks satisfyingly flustered.

“Uh, hi.”

“Are you here to see us?”

“Am I … no. I was just walking.” Then, suspiciously, “Are you here to see me?”

“I think so.”

The other steps back at that, though Ada continues to bounce a little too happily and smile at her.

Alexai unfurls and tells her to sit. She pulls herself away grudgingly and retreats to his side. Once she’s seated, he faces the one on the other side of the water and cocks his head in a way that he hopes is patronizing. She mirrors the motion, infuriatingly,

He knows he must get the first words in before she can get the upper hand. He settles on a calm and dry, “I must confess, it surprises me to see what a skinny thing you are.”

She looks suitably confused. Frowns. “What?”

“I thought you would be fatter after having so many children. That is what you do, is it not? Have children?”

There’s a spark that suddenly flares to life in her eyes. He’s hit on a sore topic. If it were not so beneath him, he would congratulate himself on finding the right button to push on the first try.

He can tell she’s trying to reign in her anger. Her eyes are still dangerously narrow when she finally responds, “I don’t have any children.”

He presses it for no other purpose but to upset her. “So what use do you serve?”

This time, she’s definitely mad and not even bothering to hide it. She snarls at him, “Killing you.”

He lets himself smirk. Extends his arms as if to say I am right here.

“What do you want?” she asks.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You were waiting for me.”

He was waiting for her. A moment to gather his thoughts, plan a strategy. Contemplates how much he should reveal so soon. He needs something from her, and now he must tread carefully to get what he wants. He lets his eyes travel over her face, from her dark hair to her delicate chin, those rounded cheeks and rounded eyes. Lets his eyes travel down further to the top of her black military coat buttoned up tight to her neck, takes in her slight form and long limbs. He’s not trying to make her uncomfortable - the thought had not even occurred to him - but she shifts a bit on her feet and glares at him.

He savors her discomfort for a moment. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Ada begin to worry her arm, and it reminds him with a sudden spike of fear of why he’s here, why he was indeed waiting for her.

“If I were,” he begins, “waiting for you, the fact that you have not turned heel and run either suggests an extreme stupidity, or that you yourself were hoping that I was waiting for you because…” he pauses deliberately, letting her wait and gathering his own thoughts. He has no idea what he’s doing - for the first time in years he doesn’t know the correct move to make, all he knows is that he mustn’t let her see that he’s not in complete control. “Because,” he continues, the words coming to him, “you were hoping to stumble upon me. So the real question is: why are we both here?”

She actually laughs. Even with the obvious scoff behind it, the sound is bell-clear and light. Almost pleasant. He tries not to cringe. “That’s a strange jump to make,” she finally says, voice full of the arrogance of the very young.

“Not so strange. You are far outside the bounds of your little cave. And this is the exact location we met last time. Seems more than a fortuitous turned of events that we find ourselves here again.”

“Fortuitous?” The question lingers in the air, and he understands what she’s asking perfectly well.

He decides to get to the important part. “You have something I want. And I have something you want.”

Her eyes widen. It takes him a moment to realize that it’s fear he sees on her face. She glances over her shoulder towards safety.

“Your people, I mean,” he clarifies patiently. “Your people have something I need. And I have something your people need.”

Her voice is shaky when she responds, “And what do you have that we could possibly need?”

“My flesh and blood. Atoms and cells. Is that not what your people crave the most? Is that not why you have been snatching off my people as if you were wild beasts dragging off your prey to be devoured?”

She raises her chin defiantly but doesn’t deny it. Her skin is pale, almost white. Her eyelashes are black and long. She’s slight and fragile, just like every one of her kind. He could break her in half. He has a sudden urge to ask her if she knows this - to search through her and find that kernel of fear that should be there. He doesn’t see it now. A moment ago, he had. But now there’s only a bold challenge and a hint of shame. An odd thing. He had not been expecting shame.

She tries to recover. “We kill any of you we come upon. It has nothing to do with you having or not having something we want. You overestimate your own importance. And that’s funny indignation coming from someone whose people have been ambushing us on water runs and hunts.”

He has the sudden urge to lunge forward and rip her throat out. But that’s not why he’s here. He takes a deep breath, smothering the unseemly surge of anger that he should not have felt in the first place. After years of self-doubt, he’s certain now that he could indeed kill a woman.

He’s too absorbed in collecting himself that he doesn’t notice Ada getting up again until she’s passing him, making her way to the footbridge as if she has every intention of trotting all the way over to the other side. He doesn’t move to stop her. He merely says her name, calm and low and full of warning, and the girl stops just short of the crossing and looks back at him.

“Ada,” he repeats, “come here.”

The girl looks confused. She doesn’t obey - which irritates him, especially under the watchful eye of that other one staring so intently at him - but she doesn’t move forward either. She turns to the woman across the river and says, “I am Ada. Who are you?”

To his surprise, the enemy actually smiles - merely a twitch, but a smile, nonetheless - and responds, “My name is Ilena. Ilena Magan.” Then she glances at him expectantly.

He inclines his head, mockingly. “Alexai.” He doesn’t offer a surname – doesn’t have one. He wishes now he did, just to force a level of formality between them.

She nods once and says, “Alex.”

His jaw clenches. He knows she can see it because she smirks.

“Miss Magan.”

She must notice the warning, but she smiles even wider, self-satisfied with her own irritating familiarity.

“And so, Alex,” she seems to savor the name, lets it roll around in her mouth, “what do you need from me?”

“I need you to help her.” He nods at Ada. “A small thing to you, but it’s imperative that we understand why she’s sick, and how to cure her.”

She makes a show of thinking it over, and he waits patiently. Finally, she asks, “Are you suggesting that I take her?”

“No,” he responds, maybe a bit too quickly, “I am suggesting that you take what you need back to your lab and bring me back a cure. While attempting to find that cure, it’s neither here nor there to us what else you do with your samples. It’s obvious at this point that you will never succeed in any of your experiments.” A shrug. “So why should it matter to me what you do?”

“You aren’t good at negotiating, are you?”

He draws in a breath. There’s too much out of his control here, too many variables. Too much of his own personal world depending on her answer. He doesn’t like the feeling of depending on anyone, much less one of them. Much less her. Such weak and annoying creatures - and he has to stand here and wait for her to give in. To help him.

“This is obviously in your favor,” he reasons, “no harm could come to you from this. And you are in need - we are all too aware of how short-lived your lives are. How susceptible you are to sickness. Even now, all I have to do is cough on you and like that,” he snaps his fingers, “you would be gone. In the face of such debilitating inferiority, how could you pass up a chance to study the genetics of a superior race? Study how our immune system works? Our regenerative abilities?”

He can tell she’s weighing her words carefully when she answers, “You have no idea what you’re really talking about.”

He shrugs. He just wants her answer. To help or not to help. He’s desperate. He hates the feeling, but he is. Ada’s all that matters, more so than war or animosity or centuries of pride. He wonders if he will truly have to break down and beg, if his life and dignity has really been reduced to that, but she saves him, unintentionally, by saying, “We already have - have had - some of your people to look at up close, but it may be helpful to have fresh samples from an unwounded specimen.”

“I want to be appraised of everything - everything related to her healing. If this happens again to another, I would rather avoid dealing with your kind.”

To his surprise, she nods. Something about the thing seems entirely too easy. She can’t really believe that a few dna samples swabbed from a little girl’s mouth or skin are really going to hold some answer.

“I’ll have to discuss it with my people. If the answer is yes, I’ll come by tomorrow at the same time with a doctor-”

“No doctor.”

“Okay,” she says, slowly, “I’ll come by myself. I’ll take a sample of your daughter’s clear skin and also of her rash to get a look at both.”

“She’s not my daughter.”

She looks taken aback by this. She glances at Ada, at Alex, back at Ada. She frowns in question. For some reason, Alexai finds himself explaining. “She’s my brother’s daughter. My deceased brother.”

“Mother died too,” Ada murmurs, that sadness creeping into her voice that she knows well enough not to show in front of the others. He wishes she were not so open about it here, with the enemy so close. But he can’t bring himself to correct her.

“And what did she die of?” the other one asks.

He glares at her. Ada tugs on his arm. “What did mother die of?”

He doesn’t answer, annoyed. He continues to frown at the woman across the river, and even her sudden embarrassment at her own unintended callousness does nothing to make him less angry with her.

Finally, to still Ada’s insistent pulling at his sleeve, to quiet that question in her large eyes, he merely says, “She had an accident.”

That seems to satisfy the child, though she smoothes her cheek against his hand in a way that makes him want to step away, only because he feels the enemy’s eyes watching his every move.

He doesn’t step away, but he presses a restraining hand against her back, out of sight. He can feel the thin bones of her ribs beneath his palm.

The matter is settled but yet the other one still stands there, almost expectantly. What does she want? A handshake? A goodbye? He takes a moment to wonder if giving her his back would be a sign of weakness or strength.

“Is that all?” she asks.

Is it?

“No. I need you to understand that if you come here with any of your other people, I will kill them. I will not be taken captive without a fight, so do not even attempt - do not even contemplate - a trick. Do you understand me?”

She cocks her head, looking admirably unperturbed. “Yeah, I understand. Sure. No point anyway. We’ve had enough of your people in our labs. The caves don’t seem to agree with you very much.”

She has said too much, but he tries not to look like he’s digesting this information. She had apparently assumed that he’s aware of what they’re doing to their prisoners of war. The idea that the change of location is altering his people is interesting. It had been suggested before, but now it seems certain.

His first instinct is to argue with her. To point out how slim her chances are of finding some miracle in a few samples of Ada’s skin, but that would be counterproductive, so he merely nods and steps back, signaling the end of the meeting. She doesn’t take the corresponding step back.

“Miss Magan,” he intones. A nod. He mentally wills her to turn around and walk away first. She refuses.

He would really like to kill her.

He gives in and pivots on his heel, striding away from her with shoulders thrown back. Ada follows dutifully, less gracefully, and the entire time he can feel the enemy’s eyes on his back.

�H����%

Next Chapter: Chapter 14