“Come on Jakob stay with us,” Liz shouted desperately. Jacobs eyes fluttered as his head swayed limply. The deep wound in his shoulder spurted blood from raw crimson flesh. Quintek staggered toward them with a few fresh wounds himself, though much of the blood painting his arms and face blue was not his own. The Syn soldier wiped his face then with a grunt wrapped a hand around Jakob’s ankle

  “Get away from him,” Taylor lashed out. His blows fell harmlessly on Quintek who ignored Liz’s kick in the stomach to drag the bleeding man out into the snow. Ignoring their shouts and punches Quintek crouched to examine the spurting wound.

  “What are you doing?” Liz demanded as she finally understood that the Syn meant no harm.

  Quintek growled something then raised his head and began to make deep wretch sounds. Eyes rolling back in his head Quintek parted his quivering beak and with a wet gasp jerked forward to vomit an oily reddish bile directly into the wound. Wiping his mouth Quintek watched with satisfaction as the substance lost its sheen and hardened into a dark brown crust. Within moments he had sealed the wound and stopped the bleeding. Jakob groaned as Quintek stepped aside to let the other humans treat the remaining superficial wounds. They were digging for something in their pack as Agra stumbled back towards the rest of the party. She was visibly shaking, a sick look in her eyes. Blue blood streaked her arms and face, the torn remnants of her stained wrappings hanging in tatters on her body. The red feathery down hanging from her grey segmented body rustled in the icy wind.

  “Your beauty is something to behold as was your fury,” Quintek commented with a preening tone. Agra ignored him.

  “Is he going to be ok?” Agra asked meekly.

  “I think so. Quintek did something to stop the bleeding,” Taylor said wiping congealed blood from around the dense scab like mass on Jakob’s shoulder. Agra regarded it with a moment of brief suspicious recognition.

  “With his survival suit torn to shreds we’ll probably lose him to the cold if we don’t get him somewhere warm immediately,” Liz said with urgency. She looked toward Agra with cold resentment. Agra was looking past her in a daze.

  “Warm,” Agra repeated softly. Only one place came reluctantly to mind, a place she had promised to avoid. Another broken promise Agra mourned as she flexed her blood smeared hands.

  “What just happened Agra?” Liz demanded Angrily. “You tell Jakob not to shoot, almost get him killed, and yet I saw you tear into one like it was nothing.”

  “I didn’t want this to happen,” Agra replied softly. “I didn’t want anybody else, human or Syn, to die here.”

  Sensing she would get nowhere Liz returned her attention to Jakob. She felt his weakened pulse and choked down despair. Jakob had stabilized, but he’d lost a lot of blood and was getting colder by the second.

  “Here take this,” Agra said offering the last bit of her cloth wrappings. Wincing, she then plucked several tuffs of downy red feathers from her body and offered to stuff it in the gaping hole in Jakob’s survival suit. Quintek watched this gesture with disbelief.

  “This will keep him warm until we get him inside,” Agra said.

  “Where?” Taylor asked. “We are hours from your cave and where we were going to set the trap.”

  “There is another place close by where it is warm and safe. We just have to hurry,” Agra insisted with a worried look in her eyes. She scanned her surroundings anxiously. Four more of her kin where still out there. Would she have to end their lives as well to save the humans? Agra could not accept that.

  Dragging Jakob behind them on a makeshift sled of red tree branches Taylor and Liz followed Agra up a snow topped ridge. They’d refused her offer of help and had been sharing their burden for nearly half an hour. Jakob experienced brief moments of lucidity as he lay shivering swaddled pieces of cloth and red down.

  “Agra where are we going?” Liz demanded. Agra hadn’t said a word since she had led them into the highlands. Was there another cave nestled amongst the loose lichen speckled granites jutting out from the snow drifts? With Jakob dragging behind them it took a moment for the humans to catch up with Agra besides where she and Quintek had stopped at the top of the stony ridge.

  “Why did we stop? Are we there?” Taylor asked with a weary gasp. Agra stood silently, her red down bristling as she looked at something across the valley. Quintek was in obvious shock at what he was seeing. Setting Jakob down gently Liz and Taylor ran ahead to see what the fuss was about.

  “Oh my god,” Liz whispered.

  The far side of the valley was covered in a sprawling twisted mass of metal. The barely recognizable remains of the ruined ship lay draped across the landscape like some gigantic dead animal. Half crumpled against a mountain side much of the wreckage appeared to have sunk beneath layers of snow. Like gravestones, enormous shards of twisted wreckage the size of buildings lay scattered in the kilometers long scar carved into the frozen ground by the ships catastrophic impact. Smaller bits of debris peppered the landscape. Large shards of melted metal even lay just below where they group stood in somber awe. Pained groans shook them from their daze.

  “Where am I? What's going on?” Jakob croaked as he came too. “I’m so cold.”

  Rushing to his side to comfort him Liz and Taylor gave Quintek and Agra a moment converse in the scared tongue.

  “I didn’t think it was possible,” Quintek said incredulously.

  “They would destroy this place if they knew it existed,” Agra said gesturing at the rusting pile of carnage strewn before them.

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  “This is just the proof I needed to confirm what I’ve always suspected,” Quintek said coldly. “They are not gods.”

  “No, they’re not,” Agra agreed.

  “Gods would not fear us,” Quintek said haughtily.

  Agra had no response to that. She turned away and with few somber words instructed everyone to find a piece of wreckage large enough for an expedited sled trip into the valley.

  A wall of scorched metal twisted and charred loomed above the wind-swept valley floor as Agra guided them deeper into the heart of the ruins ruins. Icicles lined each jagged fissure in the hull like teeth, the flow of cold air through the sagging structure like the exhalation of dying beasts. As Liz and Taylor dragged Jakob through the snow his makeshift sled uncovered pieces of bent pitted metal and bleached fragments of Syn carapace.

  “What is this place?” Jakob asked hoarsely, his voice barely a whisper. He was conscious again though too weak to move much on his own. His eyes darted from place to place as he studied his environment as best he could. “This is it isn’t it? The place where Greg found Agra,” he said. A Syn arm jutted from the snow behind him as if beckoning to him, pleading.

  “This place is a graveyard,” Taylor said stepping over the rigid back of a Syn frozen face down in the ice. “How could anything have survived the crash?”

  “I guess now we know why Agra doesn’t think another Syn deserves to die on this planet,” Liz shivered. “This place is a mass grave.”

  Quintek looked upon the bodies of his fallen kin with silent dismay. He’d seen death before, but never like this. His people treated the dead with some measure of respect. They at least instilled purpose in each death in battle by using the bodies of one generation to nourish another. How could so many be allowed to linger in meaningless death?

  The group eventually followed Agra into a deep rupture running through an immense wall of rust streaked bronze where the enormous craft had nearly split in too. Frost encrusted metal beams and wire had spewed from this gaping wound when much the structure had collapsed in on itself, but a dark passage still appeared to lead deep into the cavernous ruins. Pausing at the entrance Agra bent down to dig for something in the snow. After a moment she found a transparent sphere whose glow illuminated the interior with dim blue light. It was obvious she had been here before.

  “This way,” she said somberly.

  Filled with windblown snow the passage soon transitioned from mangled wreckage to what must have been the relatively untouched interior of a Syn ship. Agra’s light illuminated smooth organically shaped architecture lacking any sharp angles, inscriptions, or motifs. No doors blocked the shadow filled rooms they filled past. Shallow ramps led up into darkened upper and lower levels. The air began to warm as they ventured deeper within the structure, the snow replaced by pools of dripping water. The occasional buzz of distant machinery resonated through the floor with a muffled whine.

  “This ship isn’t dead,” Taylor whispered as if something behind the walls would hear him. Agra finally led them up a ramp and into a circular domed space. She fitted the sphere into a depression in the wall and filled the whole room with dim blue light.

  “Help him up onto the table,” Liz called. Taylor and Agra helped her lift Jakob up onto the flat circular table mounted at the center of the room. Jakob squirmed, swiping his hand over a portion of the smooth black tabletop which illuminated a series of characters. A swarm of red dots appeared above him, twisting and twirling until a monochromatic image of a Syn flickered to life. This Syn stood before them larger than life, fixed in a defiant pose. Wearing some kind form fitting helmet with flat spikey protrusions like a headdress this regal looking Syn held its head up proudly. Glaring down at them as though alive everyone but Agra took a step back from the Syn hologram. She stared up at the figure with sad resentment.

  “What is that?” Taylor asked.

  “It’s a Syn hologram,” winced Jakob as he disrupted the projection with a shaking hand. He squinted in the blinding red light which engulfed him.

  “Who is this?” Liz asked fixated on the image.

  “She is what you might call a Syn queen,” Agra said waving her hand over the glowing characters on the table. As the Syn letters faded the hologram shrunk away into nothing.

  “This one was my mother,” Agra admitted with a beaky frown

  “Your mother? What does that make you?” Taylor said. He and Liz had already rushed back to Jakob’s side and had been removing the wrappings to reassess his wounds.

  “Nothing,” Agra hissed spitefully. “She and I are nothing alike. My own mother would have had me killed the moment I hatched to satisfy my kinds twisted beliefs. I’m not divine like her and I don’t want to be. It didn’t save her or my wretched people from the same fate.”

  With that Agra stormed down the ramp and out of sight. As always Quintek was not far behind.

  Diffuse light filtered down through a narrow snow filled canyon torn in the rusted metal when the wreckage had nearly split in two. The shear mangled walls of exposed beams and exposed rooms rose above the ground like high rises above an empty street. The ambient howl of the wind and the groan of sagging metal only occasionally interrupted the deathly silence. Bending down to dust snow from a shard of metal protruding from the ground Agra slowly revealed the name she had etched into the makeshift grave marker. Beneath the long flat plate was a pile of stones covering one of her deepest regrets. Parting her trembling beak with a whimper Agra collapsed to the ground with her hand still pressed against her father’s name.

  “I’ve returned Father,” she exhaled sadly. The red down draped down her back bristled as his presence lingered in her memory. Agra felt like a child again, her father standing above her with disappointment on his bearded face. She bowed her head to avoid his piercing gaze.

  “I know I shouldn’t have come back, but things have changed,” Agra said choking up. She paused, making a fist in the snow as she steadied herself “Others have come like you promised they would. They brought the conflict with them and I promised myself I would do better this time. I failed.”

  Greg Anson was gone, particles of snow drifting through the air where she wished he had been. He preferred to linger just outside of reach appearing now and then as a distant figure in the snow drifts. That was her punishment.

  “Why are you doing this?” Quintek asked. The inquisitive Syn craned his slim segmented neck as he stood above her with his wide judgmental stare.

  “Someone like you wouldn’t understand,” Agra snapped with a low threatening growl.

  “I may be one of the few of our kind who can,” Quintek said vaguely. “You asked me how I knew the sacred tongue. I learned it from what was meant to be my meal, a red feathered one sentenced to execution at the hands of my kin. I recognized his importance and risked my life to drag him to the depths where he would be safe. I cared for him, and he taught me the secrets of our kind. Eventually my masters discovered that their prized prey was alive, and I was forced to leave him behind to survive. For a time I did not think I deserved to live but with time I learned to forget the pain.”

  “Then you don’t understand guilt,” Agra replied with the last word in English. The Syn did not have a word for that concept in their own tongue. Quintek repeated the word awkwardly, managing to pronounce the unfamiliar word as, “Queelt.”

  “If you can’t understand that then your nothing like me,” Agra said shifting her gaze at the other gravestone placed beside her father’s. Quintek knelt beside her and stared at the half-buried markers in silence. Why he insisted on staying by her side continued to elude her.

  “What do you want from me?”

  Quintek turned to look at her with genuine confusion in his eyes.

  “I want to help you Agra.”

  “Help me do what?” Agra asked humoring him.

  “Help you fulfill your true potential. That’s all I’ve wanted since I found you.”