Chapter 783: Imperial Control

Alex waited until Vesa could hold the altered pattern without Thepes pulling through it.

The small sample remained inside the rune boundary, separate from the blood Alex and Mingyue were using for the call. It no longer tried to make every answering pulse move at the same pace.

Thepes watched it from the floor.

"If that part folds, stop," he said. "Adding more will only make the crossing worse."

Vesa nodded.

Alex looked toward the doorway. The last of the critical patients had been carried through the route to Edonia, and Selene had people checking the wounded who could remain near the sheltered buildings.

A carrier passed the doorway with another empty stretcher. Selene had cleared enough space for them to try; the receiving area would fill again quickly.

Mingyue sat beside him, resting her bandaged left arm on her knee. She raised her right hand beside his.

"Ready?" Alex asked.

"For the call."

He understood the distinction. Neither of them knew what would follow it.

Vesa settled on a jutting stone beside their hands, her four wings folding close so they would not brush the suspended blood. She kept Alucard’s connection narrow.

"Master?"

"I can hear."

"We have both patterns."

"Then let them answer what is already there. You aren’t trying to build every survivor’s blood again."

Alex looked at the faint response Vesa had preserved from the woman beneath the pump room. She was with people who could help her now. The pattern remained damaged, but it could carry her voice without moving her arm.

That was enough to begin.

Alex let the familiar power in his blood spread beyond the few contacts they had held close.

Mingyue moved with him.

The sensation changed before another voice arrived. What had felt like a small response at the edge of his awareness became several, then more than he could hold apart by instinct alone.

His Cognitive Matrix helped him separate the changes he could actually follow. Some met the inherited pattern cleanly. Others caught against the altered shape Vesa held beside it.

He left those responses to Vesa, who guided the altered pattern into place rather than forcing them into the first path.

Thepes’s fingers moved against the ice, then stopped. His sample held its shape without following the answering pulses outward.

Alex felt the call spread farther than before. Something answered from far away, followed by another.

The blood over his palm brightened.

For a moment, the room seemed too small for all the responses gathering around that light. He could still see the cracked floor and the doorway, but he felt more and more people beginning to notice what they shared.

He had thought about finding their survivors since Vesa first told them the race was scattered.

Thinking about them had been easier than feeling them answer.

A man’s voice reached the room, loud enough to make the guard outside turn.

"Alucard?"

Other sounds followed before Alex could reply. Some were words. Some were breaths, cries, or the confused movement of people who had not expected anyone to hear them.

Alex kept the call open.

"This is Alex Campbell," he said. "Mingyue Xueqi is with me. We carry Alucard’s inheritance. If you can hear us, you aren’t the only ones left."

His own voice came back through the nearest response, repeated by someone who sounded unable to believe the words.

"We’re on Proxima," Alex continued. "There are survivors here. We can hear you."

The pressure increased so sharply that his injured side tightened beneath the bandage.

Mingyue moved her hand closer, sharing the part he had begun holding alone.

"Don’t try to answer them all at once," she said through their bond.

Alex eased his grip on the nearest voices without closing the call.

The response continued spreading.

***

On a world far from Proxima, a woman dropped her bowl in a room beneath an abandoned house.

Warmth moved through the blood in her hands.

She stared at her fingers, waiting for the pain that usually followed when she tried to gather too much strength. Instead, the familiar power moved farther than it had the day before.

Someone called from the next room, and she turned toward the bed there.

The man lying on it had pushed himself upright without waiting for her to help. His eyes were crimson, and he was looking past her toward something she could not see.

"Did you hear?" he asked.

She nodded slowly.

The voice had not come through the old communication device on the table. That device remained dark, its broken casing held together by a strip of cloth.

The words had reached something inside her.

She moved to the bed and put her hand against the man’s arm. He caught it, gripping more firmly than he had been able to for a long time.

Neither spoke for several breaths.

Then a sound came from the stair.

They looked toward the heavy bar across the door.

The woman stood between the bed and the entrance while the man lowered his feet to the floor. He stayed seated, breathing hard from the effort, but did not fall back against the bedding.

The old fear had not gone away with the warmth.

"Don’t open it," he said.

She held the bar and listened.

A familiar voice called from outside, repeating the same names they had just heard.

There were other footsteps behind him.

The woman pressed her forehead against the wood for a moment. They had spent so long keeping their presence quiet that hearing several of their people gather at the same door felt dangerous even now.

She lifted the bar. It rose without the shaking effort she expected.

On the other side stood neighbors she had seen carrying themselves carefully through the ruins. One was crying. Another kept looking at his own hands while insisting they had to find out where the call came from.

The woman stepped back to let them in.

Behind her, the man on the bed got to his feet.

***

Aboard a damaged transport between worlds, the pilot heard the call while watching a warning beside the engine controls.

He almost missed the next fluctuation because the voice seemed to come from behind him.

"Who opened a channel?" he asked.

No one answered.

Then the navigator gripped the side of her console.

"I heard it too."

The pilot looked down at his hands.

The strength he drew from his blood into the small formation beside the controls no longer faltered. He had been struggling to maintain even a weak flow; now it held steady.

The engine warning remained. He reduced the feed before he damaged something by letting too much power through.

He could feed the damaged engine steadily now, but he still had to nurse it through the next fluctuation.

"Check the rear compartment," he told the navigator.

She left her seat and called through the open hatch.

An answer came back, followed by another from farther inside. The passengers had heard the names. Some wanted to know whether the pilot had contacted someone without telling them.

He kept his attention on the failing engine until the immediate fluctuation settled.

A woman appeared at the hatch.

"You’re turning toward them?" she asked.

"I’m finding where they are."

"They gave a world."

"They gave a world under Imperial control."

The woman went quiet.

The pilot looked at the navigation display. The call had given him hope, but hope did not repair the damaged sections of the hull or tell him what waited at the destination.

He opened the route information already stored aboard and checked what the ship could reach.

"We answer first," he said. "We find out if there’s a place for the wounded. Then we decide."

The woman nodded and returned to the passengers.

The pilot gathered his blood into the small control formation again. This time, the response held long enough for him to stabilize the engine without calling another passenger forward to help.

He looked at the warning that had finally stopped flashing.

Then he tried to answer the voice.

***