For a moment, Red contemplated lying on the floor and dying peacefully. It would be a perfectly horrible end to his brief stint on Earth.

That thought was quickly squashed by whatever survival instincts he had left---since Justin Bieber's horrible lyrics had taken away most of them---flaring up at the volley of metal arrows flying down at him. An inhumanly high-pitched scream left his lips as he dove to the side, whimpering prayers to whichever god Earthlings worshipped.

"Fuck!" he heard Alisa yell as she dodged another flock of death, her dog---whose name was apparently Jada---leaping from her arms in a flurry of terrified yelps. She seemed to be trying to get to her brother---to protect him, probably. But every time she took a step, more arrows fell from the ceiling. Becca was on the floor, huddled into a ball, arms over her head. Lennox had whipped out his bow and appeared to be smacking the falling arrows with it.

Red managed to calm his racing heart down enough to notice something: the arrows weren't whizzing around randomly. They seemed to be actively seeking out Vanguard's helpless players like moths to a flame. His heart plummeted. They would never escape this room alive, no matter how much they moved. Steel projectiles rained down all around them in a flood so heavy that it blocked the exit. He felt one whistle past his back, nearly catching his shirt with its deadly tip.

Running around like a headless chicken, the rest of the room became a blur. Red's blood roared in his veins, full of desperation to live. He felt the arrows scythe through the air, occasionally piercing his skin with their sharp points. One poked through his backpack. He would have to pull it out later on.

Then he saw it: a lone arrow, larger than the rest, was heading towards Alisa. Its tip gleamed slick with green liquid. The girl, trying desperately to find a path to her twin, didn't seem to see it coming.

He couldn't let her die.

Red's heart worked faster than his brain. His hand scrabbled for his waistband, where he'd shoved the gun. Once his palm closed around metal, he yanked it out and pulled the trigger, squeezing his eyes shut. He had no idea what he was doing, where he was aiming. He'd never shot a gun before. He'd never even seen one before Vanguard. He trusted and hoped and prayed, faith overriding all common sense.

All he knew was that he had to save Alisa Lee.

There was a loud BANG, one that made his ears ring and his eyes sting with tears of agony. He heard the sharp clunk of metal against metal, finally daring to open his eyes. All the arrows had frozen in mid-air, and Alisa was staring down at a puddle of hissing green at her feet, her pet back in her arms. As if on cue, the other projectiles burst into dust and fell to the ground in a sooty mess.

Red saw Lennox helping Becca off the ground, Cheng Xin looking up in wonder as he dusted silver ash off his clothes and slowly stood. Before his very eyes, the liquid in front of Alisa steamed and quickly dried up, leaving a scorched black mark where it had been. Poison. That arrow was poisoned.

And somehow, he'd miraculously been on target.

The gun in his now-shaky hand smoked, a reminder of how badly his impulsiveness could have gone. He could have shot Alisa, Cheng Xin, heck, even Becca or Lennox. He could have sent it flying into a random corner of the room, where it would be of no use to anyone. And yet, he'd hit the arrow out of its path first try.

Red vowed to worship whichever god Earthlings prayed to as well.

Alisa slowly raised her gaze to look at him. There were tears shining in her eye. "You wasted a bullet," she said, but there was no fight in her tone. She sounded almost...grateful.

They camped at the exit, not ready to move on yet. There were minor injuries all around: Cheng Xin had a few scratches, Lennox took an arrow point to the knee, Becca was miraculously unharmed, as was Jada. Alisa sported a cut across her cheek and her eye---or rather, lack of one---had started bleeding again, red soaking through the gauze taped over it and inducing much parental concern from her twin.

Red himself had been too consumed in his earlier panic to notice the long, bloody gash opening up his upper arm in a fountain of red. It had torn through part of his t-shirt and stained it sangria, although that wasn't particularly obvious against the black.

Now, while Becca, despite her apparent madness, fawned over Lennox's wound and Cheng Xin dabbed his injuries with antiseptic from his backpack, Red frowned down at the bandages he'd pulled from his supplies. He had no idea how to fasten them, considering how his armour-plated scales had prevented him from any injury on X9-7. The original Red didn't appear to have much knowledge on anything medical, either.

"Let me..." Alisa's voice trailed off as she sat down next to him, leaning against the steel wall and scrunching her nose at his injury. "Ah, fuck it. Give me those. I'll do it for you. You'd think a grown-ass boy like you would be able to bandage up his own wounds. Does your mommy put Hello Kitty plasters on your cuts and kiss them better?" Her tone was mocking. Red was pretty sure she was insulting him.

"I, uh, it's pretty hard for us to get cuts on X9-7. We have these really tough scales, so...there's not really much injury. It's usually death or nothing," he said. And I have no idea what Hello Kitty is.

"Oh," Alisa replied, seeming at a loss for words---for once. Then, "How high are you?" as she took the bandages from his helpless hands and wrapped them around his arm. She didn't disinfect the wound first, and she pulled the gauze too tight. Red decided not to complain. Alisa was obviously no medical expert, either.

"W...what do you mean?" he stammered.

She rolled her eye. "I said, how high are you? You're obviously on something stronger than a little weed. A dash of pot doesn't make people hallucinate that they're aliens. So, what's your poison? Cocaine? LSD? The mushrooms that make you see all the colours?" Her deft fingers pulled the bandage into a knot. It really was a bit tight, but Red figured he would get used to it sooner or later.

"I don't know what any of those are," Red confessed. Drugs, the original Red's mind said. He didn't know what those were either.

Alisa stared at him for a long time, one eyebrow raised to her forehead. "You have to be kidding me."

"I'm not," poor Red answered, feeling quite confused. "I...your eye is bleeding."

"What?" Alisa brought a hand up to her face, touching the area around the gauze covering. "Oh. Small matter."

"It'll get infected."

"Small matter."

"Tell me what to do."

"What?"

Red swallowed. "Your eye. I'll...uh, I'll help you treat it as best as I can. I don't really know what to do, so you'll have to tell me, but---"

Conflict flashed through Alisa's expression, but quickly dissipated as she sat back, all the tension flowing out of her body and slumping the stiffness of her shoulders. "Yeah, sure. That would be...nice. Don't breathe a word about it to Cheng Xin, though. I've got him convinced that it's just a bad cut. He doesn't need to know I'm missing a whole eye." Her voice was barely a whisper.

Red fumbled around in his backpack, the too-tight bandages hindering his movements slightly. His eyes drifted over to where Cheng Xin sat, just in front of the doorway across from them. His smile was infectious, bright and beaming as he tickled a yapping Jada under the chin. Alisa was right---he would admit that. Her twin didn't deserve to have that spark of cheer snuffed out, and news of his sister's missing body part would definitely extinguish his optimism.

Positioning himself so he was directly in front of Alisa, blocking her from her brother's view, Red unceremoniously yanked out a bottle of water and more bandages. He found a small vial in the side pocket, labelled ANTISEPTIC in big, blocky letters. It didn't take a genius to figure out what that was for.

"Do I just...pour it in?" Red asked cautiously, trembling fingers reaching for Alisa's misshapen bandage.

She shook her head vigorously. Her dark, rapidly-loosening braid coiled over her shoulder, falling down her t-shirt in greasy, half-done waves. Even with her face shiny with sweat and bloody from torture, she was remarkably attractive. "Don't pour it in. That's dumb. I don't know how to disinfect it. Just...I don't know, replace the bandage or something. That should be fine."

Red bit his lip. He wasn't comfortable with leaving it with just a new bandage over the top, but he had no idea what else to do. "Um...do you have some kind of cloth?"

Alisa reached a hand into her backpack, tossing a pack of something soft and white at him. Red stared down at the foreign object, not quite knowing what they were meant for.

His companion snorted. "You're staring at those tissues like you've never seen them before."

Red picked them up, turning them over in his palm and looking at them in wonder. "We don't have anything like this on X9-7."

"There you go again with that crazy alien shit. Just when I thought we were getting along so well." Alisa threw up her hands in exasperation.

Anger flooded Red like lava. "I'm not crazy!" he insisted. "I'm not from here!"

Alisa rolled her eye. "Crazy Canadians," she muttered. She'd called him that earlier, when he'd first tried to explain to her that he was truly from a different planet. Red didn't know what a Canadian was, and he didn't really care to find out. So he pressed his lips together and kept quiet, especially since whatever little light shining through the room's doorway glinted off the dangerous steel-toed boots Alisa wore, almost like a warning.

He reached for her bandage again, slowly pulling the gauze and tape off. He heard Alisa let out a sharp hiss of pain, her hips bucking against his stomach. "Please don't kick me again," he whimpered as he eased the covering from her tortured eye socket. "It hurts."

"I'm not going to kick you again. Earlier was a precautionary measure," she said, which Red supposed was meant to sound reassuring but really wasn't. He gulped, finally managing to peel the gauze away. He flinched at the sight that lay before him.

Where an eye had once been sat a blank, bloody hole. It reminded him too much of a skull---the previous Red had liked to draw them. It was a void of black, skeletal and horribly grotesque. Not a shred of cornea remained. The entire eyeball had been gouged out of her head.

It was a miracle she had survived that, let alone run through part of Vanguard in the excruciating pain she had to be in.

"Is it really that bad?" Alisa's voice was flat.

Red swallowed, nodding his head slightly. His shaky hands tore the packet of tissues open---they were so soft!---and set to work on the ridged cap of the bottle. After a few failed attempts, Alisa snatched it from his hands and ripped the cap open with a sighed, "You're hopeless."

"Sorry," Red mumbled, looking down and feeling his cheeks burn red at the insult. He took the bottle back, tilting it just enough to pour a few drops onto a tissue. Lifting it to Alisa's face, he carefully wiped the blood from her wound, trying not to gag at the sight of her empty eye socket. She gritted her teeth and clenched her fists the whole time, but she didn't make a sound.

It was soon over, ending with a new square of gauze slapped over the blank space and medical tape holding it in place. Impulsively, Red pulled another tissue from the packet and dampened it despite Alisa's wastage complaints, dabbing it over the angry cut on her face and soaking the crimson liquid away.

"I didn't...well, you saved my life, and I didn't say the two words one should always say when someone saves their life," Alisa mused, hands still balled into fists at her sides. Red realised, with some embarrassment, that he'd moved closer to treat her wounds and was now almost on top of her. She turned her onyx gaze upon him, intense and steely-eyed.

"Thank you,' she said. Red felt his heart soar, because Alisa Lee had finally said something to him that wasn't an insult.