Daysider (Nightsiders) by Susan Krinard

little before the lady took her arm away. But it was enough. She felt better already, and with every breath she took she felt better still. She began to remember running away after Mommy had taken her to the big building with the very serious grown-ups who asked her so many questions. She remembered darting into hallways like long, dark tunnels and falling down stairs, hurting and crying for someone to find her.
    That was when the lady came. She picked Alexia up and carried her outside, where it was nighttime, moving like a cat chasing a mouse, whispering for Alexia to be very quiet.
    Alexia didn’t remember how long they walked. Sometime during the night the pain came, cramps in her stomach and the feeling that she wanted to throw up. Then she began to feel very hot and shivery, and she started to see ugly things, monsters with bloody teeth and red eyes who chased her and chased her and wouldn’t let her get away.
    That was all she could see until the lady woke her up and told her she’d be all right. And now she was.
    The lady took her by the hand. “We need to get you home now,” she said, sadness in her voice.
    Alexia looked up. “Are you going to take me?”
    “Yes.” The lady gave her a smile that wasn’t a smile, and she led her out of the dark room into the sunlight.
    When they got back to the big building, Mommy was waiting for her. She was crying, and the very serious people looked more serious than ever. The lady took Alexia to Mommy, said something very soft that Alexia couldn’t quite hear, and went away with the serious people. She looked back once at Alexia, and Alexia stared at her for a long time after she disappeared inside the big building, memorizing her face.
    Then Mommy took her to a place where other serious people made her undress and put things in her mouth and listened to her chest. When she went home again, she had to start taking two red pills every day. She still got sick a lot, and she always wished the lady would come back to make her well.
    But she never saw the lady again.
    * * *
    Alexia jerked awake, the woman’s face as clear in her mind as it had been all those years ago.
    The eyes. Daysider eyes, blue that was almost black.
    She sat up, shoving the blanket aside. She had forgotten. All through the painful years of her childhood, the long spells of illness before they had developed the drugs for the patch, she had lost the memory of something that should never have left her consciousness.
    Trembling, Alexia pressed the heels of her palms against her burning eyes. She understood now what it had all meant, or at least she could make a very good guess. She had run away from the Examiners at Aegis who had been conducting tests on her suitability as a future agent, as they had done with all the dhampir children born during or right after the war. Somehow she’d come upon a Daysider, who had known or guessed the nature of her first bout of blood-sickness and temporarily “cured” her.
    Then the Daysider had taken Alexia back to Aegis and—
    Alexia dropped her hands, staring unseeingly at a jay hopping from branch to branch among the oak leaves. Things that hadn’t made sense two decades ago looked very different in light of her years of training and experience. She’d been only six then, born the same year as the signing of the Treaty. The “nice lady” could have been anywhere from twenty to one hundred years old; no one could be sure of the age of any adult man or woman of vampire heritage.
    Regardless of the Daysider’s age, she shouldn’t have been in the city. The Treaty specified that her kind, like Nightsiders, were forbidden within Enclave territory. That meant she could have been some kind of spy, an operative from Erebus, which had been completed just the year before. Somehow Alexia had stumbled into her hiding place.
    But there was another possibility. If she wasn’t an agent, she must have been there with the full knowledge of Aegis. And they would never have let