Tilden tonight. You say you won this round. It’s my turn for the next move. Janus is a damned bitch to keep penned up. Let’s see what you can do with my toy. Better than last time or I wouldn’t have your genes in the Bae. Defective bast…”
Not bothering to finish the word, he dropped his eyes to see the katana blade that had passed through his back, anything in between, and exited where a human’s heart would be. “That is impressive. For cattle, you would’ve made a half-decent Auphe. My highest compliment.” The gate closed around him and he disappeared with about a third of Niko’s blade.
Half-Auphe were different. My heart was where a human’s would be, and the majority of the half-breeds I’d killed in Nevah’s Landing had been the same, but not all were that way. Some, like Grimm, took after the pure Auphe, who had kept theirs elsewhere.
“I thought”—I caught the towel Samyel threw me and wrapped it around my sluggishly bleeding hand—“you were going to let me handle this?”
Niko dropped the handle of the ruined katana in disgust and took the towel I was wrapping with one hand and tied it briskly and with enough pressure to stop the bleeding. “When did I say that?”
I scowled. “When I told you how the game worked, to take the back table, and to interfere only if he was going to kill me.”
“Yes, you said quite a few things, but I don’t recall agreeing to any of them.” He must have gone out the side door to the alley, back in the front, and Grimm and I were focused with such intensity on the game, neither had heard him or the door. Grimm was right. He wouldn’t make a half-bad Auphe.
My scowl deepened. Grimm was heavy shit, but he was my heavy shit. I might be hurt thanks to him, but no one else would be. With something like this, something worse than Auphe, Niko had to listen to me. For once in my life I knew more than he did.
“When did you stop following my directions?” I asked. He raised an eyebrow at the question with a comeback that was uncomfortably true.
“When did you start following mine?”
Black Sheep If I could respect cattle, an impossible, stupid notion, but if I could, I might almost respect the human Caliban claimed to be his brother. He was devious and sly. I liked both of those qualities. He wasn’t bad with a sword either, but he was cattle and I couldn’t respect one of them whatever their talent. And he was human, and that was the reason he wasn’t Caliban’s brother.
As if a human could be part of us. That made me want to gag. Their blood was in us, I knew, but it was disappearing. The Auphe cells are more efficient than any virus in existence. They touched the human cells or enveloped them or excreted a contagion.…I didn’t know or think about it as long as it worked.
And it did work. It turned them. Human became Auphe. We ate humans in this form, a farmer surprised in his field—he’d tasted of pork, and our cells ate human cells in turn on the inside of the form. It was a slow process by human standards, but a whirlwind to an Auphe or a half Auphe who planned to live as long as the First.
Efficiency beats fear and war on every occasion. The Auphe hadn’t known that.
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.
They had the tools, but not the schooling. Instead they attempted to make a thing that could make a gate and the last of the First would meet the first of the First to end humans before they barely began, or keep them cave-bound and low in numbers. They had determination and luck and then bad luck.
One of my teachers had taught that invaluable lesson on efficiency by combining biology and history. He told us of some human seaport close to a thousand years ago with walls too thick to breach…for humans. The attacking army came down with the plague and, smarter than your average cow, catapulted their diseased dead over the walls into the city. Those cowering there were then infected and that battle was over. That teacher—I had so many, learned so much—went on to say it did little good in the end, as the plague swept the continent and most of the humans died.
Flying humans: dead, rotting, and crawling with contamination. An entire continent all but wiped out. Cattle inventing a new way to kill, cunning enough to do tricks not unlike dogs do for treats.
All that comedy, and I missed it. It would’ve been hilarious.
I ate that teacher too, but I did pat him on his balding head first for the excellent job he’d done. He’d tasted of roots and rice and beans. A vegetarian. One bite and I’d spit it out. Evil. No good deed goes unpunished. That was my first and last plant eater.
I could taste the vegatation now and wished I’d broken every bone in his body instead of only his neck. And I took back the pat. Grass eaters could have all the knowledge in the world, but no one who tasted that bad deserved a pat.
Disappointing, and the memory of his flavor was making me want to vomit. I sighed and continued to wrap a bandage around my chest. I’d leave it until the edges of the two sword cuts meshed back together. I healed faster than the other half Auphe had. I thought I healed faster than the Auphe themselves had. I laughed at that. More proof I was above them. I’d told Caliban we were evolution in motion.
Or had I told myself that?
Or the Bae?
Who knew?
I didn’t worry. My memory was fine. Top of my class. Top…of…my…class. I didn’t remember, because I didn’t care. I was all that mattered. My plan all that mattered. Memories came and went, but I didn’t forget a single part of the plan. The plan that was born of the only beautiful thing I’d known in my life: biology. There was more to it than plague and flying bodies.
Although those were as beautiful too.
I’d always been the most Auphe of the others in Nevah’s Landing—insane and weak every one —and years later the Auphe in me had grown, then continued to grow and spread. When I took biology…I’d enjoyed throwing the irritating lab tech off the roof. Him I had no desire to eat. He was greasy and flabby with the stench of STDs following him like a cloud. How he’d gotten anyone, even a whore, to give them to him was a mystery. And loud. He was loud enough to puncture my eardrums. Off he had to go. I didn’t leave that class. I wasn’t finished and he was an obvious suicide. He covered the sidewalk in an explosion of bacon-grease-coated syphilis. He…
Where was I? Where was I? Where…
Biology.
I’d learned and what I learned combined with what I knew and felt happening in me. It wasn’t hard to figure out. The Auphe were the first predators of merit on earth. Didn’t Sidle the warden tell us that enough? Brown-nosing, cocksucking shit.
The Auphe genes had survived and evolved the longest. Mixed with any others, they couldn’t lose. You could start out half Auphe, but given years—I didn’t know how many, but I could wait—all the human would be gone from the inside. Consumed. Perhaps the outside too. We’d see.
With time, you would become pure Auphe. And with us, better—smarter. Able to learn and knowing it necessary to learn. Auphe times two. The Second Coming.
Caliban’s cattle companion taught college classes. I’d watched. He’d taught Caliban because that’s what cattle companions, loyal and true, do. They would both know biology as I did. They would have seen the changes in Caliban over the years.
They knew.
But they didn’t know.
Because they didn’t want to know.
And so they would refuse to know.
