I emerged from the Interface so paralyzed with emotion that I didn’t recognize the outer corridor, or know Oscin and Skye as they grabbed me, held me, and lowered me to the spongy floor, whispering soft words I did not hear then and would not remember later. I didn’t register the moment when the whispers stopped and they acted with cold, swift efficiency, slapping my shoulder with a patch of something designed to bring me out of shock.
I was not there.
I was on Bocai.
I was a little girl of eight, grinning with homicidal bloodlust as I looked down on the blood-soaked form of the being who had helped my parents raise me. For most of my life he had peppered me with little Bocaian endearments that translated into phrases like “Little Flower” and “Lights the Sky.” He had held me and he had treasured me and listened with all possible gravity to any of the nonsense that spilled my unformed little mind. He had said he found joy to see me play alongside the children he and his mate had brought into this best of all worlds.
I had called my human father Daddy. And my Bocaian father Vaafir, his language’s word for a concept that meant pretty much the same thing.
That day he had come into this house already reeking of blood not his own. I caught a glimpse of him, from between the couch and a Bocaian sculpture that sat next to it, and knew at once that he had entered this home my mortal enemy. He wore a necklace of scarlet human ears dangling from his neck. Some had been chewed on. Some still bore the piercings that marked them as belonging to the men of the colony, their bright, colorful patterns obscured beneath a layer of human juice. He was grinning, revealing teeth that dangled strips of ragged something that could have been fabric and could have been flesh. I knew it could have been either, because I’d witnessed some of the things he’d done. But he was wounded too; there was a long ragged tear down his side, and he remained standing only out of sheer desire.
“Andrea…” he called. “Andreaaaa…”
Even wounded, he was stronger than I. To feel the joy of his blood on my hands I had to pick my moment, and get him when he was vulnerable.
The sculpture beside the couch depicted the ancient Bocaian god of mirth: a squat little troll with mouth stretched to impossible dimensions. As a toddler I’d been fascinated by that face. As a predator I considered it my totem. I shifted position, got my knees and elbows underneath me, and dragged myself behind the little troll, making no sound at all.
The shadows of my Vaafir danced over my back as he shuffled past the hallway into the rooms in the back of the house.
I heard him enter the room that had belonged to one of his own children.
I rose, calculated my chances, and, rather than follow him, moved to the front of the house, into the cinder pit.
“Andreaaa…”
The cuisine in fashion, among Bocaians of that particular era and region, consisted of burning everything until every last ounce of moisture had boiled off, then spicing the charred remains. The Bocaian repertoire of spices was sufficiently rich to lend their meals something approaching variety and taste, even if some of the local humans only tolerated the results to be polite. But the technique required very little in the way of utensils. Just something very much like a spoon to scoop up the cinders. And something very much like a knife, to chop up the pieces as they burned.
On Bocai, that’s the same tool.
The Bocaian cooking pit was a sunken metal bowl in the center of the room that corresponded to a human kitchen. The current that warmed it was built into the substructure of the floor. A Bocaian chef kneels over the bowl and pokes at the sizzling pieces with a utensil called a kres, with a spoon on one end and a sharp point on the other.
I lowered myself to the edge of the bowl, reached in, and took out a kres still crusted and carbonized from its last use.
It was light enough for a child to hold. It was also as long as a Bocaian adult’s arm, which it also had to be, since nobody wanted to be subjected to steam burns working over a Bocaian bowl. As for its sharpness, I tested that by touching the pointed end with my index finger, and bore down until I drew my own blood.
Good.
My own life meant next to nothing to me.
The only thing that mattered to me was taking his.
A low wall, with shelves, separated this room from the family area. I pressed myself against that wall, sweat pouring down my face, listening to microsounds from the greater house beyond, forming a picture that I knew to be accurate.
I knew he was on the other side of the wall, on his hands and knees, too weakened by blood loss to remain on his feet but still capable of overpowering me if it came down to a fight. I knew that he was waiting for me to come after him. I knew that if I tried I would never have a chance to feel the pleasure of killing him.
Even the kres might not be enough if we met face-to-face.
But maybe we didn’t have to.
I shifted my weight forward, knelt, then stood, placing the kres atop the low wall.
I lifted my right foot and rested its full weight on the first of the shelves.
Had I been an adult, the shelf might have buckled.
But I was just a child. An eight-year-old. My body, much like the current state of my conscience, weighed practically nothing.
The shelf held.
On the other side of the wall, my Vaafir coughed. There was a peculiar, unpleasant, liquid quality to the sound, warning me that I didn’t have much time left.
I kept climbing.
One more shelf, then, moving with infinite care, scrambling up onto the top of the wall.
Crawling over the edge and looking down.
I saw my Vaafir’s back. He was prone, now, too wounded to move much. His tunic, pale when clean, was black and glistening in the moonlight filtering through the open windows. His back was a landscape of wounds, amazing me with clear evidence of just how tenaciously something worth killing could cling to life instead. Still, that was a knife in his right hand, clutched between two of the three central fingers and two grasping thumbs. He coughed out blood and managed a word. “Aaaannndreaaa…”
I happen to know, from later studies of these events, that the madness overtaking the humans and Bocaians on the island was at this moment beginning to fade. People had started to act with something approaching rationality again. Some traumatized survivors were already offering medical attention to the sentients they’d been trying to murder just minutes earlier.
I don’t know why my Vaafir called my name back then. He might have been trying to lure me out so he could kill me. Or he might have been trying to let me know that it was all right, and that he posed no further threat to me.
I’ll never know.
Just as I’ve never known how much of what I did next was the madness acting through me and how much was my mania for problem-solving, pursuing a puzzle to its natural solution.
But I rose and stood at the edge of the wall and held the kres pointy-side down with the sharp tip aimed at the small of his back and jumped with my legs wrapped tight around the thing to add more weight and momentum than I ever could have managed with a mere child’s strength.
The impact sounded like a pop.
Hot blood geysered from below, splattering my legs, my chest, and my face with the first evidence of my own monstrousness.
I rolled away, jumping to my feet in case he proved not close enough to death.
As it happened, I’d driven the kres well into his back, puncturing one of his three lungs but not quite managing to run him through. I’d missed his spinal column, leaving him enough strength to thrash and attempt a
