entirely a Ferret. He’d escaped from the dorms when he was eleven, so he still looked mostly human. A very thin, elongated human, with his face and jaw pushed out so that it wasn’t quite a snout but you could tell it would have been one if he hadn’t gotten away.
The Arkle also had a taste for blood. Not the full-on blood-lust the Ferrets had, because he could control it. But when the Family killed a chicken to roast, he would cut its throat over a bowl and drink the blood down like a kind of pre-dinner cocktail. Sometimes he put parsley in the cup, as a garnish. Or, as he said, for those extra vitamins. The Arkle didn’t eat a lot of greens.
He was one of the younger members of the Family. He’d come out of the city four years before, more dead than alive, his body covered with sores and his gums receding from malnutrition. He’d lasted almost six months on his own after escaping from the dorms, which was no mean feat, but he wouldn’t have lasted much longer if he hadn’t been lucky enough to have been found by Gwyn, on one of the latter’s last foraging expeditions into the city fringe.
Gwyn was the first to notice The Arkle behaving strangely. They were working together, moving one of the portable henhouses to its new location, when The Arkle stopped pushing and pressed his fingers into his jaw, using the middle knuckle so he didn’t slice himself with his talons.
“What are you doing?” asked Gwyn, annoyed. As always, he was providing most of the muscle, and though The Arkle’s participation was mainly for show, the henhouse wheels
“Toothache,” muttered The Arkle. He stretched out his jaw and ground it from side to side. “Annoying me.”
“Doc had better look at it right away,” said Gwyn. He’d had a toothache himself a few years back, and there was still a hole at the back of his mouth where Doc had pulled out a big molar. But that was better than what could happen if it was left to rot. Gwyn had seen that too, in other survivors. And Ferret teeth were certain to be trickier than more nearly human ones.
“It’s not too bad,” muttered The Arkle. He winced as he closed his mouth, though, and tears started in his eyes.
Gwyn set down the chicken house and lumbered around, towering over The Arkle. Gwyn was the big brother of the Family, and the second oldest. He’d been thirteen when the Change swept through, disappearing everyone over the age of fourteen. Like most of the surviving children, he’d then been caught up by the suited figures driving their centipede trains, and taken to the Dormitories. Big for his age and well-muscled, he’d gone straight into the Myrmidon track, fed alien steroids and exercised to the limits of torture, but like The Arkle, he’d managed to escape before the final conversion in the Meat Factory.
Even so, he was seven feet tall, measured four feet across the shoulders, and had arms roughly the same diameter as the massive logs he split for the winter fire, wielding a woodchopper that most of the others couldn’t even lift.
“Go and see Doc now,” ordered Gwyn. Like the few other almost-Myrmidons who got away from the dorms, his voice was high and reedy, a byproduct of the chemical infusions that had built his muscle, while also effectively making him a eunuch.
But high voice or not, The Arkle knew that when Gwyn spoke, he meant what he said.
“All right, all right, I’m…ow…going,” he said. “You sure you can move this by yourself?”
“I guess I’ll manage somehow,” replied Gwyn.
The Arkle nodded sheepishly and trudged back through the sparse forest where the five henhouses were arranged. At the edge of the trees, he climbed over the old rusted fence with the sinuous grace of a true Ferret, pausing to tip a finger at Ken-Lad, who was on sentry halfway up the ancient tree that served as the western lookout post. Ken-Lad made a ruder gesture back, before resuming his steady, regulated gaze, staring up at each quadrant of the sky.
The Farm lay in a deep valley, more than a hundred kilometers from the city. The creatures had never come to fight their battles there, and even the Wingers never flew overhead. But very occasionally, one of the Overlord’s flying machines did, and that was why the sentries watched. The Family could not afford to have a curious Overlord sweep down and see free humans, for the creatures would surely come then, correcting whatever oversight had kept the valley secret for the eight years since the Change.
The Farm had been a giant dope plantation before the Change, and the camouflage nets were still in place over a good thirty acres of land. The Family had poked a few holes in the nets, here and there, to let in a little more light for the much smaller portion they had under cultivation. That provided vegetables, and the chickens provided meat and eggs, and there was hunting for wild game as well. There had been a lot of tinned and dried food earlier on, but it was mostly saved for special occasions now, since it was too risky to venture toward the city and the riches that still awaited there.
Doc Carol had found the Farm almost five years before. She’d never told the others whether she’d known it was there, or had simply stumbled upon it and then worked out that it was safe from the creatures.
She never told anyone how she knew so much about medicine and healing, either. Gwyn probably knew, and some of the older ones, but they never talked about anything the Doc said or did. All the others knew was that she had been a day short of her fifteenth birthday when the Change came, a day short of being old enough to go wherever it was that most of humanity went. If they went anywhere, as opposed to simply ceasing to exist.
The Arkle spat as he remembered the caterpillar train that he had willingly climbed aboard. He’d been seven years old at the time, and his mother had vanished in front of his eyes, and he’d been desperately afraid. The train had looked a bit like the one at the fairground, and it was already loaded with children. He even knew some of them from school.
So he’d got on, and it had taken him to one of the first established dorms. A tracking and ID device had been injected beneath the skin of his wrist, and he’d been subjected to a series of tests at the hands of those silvor- visored, faceless, suited humanoids. The tests had said “Ferret,” and from then on, everything he did or that was done to him was designed to make him both less and more than human.
The Arkle looked at the strange purple welt on his wrist as he loped through the high grass that surrounded the main house. They cut the grass occasionally, using scythes, just to reduce the risk of fire, but never enough that it would look new-mown.
The tracking device in his wrist had been removed by Tira, a girl in the dorm, though The Arkle didn’t know exactly how she’d done it. She simply touched her finger to the lump that showed where the tracker lay under the skin, and there had been a moment of pain so terrible that The Arkle had blacked out. When he’d come to, there was no lump. Just the purple welt.
Of course he knew that Tira had used a Change Talent of some kind. He had one too, only it wasn’t as useful. Or at least it was only useful for one thing. The Arkle grinned as he thought of that, then grimaced and almost sobbed as the pain in his tooth came back, darting from his mouth up into his head, savaging him right behind the eyes.
The pain in his tooth was even worse than that remembered pain in his wrist.
Tira had taken her device out too, and they had run together. Only, she never made it over the perimeter wire. Tira was the one who had first called him “The Arkle.” He didn’t know why, but he’d kept the name just to remember her, his truest friend from the dorms.
Greenie was on the verandah of the house, carefully potting up seedlings of some plant or other that The Arkle didn’t recognize. She looked at him with her head to one side, and he could tell she was wondering why he had come in early. But even then, most of her mind was probably on the plants. Greenie had a Change Talent too, and though like all Change Talents, hers was very weak down in the valley, she still had a special empathy for vegetable life. Greenie could always tell when a plant needed water, or more shade, or sun, or was being strangled by its neighbors.
“Got to see Doc,” said The Arkle. He tried to smile, but it hurt too much, so he waved instead and hurried on inside.
The Arkle could see Doc Carol through the small square window that was set high in the inner door to her lab, even though the thick glass was smeared all around with sealant. Doc was clearly cooking up something fairly toxic, since she was wearing a gas mask and an ex-Army NBC suit.
The Arkle hesitated, then knocked on the window. He didn’t want to disturb Doc, but his tooth was getting worse, a lot worse. The pain had been around for weeks, coming and going, and hadn’t ever got too bad. Then a
