didn’t ask what she was now.
Did her family know she was gone? she wondered. Did her mother realize that she had not returned? Did her brothers and sisters notice that there was one less of them? She suspected that any small space in the house due to her absence would have closed up almost immediately, like flesh cut cleanly, and left no sign of anything amiss. Her mother had warned her that something would happen to her if she kept going bush. Is this what she had meant?
They got along well enough, the two of them, the beast and she, until she attacked him one day. She made up reasons for it, like resentment, like she hadn’t chosen this life. You can always find an excuse to fight. But, really, it was because she knew she could do it and get away with it. She had always been powerful and had always held herself back. Now she didn’t have to any more, not even against him.
And that was all.
She had to prove it, test it. She brought him down and wounded him, and in her terror she fled. Weeks later she returned, but his smell was gone.
Without the beast she was utterly alone. But she was, by nature, and by inclination, a solitary being so she enjoyed it well enough, or at least it didn’t send her half mad as it would have some. And if she needed company the dingoes let her sing with them of a night, though not too close, mind. She might have looked like them, but they could easily smell her difference. When she came near they backed away slowly and carefully. Their hair stood erect at the thought of her and of her kind. They thought she might jump them and eat their flesh, and she might have, too, if she were hungry or in the mood.
And that other, first life, that soft white larval stage of a life, moved further and further away. Sometimes, though, she dreamed of it and woke afterwards with a deep unease, for there was still something of that other, social creature in her. But it passed soon enough. She always felt better after she killed.
At times like these she haunted the edges of the human camps. She remembered their scents and their songs. They left a trail of smells wherever they went. The earth was crisscrossed with them like old scars never quite fading. She was drawn to them but she was appropriately cautious for she knew that, very often, you are drawn to that which can hurt you the most.
The smells were sweet and dark to her. Irresistible. She didn’t hunt them, though, the humans. She knew that if you hurt one of them, you hurt the whole pack. They were too much trouble. She remembered that much. But she ate their companions, the dogs. The dogs smelled better anyway.
And every day she remembered less. Eventually there would only be the now, the continuous now. She would forget what a day was. She would forget that the sun would set until it did. Even now it surprised her and pleased her to see a fine sunset. And then to see the glittering stones far above her in the velvet dark.
That’s what she was doing at the campsite that night. Bathing in its warmth, craving its painful comfort for reasons she had almost forgotten. Her nose twitched at the smells. She could hear high hooting sounds that had to be laughter, and the tinkling of bottles and cans, and she could hear car doors open and shut, and engines rev. And then she was on her belly, crawling nearer, dangerously near, for if they saw her, if they sensed what she really was, and how could they not with just one look into her beastly eyes, they would destroy her.
She was a mystery, and mystery must be contained.
She crawled closer, flattening grass, rustling past trees, her powerful muscled limbs pulling her closer and closer until someone came her way, almost treading on her. He wanted a piss. She ducked quickly into a shelter that was a little removed from the others, meaning only to hide herself until they passed. She stood there waiting and listening. It was dark, and in the gloom she could see a pattern of ordinary, everyday objects made sinister by the darkness and by her own faulty memory of their purpose. There were suitcases and a lamp, a folding chair and a low cot, and in the cot a young one. The young one was not crying, just playing with the ribbon on its woollen jacket. It was a very little one, so easy for her to carry, and she hadn’t known what she was going to do until she was already slipping through the opening of the shelter and running from the camp with the baby in her mouth. The baby did not cry.
She tried to be gentle, but the act had to be savage. There had to be risk. There was blood, of course, mingled with saliva, and the baby’s eyes turned blank like windblown fruit that’s been pecked at by birds, but she brought the little one a fresh kill, just as one had been brought for her, and pushed it up to the little one’s face. And the child sucked up the blood, her tiny pink tongue lapping, and her lids fluttering, and smiling up at her.
EXTRA CREDIT
by Seth Cadin
Rubber wolf masks were on back order that year. Jedward found one hanging on a railing where the team used to race, and when he cut it down he was careful, like maybe the swaying made it alive. He almost chucked it in the cruncher on his way back to the dorms.
“Perspicacity,” Karolin dictated up her own sleeve. From under the bunker’s tall awning he heard her phone dial. He’d just listen a moment. Another moment. One more. She was talking about lunch, what she ate, and he felt strongly that he needed to know.
Then she said: “No, I left it at the chem lab,” and Jedward knew what she meant. She had one too, because that year everydid. And the gloves with the funny claws. When they were left in the sun too long, the ersatz fur stitched on over the wrists would turn from black to rusted brown.
“Hey, Kay.” He shook an ant off his sleeve and extended his knuckles, which she brushed lightly with her own.
“Jeddy. You got one? Is it real?”
He turned the inside out to show her the label: Herkimer, genuine. “Found it,” he said. “Know whose?”
He’d thought she might, but she had nothing to say. Her lip gloss smelled like the candles on his grandmother’s mantle. She shook her head and sent a spray of light flying from the colorful glass-beaded tips of her many braids.
“I should turn it in … ” he said hopefully.
“Give it here.” She snatched it, her expression shifting from vacant to canny, though in the critical moment she snapped her gum.
“There’s this bird you should hear—” What was he saying now, any old thing apparently.
She wasn’t listening, not to him or any pointless birds.
“A bird that sings in the morning,” she repeated, absently, but still with clear enough disdain. “Can I have this or what?” She lifted the mask and shook it a little like a dead scalp. “Sure. I just found it anyway. I don’t care.” His arches flexed and he heeled off, squeezing his eyes shut against the reflected sprites from her braids dancing on the brick wall.
Extra credit meant extra access—clean and simple. Go over the blue line into the purple, and you could float there forever. One plus up over average got you an hour. That got you another plus, and so on. Jedward knew everyin the labs very well, because the faces never changed. The masks did, of course; mostly wolves now, a few bats from last season, one unicorn with a saggy fabric horn. They dangled from fingertips or swung cheerfully from belt-loops, and their owners fiddled with them as the big glowing clock chucked through its daylight cycle.
After an hour at his station, he felt a padded hand grip the back of his neck. Plastic claws chattered over his skin, but he forced himself not to jump. Instead, he reached up swiftly to grip the glove, yanking it off and slapping it on the table. “Just sit and try not to be annoying.”
Danny’s bright evil grin, absent two bottom teeth, swung into view. His mask was wadded up and shoved into his front shirt pocket, which was at least two times too small for it, so bulging out like a shoplifted corsage. His fiercely combed-out puff of hair was now bleached out to red, striking against his deep brown skin. Jedward thought he looked like a clown. It was better than the horns from two seasons ago, anyway. The pointy ends always ended up tangled in branches when they’d gone hiking.
“Found a Herkimer,” he said as they passed components and chemicals between them, tweaking each other’s
