Malefactor

by Robert Repino

  Augur arrived, out of breath, with vapor steaming from his nose and mouth. The deer could have trampled him. But his presence in the darkness, working alongside a wolf, made the stag reconsider.

  “You can live,” Mercy said.

  The deer’s head flicked toward her.

  “Go,” she said. “Tell your people. We are watching.”

  Augur must have seen this coming as well. A generous wolf is a strong wolf.

  Silently, the deer slinked through the gap in the fence. A sharp edge cut a red line into his skin. Mercy smelled it, swallowed, resisted the urge to give chase. Once the deer pulled free, he bounced off into the darkness. The breeze carried the scent of blood away.

  Mercy could still sense fear. And awe. Let them have both. Let everyone who stood in her way have both.

  Mercy did not remember the sun rising dull and cold over the ruined houses, shrouded in wispy clouds. Nor did she recall choosing to walk beside Augur along the beach. Her mind descended from the heights it reached the night before. The fishy taste lingered on her tongue, now dry from the salty winds. She waited for the vision of the deer to return and felt a deep void in her chest when she realized that she was trapped in the present once more.

  They trudged along, leaving wet tracks in the sand, Augur’s leather boots imprinting one foot at a time, Mercy’s paws leaving two. Like a human and his pet, she supposed. Though she knew now that he did not see it that way. A keeper of the forest, like her. Now closer to her than Dregger or Wex. Or Urna.

  Far behind them, giving space and keeping watch, Preeta and Friar stood like two dolls along the shoreline.

  “I want to see more,” Mercy said.

  “I know,” Augur said. “I said the same thing, the first time I tried it.”

  She recalled the vision of Augur as a child. “When you try it?”

  The way he gazed out over the water, she knew that the question forced him to recall a dark time. His own Damnable.

  “We were orphans, all of us,” he said. “Our parents worked on an animal preserve.”

  “Preserve,” she said.

  “A place where good humans kept the animals safe. From bad humans.”

  Her ears sagged, a sign that she could hardly believe that such a place existed. Augur had already told her that his people had a deep connection with wolves, that they lived alongside them, but had never gone into much detail. Now he told her everything, as much as she could understand. When he explained that his parents studied the wolves, she assumed he meant that they probed the wolves for a weakness, so they could attack. But no, his parents were part of a team of scientists trying to repopulate the area with new wolves nearly a century after humans had hunted the last one to extinction. The scientists even named the wolves the Toqwa pack, a word meaning rebirth.

  And one day, like everywhere else, the animals changed.

  “But the wolves refused to follow the Queen’s orders,” Augur said. “So the Alphas came to kill us all. Quarantine, they called it. I was nine years old.”

  Most of the adult humans died in the raid. The Toqwa took the children into the forest. They raised them. Taught them to survive. “This is the way it was meant to be,” Augur said. “It was only after humans were corrupted that they viewed wolves as the enemy.”

  Whenever the Toqwa wolves died, a human would take their pelt. It served as a disguise and a shield against the elements. But really, the pelts symbolized the bond between the species. They represented the only way forward. Something the humans and their pets in Hosanna would never understand.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “Special Operations,” he said. “Hosanna’s secret police. They raided our den. Hired mercenaries to do it. Bears. Only a few of us escaped.”

  For the first time, he told Mercy that he once had a mate, a woman named Yora who grew up on the preserve with him. She carried their daughter, Sherin, in her belly. A bullet meant for Augur struck Yora in the chest, filling her insides with blood.

  His voice trailed off. She brushed her cheek against his hand to let him know that he was not alone. Though he was no wolf, he had suffered, as she had. He had shivered in the cold, he huddled with his people for warmth, he hardened his heart into a block of ice in order to survive.

  “Soon after that . . . we found something,” he said.

  Earlier that year, the remaining Toqwa came across the wreckage of the humans’ airship, the Upheaval. It was a smoking mass of twisted metal. The charred balloon lay crumpled like a collapsed lung, its reflective surface still shiny. They found one of the crew still alive, trying desperately to carry as many of the rahvek canisters as he could. He begged for his life. He promised that the canisters would bestow immense power upon whoever possessed them. The rahvek was a dirty secret Hosanna kept, harvested from the Colony. For all the contempt the humans held for the ants, they wanted the Queen’s knowledge at any cost. The human demonstrated the rahvek’s power by giving some to Yora. It revived her. Then Augur himself tried it.

  “What I saw, that first time,” he said. “It was beautiful. The land at peace. Hosanna fallen silent. And a mighty wolf pack, roaming the hills, taking their rightful place as rulers of this world.”

  That gaze over the water again. His vision still remained too far in the future.

  “Your mate?” she asked.

  “We gave her a stronger dose. Hoped it would heal her. It failed. We knew then that the chemical can be harmful if taken too quickly. There will come a day when I will no longer be able to use the rahvek. You saw last night how dangerous it can be.”

  “Yes.”

  “Still, we managed to save Sherin. For now.”

  “For now?”

  “Sherin will not survive the winter,” he said. “Seeing her die is the price I paid for using the rahvek.”

  Mercy lowered her tail.

  “It’s all right,” Augur said. “She is in pain. Her suffering will end. As for Yora: she saw the day promised to us. To all keepers of the forest. You will too.”

  They approached a hill. The waves crashed against it, sending rivulets of foamy water through the cracks in the rock. As the water receded with a great hissing sound, Mercy heard a high-pitched sound. A squeal. She raced to the hill, clambering up the soaked boulders. On the other side, a fresh set of tracks had shifted the white sand. The tracks led to a ball of white-and-black fur, crawling along, shivering. No ears, no eyes, barely larger than Mercy’s front paw. A mouth opened, filled with bright white fangs, and let out a sad little yelp.

  Mercy scrabbled down the side of the hill and ran toward the animal. It was a pup, a male. She smelled blood and amniotic fluid caked into the dog’s coat. When she arrived, the pup blindly stuck out its tongue, his eyes still sealed. Mercy lay in the sand and curled her body around him. The pup clamped his lips around one of her nipples and sucked desperately, the way pups do. It hurt, and the pain made her remember how her own pups would gnaw at her. She tilted the little one’s mouth so that he could get a tighter grip. The milk flowed, releasing in a painful burst.

  Somewhere off in the distance, Augur’s feet crunched in the sand. He would come no closer.

  Mercy licked the pup as he drank. She coiled her tail around him, sealing in their warmth. A pack unto themselves. There was no Damnable anymore. No war, no phony peace treaty. No coup by Wex, no illness for Urna. For this moment, everything was made whole again.

  Chapter 7

  The Pilgrim

  (unofficial) Logbook of the SUS al-Rihla

  January 1819

  WEATHER: Windy.

  Personal health: contractions started.

  D’Arc’s hand shivered as a clenching pain swept from her stomach to the ball-and-socket joints of her shoulders. The pencil fell from one hand, the logbook from the other. They clattered on the deck of the lifeboat. A bitter wind rustled th
e pages. She could no longer hear it over the siren screaming in her ears. It took a few seconds to realize that it was her own voice screaming.

  She squeezed her St. Jude medal until it grew warm in her palm. A cloud bank rolled above, puffy and gray and impenetrable, the sunlight behind it so dull it cast no shadow. She could hear the Old Man’s voice in her head, though she could not make out the words. It was like the day she changed, the day she awakened and found herself on a boat like this one, adrift under the same milky sky.

  The burning sensation rippled through her again. She gripped the sides of the boat and dug her nails into the wood. Something shifted inside her, like bones rearranging themselves, and again she wondered if this was the past or the present. On the day she changed, her spine extended with series of pops and cracks. Her paws stretched into hands, like some deformed flower, all before her primitive brain could grasp what was happening. In those brief flashes of terror, she wanted to bite her own arm and whip her head from side to side until she tore it off.

  “No,” she sputtered. As if she had a say in what was happening.

  A salty puddle sloshed in the boat. As the bow tipped forward, the water rushed around her, sweeping away the logbook. Between her legs, a steady drip of blood oozed out, sticking to her fur and turning the water pink. Everything below her waist became dead weight, a parasite hooked onto her body somehow, making her weak and dizzy.

  Another shifting inside of her. She pictured a fist spinning in her gut. The fist slid toward her thighs and released. Something small and wet flopped into the pink water and then lay still.

  Life is the mission, she thought. This is the mission.

  She leaned forward to find a soaked pile of fur. Black and formless, still tethered to something inside of her by a slimy wire. She licked it furiously, and her tongue prickled with the taste of iron. The pup rolled to its side, its tiny paw stiffly curled into its belly. She exhaled on it to provide some warmth. A cloud of vapor covered the baby. When she tilted the pup, the head flopped from one shoulder to the other. The dog must have died when the wave hit.

  Another tightening sensation forced out a blob of flesh, covered in dark, sticky blood. The placenta. With the dead pup nuzzled between her legs, she devoured this alien organ, something that could not possibly have come from her. The flesh proved stubborn—she needed to bite hard and then rip each piece away. The taste reminded her of Alpha meat, gamey but rich.

  She was alive. Her child was not. For the first time in so long—perhaps the first time ever—she could clearly remember when her first litter was born, before the Change. She survived then because she ran away. And they didn’t. They did not even have names, thanks to her.

  Unable to cry, she felt a void open in her heart. A dead space where she could drop these memories—for now at least. No, she thought. I am a beacon of light, guiding the other ships home. Her pain would make her kinder, not harder. She would feel more, not less. All of that still made sense somehow.

  She stuffed the last of the flesh into her mouth and chewed. It squished between her teeth until she swallowed it in a heavy gulp.

  “Hey there, Mountain Girl.”

  D’Arc lay in the raft with the weight of her dead child on her chest. Somehow, the raft had expanded so that it was wider than the al-Rihla. The entire crew stood on the deck. Moab the bear. Captain Vittal. Kang the cook. The Navy woman and her cat friend, each with hand-rolled cigarettes between their lips. Wilson with his arms folded, hiding behind Harlan.

  “You still seasick, Mountain Girl?” Harlan said. His mouth did not move. Neither did the ocean, which resembled the surface of a pond.

  D’Arc sat up, still cradling her son.

  “Whatcha got there?” Harlan asked.

  “Tristan,” she said. “His name is Tristan.” After her former master.

  “Tristan, huh?”

  She glanced at her child and found instead a massive ant larva in her arms, bright white and wriggling, its prehensile limbs forming little nubs under the surface of its skin. She held her child closer. She did not want anyone to get near.

  A searing pain in her gut made her wince. When she opened her eyes, she was back in the lifeboat, bobbing in the waves. The sun poked under the clouds near the horizon, on its way down. Beside her, facing away, Tristan’s body swayed along with the boat. She rested her hand on his cold fur. And then, before she could give it any further thought, she lifted him over the gunwale. He was so impossibly light, an empty sack. She set him gently in the water and pressed him under until a few bubbles rose to the surface. When she let go, the pup sank and disappeared. She leaned on the rail as another burning contraction forced her to lie on her side and tighten her fists. The film of icy water on the deck felt cool as it sloshed over her.

  January 20

  WEATHER: Clear sky. Cold.

  0133 Female born. Nutical. Nautica.

  Life is the mission.

  Life is te the misson.

  Life is the

  Prsonal hlth: Blood loss. Tired.

  The second pup would not nurse. D’Arc coaxed her, cradled her, nudged her, breathed on her, licked her. Still, the baby would not latch on. The little mouth would fall away from the nipple each time, dribbling the milk onto D’Arc’s belly, her tiny heartbeat racing. In the moonlight, Nautica looked no different from the larva in D’Arc’s dream. With her white fur and her eyes sealed shut, her ears barely poking from her skull, only her stubby snout and yawning mouth gave her any form. Her cries came out in weak little squeals, barely audible over the waves.

  D’Arc had managed to bail out most of the water in the boat before Nautica arrived, though the last stubborn puddle would always remain. Once again, she glanced at the hooks on either side, where the oars should have been. When she found the boat capsized, the oars had already floated away. Without them, she would drift forever on this steel-colored sea. She still had her sword, but it was too thin to use as an oar. In frustration, she tried paddling with her hands until they went numb. A waste of energy. The Atlantic would decide if she ever made landfall again.

  The sky brightened. The iron taste of another placenta still tingled in her mouth. In the growing light, she could make out the filmy slits of Nautica’s eyes, her sharp teeth. Her tail, the pads of her paws. A dark snout like her father. It seemed so wrong to think of her time with Falkirk now, yet it made sense, since she conceived her pups in a similar space: hemmed in, standing in water, wondering if she would see another day. The end of the world had come, not as a fiery judgment, but with the gentle lapping of waves, smoothing all the sharp edges to sand. Falkirk felt so warm when everything else had gone cold. Being with him became a defiant act of living after the world had drowned.

  And now this. When the sun poked its yellow scalp over the horizon, D’Arc could finally see Nautica. So beautiful. A tiny warrior of a new generation. Another beacon of light. Life would be her mission.

  But Nautica was dead.

  Again, D’Arc placed her child into the water. This time, when the ocean accepted her sacrifice, D’Arc imagined herself stepping off the side and sliding into the darkness. The sea muffling the wind at last, until she could hear nothing else.

  Another movement in her belly, so excruciating that she wanted to bite the gunwale.

  “No,” she begged. “Please, no more.”

  Something inside her was searching for the light, not caring about the flesh that it stretched to the limit. We are not finished here, it said.

  D’Arc flopped onto her side. Her medallion pinged onto the deck with St. Jude facing down.

  Janry 32

  WEATHER: Sunny. Summer?

  Cold again. Cold forever.

  The third pup spilled out still partially wrapped in its amniotic sac. D’Arc barely had the energy lick the membrane away. She did not have to. This dog, a male, wriggled free of it and cried out. He had d
ark fur and a pointy snout. So much like a husky. Without thinking, she pressed him against her until her nipple stifled his cries. He sucked the milk with a squeaking sound. D’Arc rolled over, reached for the remnants of the sac, and jammed it into her mouth. She was so thirsty that the blood went down as easy as spring water. I help you, you help me, she thought. This one must have hidden behind his siblings, who bore the brunt of the wave and the impact of the water. And who knew how long she had with this one, whose name she did not yet know? The dog with no name. From the war with no name.

  Whatcha got there, Mountain Girl?

  “Go away,” she said.

  She wondered if she and this pup were the only survivors of the al-Rihla. She remembered those last few seconds on the ship when the ocean punished them all for their arrogance. Maybe the ocean reclaimed everyone, everywhere. That’s what it wanted, right? She had seen it before. The humans still worried about it. One day, there would be nowhere to go, and everything that people like her had built would be reduced to floating debris bobbing on the waves.

  No, no. That couldn’t be true. She gripped the St. Jude medal again. It brushed against the pup’s head. The tiny dog lifted his mouth away and licked the medal a few times before deciding it did not have what he wanted. He returned to his suckling. She watched him, this new life sprung from her body. An extension of her and all the things she endured.

  Wait till you hear about this day, she thought. Wait till I tell you all about this.

  A cold rain swept over the boat, troubling the surface of the water. D’Arc wrapped her rain slicker around her body to keep the infant dry. As he nursed, D’Arc tilted her head and caught the raindrops in her open jaw, closing it every minute or so to swallow. Every sip made her feel stronger, lighter. The fog clouding her brain lifted. She occasionally peeked underneath the coat to see her son still clamped to her chest. As far as he knew, this is what shelter looked like.