Fledgling

by Butler, Octavia

  understand. He said, “It almost feels like I’ve always been working with them. I mean, I know I wasn’t, but it really feels like that, like nothing really matters but the work we did together. I remember I had been watching TV with my brother and two of my cousins. The Lakers were on. Basketball, you know? I needed some cigarettes. I went down to the liquor store to buy some, and this tall, skinny, pale guy

  pulled me into an alley. He was goddamn strong. I couldn’t get away from him. He . . . he bit me.” Victor looked down at me. “I thought he was crazy. I fought. I’m strong. But then he told me to stop fighting. And I did.” He stopped talking, looked at me, suddenly grabbed me by the shoulders. “What do you people do to us when you bite us? What is it? You’re goddamn vampires!”

  He shook me. I think he meant to hurt me, but he wasn’t really strong enough to do that. I took his hands, first one, then the other, from my arms. I held them between my hands and looked into his frightened eyes.

  “Answer us honestly, Victor, and you’ll be all right. Relax. You’ll be all right.” “I don’t want you to bite me again,” he said.

  I shrugged. “All right.”

  “No!” he shouted. And then more softly, “No, I’m lying. I do want it again, tomorrow, now, anytime. I

  need it!” His voice dropped to a whisper. “But I don’t want to need it. It’s like coke or something.”

  I suddenly felt like hugging him, comforting him, but I didn’t move. “Relax, Victor,” I said. “Just relax and answer our questions.”

  The Gordons watched both of us with obvious interest. Daniel, in particular, never looked away from me. I supposed that I was as much on trial as Victor was but in a different way. What did I remember? How well did I compensate for what I didn’t remember?

  Did they still want me? I thought Daniel did. His scent pulled at me. His brothers smelled interesting, but his scent was disturbing. Compelling.

  I sighed and dragged my attention back to Victor. I looked from Preston to Hayden. The others had left the questioning to them so far.

  “Victor,” Preston said, “where were you taken after you were bitten for the first time?”

  “The guy had a big Toyota Sequoia. He told me to get in and just sit there. I did, and he just drove around. He was spotting other guys and picking them up. I guess I was his first catch of the night. He caught five more guys, then he took us all out to some houses up above Altadena, up in the San Gabriel Mountains, kind of all by themselves on a dead-end road. His family was there. They all looked like him—tall, lean, pale guys. And there were a lot of other just ordinary people.”

  There was a stir among the Gordons. They didn’t say anything, but I could see that they knew something. Most likely, they knew which Ina family lived aboveAltadena in the San Gabriel Mountains. I had no idea how far away these places might be, but they did.

  “Victor,” Hayden said, “when did all this happen? When were you taken and bitten for the first time?”

  He frowned. “More than a month ago? Yeah, it was that long. Maybe six weeks.”

  I could see what was coming. I stared at the rug, needing to hear more, needing to hear everything, but not quite wanting to hear it. It was only reasonable that Victor had been one of those used to kill both my families.

  “So you’ve done other jobs, then, haven’t you?” Hayden continued.

  “Up in Washington State, yeah,” Victor agreed. “We did three jobs up there.” “How did you get there?”

  “They flew us up in private planes with all our gear. Then we rented cars. Followed the maps we were given.”

  “So they gave you new identities? Credit cards?”

  “Not me. Five of the other guys. And they gave them plenty of cash. They had cell phones, too. They’d call in when we were ready to do a job and tell us to go ahead. Then they’d call in afterward and we’d

  be told what to do next, which was mostly to get motel rooms and wait for the call to get into position for the next job. The five guys they chose, they were all ex-military. One used to be Special Forces. They told the rest of us what to do.”

  So by now, with no phone call, their bosses must have realized that something was wrong. I wondered how long it would take these enemy Ina to collect new human tools and send them out to try again.

  “You said you did three jobs,” Preston said. “Where in Washington did you do those . . . jobs?” “One a few miles outside a little town called Gold Bar. Another not too far from a town called ...

  Darlington? No, Darrington. That’s it. And one at a house near the town of Arlington. That’s all up in

  western Washington. Pretty country. Trees, mountains, rivers, waterfalls, little towns. Nothing like L. A.” “You were successful in Washington?”

  “Yeah, mostly. We hit the first two, and everything went the way it was supposed to. Something went wrong at the third. People got killed. The cops almost got us.”

  “Weren’t people supposed to get killed?”

  “I mean . . . our people got killed. We didn’t know what happened at first. Later we heard on the radio that two got shot and three had their throats ripped out. The rest of us never saw what did that—a dog, maybe. A big dog. Anyway, the cops were coming, and we had to run.”

  I thought about telling him exactly what had killed his friends, then decided not to. None of it was his doing, really. Even so, I didn’t want to be sitting next to him any longer. I didn’t want to know him or ever see him again. But he was not the one who would pay for what had been done to my families. He was not the one I had to stop if I were going to survive.

  I took a deep breath and spoke to Preston. “Do you know who’s doing this?”

  He looked at Victor. “Who are they, Victor? What’s the name of the family who recruited you and sent you to kill us?”

  Victor’s body jerked as though someone had kicked him. He looked at me desperately, confusion and pain in his eyes.

  Hayden picked up the question. “Do you know them, Victor? What is their family name?” Victor nodded quickly, eager to please. “I know, but I can’t say . . . please, I can’t.”

  “Is the name ‘Silk’?”

  Victor grabbed his head with both hands and screamed—a long, ragged, tearing shriek. Then he passed out.

  I didn’t want to care. It was clear from the Gordons’ expressions that they didn’t care. But I had bitten him twice. I didn’t want him, wouldn’t have kept him as my symbiont, but I did care what happened to him. I couldn’t ignore him. It seemed that the bites made me feel connected to him and at least a little responsible for him.

  I listened to his heartbeat, first racing, then slowing to a strong, regular beat. His breathing stuttered to a regular sleeping rhythm. “What can we do with him?” I asked Preston. “I can talk him into forgetting all this and send him home, but what if the Silk family picks him up again?”

  “You feel that you need to help him, in spite of everything?” he asked.

  I nodded. “I don’t want him. I don’t like him. But none of this really has anything to do with him.” He looked around at his brother and his sons. Most of them shrugged.

  Daniel said, “I don’t think the Silks will bother about him. They won’t know he survived. They probably don’t even know exactly where he lived before they picked him up. He’s just a tool. They might have rewarded him if he survived, but if they think he’s dead, that will be the end of it. We need to check what he’s said with what the other prisoners say. If their stories agree, they can all go home. You can send them back to their families.”

  I nodded. “I’ll fix Victor. Do you want me to fix the others, too?”

  “Once we’ve questioned them, you might as well. You’ve already bitten them.” He didn’t sound entirely happy about this. I wondered why.

  “Is there transportation back to L. A. from somewhere around here?” I asked.

  “We’ll get them back.” Daniel looked uncomfortable. “Shori, I think your venom is the reason this
man is still alive, the reason he was able to answer as many questions as he did.”

  This was obvious so I looked at him and waited for him to say something that wasn’t obvious. “I mean, your venom. If one of us had bitten him instead of you, I think he’d be dead now.”

  I nodded, interested. That was something I hadn’t known.

  “And that means that if the Silks do get him again somehow and question him, he won’t survive. There may be female relatives of the Silks—sisters or daughters—with venom that’s as strong as yours. They could question him, but chances are, they won’t. And he wouldn’t survive being questioned by males. Their venom would make it necessary for him to answer but not really possible. The dilemma would kill him. He’d probably die of a stroke or a heart attack as soon as they began.”

  I looked at Victor and sighed. “Is there anything we can do to keep him safe?”

  “No,” Preston said. “It really isn’t likely that the Silks will pick him up again. He’ll probably be all right.

  But unless one of us wants to adopt him as a symbiont, we can’t keep him safe. Daniel only wanted you to know ... everything.” I heard disapproval in his voice, and I didn’t understand it. I decided to ignore it, at least for now.

  I looked at Daniel and thought he looked a little embarrassed, that he was staring past me rather than at me. “Thank you,” I said. “So much of my memory is gone that I’m grateful for any knowledge. I need to know the consequences of what I do.”

  Daniel got up and left the room.

  I looked after him, surprised, then looked at Preston. “When should Victor be ready to go?” “A couple of nights from now. After we’ve questioned the others.”

  “All right,” I paused. “Can one of you take him? I don’t want him back at the guest house.”

  Preston glanced at the doorway Daniel had gone through. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll take care of him.”

  “Thank you,” I said with relief. Then I changed the subject and asked a question I had been wanting to ask since I arrived. “Are there ... do you have Ina books, histories I could read to learn more about our people? I hate my ignorance. As things stand now, I don’t even know what questions to ask to begin to understand things.”

  It was Hayden who answered, smiling. “I’ll bring you a few books. I should have thought of it before. Do you read Ina?”

  I sighed and shrugged. “I honestly don’t know. We’ll find out.”

  eighteen

  To my surprise, I did read and speak Ina.

  Hayden brought me three books and sat with me while I read aloud from the first in a language that I could not recall having heard or seen. And yet as soon as I opened the book, the language seemed to click into place with an oddly comfortable shifting of mental gears. I suppose I had spoken English from the time I met Wright because he and everyone else had spoken English to me. If I had heard only Ina since leaving the cave, I might not know yet that I spoke English.

  I shook my head and switched back to English. “I wonder what else I’ll remember if someone prods me.”

  “Do you understand what you’ve read, Shori?” Hayden asked.

  I glanced at the symbols—clusters of straight lines of different lengths, inclined in every possible direction, and often crossed at some point by one or more S-shaped lines. They told the Ina creation myth. “Iosif told me a little about this,” I said. “It’s an Ina myth or legend. The goddess who made us sent us here so that we could grow strong and wise, then prove ourselves by finding our way back home to her.”

  “Back to paradise or back to another planet,” Hayden said. “There was a time when Ina believed that paradise was elsewhere in this world, on some hidden island or lost continent. Now that this world has been so thoroughly explored, believers look outward either to the supernatural or to rather questionable

  science.”

  “People truly believe this?” I frowned. “I thought the story was like one of the Greek or Norse myths.” I

  had run across these in Wright’s books.

  “There was a time when those were believed, too. A great many of us still believe in the old stories, interpreted one way or another. What you’re holding could be called the first volume of our bible. Your parents believed the stories were metaphors and mythologized history. We do, too. None of us are much interested in things mystical. I don’t believe you were either before, but now I suppose you’ll have to

  read the books, talk to believers as well as nonbelievers, and make up your mind all over again.” “How old is this book?” I asked.

  “We believe that its oldest chapters were originally written on clay tablets about ten thousand years ago. Before that, they had been part of our oral tradition. How long before that had they been told among us? I don’t know. No one knows.”

  “So old? Are there human things ten thousand years old?”

  “Writings, you mean? No. There were wandering family bands, villages of human farmers, and there were nomadic human herders. They left behind remnants of their lives—stone tools, carved stone figurines, pottery, woven matting, stone and wood dwellings, some carving on bone and stone, painting on cave or cliff walls, that sort of thing.”

  I nodded, interested. “What signs did we leave?”

  “We had already joined with humans ten thousand years ago, taking their blood and safeguarding the

  ones who accepted us from most physical harm. I suspect that by then we had already been around for a very long time. Whenever we evolved or arrived, it was much longer ago than ten thousand years. Ten thousand years ago, we were already thinly spread among human tribes and family bands. Even then, that was the most comfortable way for us to live.

  “Our earliest writings say that we joined humans around the rivers that would eventually be called Tigris and Euphrates and that we had scattered north and west into what’s now Russia, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, and those regions. Some of us wandered as nomads with our human families. Some blended into stationary farming communities. Either way, we were not then as we are now. We were weak and sick. I don’t know why. The stories say we displeased the goddess and were suffering her punishment. The group that believes in an outer-space origin says that our bodies needed time to adjust to living on Earth.

  “For a while, it seemed that we might not survive. I think that’s when some of us began to find a new use for the writing we had developed for secret directional signs, territorial declarations, warnings of danger, and mating needs. I think some of us were writing to leave behind some sign that we had lived, because it seemed we would all die. We weren’t reproducing well. Our children, when they were conceived, often did not survive their births. Those who did survive were not strong. Few mated families managed to have more that one or two children of their own. Everyone took in orphans and tried to weave new families from remnants of the old. We suffered long periods of an Inaspecific epidemic illness that made it difficult or impossible for our bodies to use the blood or meat that we consumed, so that we ate well and yet starved. We believe now that the disease was spread among us by Ina nomads and by families traveling to be near mates.

  “Our bodies were no better at dealing with this illness than our human contemporaries were at dealing with their illnesses. But while our attentions helped them deal with their infections, defects, and injuries,

  they could not help us deal with ours. We died in greater numbers than we could afford. It got harder and harder for us to find mates. Then, gradually, we began to heal. Perhaps we had simply undergone a kind of microbial winnowing. The illness killed most of us. Those left were resistant to it, as were their

  children.

  “Even when we were fit, though, we had to be careful. Nonsymbiont humans might attack us and murder us to steal our possessions or because we were careless and lived too long in one place without seeming to age.” He shrugged. “Some humans wanted to know how we could live so long. What secret magic did we possess to avoid growing old? What coul
d be done to us to force us to share our magic with them?

  “Suspicions about us grew out of control now and then down through the ages, and we had to run or fight, or we were tortured and murdered as demons or as possessors of valuable secrets. Sometimes they hacked at us until they thought we were dead, then buried us. When we healed, we came out of our graves confused, mad with hunger . . . perhaps simply mad. Well, that’s how in some cultures we

  became the ‘walking dead’or the ‘undead.’That’s why they learned to burn or behead us.” “What about the wooden stake through the heart?” I asked.

  “That might work or it might not. There’s nothing magical about wood. If the stake leaves enough of the heart intact, we heal. One of my fathers was buried with a stake in his heart. He lived and ... killed six or seven people when he came out of his grave. As a result, my families had to leave Romania and change their names. That’s how my brothers and I happened to grow up in England.”