Sinna’s absolutely clueless, and if I let her walk out of this house the same way she walked in, even with an armed, overprotective escort, she’s going to end up dead, or worse. This new world doesn’t suffer fools.
I feel sorry for the little bit. It’s a shitload to take in all at once, and I’ve gotta be the one to dish it, since Bryce can’t be bothered to say more than three words at a time. Great. I’m about to have the “birds and bees” discussion with a baby sister. But hey, if li’l sis needs a life lesson, she might as well get comfortable. Class is in session. Professor Alpha presenting.
~
“All right, first thing’s first,” Aiden said in all seriousness. “I gotta know how smart you are. Can you read?”
Bryce elbowed him—hard.
“What? It’s a legitimate question!”
Bryce elbowed him again.
Aiden hit him back.
“Yes,” Sinna said quickly, “I can read. And it was a legitimate question.”
“Thank you.” He shoved at Bryce to sit farther away. “Now, do you know what DNA is?”
She nodded.
“Good, good,” he said, then in an aside to Bryce, added, “Not the lost cause I was afraid of,” which earned him a half-snarl. For all of his non-communication, people often forgot that Aiden’s younger brother used to be the nice one. Before they beat it out of him. “Okay! You’re about to get a lesson in how the world works.”
Sinna blinked her big hazel eyes and nodded slowly, gaze darting between them. “Oh-kay.”
Not the most promising beginning, but at least she was paying attention. “Do you wanna take notes?”
“Aiden!” Bryce barked.
“Okay, fine. I see this is going to be a tough crowd. Here we go. It all started back in the day when scientists discovered DNA. It was like giving a bored kid a brand new video game. They locked themselves in the basement and spent the next few decades trying to beat each consecutive level. Except, the basement was a top secret facility deep beneath the site of a nuclear meltdown, and the game was ‘Bend or Break, the Nature’s Laws Edition.’”
“I never played video games,” Sinna said.
The breath Aiden had taken to launch into his story fizzled out of him. He said “top secret facility” and “nuclear meltdown” and all she heard was “video games”? He glared at her, and shook his head in disappointment.
Sinna shrugged. “What?”
Aiden forced a smile. “Moving on. Chernobyl den was built first. But there were too many people who didn’t agree with each other working too closely together, so they split off. The Japanese team took their assigned specimens and the formula to make more, built another den underneath Fukushima, and cooked up so many samples, they had warehouses of artificial sacs developing embryos. We’re talking half a football field stacked with shelves of them.”
“Wait,” Sinna said, making him growl. Was she going to keep interrupting him every thirty seconds? “How many different creatures did they make?”
“Ah, good question.” He’d forgive her this one time. “It appeared they created three new subspecies. All of them looked human, but they changed over time. You already know about the Grays. We call them converts. Homo sapiens infensus. They were the fuck-ups, the ones where something went wrong and they went apeshit bonkers. Then there were what they called Homo sapiens soporatus, or inerts; the ones that had all the makings of something great, but it just never activated.”
“And you said that’s what I was supposed to be. Or what Gerry thought I was.”
“Correct.”
“But I’m not?”
She sounded worried, and Aiden couldn’t blame her. Aside from the obvious, he didn’t even know what had happened to her today, but it must have made one hell of an impression if that was all the reaction he got. Most people would have been freaking out at the thought of being something other than human. “No, little bit, you’re not.”
Sinna nodded, somewhat uneasily. “So then, what am I?”
“One of us,” Bryce said. “Pack.”
Alarm sparked in her eyes. “Pack, like Grays?”
“Actually,” Aiden said, for once glaring at Bryce to shut up instead of speak, “converts don’t form cohesive groups for any length of time, so they’re not really pack animals in terms of social behavior. We are. Pack, I mean. Well, and animal, too. Sort of.” He huffed. “I’m not explaining this right.”
Bryce stared at him as if he’d lost his mind, and Sinna looked from him to Bryce, tense, like she wanted to make a run for it. “Just tell me this,” she said, “am I in danger?”
“Uh, yes and no?”
“What does that mean?”
Aiden rubbed the back of his head. “Hold on a second. I need to explain this in order, or it’s not going to make any more sense. We are Wolfen. We’re the pinnacle of what those humans hoped to achieve—Homo sapiens infragilis. Basically, we’re like a super-creature put together with different animal traits. Humans are limited, in body and mind. With us, they basically removed those limitations. Are you in danger? Not from us—never from us. And now, not from converts, either. We’re like opposites of each other. We don’t mesh. Converts will avoid Wolfen unless we engage.” He paused to survey her reaction.
Sinna stared for a moment, looked to Bryce for confirmation, then noted the wide-open window and the door left ajar.
Aiden nodded. “Right. We don’t have to worry about barricades. If we leave them alone, converts don’t bother us. We carry a scent they really, really don’t like, and see these?” He held up his chains, and wriggled his fingers to show off the rings. “Silver makes that scent stronger. It’s like a territory marker; it tells them they aren’t allowed here.”
Sinna regarded the tight silver cuff on her left wrist, rubbing the metal, lost in thought. “Gerry was going to give this to me the day she died. They killed her because of me. Because I wasn’t there.”
“No.” He knew that guilt; he and Bryce carried their fair share of it. “You couldn’t have known.”
“But Gerry must have. She kept telling me to stay close. If I had listened to her, she’d still be alive. She was counting on me, and I just left her!”
“Sinna, listen to me—”
“It was only for a minute, but they were so fast.”
“You were a kid.”
“I was eighteen,” she snapped. “More than old enough to know better.”
“Okay, you don’t want kid gloves? They’re coming off. You have two options: One, neither you nor Gerry knew exactly what you were, and what happened to her was a terrible accident. There’s nothing to say it wouldn’t have happened if you had been there. For all you know, your scent didn’t start changing until yesterday, or the day before.
“Or two, Gerry knew exactly what you were and kept it to herself. Wolfen crave freedom—because they can have it. Gerry was human, stuck in some hidey-hole in the middle of a convert-infested city she could never hope to escape, and she knew you—the experiment, the thing that wasn’t even human—always had the option of walking away. Deep down, that had to scare the shit out of her, ‘cuz if you ever figured out exactly what you were, and who she was, and what she’d probably done back in the den, you would leave her ass in the dust. So she decided to up her odds. She used you, kept you ignorant, scared, and locked up tight with her, so she could be safe.”
Sinna was breathing hard, eyes huge and glittering with tears in the moonlight, jaw clenched so tight against them, Aiden could see the muscles twitching.
“Now you choose,” he said. “You tell me which reality is easier for you to accept, because there is no option C.”
Sinna shuddered and ducked her head to wipe her eyes. She didn’t look at him for a long time, staring out the window instead.
Aiden didn’t force the issue. Whatever inner battle she waged, he couldn’t win it for her. He waited until her breathing evened out and she’d calmed herself some before he continued with the lesson.
“They evacuated and left me and Gerry for dead,” Sinna said suddenly. “She climbed thirteen stories up a ladder with me in tow to get to the surface. And once we got there, we had nothing. The clothes on our backs and a whole lot of strained muscles. Gerry didn’t even try to find the others; she knew they wouldn’t bother coming back for us, so she got us plane tickets bound for San Francisco and prayed we were leaving the nightmare behind.” She looked him dead in the eye. “She saved my life.”
Aiden nodded. “Fair enough.” He wasn’t about to argue that point, and Sinna unclenched, and dipped her chin in acknowledgment.
“You’re right,” he said. “No one went back to Chernobyl. They figured there was no one left anyway, and the converts in the den wouldn’t be smart enough to find a way out. But given what happened in Europe shortly after that, I’m pretty sure they underestimated a convert’s survival instinct.
“The rest of us went to a U.S. military base. It was supposed to be a layover point until the new facility was built in Montana. But once we got there, outside of controlled conditions, some of the inert children converted and broke free. Lesson number one: if you have a stick of dynamite that failed to go off, don’t toss it back into the box with the others. There’s no such thing as an inert. The potential is always there, and sooner or later, it always activates. When the mini-converts escaped, everyone freaked out and sent soldiers to go hunt them down. In the meantime, scientists decided to hedge their bets with the remaining inert kids—slaughtered all of them. Didn’t care that some might have grown up to become Wolfen, like you. Most of the escaped converts got taken out, but at least one breeding pair went unaccounted for. And that’s all it took. The world went boom on an epic scale.
“Two continents went down in a matter of months; communications shot to shit, infrastructure crumbled, to say nothing of commerce. Cities fell first, then converts spread outward to the ‘burbs, countrysides, and even places where humans hadn’t left their mark yet. Extreme climes fared better than mild ones; not enough food in the desert to feed a convert, so he’ll stick to where he can hunt. Bryce and I figure, by now, Europe and most of southern Asia is beyond redemption. There might still be some holdouts in Africa and around the poles, and islands went largely untouched, because converts don’t have an instinctual ability to swim, so Greenland, Iceland, and Australia are still safe bets for human strongholds. Also, whoever managed to escape on cruise ships and the like might have had a fighting chance, until their food ran out, that is. And South America is kind of a question mark.”
Bryce nodded along with that assessment.
“So there are more survivors,” she said.
“Most of them are opportunists who managed to find a loophole or learned how to exploit a natural resource.” Like Wolfen. “But yeah, there are some. Not enough. Basically, by now, our big blue marble belongs to converts.”
Sinna shook her head. “But, how did there get to be so many? One breeding pair isn’t enough to sustain a population, even I know that.”
“It is, if they reach sexual maturity at age four and aren’t discriminating about mates. Only the original ones were human to start. From then on, each species naturally produced offspring fully Wolfen or fully convert, regardless of the other half of their parentage. A convert’s gestation period is about three months, and they’re born with a full set of teeth. Carnivores from the go.” That was as simple as he could make it, without getting into too many nasty details, like how a convert could rape and impregnate a human woman or force a human man to be physically receptive and give up semen—all while getting devoured; or how female converts needed no recovery period and could birth up to three young every three months.
Aiden gauged Sinna’s reaction, but by that point she was beyond exhausted, physically and emotionally. She didn’t ask any more questions, simply fought to keep her eyes open.
Bryce nudged him, and made a circular motion with his fingers. He would check the perimeter.
Aiden nodded. When Bryce was gone, Aiden tilted his head at Sinna. “How’re you doing there, little bit?”
Nothing.
“Sinna?”
She blinked. “Huh?”
“You should get some sleep. We have a long drive ahead.”
“Where are we going?”
Aiden preened. “I like to call it home. It’s just about the best place a Wolfen girl like you can be. Remote, protected, tricked out with all of the modern comforts like running water and flushing toilets. And best of all, no trigger-happy humans.”
“What if I don’t want to go?”
Okay, that came out of left field. “Why would you not?”
“I don’t know you, I don’t really understand what you are or what I am, I have no reason to trust you.”
“Other than our saving your life, you mean?”
“It’s because you saved my life I don’t trust you. Why would you do that? There’s no reason for you to take on another hungry mouth unless—”
“Then stop thinking like a human,” he said simply. “All of those bad things you’re imagining are baseless; you’re applying old standards to a new situation and lumping us together with the species that created this whole mess to begin with. We’re not them. Don’t go guessing at our motives; you have no idea what we do.”
She didn’t look convinced.
Just then, Bryce, bless his heart and his superb timing, came back with a stack of clothing for Sinna, likely scavenged from one of the other rooms. This house had been abandoned in a hurry, almost as if the residents saw something coming, grabbed their loved ones, and ran like hell. Aiden could respect that. He kind of hoped they got to safety.
Bryce handed the stack to Sinna, cleared his throat, and said, “There’s some water in the bathroom for washing. Clothes should fit.”
Aiden stared. “Whoa, dude, no need to talk her ear off. Take a breath, will you?”
Bryce snapped his fangs at him. He was still bloodied from carrying Sinna, but apparently he’d left all the washing water for her. Curiouser and curiouser.
Sinna accepted the clothing with a tentative smile at Bryce. “Thank you.”
He nodded with a grunt, and went back to his corner. If that didn’t confuse the little bit out of her silly ideas, Aiden didn’t know what would.
“Bathroom’s right outside, to the left,” Aiden said, driving the last nail into that coffin, “in case you were wondering.”
Sinna stared at the door, clearly debating whether it would be worth the physical exertion, then she made a face and surged to her feet. But she stood up too fast, and pitched forward. Aiden caught her before she face-planted into the wall behind him. “Whoa there, little bit. Easy does it.” He could feel her shivering. She was barely awake, but she stubbornly righted herself and brushed off his hands. “You good?”
“Yeah, I got it.”
“All right, then. Yell if there’s trouble.”
“Right,” she muttered as she went out the door, not realizing Wolfen hearing was ten times better than a cat’s. “Trouble from the scary monsters who won’t come in because they don’t like the way I smell.”
Aiden’s mouth twitched in a half-smile. Sweet, innocent girl. Even after everything he’d told her, she still had no idea. It was never converts Wolfen had to worry about.
It was only ever humans.
8: Sinna
I wonder if this could be a dream. If somehow my dying brain has mana
ged to conjure a vision in my final moments. I always knew the old religions had it wrong. There is no heaven or hell, only more of the same kind of different.
But I know better than to pretend. The person staring back at me from inside the mirror, with her eyes aglow, her pert chin tilted down, and her skin pearlescent pale in the moonlight, isn’t me. It can’t be me, because I am not this…this thing they tell me I am. And if it’s not me, then it’s someone else—I am someone else. Strange, the idea doesn’t fill me with dread or fear, only a deep sense of sorrow.
There can be no creation of something new without first a destruction of what used to be.
I mourn the old Sinna. I will never see her again.
She is dead.
~
A solid marble sink stood in the bathroom. Sinna leaned her weight on it, staring beyond her reflection to find some mystical marker to point her toward reality. Her legs were wobbly, and her head still ached. Aside from her blood-soaked clothes, those were the last remaining signs she’d been hurt in the first place.
Sinna shrugged out of her jacket and sat on the toilet to rest her legs. From high up on one wall, a bright shaft of moonlight streamed in through a small window, and she stuck her arm into it, tracing the long, thin scar. It was still there, years after the wound had been inflicted.
She pulled her T-shirt off and twisted her torso into the light. The skin over her stomach was smooth; no bumps, scabs, scars, or discoloration. Nothing to suggest she’d been shot at all.
The old world order is gone, Gerry had once told her. There’s only one rule of survival now: Adapt or die. You can’t think this through; there’s no pattern in destruction like this. There’s only before, and after. Before, who we were mattered. After, all that matters is what we are.
Sinna could sit in this bathroom until the end of time and stubbornly deny what Aiden had told her, but it wouldn’t change anything. Deep inside, she knew he’d told her the truth; she could feel it, see it on her own skin. Sinna stood again and looked at herself in the mirror. Nothing had changed with this transformation, and for some reason, that made it more difficult to accept. If she wasn’t human, then something should make that obvious—purple skin, or long fangs, or scales. Something.
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