The Superiors

by Lena Hillbrand

  “No, no. They are quite fascinating to me. I try to imagine that world, but I cannot.”

  “It was a scary time, my friend. I could have died instead of evolving. I’m only lucky that someone decided to help me out, and my wife. I think it was only at random, mostly. First Orders, they just got whoever they could and let us loose until they thought enough of us had evolved to wipe out the rest of the city. It was a bloodbath, quite literally. Only later we found our children, months later, and got permission to evolve them. My wife wanted to, and I guess I did too, although I had reservations. But she insisted, and she can be insistent.” Byron laughed. “I love her now the same as I did then. I’d do anything for her. Never could deny her. In a way I didn’t want to change them, because I thought they’d end up getting shipped off to war, you know. Thought they’d be better off just getting bitten. But my wife, she said this way there was a chance they’d live and if they stayed sapiens, they were guaranteed death. So we did it.”

  “You didn’t want to give them this life?”

  “Not because I dislike being Superior. No, the only thing I don’t like is that I was ever human at all. Sometimes I look at them, and I just cannot believe I used to be one of those moronic creatures. That I was ever so pathetic and hideous and I never knew it at all. But then I guess that’s part of being stupid. They just don’t know at all how stupid they are.” He laughed again, and Draven did too, but he thought about Cali, that she didn’t seem stupid. Instead of not knowing her stupidity, she didn’t know her intelligence.

  “Yes, that, and I don’t like remembering the change, the animal way we were when we were evolving, before we’d become truly Superior. I can deal with having killed all the sapiens—they needed to be killed, and it made me strong, and I needed to eat. It’s the way we did it, so savage, like rabid wolves. Disgusting. I don’t like to think of myself that way. I had misfortune, too, Draven. You can’t imagine how it was for us, not knowing what we were or how we got to be that way or what we were doing. The things I did… I did some horrible things without knowing what I was doing, and that weighs on my conscience, even though I still believe to this day I didn’t have a choice. And that’s the thing that weighs on me more than any of the choices I made that killed someone.”

  “What thing?” Draven asked, not certain he wanted to know what could weigh on the conscience of a man as morally firm as Byron.

  “A man like Ander… I could kill him and I’d take responsibility for ending his life. But I’d have a choice. Back then…we were just filled with bloodlust and confusion and fear and power. We didn’t know our strength or what we could do.”

  “You have told me so many times that you didn’t know, that I can’t know. I believe you. I can remember the way I felt after the evolution, and I believe I would have killed a sapien, even a Superior if he tried to stop me from getting at the food. I’m glad for the way I was treated, even though at the time I was mad with anger at being chained up and restrained that way. I took a bite of the flesh of the first person I bit. I didn’t know how to do it at all, even though of course I’d been drawn from myself. I just wanted it so much.”

  “Yes, I suppose that part was the same for you. They say if you don’t eat long enough, you’ll go into a form of sleep, a coma, and when you wake you feel that way again. But I don’t think it’s ever like that, not once you’ve known how to control yourself and how to draw correctly.”

  “All this talk, it’s making me quite hungry,” Draven said, and both men laughed.

  “I’ll tell you what I did to my first sapien, and you won’t want to eat for days.”

  Draven poked the fire and thought about the sapien from Estrella’s sleeping somewhere undisturbed, and he didn’t imagine anything could make him not want to eat.

  They sat in silence for a time. Byron took out a tin and handed Draven a cigarette, and both men smoked and listened to the fire crackle and the wind whine over the sand. When he had finished, Byron spoke. “I woke in the apartment where I lived with my wife and my children. I am only thankful I didn’t find my children sleeping upstairs. But maybe the First Order had already removed them, I don’t know.” He shuddered and then went on. “I woke first, and I had this panicked feeling, because I thought I’d died. And I saw my wife, and she hadn’t woken, and I thought she was dead, and I tried to rouse her but she didn’t wake. I was torn with anguish and anger and this frenzy I didn’t know then was hunger, because it’s not like the hunger of a human, that need to feed. I tried for a long time to wake her before I gave up and left. In all the streets the evolution was taking place. They were everywhere, running and screaming and searching for this thing, and we didn’t know what it was at first. Only this need.”

  Byron stopped to toss another twisted branch into the center of the fire. Sparks went flying and the coals rolled and bounced from the pit. Draven pushed them back while Byron continued. “When we found a sapien, we could smell it, you know. The first time, I didn’t even know what I was smelling. I had this need, and I smelled the thing that I needed, and I found her in the stairwell of an apartment building. She didn’t know what was going on, but she could hear people screaming and she was going home I guess, running up the stairs when I caught her.

  “I didn’t know what I was, I had never heard of Superiors, and I didn’t know that I would feed on sapiens the rest of my life. I didn’t even know I wasn’t a sapien anymore. I just found her, and I needed her, and she smelled, oh God. Like you wouldn’t believe how irresistible. She had her time of the month, you see, and that was what drove me crazy. I didn’t know what I was doing, what I was supposed to do, that I should bite her neck or her vein. I just smelled sap and I wanted it, so I drew from the source. And I had never done that, you know, as a human, in any capacity except for sexual. I thought that’s what was driving me mad, I thought it was some kind of sexual lust and not a blood lust. So after I couldn’t fulfill that craving, it was still so strong, and I…I…” Byron stopped speaking and finished the wine and threw the bottle into the fire.

  Draven didn’t say anything. The story was fascinating in its horror. He couldn’t bear to hear it, but he couldn’t tell Byron to stop either. And it explained the Enforcer’s disgust, his guilt, his hatred for those who prostituted and consorted with saps.

  “I forced myself on the human. I didn’t know I wasn’t human then, I didn’t know what I was, or how strong I was, or what I needed to do to satiate myself. I don’t think I knew much of anything right then, except that I was out of my mind with this gut-wrenching hunger and I didn’t know how to feed it.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “When I got up from the girl, she was dead. I’d crushed her. I was out of control, and I didn’t know I was stronger even though I felt strong. I didn’t know I was inhumanly strong. That’s the first thing I ever killed. Just a human girl, you know, a sap. An animal. Now when I think about it, it doesn’t seem so bad, you know, to have killed it. I’ve killed lots of them since then, even lots that same night. But I…I guess it hit me like that because I didn’t know when I did it that I wasn’t human. I reacted as a human who killed another human by brutal means, brute force. For a moment after, just one moment before the bloodlust set back in, I saw what I had done and I saw it through human eyes. I don’t know how to forget it, Draven. I’ve had it with me for two hundred years, and I can’t make it inconsequential like it should be. It’s that one, that first thing I killed when I thought I was still just like her, that’s what stuck. I can’t ever forget that like I should, even knowing it was just a dumb sap and someone else would have killed her that night anyway.”

  “That’s true,” Draven said, both horrified and intensely sorry for his friend.

  “After that I wanted to run away, you know, when I saw what I’d done. But she was bleeding and that set me off and I drew everything from her afterwards, and then I realized what the thirst was, how to fill it. I never touched another sap that way again, you know. I feel
sick just thinking about it.”

  “That makes sense,” Draven said slowly. “At least you aren’t like those men, like Ander, with the strange fetish for sapiens.”

  “Yes, sexual predators… It’s a perversion, soldier. A sickness. And you know, in over two hundred years, that’s the only time I’ve ever been unfaithful in my marriage. It’s one of the only things I’ve ever kept from Marisol, besides work cases that have to stay confidential. I was unfaithful to my wife that one time only, in two centuries. And with a sap. My stomach turns when I think of it. I didn’t know I wasn’t one, or that she was a different species than me and that it was wrong. I didn’t know I was any different from the thing in the stairwell, and I thought my wife was dead. But I still did it.”

  “And that’s why you hate them?”

  “I don’t hate them, exactly. I’m just repulsed by them. Maybe that’s why, I don’t know. Because I did that not knowing I was Superior already, that I’d evolved. And because she was out instead of at home, and of all the saps to run into it had to be one having her cycle. If it had been anyone else, it would have been different maybe, I don’t know. I only know what happened to me. When the Second Evolution came around, I was careful, I helped bring it about. For the ones I evolved, I explained it very thoroughly. I told them what was happening, that they would be Superiors afterwards, how they would feel, everything. I didn’t want anyone to ever have an experience anything like mine. The man in charge of your evolution, Draven, was he a good man?”

  “I believe so. He didn’t explain that well, but he told me. And he was quite kind, calming me. I was just a scared sap. He wasn’t a cruel man.”

  “That is good, my friend. Now you have my stories, and I’ve been going on all night. I fear I’m quite drunk. I’m going to go vomit it all up before it’s time to sleep.”

  Byron went away from the fire to rid himself of the foreign substance. Draven sat and thought about the brutal story he’d heard. Of course he knew the basic story of the Takeover. Everyone knew that. But hearing it from someone who had lived through it… He hadn’t thought about how old Byron was. He had lived through so much, seen and done so many things.

  Byron came swaying back to the fire and sat. “Let me ask you this, my friend. Now that you know why I hate the men who hire out the humans for this reason…you know what I think of men who use them, how hard I will work to bring every one of them down. Do you think now I am a hypocrite?”

  “Because you did once what you so loathe?” Draven paused and thought over the question before answering. “No. I find only you have more reason to be genuine in your hatred of it. Hating what you know, hating what you’ve done—that’s more real than hating something you don’t know.”

  “Thank you for seeing it that way, soldier. Now I think I’m pissing drunk and going to bed early. We have a long night of travel ahead.”

  Draven stayed awake a while longer, until morning lit the desert sky. He thought about the night before, about his new knowledge of his friend. And about what his friend had done, about the awfulness of his experience and the guilt he carried from it for so long, that he would never escape. Perhaps he should have felt disgust for Byron. Perhaps he should have felt pity and loathing for the way Byron had killed the sap and the weight of it on his conscience. He did feel a bit of these things.

  Then his thoughts turned and he looked at his own life—over a hundred years of Superior existence, and he had done nothing. Even his evolution held nothing extraordinary—every Third had roughly the same experience. Byron had done so much more. His life had been hard and brutal in those first hundred years, before Draven had lived. Now his life was full of travel and solving cases and catching bad men like Ander. Yes, he’d had to kill at times. He’d killed many times. But his life contained excitement, danger, love, travel, adventure. Perhaps Draven should have felt lucky that he hadn’t had to do the things his mentor had, but only heard tales from the higher Order. He did feel lucky. But mostly he felt envy.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Draven searched for sleep, but for a long while he couldn’t find it, even in the darkness inside his black tent. He couldn’t stop thinking about the thing he had done, with or without a choice. But even if he’d had no choice, even if he couldn’t have done anything different… The steps that led him to the murder were all choices. If he hadn’t wanted to buy a sapien, he wouldn’t have needed money, and he wouldn’t have come on the journey. But he had come.

  He had decided he would own livestock, and he’d done a terrible thing to fulfill his ambition. He had accepted the mission so he could buy Cali and take her to his place and keep her safe, keep her from unhealed wounds and persistent human suitors. He had killed a man so he could live—live to have her. He had done the thing for himself, and he had done it for Cali.

  He thought of these things many times on the walk back through the desert. Although less circuitous, the route he and Byron traveled to get back proved just as slow. Draven remained weak from blood loss and hadn’t proper nutrition for full recovery. He didn’t know what Ander had eaten in the desert, but the man had stayed much stronger than Draven. Draven had weakened even before the fight, and now he grew much weaker. He had lost much blood to Ander and had only dried sap to fuel him. He ran out of that and Byron gave him more. At first Draven protested taking food from his friend, since he thought Byron had started out with the same amount he had. But it became apparent that Byron was much stronger—in fact, he’d grown stronger even than at the start of the journey.

  Byron only ate one or sometimes half a packet a night, and Draven worried about his friend. But without food he only slowed Byron, and although Byron never criticized, Draven noticed him checking his pod almost as frequently as when they’d tracked Ander.

  “What concerns you?” Draven asked one night when he saw Byron slip the sleek black rectangle back into his pocket.

  “I’m not worried. I’m just keeping track of the days.”

  “How many days has it been?”

  “Forty-five.”

  “Do you need to be somewhere soon?”

  “I have received communication setting the date for my departure. I will be going north of here, into the mountains.”

  “Yes, I remember. When are you leaving?”

  “Soon. When we get back, I may have a few days, or I might have to leave right away.”

  “I am sorry that I slow you,” Draven said. “Would you rather go ahead? I am content to be alone, if you will send back a car to get me when I arrive at the road.”

  “Nonsense, my friend. We came on this mission together, and if you aren’t as strong as me it is only because you refused to take back what Ander took from you. I respect a man who holds to his principles. I do the same myself.”

  “I have noticed this,” Draven said, thinking of Byron’s hatred for sapien-Superior relations. “I respect that in you, as well.”

  After a few days, Draven stopped protesting when his friend handed him his powdered sap. He accepted it, put it in his mouth, and waited for it to turn to a paste and finally dissolve. They drank from cactus plants, and when it rained they put out their bottles and hydrated themselves for a few days. Draven fed off animals two times, finding the task nauseating but energizing.

  When at last they reached the road, the car awaited their arrival. Draven’s eyes tethered to the trailer behind the car. The thick trailer walls could contain a man like Ander, but for a moment Draven thought of throwing himself at it to get to what he knew waited inside. But he didn’t have to. Nothing kept him from his next meal.

  He went straight to the trailer and waited for the driver to unlock it from inside the car. Draven went into the trailer and knelt beside the sleeping sap—the brunette from Estrella’s. He lifted her arm, trembling with hunger and longing. He could hardly keep himself from sinking his teeth into her anywhere, just to draw blood. But he forced himself to wait until the vein rose up in her arm before he began his long-awaited reward.
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  Draven expected that after all the powdered sap—and worse—he’d eaten in the desert, the sapien would taste like the best thing he’d ever eaten. She tasted good. But the whole time he drew from her, he kept thinking that he’d had better. All that time wandering in the desert, through a silence too empty and endless, he had thought about going home. He hadn’t thought about the two-night car ride to get there. As he’d wandered, he had thought of the reward that waited for him; he’d thought that after all that hunger, he’d get to have Cali again. And this sap was not Cali.

  When he’d drawn a bit too much, Draven withdrew, still not satisfied. His hunger dissipated for the moment, but he knew he’d feel something amiss until he’d drawn from Cali. Only a few more days, and he could draw from her whenever he wanted. But those days seemed to stretch out in front of him longer than the two months he’d been gone.

  Byron drank a cup of sap when he got back in the car. He’d had his sap drain it herself. Before turning to Draven, Byron told the driver to continue.

  “I have to go on my next assignment quite soon,” Byron said. “This one will be much longer, as I mentioned.”

  “I will be sorry to lose such a friend and mentor as you’ve been to me.”

  “And I’ll be sorry to miss the next ten years of your promising young life. You will be a great fighter, if war breaks out again.”

  “I hope it doesn’t.”

  “As do I. But even in times of peace, you have a bright future, Draven Castle.” Byron held up his cup in a toast and Draven raised his bottle of water. “To the future. May it be profitable for us both,” Byron said.