Ember nodded.
“Did you just—” She shook her head. “Never mind. Goodbye, Ember. I’ll see you in a day or two. Get some rest, okay?”
Michelle strode down the chamber without another word. As her footsteps faded, Ember sighed and glared at her paws again. ‘What am I, now? Am I becoming something I’m not, or is this what I really am? A wildcat? A creature? A monster? A machine? Maybe I’m all of them at once. Or something else entirely. If I can’t go back home, what am I going to do? Even if I do go back home, what will I do? I don’t look like me anymore. They might not even recognize me.’ She wrapped her paws over her eyes, trying to find some comfort in the darkness. ‘Everything I’ve worked for is gone. My family, my apprenticeship, my colony. I know for a fact that Commander Aspen and Tainu are gone. At least one Westerner probably died in the ambush. And even the ones who did survive I’m probably never going to see again. What am I going to do now?’
Most times, when the misty oranges of sorrow crept into her thoughts, she tried to push them away to prevent herself from crying. Yet here, in the keep of the enemy, she had nothing left to lose. The domestics wouldn’t judge her, and the humans didn’t care, so she let the tears fall. It felt refreshing to cry in the darkness, and to not have to worry about hiding it from the world.
After a while, Hye’s scent re-entered the chamber. “Hey, are you okay?”
Ember didn’t move.
“Michelle said you might have some questions. I’ve still got a little break time to burn, so I thought I’d try to answer them.”
“Why is it so important to you that I stay here?” she whispered. “Michelle said the bad people probably wouldn’t need me, so why can’t I leave?”
“Oh boy. That’s quite a question, and one I’m not sure how to answer in a way you’ll understand. I’ll try my best, though.”
Ember lifted a mechanical paw and peered up at him with one eye. “Okay.”
He drew a deep breath, then let it out in a sigh. “To start with, I’m something called a ‘veterinarian.’ I help injured animals heal. That’s my job. If I don’t do my job, I can’t feed my family, and I’ll lose my home. How I get my food is through something called ‘money.’ I use it for pretty much everything I and my family want or need. The people who give me this money have rules I have to follow. If I let you go against their instruction, I could lose everything. Please understand that I don’t necessarily agree with all of these rules, but I can’t change them, or break them. I’d be putting myself and my family at risk.”
“What if those people decide they don’t want me?” Ember asked.
Hye held up a hand. “Wait, let me finish. In addition to all this, you and your prosthetics represent a large amount of this money, and given how you’re the first creature to have this procedure done, and at this scale, you also represent a significant technological breakthrough. We need you to show the world what can be done. You being here could help improve and save lives, especially now with so many war veterans coming back permanently wounded.”
‘War veterans? You’re at war too?’ Ember covered her face again to hide her tears. “You don’t understand. I have to go back.”
“Ember, listen to me, the parts we put inside you are self-healing, but only to an extent. They need to be monitored, otherwise they might break, and if that happened out in the woods, you’d be stuck. Chances are, we wouldn’t be able to get to you, and you’d die. If you leave, you’d probably only have a few years to live, if that.”
“But if I stay, I’ll be a prisoner. That’s not living. This isn’t living. I can’t be your example of life if I’m not living. I have to go back.”
Hye sighed. “We can talk about this more, later. If this really is that important to you, I’ll see if I can work something out. For now, my break is over. I should get back to work. Before I do, you’re probably hungry, so let me go get you something to eat. We had nutrients running to you while you were under, but when it comes down to it, there’s nothing like real food.”
Since she’d woken up, the thought of food had never once crossed her mind. Now, with a chance at going home, she could relax enough to listen to her stomach. It growled at her.
“I guess I am hungry. Don’t give me anything too big, please. I’ll make myself sick if I try to eat it all. Maybe just a mouse.”
Hye had already ventured farther into the chamber and out of earshot. After a few moments of waiting, he returned with another bowl, similar to the one containing her water. A strong, fishy scent filled the area. The domestics nearby perked up. A few of them yowled for him to give it to them. He opened the panel, set the dish in front of her, then closed it again, as if she might try to escape.
Ember squinted and leaned back as the nauseating smell clogged her nose. She coughed, then peered into the bowl. Little flakes of what appeared to be cooked meat filled the bottom, and a thick brown goo coated them.
“Er, what is this?” she asked.
“Food,” Hye replied. “Give it a try. If you don’t like it, I’ll find something else.”
‘That’s not very specific,’ she thought, fighting back a gag. “Food? Did someone else eat it already? Or is it rotten?”
Hye raised a hand to scratch the back of his head. “No, and no. Most domestics love strong-smelling food, so it’s made to smell strong. Just try it, okay? It might surprise you.”
‘Come on, Em. Give it a chance. Food is food, and food is valuable, and you should be grateful for it.’ Ember held her breath and licked her meal. She licked it again, then ate a meat flake.
“Not bad,” she said. “Thank you.”
“Okay, great. I need to get back to work now. Enjoy your meal.”
‘I mean, it’s not good either, but it’ll keep me from starving, so I should eat it.’
Ember stared down at the slime-covered food. Another canid of some kind barked in the distance. More foreign clanking and tapping noises came from somewhere nearby. The sounds of unseen footsteps meandered the alien structure. They made her heart palpitate every time they drew nearer. She did her best to ignore it all and leaned over to nibble at another piece of meat. A soft chime echoed through her head.
[You have one new message from Michelle Castell.]
[Would you like to view it?]
‘Yes. I don’t know what a message is, but show me.’
[Hye told me to make you an ETAg. You’re going to need it if you want to go back home. I’ll see you tomorrow, sweetie.]
[Would you like to reply?]
‘So that’s what it is. I guess you can tell her “thanks and bye?” ’
[Message sent]
———
Time passed like a slug crawling up a mountain. Humans entered and left, ignoring her for the most part, but Ember didn’t ignore them; they were fascinating to watch as they removed or added cats. Sometimes they would take out a domestic, then bring it back sometime later, either sleeping or with a fresh look of terror on the unfortunate feline’s face. It made her see-feel silver when it happened, but the eclectic variety of reactions was morbidly fascinating.
Every time they removed a cat, Ember asked where they were taking it. Occasionally she’d get a reply, but most of the time they didn’t even seem to hear her. When the anxious fat cat got removed, the human collecting him happened to be one of the few who answered her questions.
“Where is he going?” Ember asked.
“Back home,” the human said.
“What are you doing with me? What are you doing?” the fat cat mewed.
The human—a lanky one with pale, speckled skin, and a fur tuft the color of fire—hefted the cat up, then placed him in a smaller, more movable cage. “Bring you home. Do not fear, Stripes. You okay,” he replied in broken Felid.
“Oh good, oh good, oh good. I want to go home. This place is scary, and I haven’t gotten pet right in ages.”
Ember chuffed. ‘Stripes, huh? Your family wasn’t very creative, was it?’
Yet she couldn’t help but smile at the kitten-like excitement in Stripes’s mews as the human carried him away. Primitive as his mind might be, he clearly loved the people who cared for him. Maybe not as strongly as she loved her family, but the bond existed.
‘The History Tree is wrong. It has to be, at least partly. Some humans aren’t as bad as Dark thought. I’ll have to clawmark about this on something when I get back. They’ll never believe most of it, but they already think I’m crazy, so I’m going to do it anyway.’
She pulled her water bowl close enough to drink. ‘Not onto the History Tree, obviously, because then Whitehaze would have a fit. But I should make a tablet or two on my experiences here. Oh! And Thai can help. Look, now you’ve got a project you can work on, along with almost all the resources to do it. Except claws, but they can probably make some for you. And it’ll improve your clawmarking and history-telling skills in the process. See, Ember? Everything’s going to be okay.’
She finished drinking and rested her chin against her cold, lifeless forelegs. ‘This will be a good thing, if you know how to use it.’ She snapped her head back up. The headache came back, but she ignored it. ‘Wait, if I could find out the name of a mountain, what else can I find out? Thai, how many mountains are there?’
[There are 1,000,821 named mountains in the world, but there are many others that have not been named.]
A tiny burst of pride flared in her chest. ‘I have almost every piece of collected human knowledge available at my command. I can learn more than anyone else in the valley. I can do so much with this. Mom and Dad will be so proud of me. And—oh! All the new things Kivy and I can talk about. I just need to get Michelle to make me claws that never get dull. Then, shorter life or not, I will be powerful. Instead of treating me like I’m crazy, the colony will finally come to me with respect. Even Silentstream. I guess I found that missing piece, so now everything will be okay.’
Her mind sent her a series of all-too-vivid images from the night of the ambush. Her excitement faded. ‘Oh. Right.’
Tainu and Aspen were dead. With the ambush, any number of others could’ve fallen, and on top of that, everyone still alive thought she was dead. When she returned, if she returned at all, she’d no longer be the historian apprentice, and those were just the facts.
‘Stop getting your hopes up, Ember. The likelihood of everything more or less going back to normal again is on par with a giant purple elk walking in right now and coughing up a mouse on my head. It’s possible, but not going to happen. And the chance of anyone from back home believing Thai is low too. Anything human-made is bad.’ She looked down at her prosthetics. Another wave of yellow flashed through her mind. ‘They might chase me away. What if they chase me away? Then what? I can’t survive in the Lowlands.’
She mewled softly and shook her head. ‘Don’t think about that right now.’
As time crawled forward, Ember busied herself by asking Thai questions about anything and everything. She asked questions about the stars, questions about the Earth, and even questions about colony cats, or ‘appalas,’ as the humans referred to them. She discovered something the humans called a ‘documentary’—which covered the humans’ side of the story—and watched it in her head. Thai linked up with her nervous system and projected moving pictures into her mind’s eye. It was like visiting a vivid memory she’d never once experienced.
Right from the beginning, she discovered some bitter truths about the ways her ancestors, along with several intelligent rats and dogs, had been treated. She didn’t have to understand their language to figure out these humans weren’t like the ones she’d met. At one point, a clip from before the escape appeared. It showed a human in white clothes holding Dark himself in place against an elevated platform. The human needed to raise his voice to speak over Dark’s meows for help. Ember had to strain her mind to hear him over the ambience of the Center, and the talking person in the documentary didn’t help. Yet Dark kept his voice level, making him just a tiny bit easier to focus on. Calm cats made the best focal points.
“If there’s anyone out there listening to this,” he said. “Please help us. They treat us as objects. They run us through dangerous experiments. They force us to mate without our consent. Please, get us out of here, or send someone to kill us all,” he said.
Ember shivered. She wondered how long he’d spent there after those desperate pleas before he’d come up with an escape plan and left with his kin.
The human continued to speak over videos of seemingly harmless experiments showing off the intelligence of appalas, along with the dogs and rats. At one point she spotted a cat who could only be Forestfire, with her blazing, tabby coat. Forestfire watched a screen as groups of shapes appeared on it. With every shift in amounts, she selected the ones with the largest numbers by raking her claws across the screen. Even Ember could recognize the hate in her eyes.
Other clips showed the escape as it happened through security footage. Her heart sank each time it showed a cat getting left behind, and it fell even harder when those trapped or caught gestured for their kin to keep going. The cats they’d lost during the escape were more brave than the ones who’d made it, just as Dark himself had clawed into the History Tree.
‘I wonder what would’ve happened if they’d taken the time to free the dogs and rats. They could’ve helped, but who and how many more would’ve been captured? And then, of course, they wouldn’t be able to discuss plans or improvisations in those plans, so it would’ve added confusion to the chaos. That wouldn’t have been good. But still.’
The documentary then went on to show humans in gaudy outfits holding appala cats and dogs by long vine-like things wrapped around the canines’ and felines’ necks. Ember bit her tongue. The collars on some of them were designed to tighten if they struggled. One appala had a collar with some kind of mechanical contraption on it. She couldn’t make out what it did.
While the human was talking, the cat accidentally jerked its leash while following some scent in the air. The human pressed a button. The cat yowled in pain and surprise, then scampered back to the human’s side. The human herself just laughed.
‘This is what happened to the ones who stayed? Would Dark have kept going if he knew about this? Would he have tried to save them, and the other animals too? They were just like us, but without a leader. I guess it’s for the better that he kept going. Otherwise they might have all ended up like that. If they don’t let me go, is that my future too?’
Unmoving images appeared of one of the humans—the button-presser—along with music, followed by an image of the appala, now bloodied and vicious-looking. Ember recognized the spray pattern marring the cat’s fur; he’d had enough, and managed to kill the human by severing an artery, most likely in her arm.
Two similar montages followed, both of these with dogs as the killers. This supposedly sad display was replaced with footage of cats and dogs in rows upon rows of cages. The captured animals sat in their cells, most of them sitting tall and proud. Even the young ones looked ready to accept their fates with dignity. The humans feared them, so they were to die for crimes they didn’t commit.
The documentary switched to videos of deer and birds, humans with long, loud, stick-like contraptions, and a still image of a dead appala cat with a bleeding hole in its side.
Ember’s heart leaped into her throat. She bit her tongue harder and thought, ‘Turn it off, Thai! Please, turn it off!’
The documentary disappeared. Ember opened her eyes, breathing heavily. What she could see of the Center looked peaceful, too peaceful compared to the things her ancestors and their kin had faced.
A dog yipped, causing her mind to drift to the canines of ARC.
‘Dark never even mentioned there were other species there. Did he ever feel guilty about not even trying to save them? Of course, he probably never thought all that would happen, and he never knew it did. It’s also strange how the rats just disappear after the first part. What happened to them? Did they escape
too? Or were they all killed?’
Ember shivered. ‘The History Tree was right after all. Partially. They can be kind enough to save my life, or cruel enough to kill all those innocents. And yet, they see us as savages only fit to be destroyed. That was history. I just watched history play out in my own head. The terrifying thing is, I’m not so sure I like it now.’
After what seemed like an eternity, Hye returned and gave her another dish of gooey meat. When she finished, he helped her into the larger, rectangular bowl which he called a ‘litter box.’ Finally, he rubbed something cold, white, and sticky on her furless patches of skin. He didn’t say much of anything, but he slow-blinked and dipped his head as he left, which only served to confuse her.
As time passed, everyone left—all the humans, at least. Unlike the sun, human lighting didn’t fade gradually; it switched from day to night in an instant. Ember closed one eye to make them adjust faster, then blinked a few times to get the lopsided feeling away. All around her, animals snored, or mewed, or barked, or growled.
‘How in the forest am I supposed to get to sleep in all this? It’s almost as loud as it was when the humans were here crashing around and talking.’
[Incoming call from Dr. Hye-sung Sagong.]
[Would you like to accept?]
‘What is this? Can I talk to him with my thoughts now? That’s weird, but in a way, maybe it’s a good thing. I don’t stutter when I think. Then again, what if I accidentally think about something wrong? Come on, Ember. He’s not like them. He’s safe. He’s one of the good ones. He isn’t going to kill you with a loud stick. He isn’t going to hurt you with your own thoughts.’ Ember’s heart thumped with anxious excitement and curiosity. ‘Yes, I accept. Hello?’
‘Hey, Ember,’ Hye replied. His thought-voice was different from his normal one; it was soft, almost sleepy, and came from everywhere at once. ‘Sorry I have to contact you like this, but I hope you can understand the risks we might be taking by trying to help you.’
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