by Rich Larson
Bo stared at the scar, transfixed. Better than the whirlybird’s marks on his wrists. Better than any of his scars, from any fall or fight.
“I hate them too,” he said. “I hate the fuckers.” He tried to make the curse come out smooth.
“They made us their experiments, right?” Wyatt said, leaning forward as he tugged his shirt back down. “But it’s going to backfire on them. They gave us our weapon. We’re going to learn to use it. Use the Parasite.”
“Then what?” Bo asked, feeling his Parasite wriggling, his heart pumping. Use it.
“Chase them back where they came from,” Wyatt said. “Or kill them all here. You’ve got a strong one, if it took you through the wormy wall on your first go. If you’ve never shifted anything before. Maybe the strongest yet. But having a strong one’s not enough.”
Bo looked from Wyatt to Violet, both of them standing stock-still, both of them with cold hard eyes fixed on him. “Guts,” he said. “Right?”
Neither of them cracked a smile.
“The grown-ups, they let themselves get rounded up and clamped,” Wyatt said. “They were scared. Now they’re wasters. The kids in the warehouses, the ones who drink the water and follow the whirlybird and think if they’re good, nothing bad will happen to them. Nothing worse.” Wyatt nearly snarled. “They’re scared too. If you’re going to be a Lost Boy, you can’t be like them. You need guts. Are you brave, Bo?”
Chase them back, or kill them all here. Bo’s heart hammered in his chest. Get his sister out, free the others.
“I’m brave,” he said. “I’ll show you I’m brave.”
“You’ll have to,” Wyatt said. “If you want to be a Lost Boy, you have to kill your othermother first.”
4
I want you with him for it.”
Violet looked up. She’d been reorganizing the drug cabinet, a black Ikea shelf Bree and Elliot had put together, slotting the painkillers and antibiotics in neat rows. She used to think nobody could sneak up on her, but that was before she met Wyatt. Wyatt, with his silent step and slate-gray eyes. He was standing over her now with arms crossed.
“With the new kid?” Violet asked, trying not to let her gaze linger too long on his biceps flexed all taut. “It’s Jon’s turn to do the mother hunt.”
“I want you to do it,” Wyatt said. “Nobody’s gotten out since the wormy wall went up. If he’s telling the truth? If he actually shifted the wormy wall enough to get through? That’s something special.”
Violet felt a strange twist of jealousy in her stomach; maybe it was only her Parasite on the move. She glanced behind her to where Bo was eating, spooning cold ravioli out of a tin, jaws working slow and careful after four months of warehouse nutrient gel. He had a tough-kid act, how most of the escapees did, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t freeze up at the critical moment. Just bumping into that waster on the street had shaken him.
Of course, the first time Violet saw the clamped adults up close, their ragged clothes and pierced skulls, she’d hid behind the dumpster of the 7-Eleven and nearly pissed herself right there.
“You want me to do it for him?” she asked. “If he’s too soft?” She said it knowing it would put a twist on Wyatt’s perfect face.
“No,” Wyatt said, after a beat. “He has to do it himself, like everyone else. Every Lost Boy kills their mother. Just make sure he gets that far, right? Make sure things go smooth.”
He touched her shoulder in a way that still made heat creep through her skin. Flashed his white smile. Violet tried not to smile back too big. Wyatt headed off, leaving her with the small imprints of his fingers on her flesh, and she wished she was as smooth around him as she was around Dennis the pharmacist. She finished up with the medicine cabinet, double-checked for the aluminum baseball bat in her duffel bag, then walked over to where Bo was cleaning out the can with one finger.
“Let’s go, Pooh Bear,” she said.
Bo licked red sauce off his knuckle, frowning up at her. “Bo,” he corrected. “That girl over there said I could sleep first. Sleep a night, if I want.”
“I say we’re getting it over with today, because I have other shit to do. Don’t you want to be a Lost Boy?”
She watched his gaze travel over to Wyatt, how most kids’ did. Wyatt was stretched back in one of the theater seats, reading Sun Tzu again or else one of the military history books he’d taken from Chapters. He read twice as fast as Violet, and she’d always been decent at it.
“Yeah,” Bo said. “I wanna.”
“Then let’s go find her,” Violet said. She checked and saw one of his shoe soles was peeling off, wagging against the floor. “We can get you new runners first,” she said. “Don’t want you tripping over those.”
Bo’s dark eyes lit up. “Foot Locker,” he said. “The one in the mall.”
“Sure,” Violet said. “I think they got a sale on today.”
A smile ghosted over Bo’s face, just for a second. That was good. Some of the kids never smiled again. Violet adjusted the sit of the duffel on her shoulder and cocked her head toward the exit. Bo stood up from the duct-taped table, wiping his hands on the seat of his pants. The other Lost Boys who’d been eating looked up at him and saluted. Violet couldn’t remember when that had started—nobody had saluted when she and Wyatt set off to kill her first othermother.
“Good luck, Bo,” Gilly, the youngest, said solemnly.
“Thanks,” Bo said, then looked around at the others, maybe trying to decide whether to salute back or not. “Be right back.”
Cocky of him. Violet sort of liked it.
Bo knew the exact shoes he wanted. He’d known since before the ship came down, when he went through the mall on his way back from school and stopped and stared at them, wishing his feet were growing faster or that he hadn’t wasted his eleventh birthday asking for PlayStation games. He knew they’d make him aggressively agile, like the Nike ad with the cyborgs, even though he didn’t like cyborgs so much anymore because they were too close to wasters.
He was thinking about the shoes when the girl or boy named Violet reached back and pinched his arm to stop him. Girl or boy, because he wasn’t quite sure now. Violet was really pretty, puffy lips like a fashion model, sooty lashes, but her voice was different from Lia’s or any of the older girls Bo knew. He’d decided it wasn’t that important.
“There’s one,” Violet said. “Look.”
They’d been heading to the mall by the backway, hopping a fence and crossing the empty railroad track, crunching on gravel. As they entered through the derelict parkade, Violet had pulled him behind a concrete pillar. Bo peered around the edge of it now. He could see the food court entrance. The grass was overgrown and tangled yellow, but apart from that it looked nearly normal. A few wasters were shuffling around the outside; the sliding doors didn’t open for the sensor anymore.
But Violet hadn’t meant for him to see more wasters. Bo blinked as what he’d taken at a glance as a spindly tree suddenly turned and started to walk. The thing, which he knew had to be an othermother, towered over the wasters, taking slow and delicate steps. From the waist up it looked like a person—it was even wearing a floral-printed shirt, from what Bo could see. But its legs were long metal stilts, jointed like a praying mantis, and when they lifted off the ground the feet were clawed clubs.
Bo felt his mouth go dry and his throat go tight. He remembered the slimy figure that dropped out of the whale-thing, and wondered how they gave it the skeletal metal legs. The othermother was making a warbling, trilling sound, indistinct. It took Bo a second to realize she was calling someone’s name, over and over.
“Gilly! Gilly! Gilly!” The othermother’s voice was high and syrupy and she never paused to breathe. “Gilly! Gilly! Gilly!”
“Why would they do that?” Bo asked, swallowing bile. “It’s not actually … That’s not really her mom, is it?”
“No,” Violet said casually. “They grow them. Whole batches of them. Like, cloning type thing.” She sh
rugged. “The aliens don’t think how we do, Wyatt says. Not yet, anyway. So to them, sending our moms to come get us, you know, it makes sense.” She gave her no-eyes smile again. “Gross, right?”
“Yeah,” Bo said. “Gross.” But it wasn’t just disgust making him feel sick; it was fear too, and his Parasite could tell. He hoped Violet couldn’t. He was going to have to get near to one of those things. He was going to have to kill it.
“We’ll sneak around it,” Violet said. “No use getting the wrong one all riled up. Then I’ll pick up a few things while you grab your shoes, alright?”
Bo tried to visualize the shoes again, the deep green with dayglow orange slashes and laces. Sitting on the untouched shelf, waiting just for him. It didn’t help any. The Parasite in his stomach curled over and over.
Once Violet had retrieved Bo and his new shoes from the Foot Locker, she took him up to the top of the parkade for a better vantage point. The sky overhead was still a thick nuclear gray and unlikely to change. Violet sat on the hood of a battered white Nissan while Bo watched from the edge, his elbows hooked over the concrete railing.
The othermothers were easy enough to spot, stalking the streets on their long skinny legs, calling in high grating voices. At least a half dozen passed under the parkade, but Bo shook his head after each, until Violet began to suspect he was lying. She pictured Wyatt waiting in the theater and wondered how long it would take for him to start worrying just a little.
She thumbed absently through the new underwear she’d gotten from the La Senza with a shattered front window and dismembered mannequins. Bo’s whisper a minute later was so faint she almost didn’t hear it:
“That’s her.”
Violet slid down off the hood, going to the edge and splaying her fingers on the barrier to steady herself as she peered over.
From the waist up, Bo’s othermother looked mostly human. Her hair was glistening wet, like she’d stepped out of the shower, and it was the same black as Bo’s but less tightly curled. It clung to her over-long neck, not quite hiding the bony nodes of her vertebrae, and plastered over a bulging forehead. She had slim shoulders, a trim waist; the cornflower-blue summer dress looked nice on her, even if it wasn’t appropriate to the season. They hadn’t done her fingers quite right. The digits looked more like the tines of a fork.
Below the waist was nowhere near human. Under the hemline of the dress, her legs were the usual long insect-jointed stilts, mostly metal but with swathes of raw-pink flesh and a hard, shiny sort of keratin.
The mother picked daintily through a gaggle of wasters, looming over them as she started to trill. “Boniface honey Boniface honey Boniface honey!”
“Boniface, huh.” Violet saw the numb kind of terror sneaking into Bo’s eyes and tried to quell it. “That’s worse than Pooh Bear.”
Bo shook himself. He was shaking all over, actually, and Violet felt the strange, hot impulse to wrap herself around him, bury her face in his hair, and tell him it wasn’t real, it wasn’t real, none of this was real. She’d done that for a few of the younger ones and sworn them not to tell.
“Time to see what you’re made of, Bo,” she said. “This goes over your head. And stays there.” Violet peeled apart a pair of panty hose and handed one over. “It helps keep her guessing. If she gets a clean lock on your face, she’ll lunge. Like I said, they’re quicker than you think. And if she starts wafting pheromones …”
“If a mother drops ’mones, don’t breath through your nose,” Bo chanted back to her, pulling the fabric over his head. It made his face warped and shiny, like a burn victim.
“Yeah,” Violet said. “Or else you’ll be following her right back to the warehouses.”
“Never going back there.” Bo’s face was hard under the nylon.
Violet couldn’t say good luck, because Wyatt said luck didn’t exist. “It’s a nice dress,” she said instead. “She must have been really pretty.”
Bo’s throat bobbed. “Yeah.”
“But that’s not her,” Violet enunciated. She nodded her chin toward the exit. “So go.”
Bo went, scampering down the double flight of chipped concrete steps. The panty hose over his head caught his hot breath and held it. His Parasite quivered. Violet had told him, while they waited, that the Parasites ate chemicals. She’d told him adrenaline was their favorite. Bo knew he was full up of it, his limbs all jangling how they’d be before a race. He told himself this was a race, or maybe more like tag, or Marco Polo. He pushed the door open and walked out into the street.
The othermother was turned away. He would have to see her face sooner or later, but even just the blue dress put an ache behind his nose and mouth. His mom had worn it last summer, when she packed them into a friend’s borrowed car and drove them, barefoot, windows down, to the pale-gray beach outside the city. Him and Lia had stuck their arms out the windows, trying to make them ribbon in the wind and sniffing for the sea.
They’d played rock-paper-scissors for the radio—Lia liked Top 40; Bo liked music without words in it. Lia nearly always picked scissors, and Bo nearly always beat her.
Get out of my head, Bo, she’d growled, as Bo gleefully knocked his fist over her two fingers.
Get out, Boniface, his mom had agreed. It’s dangerous, there’s nothing in there but scissors.
Lia’d pursed her lips how she did when she was angry, but laughed a second later. The three of them hadn’t really fought once that whole drive, that whole day.
The othermother still hadn’t noticed him.
“Hey!” he tried to shout, but it came out choked and quiet. He sucked in a breath. “Hey!”
Violet had briefed him on getting their attention, on dangling them, on ins and outs. The othermother’s waist split and rotated with an awful grinding noise and suddenly she was staring down at him, smiling curiously.
“Boniface, is that you?” Her voice tumbled over the syllables like bad text-to-speech. “Shoes off at the door, honey. Put them on the shelf.”
Her legs realigned, stomping a neat circle, then folded down with a series of clicks as she crouched. Bo felt like his insides were thick black tar. Up close, her face was rubbery, like a porpoise he’d seen at the aquarium, and the proportions were wrong, her mouth too wide and gashed into her face. Her eyes looked like black pigment inked onto the skin.
“Boniface, is that you? Shoes off at the door, honey. Boniface, is that you?” The othermother cocked her head to one side, peering at him.
Bo turned away, sucked in air again. He stared down at his pristine Nikes he’d taken while Violet tried on underwear two stores over, and realized he didn’t even want them anymore. He hoped they’d still make him aggressively agile.
“It’s me,” he said. “Come on, then.” He was mustering up a curse, something Violet would hear and know that he wasn’t fooled by the othermother, that he was tough and ready and had the guts to be a Lost Boy. But he’d never sworn in front of his mom, not even when he tore his toenail off at the swimming pool, and he still couldn’t.
Bo started to walk, and the othermother stalked a hesitant step after him.
“Come home for dinner. Dinner’s at six. Boniface, is that you?”
Bo felt saline pricking his eyes, but he knew as long as he didn’t wipe them Violet wouldn’t be able to tell he was crying.
Baiting an othermother was stop-and-go stuff, laborious, but it looked like Bo was getting the hang of it. Violet watched him lure her in close, sometimes too close, and then dart nimbly away each time she reached with her tine fingers, leading her ever closer to the parkade ramp. If the othermother was getting frustrated she made no sign of it. Still cooing and chirping. Othermothers were patient.
Violet remembered her first. Standing with Wyatt in the middle of the abandoned plaza, a stiff wind whipping their hair and clothes. She watched and waited while he unzipped his black duffel and set to sharpening the Cutco butcher knife. When the othermother came wailing for Ivan, Violet knew Wyatt knew about her, but th
ere was no distaste, no embarrassment, no confusion on his face. Not even curiosity. That was when Violet started loving him, or at least lusting him.
Nothing ever shook Wyatt. Hardly anything could startle him. Violet had seen him flinch only once, when she had her fingernails long and was feeling daring and ran them down the back of his arm. The cloudburst fear in his eyes, so brief she almost missed it, was something she’d recognized. She knew Wyatt had scars besides the one on his stomach, and that made her want him more. It made her think, in a small stupid way, that they were perfect for each other.
Down below, there was a problem. Violet frowned. At the mouth of the parkade ramp, the othermother had come to a dead halt, planted stubborn despite Bo’s coaxing. Violet hadn’t seen that before. The mother rotated her waist, spinning and scanning, and Violet ducked instinctively. Othermothers were not supposed to get suspicious.
Violet craned over the edge again and saw the mother swaying, indecisive. Bo was shouting. Pleading, almost. Then, incredibly, the othermother turned and began stalking away. Bo looked as stunned as Violet felt, his small shoulders imploded, his hands dangling slack. He looked up. Violet waved, motioning him to come back up, but Bo shook his head.
She realized what he was going to do a moment before he ripped the panty hose off his face.
Bo let the stifling nylon flutter down to the street as he jogged after the othermother, heart jackhammering his ribs. “Hey!” he shouted. “Hey! Look at me!”
The othermother swiveled her waist without breaking stride, then froze all at once. She lurched into a clacking crouch. “Boniface, is that you? I missed you! Honey. I missed you!” Her head cocked one way and then the other, twisting on the long veiny neck, and Bo looked her right in the eye. She smiled with teeth that were two long white chunks in her gums and—
Lunged.
Bo dove right, then scrambled to his feet as the othermother gathered herself again, leaning back on her haunches like an accordion. She sprang, shrieking through the air, grasping for him with hands that looked more like hooks now, like metal claws. Bo took off. This was not Marco Polo.