“None of you are allowed to hurt each other,” I say. “But she will hurt you if you become a threat to me.” I hope they take that warning to heart.
I’m not going to pretend to know how to recognize different species of monsters and what they can do. I’ve definitely seen some spectacular shit in my lifetime, maybe the most impressive being Notto and Keary a few hours ago.
But I’ve also seen what Kaida can do, and her small size shouldn’t be discounted.
“You’re acquainted with the lut?” Keary asks.
“Her name is Kaida,” I answer. “Yes. She found me shortly after my parents died and hasn’t left my side since.”
“Except for the past week,” Drystan muses.
“She was luring the quill-beast away. She’d have found me when we escaped. She always has.”
“And you were teasing when you called him a pet,” Drystan says to Notto, laughing.
“Was I?” Notto answers.
I ignore them and press my face into Kaida’s chest. She’s mostly fur here, but the back of her neck is all feathers. My heart gives a little leap.Fuck, I’ve missed you,I think. There’s a chance that she hears me. Kaida nuzzles the side of my head, and her tail thumps on my legs a couple times in response.
We get up from the ground, and Kaida plants herself at my side as we retake our seats around the fire. Her noseimmediately goes to my ankle that had the quill through it. She roots around the injury for a while, pressing her cold nose against my skin.
Keary seems distracted by Kaida’s presence, his smile now back as he watches her. Since I’m not looking to get choked up, and I think talking about her will bring me there right now, I decide to ask a question to get them talking.
“You keep referring to the group of monsters I’m looking for as pods as opposed to Houses. What’s the difference?”
“A House is a family,” Keary says. “Way back when the world was… densely populated, it was a single family—be that your parental family or your romantic family, depending on what stage in life you were in. I belonged to the House of Ra, which consisted of my parents and me. Notto belonged to the House of Ioa, which was his parents and him.”
I look at Drystan.
He gives me a demure smile. “I belonged to a lab.”
I flinch. “Sorry.”
Drystan shrugs.
“What makes up a House is different now,” Keary continues. “My family was absorbed into another as we worked to redefine our lives in the new normalcy of a world after Silence. Now we’re a group of close families, generally under a common classification. In our case, we’re divine monsters.”
“Two gods and a teko,” I note. Two of them make sense, at least.
“Teko is my species,” Drystan says, then makes a face. “In a way. Teko genetics are all over the place. Some will say that we’re all new, individual species, which is our common denominator, giving us the collective name teko. But from there, we can still be broken down into classes of monsters. There are shifters and healers and demonic affinities.” He waves his hand in an etcetera motion. “That kind of thing. Which actually makes usmore closely, uh, suitable for some families. When I was rescued from the experiment camp, I was given a name instead of a number by a really nice lady. We talked about what I could do and took the label ‘experiment’ off me in an attempt to get rid of the negative connotation associated with it. Now, I’m considered a ‘soul’ by her parameters. Because souls are associated with deities and gods, life and death, souls have been classified as divine monsters.”
“That’s… I have more questions than I started with,” I admit.
“Let’s finish the first question,” Keary says. “Houses are families. Houses tend to live in what you call compounds, where there are tons of Houses forming a city. We share resources and live in communities. That’s the most common way that monsters live—within the compounds—because survival is easier and it allows us to retain some sense of normalcy from the life we had before Silence got their claws on the world around us. Obviously, as you know, some don’t live within compounds for whatever reasons they choose. The pods aren’t families. They’re not even necessarily made up of the same classes of creatures. They’re survivors of the Division of Silence who are attempting to finish what they started.”
My blood turns cold as I stare at them. “Killing off humans?”
“Eh,” Keary says, wiggling his hand back and forth. “Believe it or not, you’re a byproduct of their actual goal. You’re a… tool.”
“You’re a womb to grow experiments,” Drystan says, giving me an apologetic smile.
I frown. “I don’t have a womb.”
“No. Weirdly enough, they’d always gathered males as well. I think they were trying to find a way to use them as wombs. Males were just as much of an experiment as I am, but in a different way. You’re the specimen they’re trying to manipulate. I’m the completed project.”
“I’m disturbed by the way you talk about this as if it’s… just another random birth.”
“When you’ve lived as long as I have while remembering the things you went through, the circumstances around your creation, and being forced to kill innocent people or suffer punishments worse than death for refusing…” He shakes his head. “You learn to cope with it in whatever way works best for you.”
