“Did you sleep well?” Drystan asks as if he’s the host of the library.
I nod, amused. “Yeah. I always sleep well in the library.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s safe. When I was younger and we’d visit the big library in Nyc City, I used to imagine my parents deciding to leave me there because it’s a safer place than anywhere else in the world.”
Drystan hums.
“You don’t find the outside world… scary?” I ask.
“No,” he answers, shrugging. “I know what true terror is. I lived through it.”
I swear I can see ghosts reflecting in his eyes. “How long were you…” I’m not sure how to ask the question without using the word “torture” or an equivalent.
“I don’t know. We didn’t exactly celebrate birthdays. At best guess, I was eight or nine.”
My stomach churns. The things he’s seen. The horrors he’s been through. “How did you get out?”
His head tilts and focus gets distant. “My group was sent in to kill a family with the living drones. I used to cry the whole time because these families that we were sent to attack were innocent. Our options were to kill them or be tortured for days and days. We mostly won because when they saw they were facing kids, they’d hesitate. That was our advantage. One day, we went in, and one of the kids from my group broke down. She curled up on the ground and begged for them to kill her because she didn’t want to kill anyone else. The monsters we were attacking showed her mercy, promising not to kill her if she sat out of the fight. She did for a short time, then she went around to the rest of us kids and offered us an out. We left the drones to their own devices, and all eight of us kids sat to the side, just where the monster told the girl to sit. When it was over and they killed the drones, they took us to the Harem Project headquarters where we…”
Drystan’s voice trails off. He closes his eyes for a second as he takes a deep breath. “We were shown kindness,” hewhispers. “We were given a life. Forgiven for the murders we’d committed.” He swallows.
Silence settles between us as he stares into the distance. He blinks several times and turns his attention back to me, giving me a wry smile. “Yeah, so...” He shrugs. “I’ve seen real horrors, and I know what pain is. I know what it feels like to kill innocent people and the threat of failing. You only refuse once, and that lesson is learned. There’s nothing left in the world that scares me.”
Chills break out all over my body. “That’s… awful.”
“Silence has only ever done awful things. When you think you’ve seen their worst, you open another door and find that you’re very, very wrong.”
“What happened when you were taken away from Silence?”
“We were allowed to be kids… for a while. The war with Silence was looming. We watched Silence send waves of plagues into the world, and finally, the good monsters were forced into action before there was nothing left to defend. The teko, we were never expected to fight again. We never had to kill or face consequences. Even in the epic war where it was the epitome of good or evil winning, the only expectation placed on us was that we stay within the walls where we’d be safe.
“But the teko were angry. We didn’t want the evil to survive. We didn’t want to give them a chance of winning, so we joined the adults. We fought alongside them to take down Silence and their hundreds of thousands of drones. Their killer beasts. We fought alongside them, and we won. The relatively few left alive in the world are still being hunted like the vermin they are.”
“I can’t imagine,” I murmur.
Drystan gives me a smile. “It’s been a hundred years. Mostly, I’m fine now. There are days that I’m less fine. There are things that trigger aggressive memories that can pull me down into deep, dark rabbit holes, but Notto and Keary are always there topull me out and remind me that I’m safe. That’s not my reality anymore.”
“The pods… They're Silence survivors.”
He nods. “Yep. We got the vast majority of them. We’re talking if there were a hundred-thousand agents—not drones or beasts or whatever, only agents—if there were a hundred thousand, we took out ninety-nine thousand. We destroyed their facilities. Their technology. Their projects. Their software. We destroyed it all. That means if they want to rebuild, they start from the ground with nothing but their memories. But this time, they’re being hunted. This time, there’s no hiding. We’ve also cut them off from the monster world, so they’re left in the destroyed human world that they created. It’s like cutting off their heads and their hands before sending them out into the world to try again.”
Our conversation ends when Keary and Notto’s arguing voices meet our ears again. It’s indistinct at first, but then we catch words here and there.
I’m not sure what they’re fighting about, but I listen as they enter the space again and set the plates down on the table. I reach for one, as does Drystan. Notto and Keary are too busy arguing to eat.
I choose to regard them as entertainment as I eat, trying to determine what it is they’re arguing about exactly.
“Why do you insist on fighting this all the time?” Notto demands. “You’re fucking exhausting.”
“I didn’t ask you to come nor stay. Go away.”
“I’m not leaving.”
“I don’t want you here.”
“I didn’t ask what you wanted,” Notto snaps. “I’m so fucking tired of your lies. I know what you want, but you insist on being a dick.”
