“I’m not,” the kid says, “but I’ve seen enough to know some things.” They tug on my arm until I get up. “Thanks for saving us.”
“What were they doing here?” Drystan asks as he watches the other kids walk through the gaps in the bars that came away with the top.
“Their end goal?” the oldest of the kids asks, shaking their head. “Dunno. This might be surprising, but they weren’t interested in telling us what they were doing.”
“Smart ass,” Keary notes, grinning.
The kid shrugs. “We were taken specifically for what we can do.” They nod toward one crouched on the ground. “Missa heals.” They both look at me, and I realize that Missa is the one who fixed my head. I smile, grateful.
“The humans?” the oldest asks and shrugs again. “I’ve spent my time here trying to piece it together as a means to make the days go by and drown out the screams, but I don’t have an answer.”
“They’re trying to successfully combine a human and a monster,” Missa says. “It’s thewhywe don’t know.”
“Are there others here? Other humans? Other monsters?” Notto asks.
All six children nod.
“There are,” the oldest says. “I don’t know where, but when they kill one, they immediately have another to replace them with.”
My body feels cold. Is this what it felt like to live in this world a century ago? Hunted by monsters. Torn apart so they could reconstruct you. Forced to live through it, even when you prayed for death.
It’s too horrible to fathom. Too awful to imagine. Is there really any wonder why humans are afraid of monsters? That old resentment begins to build in my chest again, but then the imageof Leema—the water monster who’d been tortured by humans for ages—flashes before my eyes.
The truth is obvious. There’s no difference between humans and monsters. Both are capable of true evil, and everyone is their victim. Members of their own kind right alongside members of other species.
Your genetics don’t make you superior. It’s how you treat another living being.
“How about you and Kaida hang out with the kids?” Keary offers, his thumb gently brushing against my cheek. “See what you can learn from them, okay? Maybe grab a shovel and we’ll dig a grave for this innocent man.”
I’m torn between wanting to help them and knowing that I don’t have the stomach for it. In the end, I nod. “Yeah. Okay. Be careful.”
He smirks. “I think I’m growing on you, precious.” His lips press against mine, and I’m guessing he feels how shaken I am when my hands dig into his shirt, not wanting to let him go. Keary’s arms wrap around me, holding me to him for a minute. “It’s okay,” he whispers, lips against my ear. “We’ll keep you safe. Promise.”
DRYSTAN
I love the way you love me exactly as I am, seeing me as a perfect monster when I was created with the sole purpose of death.
It was difficult to know where I was while we were at the garage tearing apart the pod. It felt far too similar to the past. To being a child stuck in a cage, commanded to do as I was told lest I end up like the man on the table.
Thunder and lightning is an instant trigger to panicking. There’s nothing quite like a storm that has the ability to drown me in memories, dragged up from a past long suppressed inside me. If the storm is bad enough, if I’m caught in it, the past can come to life around me as ghosts.
Being surrounded by pods has the same effect at times even though I know I’m in control now. I’m able to fight back, whereas small-child me wasn’t able to.
I’ve come to the conclusion that they beat fear into us from the moment we came out of the womb, and they used that fear to control us.
The reality of the situation is simple. If we’d been able to break free of that fear, we’d have realized that we were stronger than the monsters who kept us. They’d created weapons that far surpassed their strength and means. The only shackles they had to hold us were fear.
It’s a liberating feeling, knowing that I have the strength and power to kill them. I take pleasure in that. It’s therapeutic. The pods that exist now aren’t the same monsters who created, kept, and hurt me—I’m relatively convinced they’re dead—but these monsters are just like them.
It’s cathartic to kill them, to torture them as they’d have done to me, in the ways that they do to their victims now.
My stomach is unsettled when I look at the broken body of the human they’d been working on. It all leads to one very clear conclusion: they’re experimenting on humans again.
We found a heaping pile of bodies in the basement, having been tossed there through the hole in the floor where people used to drive their cars over for oil changes. The living humans were behind a wall of bars in clear view of the dead.
I recognize that fear tactic well. As I stared at the scene, I was the small child being forced to stare at another experiment’s dead body from behind bars. An experiment who’d defied them. Refused to do as they were told. The experiment had once slept in the cage beside mine. Now, their body was completely unrecognizable. I didn’t know exactly what they’d done to them, but it did the trick.
I was fucking terrified.
