Lenore’s image in the rearview mirror nodded. “And if it’s happening here in small numbers, it’s happening elsewhere in bigger numbers.”
“It’s coming!” that amplified voice called from behind us as we rolled slowly toward the café. “The government says there’s nothing to worry about, but they’re just trying to cover their own asses! We know what’s going on. We recognize the symptoms.We remember the reaping.And we willnotlet it happen again!”
A cheer rang out from the crowd and I looked in the sideview mirror to see people pumping their fists in the air.
“What do you think that was all about?” Lenore asked as Zy turned right into the café parking lot.
I shrugged. “Sounds like there was another shooting.” The news had been consistently horrible since we’d escaped from the Spectacle, but I couldn’t be sure that was any different than it had always been. I hadn’t read much news before I was arrested, but I’d done little else since our escape.
My mom always used to say that there were no green cars on the road in Franklin, Oklahoma, until she’d bought one, then all of a sudden they were everywhere. Because all of a sudden she was more likely to notice them.
The recent spate of bad news could easily have been the green car phenomenon at work. But if that were true, based on the angry mob forming in the rearview mirror, I wasn’t the only one driving a metaphorical green car.
“How long ago was the reaping?” Zyanya asked, and I glanced at her in surprise. Then I remembered that people who grow up in captivity aren’t taught history. Or anything else. Since our escape, Zy had become a sponge, soaking up knowledge everywhere she found it. And retaining it virtually word for word. But she could only soak up what someone else let leak.
“It was in 1986,” I told her. “Four years before I was born. So, thirty years ago.”
My mother had told me many times what the world was like before that, back when humans and cryptids had lived and worked alongside each other. It wasn’t perfect. Humans had feared appearances and abilities they didn’t understand and considered themselves defenseless against.
Cryptids had feared the fact that the larger human population kept everyone else underrepresented in government, a predicament that could—and eventually did—lead to the loss of their civil rights and protections.
But for the most part, people were people, whether they had two legs or four. Whether they had nails or claws. Young werewolves learned to read and write in school, alongside human boys and girls. Restaurants served families of oracles and dryads at tables next to human families. There was a sort of peace, however tenuous.
But all of that was long over by the time I’d started kindergarten in a room full of human-only classmates nine years after the reaping. At that point, cryptids caught pretending to be human would be arrested and placed in labs, preserves or carnivals.
And now, cryptids were more likely to be shot on sight than arrested. Signs in the windows of local businesses reminded people to report any strange or unexplained sightings directly to the Cryptid Containment Bureau—bypassing local law enforcement—at the national hotline number. Flyers handed out at all government buildings and stocked in cardboard stands next to every cash register in town provided “quick lists” of identifiable features for the most common kinds of cryptids, to help citizens accurately report any sightings.
And the really scary thing was that our escape from the Savage Spectacle nine months before was only partially responsible for the renewed public panic. Though obviously we made a convenient scapegoat for any tragedy humanity didn’t want to accept the blame for.
“Things are extratense this week,” I said as we approached the internet café on the corner. “So we need to be extracareful.”
“We’re always careful,” Lenore insisted. And she was right. But the warning was burning a hole on the end of my tongue, and an even bigger one in my heart. I hardly recognized the world I’d grown up in, and I wasn’t sure whether that was because it had changed or because I had.
“It’s my turn to order.” Zyanya pulled our van—the third we’d stolen since our escape from the Spectacle—into an empty spot on the edge of the parking lot. It wasn’t a true panel van, because it had windows down both sides and in the back, but the side windows were covered with a plain white decal you could see out of, but not into, and the rear windows were too deeply tinted to allow nosy passersby to see inside.
Stolen though it was, that van and the four-door sedan parked behind our remote cabin were our most valuable possessions, because there was no safer way to travel for those of us who weren’t—or couldn’t pass for—human. We’d been driving it since before we’d found the cabin, and it was probably past time to find another and steal new plates. But we couldn’t afford to do that until we were ready to leave town.
And we wouldn’t be ready to leave town until after the baby was born.
I eased myself out of the front passenger seat and rounded the vehicle to smile at Zyanya as we headed into the café. It wasn’t her turn to order, but Lenore didn’t mind, and lately it was as much of a risk for me to speak to the barista as for Zyanya to. My face—though thoroughly human—was the most famous from the news coverage of the disaster at the Savage Spectacle. During our escape, the owners had sent in the national guard to bomb the entire compound, killing dozens of innocent cryptids and not-so-innocent guards, whom they’d deemed acceptable collateral damage.
The only upside to that slaughter was that the government couldn’t be sure how many of us had actually escaped. Unfortunately, they were fairly certain that Gallagher and I were among the survivors.
Thankfully, the authorities seemed to have no idea that I was pregnant, and people were usually more interested in my stomach than my face. Well-meaning strangers often stopped me to ask questions about the baby, which made me feel highly conspicuous yet oddly invisible at the same time.
But eventually someone would put two and two together and come up with three—me, Gallagher and the baby. And if we got caught, so would the rest of our fugitive family.
We headed into the café, and while Lenore and I found seats near the window, Zy headed to the counter without asking us what we wanted. We always ordered the same thing. The cheapest thing on the menu: three small coffees. Two regular, one decaf.
Coffee was one of the things I’d missed most when I was first sold into captivity, but now that I was free, for however long that lasted, I was abstaining from the good stuff because I’d read that caffeine was bad for the baby.
Of course, when I’d made that decision, I’d had no idea that afear deargpregnancy could last an entire year. Give or take a month, according to Gallagher. But I chose to believe that after ten and a half months, I wassurelygetting close to the end since, though the father—and possibly the baby—were redcaps, I was thoroughly human.
While I sank into a hard plastic chair at the back of the café, Lenore dragged an extra seat over from another table. She set her slim purse down and picked up a tablet locked into a case that was tethered to the table, and while she began scanning headlines from all the major news networks, I watched Zy order.
In the months since our escape, the cheetah shifter had gotten very good at playing human. As long as she spoke slowly and calmly, she could hold a long conversation without revealing her canines, and despite having grown up with no education at all, the cashier and accounting skills she’d developed when we were secretly running the menagerie far exceeded the experience one needed to order and pay for coffee.
The only thing that worried me was her eyes. Like her teeth, Zyanya’s eyes would always look feline, even in human form, and if one of her over-the-counter noncorrective colored contact lenses ever fell out in front of someone, we were all screwed.
