Fledgling Page 21

  “All right, Victor. Tell me why you attacked this place.” He frowned. “We had to.”

  “Tell me why you had to.”

  He frowned, looking confused. It was a kind of confusion that worried me since it seemed to me that it could mean only one thing.

  Celia and Brook came into the kitchen, saw us, and stopped. “Come in,” I said. “Did you come to get food?”

  “We missed lunch,” Brook said. “We probably shouldn’t be hungry after all this, but we are.” “It’s all right,” I said. “Eat something. Fix some for Victor here, too. And sit and talk with us.”

  They didn’t understand, but they obeyed. They cooked hamburger sandwiches for themselves and one for Victor Colon. They had found loaves of multigrain bread, hamburger meat, and bags of French fries in the freezer, and had put the meat and bread in the lower part of the refrigerator to thaw. Now, they fried the meat and the potatoes in cast-iron pans on the stove. There was salt and pepper, mustard and catsup, and a pickle relish in the cupboard but, of course, no fresh vegetables. At some point we were going to have to find a supermarket.

  Once they all had food and bottles of beer from the refrigerator, and I had a glass of water, the confused man seemed more at ease. As he ate, he watched Celia and Brook with interest. He was seeing them, I thought, simply as attractive women. He stared at Celia’s breasts, at Brook’s legs. They knew what he was doing, of course. It seemed to amuse them. After a few glances at me, they relaxed and behaved as though Victor were one of us or, at least, as though he belonged at our table.

  Celia asked, “Where do you come from?” Victor answered easily, “L. A. I still live there.”

  Brook nodded. “I went down to Los Angeles a few years ago to visit my aunt—my mother’s sister. It’s too hot there.”

  “Yeah, it’s hot,” Victor said. “But I wish I were there now. This thing didn’t go down the way it was supposed to.”

  “If it had, we’d be dead,” Celia said. “What the hell did we ever do to you? Why do you want to kill us?” Oddly, at that moment she handed him another bottle of beer. He’d already finished two.

  Victor frowned. “We had to,” he said. He shook his head, reverting to that blank confusion that so worried me.

  “Oh my God,” Brook said. She looked at me, and I knew she had seen what I had seen. Celia said, “What? What?”

  “Victor,” Brook said, “who told you and your friends to kill us?”

  “Nobody,” he responded, and he began to get angry. “We’re not kids! Nobody tells us what to do.” He drank several swallows of his beer.

  “You know what you want to do?” Brook said. “Yeah, I do.”

  “Do you want to kill us?”

  He thought about that for several seconds. “I don’t know. No. No, I’m okay here with you pretty ladies.”

  I decided he was getting too relaxed. “Victor,” I began, “do you know me? Who am I?”

  He surprised me. “Dirty little nigger bitch,” he said reflexively. “Goddamn mongrel cub.” Then he gasped and clutched his head between his hands. After a moment, he put his head down on the table and groaned.

  It was clear that he was in pain. His face had suddenly gone a deep red.

  “Didn’t mean to say that,” he whispered. “Didn’t mean to call you that.” He looked at me. “Sorry. Didn’t mean it.”

  “They call me those things, don’t they?” He nodded.

  “Because I’m dark-skinned?”

  “And human,” he said. “Ina mixed with some human or maybe human mixed with a little Ina. That’s not supposed to happen. Not ever. Couldn’t let you and you . . . your kind . . . your family . . . breed.”

  So much death just to keep us from breeding. “Do you think I should die, Victor?” I asked. “I ... No!”

  “Then why try to kill me?”

  Confusion crept back into his eyes. “I just want to go home.”

  “Victor.” I waited until he sat up and faced me. “If you leave here, do you think they’ll send you after me again?”

  “No,” he said. He swallowed a little more beer. “I won’t do it. I don’t want to hurt you.” “Then you’ll have to stay here, at least for a while.”

  “I . . . can I stay here with you?”

  “For a while.” If I bit him a time or two more and then questioned him, I might get the name of our attackers from him—the name of whoever had bitten him before me, then sent him out to kill. And if I got that name, the Gordons would probably recognize it.

  “Okay,” he said. He finished his beer. Celia looked at me, but I shook my head. No more beer for now. “You’re tired, Victor,” I said. “You should get some sleep.”

  “I am tired,” he said agreeably. “We drove all night. You got a spare bed?”

  “I’ll show you,” I said and took him upstairs to our last empty bedroom. I had intended to give it to Theodora. We would have to get rid of Victor soon. Maybe one of the other houses would have room for him. “You’ll sleep until I awaken you,” I told him.

  “Will you bite me again?” he asked.

  “Shall I?” I didn’t really want to, but of course I would. “Yeah.”

  “All right. When I awaken you, I will.”

  “Listen,” he said when I turned to leave. “I didn’t mean to call you ... what I called you. My sister, she married a Dominican guy. Her kids are darker than you, and they’re my blood, too. I would kick the crap out of anyone who called them what I called you.”

  “You only answered my question,” I said. “But I need more answers. I need to know all that you can tell me.”

  He froze. “Can’t,” he said. “I can’t. My head hurts.” He held it between his hands as though to press the pain out of it somehow.

  “I know. Don’t worry about it right now. Just get some sleep.”

  He nodded, eyelids drooping, and went off to bed. I felt like going off to bed myself, but I went back down to the kitchen where Celia and Brook were waiting for me. Wright and Joel had joined them. Wright spoke first.

  “All eighteen attackers are accounted for,” he said. “No one got away.”

  I nodded. That was one good thing. None of them would be running home to tell the Ina who had sent them that they had failed, although that would no doubt be obvious before long. And what would happen then? I sighed.

  Joel seemed to respond to my thought. “So some Ina is sicking these guys on us,” he said. “When he sees it didn’t work this time, he’ll send more.”

  “It seems that way,” I said wearily. I sat down. “I don’t know my own people well enough to understand this. I feel comfortable with the Gordons, but I don’t really know them. I don’t know how many Ina might be offended by the part of me that’s human.” I wanted to put my head down on the table and close my eyes.

  “The Gordons will help you,” Joel said. “Preston and Hayden are decent old guys. They can be trusted.” I nodded. “I know.” But of course I didn’t know. I hoped. “Tonight we’ll talk to the prisoners. Maybe

  we’ll all learn something.”

  “Like which Ina have been trying to kill you,” Celia said.

  I nodded. “Maybe. I don’t know whether we can find that out yet. It may be too soon. But Victor isn’t really injured, so we can begin questioning him tonight. The others, though, they might need time to recover, and they might know things that Victor doesn’t. Or we might just use them to verify what Victor says.”

  “You’re sure you can make Victor tell you what he knows?” Wright asked.

  “I can. So could the Gordons. It will hurt him, though, stress him a lot. It might kill him. I don’t believe any of this is his fault, so I don’t want to push him that far.”

  “You remember that,” he asked, “that your questioning him could kill him?”

  I nodded. “I saw his face when I asked him who I was, and he answered. It hurt him. In that moment, I

  knew I could kill him with a few words. But he’s only a tool—one of eighteen to
ols used today.” “What makes you so sure he’s not a willing tool?” Celia asked.

  “His manner,” I said. “He’s confused, sometimes afraid, but not really angry or hateful.” I shrugged. “I

  could be wrong about him. If I am, we’ll find out over the next few days.” “You’re sure it’s all right to leave him alone upstairs?” Wright said.

  “He’ll sleep until I wake him,” I said. “And when he wakes, I won’t be the only one wanting to question him.”

  seventeen

  I went upstairs feeling tired and a little depressed. I didn’t know why I should feel that way. I was close to finding out who was threatening me, and I had taken a full meal from Victor, which should have restored my energy after all my running around in the sun and blistering my face until it hurt. Somehow, it hadn’t.

  I had taken off my shoes and was lying down on the bed Wright and I usually shared when Brook looked in and said, “Come to my room and lie down with me for a little while.”

  The moment she suggested it, it was all I wanted to do. I slid from the bed and went down the hall to her room.

  I lay down beside her, and she turned me on one side and lay against me so that I could feel her all along my back.

  “Better?” she asked against my neck. “Or is this hurting your face?”

  I sighed. “Much better.” I pulled one of her arms around me. “My face is healing. Why do I feel better?” “You need to touch your symbionts more,” she said. “Temporaries like Victor don’t matter in the same

  way, and Joel isn’t yours yet. You need to touch us and know that we’re here for you, ready to help you if you need us.” She brought her hand up to my hair and stroked gently. “And we need to be touched. It pleases us just as it pleases you. We protect and feed you, and you protect and feed us. That’s the way an Ina-and-symbiont household works, or that’s the way it should work. I think it will work that way with you.”

  I brought her hand to my mouth and kissed it. “Thank you,” I said.

  “Sleep a little,” she said. “It isn’t likely that there will be any more danger today. Take a nap.” I drifted off to sleep in utter contentment.

  “Shori?”

  I awoke sometime after dark and disentangled myself from Brook as gently as I could. I got up, listening. Someone had called my name. Daniel’s voice, not speaking loudly, not in the room with me, not even in the house, but clearly speaking my name to me.

  I didn’t want to wake Brook so I went to the bathroom down the hall. The window there faced the road and the other houses.

  “Yes,” I said aloud, eyes closed, listening.

  “Bring your captive to my house for questioning,” he said. “You can act as his protector, as some of us will scare him.”

  “Other Ina ordered him to kill us,” I said. “He’s their tool, not a willing volunteer.”

  Silence. Then, “All right. Bring him anyway. We won’t hurt him any more than we have to.” “We’ll be over in a few minutes.”

  I went to Wright’s and my bedroom and got my shoes from beneath the bed. Wright was there, snoring softly. I didn’t disturb him. I went back to the bathroom, put my shoes on, and washed my face, all the while thinking about how easily Daniel and I had spoken. I had heard him even though he had not left his house, and he had known that I would hear him. I stood for a moment in the bathroom and listened, focusing my listening first on the guest house where Victor and my four symbionts were all asleep, breathing softly, evenly. Then I focused on Preston’s house and heard a female symbiont tell a male named Hiram that he should telephone his sister in Pittsburgh because she had phoned him while he was out helping with the wounded. A male was trying to repair something. He was cursing it steadily, making metallic clattering noises, and insisting, apparently to no one at all, “It’s not supposed to do that!” And a woman was reading a story about a wild horse to a little girl.

  Of course I had been focusing my listening almost since I awoke in the cave, but I had not been around other Ina enough to know how sensitive our hearing could be. It had never occurred to me that someone could awaken me and get my full attention just by calling my name in a normal voice from another house across and down the road. Had I heard because on some level I was listening for my name? No, this couldn’t have been the first time people talked about me when I wasn’t present or wasn’t awake.

  But it probably was the first time someone so far away had spoken to me as I slept. And perhaps that small thing, the tone of Daniel’s voice alone, had been enough to catch my attention.

  I went to Victor’s room and woke him. Then, because I had promised and because it would help me get information out of him later, I bit him again, tasting him, taking only a little blood. He lay writhing against me, holding me to him, accepting the pleasure I gave him as willingly as I accepted his blood. I found myself wondering whether anyone had ever investigated the workings of Ina salivary glands or tried to synthesize our saliva. It was no wonder that Ina like my father worked so hard to conceal our existence.

  When the bite wound had ceased to bleed, we got up, and I took him over to Daniel’s house where all of the Gordons, except those who had flown up to Washington, waited.

  “What’s going to happen to me?” he asked as we went. He seemed frightened but resigned. He had

  been in Ina hands long enough to know that there was no escape, no way of refusing his fate, whatever it turned out to be.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “You do your best for us, and I’ll do my best for you. Relax and answer all

  questions truthfully.”

  When we reached Daniel’s house, I saw that the Gordons had gathered in the living room. There were no symbionts present. That was interesting. I had not even thought of awakening my symbionts to bring them along. If Victor died tonight, I didn’t want them to see it happen. I didn’t want to confront them

  with the reality of what could happen to them if some Ina who hated me got hold of them. But they knew, of course. They were all intelligent people. They even had some idea of what I could do to them if I were to lose my mind and turn against them. But they trusted me, and I wanted—needed—their trust. They didn’t have to see the worst.

  I sat with Victor. He was alone and afraid, actually shaking. He needed someone to at least seem to be on his side. He was the alien among us, the human being among nonhumans, and he knew it.

  “His name is Victor Colon,” I told the Gordons when we were settled. “Victor,” I said and waited until he looked at me. “Who are they?”

  He responded in that quick, automatic way that said he wasn’t thinking. He was just responding obediently, answering the question with information he had been given. “They’re the Gordon family. Most of it.” He looked them over. “Two are missing. We were told there would be ten. Ten Gordons and

  you.” He glanced at me.

  I nodded. “Good. Relax now, listen to their questions and answer them all. Tell the truth.” I looked at the Gordons. They must know more than I did about questioning humans who had been misused by Ina. I would leave it to them as much as possible.

  Preston said, “What else are we, Victor? What else do you know about us?”

  “That you’re sick. That you’re doing medical experiments on people like the Nazis did. That you are prostituting women and kids. I believed it. Now, I don’t know if it’s true.” He was trembling more than ever. He jumped when I put my hand on his arm, then he settled down a little. “They said we all had to work together to stop you.”

  “How many of you were there?” This was from Hayden, the other elder of the group. They were centuries old, Hayden and Preston, although they looked like tall, lean, middleaged men in their late forties or early fifties, perhaps. Their symbionts had told me they were the ones who had emigrated here from England, arriving at the colony of Virginia in the late eighteenth century.

  “There were twenty-three of us at first,” Victor said. “Some got killed. Jesus, first five guys dead
and now just about everyone else . . . Today there were eighteen of us.

  “Eighteen.” Hayden said nodding. “And were they your friends, the other men? Did you know them well?”

  “I didn’t know them at all until we all got together.” “They were strangers?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But you joined with them to come to kill us?”

  Victor shook his head. “They said you were doing all this stuff . . .” “Where were you?” Preston asked quietly. “Where did you get together?”

  “L. A.” Victor frowned. “I live in L. A.”

  “And how were you recruited? How were you made part of the group that was to come for us?” Victor frowned. He didn’t appear to be in pain. It was as though he were trying hard to remember and