“You could say that.” He glanced back at Paris, who continued sleeping peaceful, the drugs and the exhaustion of the change keeping him so far down in unconsciousness you probably could have put a bullet in the floor by his head and he’d never have moved. Roan belatedly wondered why he hadn’t given himself a shot too. “What do you want?”

He sighed. Sikorski liked to try and be friendly, liked to show how expansively liberal he was for a cop by being nice and interested in one of his kind, but Roan was too accustomed to scorn, suspicion, and outright hatred to ever trust anyone’s well intentioned kindness. Paris would tell he was far too cynical for his own good, but he thought he had just enough cynicism for his own good. “We have what looks like a homicide via cat here, but there’s some … oddities. I thought we could benefit from your expert opinion.”

Roan closed his eyes and gently but firmly rapped his knuckles on his forehead. Yes, he was awake. “Isn’t this illegal or something? Inadmissible?”

“You’ve been cleared by the courts. Remember, the Parvinder case? Anyways, I’m not asking for a deposition, just a … look around.”

Sniff around is probably what he meant, but he wasn’t about to admit it. Most of the infected had no cat skills when they weren’t transformed; they were just people who had to deal with a really unfortunate problem five days a month. But as a virus child, he had some side effects that lingered no matter what his form, and as such he had a rather acute sense of smell and taste for a Human – much too acute most of the time if you asked him, especially if he was near a men’s room. “I’ll contaminate your crime scene.”

“It’s already been locked down. And it’s not that far from you either, it’s on Pacific Court.”

Something in his gut turned to ice, leaking liquid nitrogen into his bloodstream. “What?”

“815 Pacific Court South. That’s only a couple miles down from you, right?”

He looked at Paris’s sleeping form, huddled underneath the green and red plaid acrylic throw. Close enough that he could have done it last night; someone he could have killed. Although it was a stupid question, he had to ask, “Are you sure they were killed by a cat?”

Sikorski snorted derisively. “Neck torn out, nearly decapitated, gut ripped open by claws? Yeah, I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say cat. You comin’?”

Roan covered the receiver as he sighed. Throat ripped out? Holy shit yes, it could have been Paris; in fact, that had just moved the victim into the most likely category. “Yeah, I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

“Twenty minutes? But you’re -”

“I need my coffee,” he said, and immediately hung up.

He looked at Paris’s huddled form, aware that he didn’t look small even when he was curled up in a fetal position. It was almost impossible for a guy who was six four and broad across the shoulders to ever look small. The courts sometimes made exceptions for crimes committed in cat form, simply because you were legally non compos mentis at the time, although lawmakers were always insisting that wasn’t true, and had passed a law adding legal culpability if you didn’t lock yourself up or voluntarily turn yourself over for detainment at your time of the month.

But when you became a cat, even if you were a virus child like him, you weren’t even remotely human anymore. The higher brain was gone – some said damaged, but he never felt brain damaged in his human form – you couldn’t speak, couldn’t reason; you were simply instinct. And the problem was, those instincts were killer.

He knew he had to go to that crime scene now, if only to confirm or deny what Sikorski had said. If the man had been clawed in the gut first and then had his throat ripped out, he would know it wasn’t Paris who did it, and that knot in his gut could relax.

Because tigers always went for the throat first.

****

He showered quickly, hardly able to stand the smell of himself, and opted for a bottle of cold frappuchino rather than deal with the bother of brewing some. He actually hated the taste of these fucking coffee milkshakes, but the caffeine and sugar punch was powerful, and he was feeling far too wide awake and edgy by the time he drove to Morning Crest, the suburban housing enclave where Sikorski’s murder victim lived.

Pacific Court was a cul-de-sac, and 815 was the second house from the end, a small pre-fab that looked exactly like its neighbors in shape and design, as if someone had erected all these three bedroom, two bathroom dwellings with a large cookie cutter. Even the lawns, almost perfectly weed free and cut so short they seemed scalped, looked the same. The only way to tell the houses apart that he could see was by the color, and 815 was painted an oddly pale, dull green, like the owner had been shooting for Army drab and ended up with a faintly pastel Martha Stewart version of the color. In spite of the color differences, all the houses were painted in pale shades, as if bright colors were against the law.

Damn, he hated this place already, and he just got here.

There was a black and white in the driveway, and ambulance that doubled as a discreet meat wagon behind it, but there was also a very plain silver grey sedan that he knew to be an unmarked car. Probably Sikorski’s, as he didn’t like to be too obvious, although every slightly disreputable person on the planet knew an unmarked cop car when they saw it. Who did he think he was fooling?

Yellow crime scene tape cordoned off the back yard from the front, and a bored looking beat cop stood near the back gate, and moved to intercept as he approached. He held out his i.d. at the kid, who was so young he still had a smattering of angry red acne on his left cheek. “I’m Roan McKichan, Detective Sikorski asked for me.”

The boy – who couldn’t have been more than twenty three – squinted at his identity card as if he expected a fraud. He was gangly, a string bean of a cop, with his hair cut so short it was as buzz cut as the lawn he was standing on, making his head look oddly square. His almond colored eyes were almost lost in the shadow of his prominent caveman brow. He smelled of cheap aftershave and gun oil. “Oh, you’re the …” he petered off as he backed up a step.

Roan briefly considered yelling “Boo!” while mock lunging at him, but he figured Barney Fife here would draw his gun and shoot him. So he settled for a withering stare, that had the desired effect: the kid seemed to squirm in his police issue shoes. He looked down at the ground as he held up the police tape, moving a few steps farther away from him. Roan sighed and shook his head as he ducked under the tape and proceeded through the gate to the back yard.

He paused as the scent of freshly shed blood hit him like a fist. Death rode its current, a sickly sweet smell like rot on top of shit, a disgusting aftertaste to the meaty metallic tang of blood – it was hard to explain to people who had never smelled it before, and didn’t have his sensitive nose.

Breathing through his mouth – a terrible proposition, since he got to taste it even more vividly – he continued onward, into the back yard. It was a small enclosed space, fenced on three sides with those thin slats of plywood that always looked like Popsicle sticks to him. Why did people get those? They could be kicked in by toddler, so it couldn’t be for security purposes, and they were as ugly as sin, so it couldn’t be for aesthetic purposes either. What was left?

There were a few shrubs, an overgrown juniper, a wild butterfly bush as large as a small tree, a birch in the corner with white peeling bark, and a knocked over green plastic garbage can, although either the garbage had been picked up or had remained inside it in spite of the upset. There was no obvious ingress – the cat had jumped the fence, or the victim had left the gate open or unlocked.

There was still some of the forensic team here, a short, stocky woman and a taller but equally stocky man in disposable white suits and latex gloves crouched on the poured concrete patio, doing something undoubtedly skin crawling to the large stain of blood that had discolored the majority of the concrete.

Standing on the back lawn, amidst puddles of gore, was Sikorski, who waved him over. “Careful where you step,” he said, with what seemed to be an inappropriate smile. He was a tall man, a little too solid to be called lanky, although much of his weight was starting to settle in his gut. His hair was now wire grey, with strands of his driftwood colored hair lost amongst the silver. His face was open and avuncular, the crinkles in the corners of his pale blue eyes making them seem kindly, like you just knew that in a game of good cop/bad cop, he was always the good cop. He was in his late forties, although he could pass for older or younger depending on how much sleep he’d gotten and what kind of day he was having. He’d obviously had much sleep, and in spite of his day starting with a grisly homicide, it’d otherwise been dandy.

Avoiding the unmistakable puddles of blood on the ground, he noticed a change in the taste of the air. Glancing down, he asked, “It killed his dog?”

Sikorski chuckled, but it was humorless. “Damn, you’re good. Only it wasn’t his dog, Sherlock, it belonged to the neighbors. Its name was Amber, and it was a pretty sizable Rottweiler mix, according to the real owners. We only found about a quarter of it, mainly guts and a back leg. We’re still looking for its head. The neighbors claimed they heard nothing, not even Amber barking.”

“No one ever hears anything. I don’t know why you bother asking.” He turned towards the patio, now vacated by the last of the forensics team. The blood splash on it was enormous, a wine dark stain that relegated the true color of the concrete to the outer edges. “Took out the carotid and the jugular, huh?”

“In a single chomp, as far as we can tell. This sucker must have been a big one, ‘cause Hank wasn’t a small guy.”

He glanced over his shoulder at him, studying him curiously, assiduously keeping the fear off his face. Paris was moving up continuously on the suspect list. What was he going to do when reasonable doubt became a certainty? “You sound familiar with the victim.”

“I was. Well, I knew of him. His name was Hank DeSilvo, an ex-cop.”

“I never heard of him.”

Sikorski just shrugged, the shoulders of his slightly rumpled and wholly stereotypical trench coat barely moving. “He worked uptown patrol; you probably never ran into him. He retired out about two months ago.”

“He that old?”

“No, it was due to health issues. He’d been hospitalized twice for bleeding ulcers within the past six months, so he just hung up the badge.”

“Should guys with bleeding ulcers be drinking so much beer? I’m smelling alcohol in the blood, and somehow I doubt it was the dog.”

Again that humorless chuckle, one just north of a snicker. “That’s creepy how you do that. I don’t think it’s wise for a man with a bleeding ulcer to be drinking, but you’re right, he was; we found two empties and a third can, half full, on a coffee table inside the house. The t.v. was still on ESPN.”

He nodded, catching the splattered drops of reddish-black blood on the house’s siding. The blood’s spatter pattern seemed to indicate a quick, violent kill, a single throat bite severing several arteries at once – another possible check in the tiger column. “What’s the story, so far as you can tell?”

Sikorski cleared his throat, and his voice dropped into its “just the facts, ma’am” register. “Hank was watching the tube, having a few, when he heard or thought he saw something in his backyard. He decided to confront it, and pulled out an illegally sawed off shotgun. He came out, but before he could fire a shot, he was pounced on and killed. That’s our best guess at this point.”

“A pretty straightforward narrative. But even with a sawed off, why would he come out here to confront a big cat, even if it was killing the neighbor’s dog?”

Sikorski shrugged with his hands, a helpless gesture that encompassed the crime scene. “You’ll have to file that one under the “I have no fucking idea” category. If he’d only had three domestic beers, there’s no way he was too drunk to know better.”

“Maybe something else brought him out here?”

He snorted, his eyes twinkling with dark mirth. “With a sawed off? How paranoid can one man be?”

Roan met his gaze flatly, wondering inwardly if he’d ever turn Paris in. If Paris found out about it, he’d probably turn himself in, but Roan couldn’t see handing him over to the authorities. Not for an ex-cop’s death especially; that was a good way to get to kitty heaven right quick. “I’m really not the one you should ask. And the cat wasn’t wounded and didn’t mark its territory; I smell nothing beyond blood, death, and dog here. Am I done?”

“Not quite.” Sikorski turned and motioned one of the forensics team over, the stocky woman in the disposable jumpsuit that he recognized seeing her straight on. It was her dishwater blond hair and penchant for tortoiseshell glasses that gave her away as Lise Slavin, the forensic tech everyone called “Slab”. That was apparently what passed for humor among the forensic people.

She brought over a plaster mold sealed inside a clear plastic bag, already marked and labeled as part of the evidence chain. It was a partial paw print, he could see it as Sikorski took it from Slab and handed it to him. “We got a partial print, left in bloody mud, but our so called paw print expert left scratching his head. Do you recognize it?”

It was just a side of the main pad, and one and a half “toes”, but there was something odd about it. Maybe it was the simple distortion from stepping in mud, from the cast being made, or both, but the toe pads seemed almost thin, too close together, while the main pad seemed to indicate an almost heart shaped curve. Not tiger, not if it was correct … but this was too partial, too inconclusive. He couldn’t say it wasn’t a tiger, not one hundred percent. He couldn’t say what it was.

>He noticed Sikorski staring at his hand. “What?”

Sikorski seemed slightly startled to be caught staring. “I was just wondering what that tattoo was. Looks kinda weird.”

Roan had it on the underside of his right wrist. Done in thick black lines, Paris had described it as looking like a woman’s hair do done in a flip – it was a sinuous curve, almost an inverted U shape, starting with a low curl at one end, the curve rising slightly, and ending in a less elaborate curl at the other end. “It’s the symbol for the astrological sign Leo,” he explained, studying the cast closer. He wanted so badly for genuine proof that cleared Paris, it seemed like a universal slap in the face that all he got was “maybes”.

“Oh. I didn’t realize you believed in that shit.”

“I don’t.” He handed him back the mold, and repeated, slowly this time, “It’s the sign for Leo.”

It took a moment, but the penny finally dropped. “Oh! That’s what you are, right, your strain? Lion? I get it now. Explains the hair, I suppose.”

He scowled, and considered punching him, but as a general rule he didn’t punch men who had the ability to arrest him unless they really asked for it. Whenever he mentioned it or someone figured out he was a lion, the jokes about his hair ensued. He had no idea if there was a correlation, but the hair on his head grew in thick and fast; a severely short hair cut would last maybe two weeks, and then he’d be back to what he had now, a shoulder length “mane” of reddish brown hair. (For some reason the hair on his face didn’t grow in that fast, but he was glad, or he’d have to shave five times a day.) Roan couldn’t bring himself to tie it back in a ponytail, he didn’t want to look like a dick, so he just ended up hacking most of it off every two weeks or so like clockwork. It was always growing back thick and fast, like grass on a gravesite. “Your paw print expert had no guesses to the strain?”

Sikorski handed the mold back to Slab, who took it without comment, remaining grim lipped throughout. “No. He speculated maybe cougar, but I’ve never heard of a cougar quite as big as we’re speculating.”

“Neither have I.” There were five separate strains, in order of commonality: cougar, lion, leopard, panther, and tiger. Cougars were common, and while just as dangerous as every other cat, didn’t do much in the way of collateral damage; on the other end, tigers were exceptionally rare, one in three thousand infected basically, and mostly that was due to the fact that only one in ten tigers survived their first transformation. It seemed to be the hardest on the body, although there were some who thought it was some kind of built in safety, since tigers were the strongest, most deadly, and caused the most collateral damage. (Whether you believed the “safety” theory or not depended on whether or not you believed that the virus was engineered, like the conspiracy theorists who first floated the idea.) A tiger could have easily eaten a Rottweiler, chewing its head like an ice cube. “Sorry Gordo, I don’t think I can help either. Let me know if something more telling turns up in forensics.”

He’d started walking away, casting furtive glances around the yard in hopes of catching something they had missed (something that screamed “not tiger”), when Sikorski said, in a deceptively casual way, “Where were you last night?”

He froze, then after a moment when he let the anger come and ebb away, he turned to face the older homicide detective. “On a case, actually, I was snapping pics of a cheating husband nailing his best friend’s secretary. They’re all digitally time stamped, if you’d like to check.”

Sikorski kept his expression easy and guileless, but Roan knew better than to trust it. “I doubt that’d be necessary, Roan. What about that … friend of yours?”

“Can’t say boyfriend? Lover? Fuck buddy?” he spat, with more rage than he anticipated. The lingering beat cop and the stragglers of the forensics team all looked back at him in varying degrees of surprise. He didn’t know if they were shocked he was gay, or shocked that he was so damn angry about it. But Sikorski’s expression remained placid, the smallest of insincere smiles curving his lips. “He was with me,” Roan lied, not sure what he was doing but still unable to stop himself. “He was following the secretary while I was tailing the husband.”

“Sounds like quite a case.” In spite of his pleasant expression, he caught a faint whiff of derision.

“It pays the bills,” he snapped, then turned on his heel and quickly left the crime scene.

That could have gone better. But if Sikorski actually bothered to do a follow up, things were bound to get worse.

Not that it mattered. The only light currently in the house was coming from the television, and as long as he ignored it, he developed enough adequate night vision to make out a shape moving in the back garden. Or was it the wind moving a shrub? Kind of hard to say.

He slammed his can down with an annoyed grunt. It was probably the Hindle’s stupid ass dog again, shitting all over the place and tearing through his garbage. He hated that fucking thing, some ugly Rottweiler mix that they insisted was a “friendly” dog and yet it always had a look in its flat black eyes that was just this side of rabid. They never leashed the damn thing either, and apparently his yard destruction was “cute”. He was just about out of this fucking place and that damn thing had to make a final appearance. And it was final all right; he was going to make damn sure of that.

He went back to the living room, glancing at the game as he walked past – it was a fucking damn boring game anyways – and got his shotgun from the cabinet. It was illegal as all hell, a sawed off thirty ought six with the barrels so short you could have stowed it under a jacket, but the barrels had been filed down expertly; it wasn’t just the rough work of a desperate amateur but the sign of a pro. Which was why when they searched the drug mule’s truck and he found it wedged under the front seat, he hid it in his trunk and didn’t report finding it. It wouldn’t have added that much to his sentence anyways; he already had enough rock in his glove compartment to put him away for the rest of his pointless life, especially if it was his “third strike” (and it was, no surprise there), and he doubted the guy was so stupid that he’d actually ask why he wasn’t charged with owning an illegally modified weapon. Yeah, he was dumb, you had to be dumb if you were speeding and had a few thousand in rock in the car, as well as being obviously stoned yourself, but asking after that was a special kind of stupid, the kind only politicians and people on reality television ever seemed to crest.

He cracked open the gun and made sure he had some shells loaded in it before snapping it shut again with a sharp flick of his wrist. Man that felt good. This was a real man’s weapon, made him feel a foot taller and made of pure muscle, and he knew why that meth fuckhead was carrying it around with him. A weapon like this was a real god killer; it made you feel invincible.

It was pure overkill, of course. The Hindle’s dog was fairly big, and yet one shot from this gun would rip it in half clean down the middle, as well as make a boom loud enough to set off every car alarm on the block. But what the fuck did he care? He was an ex-cop; he’d say the dog charged him, and on his property, he could shoot the fucking thing if he wanted. He’d swap out the sawed off for his Remington before they arrived. Ballistics wouldn’t match, but by the time they proved that, he’d be long gone. Good bye shithole city, hello tropical paradise. It was just a shame that it took him this long to collect.

He stood at the back door for a moment, cradling the shotgun gently, and let his eyes get adjusted to the dark before going out onto the concrete patio. He had a mini MagLite with him with a red lens over the bulb, so if there was something he needed to see he could twist it on without losing his night vision. Not that he needed to make a direct hit; even if he just winged the dog, he’d probably rip half its face off, maybe a leg.

First step off the patio his foot squelched in something, although it felt too liquid to be shit, and the smell that hit him was meaty, redolent of shit and offal and god knew what else. Had that fucking dog already strewn his garbage about? Goddamn it.

Holding the shotgun in one arm, he turned on the flashlight and looked down at what he stepped in.

At first it looked like a puddle, which didn’t make sense since it hadn’t rained in a week, and the thought that it was dog piss was dismissed since it was dark, and dog piss wasn’t usually black. Or was that red-black? Swinging the light outwards, he saw greasy, ropey strands that couldn’t have come from his garbage can, and then a big hunk of raw, bloody meat like a lamb shank … only it was too long and thin to be a shank, too dark, and ended in a paw.

It was a Rottweiler leg.

Someone – something – had dismembered the Hindle’s psychotic dog and spread about a third of it all over his back yard. He saw the leg, which was the biggest piece, an assortment of internal organs, loops of intestines laid out like fallen party streamers, and lots of blood. But where was the other two thirds of the dog?

The hair stood up on the back of his neck, and he knew he had to get the fuck inside now. But as he turned, shotgun at the ready and braced against his hip, he saw the flash of white teeth in the dim moonlight, and his brain sent out the impulse to pull the trigger.

He didn’t have time to wonder why it never happened as the teeth ripped open his throat.

****

According to the movies and several t.v. shows of questionable reputation, being a private detective was a thrilling occupation, or at least a somewhat exotic one. Roan wondered if that was ever true.

Right now he was just awash in the exotic drama. He was seeing the sunrise coming over the freeway as he fought off yet another yawn, and forced himself to gulp the horrible transmission fluid that the 7-11 laughingly called coffee in the hopes of staying awake long enough to get home. He hated living so far out in the middle of nowhere, but it was for the best for several reasons. He liked his privacy; in fact, he required it. So did Paris.

And he was coming back from his exotic case du jour, namely taking photos of a man meeting his mistress at a fleabag no-tell motel, getting enough pics of them in compromising positions (it was nice of them to go to a sleazy motel with few good photo angles, and then fuck in the car) that his client was sure to have grounds for voiding their pre-nup. She’d clean up big time in divorce court, and he’d still get nothing more than his measly hourly fee and applicable expenses. It was so much glamour he could hardly stand it. Just add a breakfast burrito and a bad case of hemorrhoids, and boy howdy, there was the dream. Raymond Chandler, eat your heart out!

He supposed he shouldn’t complain, because at least he got out in the field, even if it was in the side of town where burning cars on the side of the road had become a point of interest in the tourism brochures. Most of the work he did was background checks and credit checks, all easily done from his computer at home or in the office, and the occasional missing persons case or what Paris liked to call the “Springer cases” (cheating spouses/significant others/whatever the hell). Those Springer cases made you feel nice and sleazy, like you were a voyeur participating in the acts, but the worst thing as far as Roan was concerned was the reaction from some of those suspicious lovers/spouses when he told them their fuck buddy wasn’t cheating on them. Most were relieved, which was fine, but the ones he abhorred, the ones that really made him hate the human race, were those who insisted that they were cheating. Either he hadn’t looked hard enough or were working with the goddamn bitch/bastard. Rather than be glad, they were sure there was something wrong and that their partner couldn’t be trusted. His advice – for them to break up with their significant other and move on, because clearly they were unhappy and trying to pin the blame on their partner – was generally met by rage, snits, and threats of physical violence. He kind of hoped they would try something with him, but so far no one had. He wondered if they knew he was one of the viral children; certainly the cops had for the very brief time he was on the force. He was pretty sure two years was more than enough time to make him anonymous again, but you could never really be certain. It didn’t help that he had a freaky ass name like Roan McKichan, an almost aggressively Scottish name that almost no one could pronounce properly. (For some reason, many people liked to pronounce Roan “Ro-Ann” – did he look like a woman? – and McKichan was usually pronounced “McKick-In” or “McKitchen”. They seemed absolutely baffled that the I was pronounced like an E, and it was McKee-ann, which some people liked to tell him wasn’t at all the way it was spelled.) At least he teamed up with a man with a name even worse than his: Paris Lehane. Yes, they could easily pronounce it, but he always faced the question: “Like Paris Hilton?”

Roan liked to say yes, yes exactly like Paris Hilton. Only he wasn’t a skanky blonde heiress with no discernable talent and a disturbing nose; he was a man who looked like the athlete he had been before he was infected and went a bit nuts, and he had some discernable talent. Perhaps he had the bit nuts thing in common with Hilton – she was probably so heavily medicated, you couldn’t tell.

Finally he turned down the gravel drive leading to the house, yawning all the while, and he parked behind the ‘68 GTO Paris had been attempting to restore in his free time. The body needed a lot of work still – there was quite a bit of rear end damage, rust spots marring the fender, and the left side was dotted and splashed with primer – but there was no fear of anyone stealing it, because Paris had pulled out the engine to rebuild it, and it was currently spread out on a tarp on the floor of the garage. If someone wanted to steal his GTO, they’d need a tow truck.

He dumped out the sewer mud jokingly called coffee on the side of the driveway, then tossed the cup in his car garbage can as he grabbed the bag containing his laptop and digital camera, which were also known as the backbone of his business, and headed for the house.

He shouldered the bag as he dug out his keys, and wondered if he should bother to be quiet. It was Paris’s time more or less, right? They ran on different viral cycles, and sometimes when he got caught up in work, he’d forget. If it was his time, he’d be in the basement, so he didn’t have to worry about being quiet – not for now at least. Later on he might be pissed at him, but he’d deal with that later, once he was rested and fully caffeinated.

But as soon as he was in the door, he knew something was wrong.

It was several things all at once. When he closed the door, a puff of wind seemed to move through the house, bringing with it a taste of fresh outside air. There was also another scent wafting after it, one of pain and the musky smell of a cat mixed inextricably with that of a human. Altogether it was like sour milk with a hint of flesh, iron, and fresh cut grass. Not only weird, but immensely troubling. “Paris?” he asked, alarmed, putting his bag on the side table before venturing into the living room.

What awaited him there looked like the aftermath of an explosion. Half of the sliding glass door leading to the backyard had been shattered into pieces, broken glass sparkling like fractured diamonds on the slate grey outer deck, and the curtains were partially torn down, the fabric bellowing in the breeze like a collapsed sail. An armchair had been reduced to kindling with random clots of stuffing, and the coffee table was tipped over, its legs sticking up in the air like a dead insect. On the floor between the table and the couch, naked and curled up in a fetal position, was Paris, semi-conscious and panting through the pain. He looked totally human, his skin slicked with sweat, but when his eyelids flickered open, he could see his eyes were still almost totally amber, the whites mere spots in the corner, his pupils still dark vertical slits. It was common that the eyes were the first to change and the last to go. “I’m sorry,” he gasped. “I fell asleep upstairs, and when I woke up … I tried to get downstairs, but …”

“It’s okay,” he lied. Considering Paris’s strain, him getting out was never a good thing. Not only was he quite noticeable, but the amount of damage he could do was extraordinary; they were lucky to have just lost some furniture and a sliding glass door. He hoped that was the extent of it all, but Roan was not a natural optimist. That’s why they lived out here, in the middle of nowhere, far from other people: less chance of collateral damage if everything went wrong.

They had an emergency first aid kit in the downstairs bathroom, so he retrieved it, sorting through the contents on his way back. Most first aid kits were full of gauze, band-aids, and Neosporin, but this one was custom made for them. Meaning it was full of disposable hypodermics and lots of painkillers. After his transition, he ached, but it wasn’t too bad. Then again, he was a virus child, and they were different; the virus integrated into their DNA fully, rendering them slightly different than those who started out human and later became something else. He heard for them that the pain was excruciating, and often hastened their deaths. Paris seemed to be living proof of that.

He loaded up a needle with the fentanyl analogue he picked up last time he was in Canada. Not only was it cheaper and easier to get there, but they didn’t ask so many questions if you identified yourself as an infected. They just assumed you wouldn’t make such a thing up.

He knelt down beside him, and stabbed the needle in his butt. He was in so much post-transition pain he didn’t even notice. He looked up at him, the amber receding but the pupils still slits, and said, “I’m so sorry …”

“Don’t worry about it,” he assured him. There was no point in worrying about it now; what’s done was done. He couldn’t turn back time and sling Paris in the cage in the basement.

Paris sighed and his whole body seemed to relax as the drug took effect. His muscles stopped spasming like they were trying to burst out of his skin like angry aliens, and he seemed to sag into the carpet bonelessly, not so much losing consciousness as slowly sliding out of it.

Roan grabbed the throw off the couch and spread it over him, deciding to get down on the floor and lay down beside him, wrapping his arm around him for comfort. Paris leaned back into him, glad for the contact. “You don’t think I hurt anyone, do you?” he muttered, his voice fading away.

“We live in the middle of nowhere. Who could you hurt?” But even as he said it, he knew if Paris had been closer to consciousness, he would have heard the hesitation in his voice. Yes, they lived in the middle of nowhere, but it wasn’t really that far from people, and a little less than a mile away was one of those suburban housing projects that seemed to spring up like toadstools. Paris easily could have covered the distance, eaten an entire family of four, and still have had most of the night to kill – so to speak.

If only the strain reflected the character. Paris was the kind of man who wouldn’t hurt a soul … and yet he ended up with the fiercest strain of them all. Roan knew himself to be a darker, harder person, and yet Paris’s strain could kill his with little trouble.

Like he needed one more reminder life wasn’t fair.

After Kvec returned Blue to her tank, he came back for the comatose Khal and carried him back to his room, as no one was sure what else to do with him. The Nyorai simply wasn’t built to take care of injured people, beyond its store of nanites. And poor Kvec got all the shit jobs since he was the strong one that wasn’t squeamish: after taking care of Khal, he was left to drag the bodies of the Tk’Tk’Skree to the airlock so they could be jettisoned out into space. There wasn’t much else they could do with them.

In the meantime, she, Gen, and Skr’Takk were debating over what to do with the Tk’Tk’Skree ship. Dar felt it was best left behind, it could do them no good, but Gen wanted to go over and take a quick look around before they abandoned it, on the off chance there was something “useful” over there (meaning something they could sell on the black market), while Skr’Takk thought she could neutralize the transponder and take the ship for herself. The debate was pointless, mostly because no one intended to concede the sense (if there was any) in each other’s position.

Vani stayed in Khal’s room, hovering over him, monitoring his coma, although there was nothing she could do. Vani didn’t like feeling useless, so she was starting to show rare signs of distress. Mainly scale molting, although she also developed an eye twitch.

They had just reached the end of the system when Khal woke up.

To say he looked pale was to say that space was black: a statement of the obvious, and yet inadequate. He was the color of curdled milk, his lips bloodless, his eyes still angry red with broken blood vessels. Vani seemed startled that he was awake already, but before she could say anything, Khal sat up, and said, “I know what happened.”

He proceeded to tell them what had happened on that moon, how MoSys were trying to utilize technology that the Tk’Tk’Skree didn’t want them to have, and how MoSys had found a perfect code in the “songs” of the Cryers; it was a language that didn’t actually sound like a language, and was almost impossible to translate without an actual Cryer there to do it. The deal MoSys broke was simply a case of overreaching their bounds, bounds imposed on them by the Tk’Tk’Skree. It sounded plausible and logical, and jibed with what little evidence they had. But there was one thing wrong with all of it. “How do you know this?” Dar wondered.

He made a noise that could have been a scoff, but was too anemic. He slid his legs off the bed and sat on the edge, looking like a reanimated corpse. “I honestly have no fucking clue. My powers just seemed to go nuclear on me.”

“We did notice that part. How long have you had powers like that?”

“I assume I was made with them, they just aren’t easy to access.” He stood up with the pained carefulness of an elderly man introduced to gravity after a time away from it.

“You sshould ssit,” Vani suggested so politely it was difficult to tell it was an order.

He shook his head, but it was clearly making him dizzy so he stopped. He found a shirt and pulled it on, then grabbed a pair of pants, but rather then risk his precarious balance he sat back down to wrestle them on. “I’m sorry, but there’s something I have to do.”

Dar assumed he was delirious, but his medical readings were incredibly steady. “What is it you think you have to do?”

“I have to let MoSys know that they can’t use us like this. We’re people, not property.” He struggled his pants on, and almost fell off the edge of the bed while doing so. It would have been amusing – in a pathetic sort of way – if he hadn’t been so serious about it all.

“Uh huh. And how do you plan to do this?”

He looked up at one of her sensor nodes, scowling. “You think I’m full of shit.”

“No, it’s just that you’re not well Khal.”

That earned a scoff. “I know. I’m a bomb, I went off. But I think I have another blast in me.”

Vani glanced up at the node, clearly concerned he was rambling like a crazy person. Was there any way to talk to a person in his state that didn’t come off as patronizing? It was a conundrum. “I’m not understanding this. Could you explain this to me?”

He rolled his bloodshot eyes, as if he knew what she was doing. “I’m dying, Dar, I don’t really have the time to sit and chat. Just do me a favor and head towards the far colonies or the mine reaches. I’m going to buy you some time, so use it, stay under the radar. And tell Kvec I’m sorry, okay?”

How wonderfully ominous. “Sorry about what?”

“Abandoning him.”

She wanted to press on, but the strangest thing happened – Khal stared up at her sensor node, and suddenly everything went black.

****

She came to with the ship streaking onward at full speed, the solar wind caressing the hull of the ship, her skin, as it moved like a bullet towards the nearest transit gate.

“Bruno,” she asked, replaying her last recorded memory. “What the hell happened?” The replay wasn’t at all illuminating.

“Technically? Fuck if I know.”

“Bruno.”

“Well, it’s like this – everybody fell asleep, except Khal and Blue, and he told me that I had to get everyone as far from MoSys space as possible as fast as possible, and you’d all wake up as soon as we were outta their range. Can’t say it made a lotta sense t’me, but he said that was just how it was gonna work. Then he had me grapple the Tk’Tk’Skree ship in, and he an’ Blue took off in it.”

She would have asked him to repeat that, but she got it; it just didn’t make that much sense. “Since when does Khal have the power to put us all to sleep?”

“Since when does he have the power to kill a bunch of bugs?”

Fair enough. She quickly accessed all her eyes across the ship, and discovered that Gen and Skr’Takk were still sleeping, but Kvec and Vani were starting to wake up, and looked just as confused as Dar felt.

Vani had fallen asleep on the floor of Khal’s quarters. As she looked around and shoved herself to her feet, she asked, “Are thhings ass bad ass I thhink thhey are?”

“Undoubtedly.”

What the hell did Khal think he was doing?

***

The alerts started coming in at twenty hundred hours median.

The automated sentinels reported a Tk’Tk’Skree warship headed not just into MoSys federated space, but headed straight towards corporate headquarters. All ships that went out to intercept fell oddly silent without firing a shot, although they still existed and hadn’t disappeared inside their own micro singularity. Someone at HQ assumed this was a further power play on the Tk’Tk’Skree’s part, a show of force, and rather than engage dialogue was attempted by the negotiators. All negotiators who attempted to make contact fell almost instantly into a deep sleep without saying a word. When the automated weapons system went live, they were quickly neutralized by the Tk’Tk’Skree weapons, although the micro-singularity weapon was not deployed. It was impossible to say if that was good news or bad.

There was no one MoSys centrality, but the Hub was considered the heart of the corporation, its main headquarters. It was a triumph of MoSys engineering, a space station roughly the size of the old Earth country Japan, but with a rather meager population, made up of CEOs, bureaucrats, higher level functionaries and the support staff that took care of them. It was also home to the main gengineering complex, although by now they had scattered the modifying tanks into the rim worlds and the settled territories. Top of the line MoSys warships guarded the Hub, but before the word to engage them even came down, ship’s crews started dropping into the same near comas that had hit the negotiators. Even with superior Tk’Tk’Skree technology, one ship wasn’t believed to be enough to be considered a declaration of war, so in good faith – and what was believed to be a public relations first strike – the way was ordered clear, with no one to make any further hostile moves on the ship. (It wasn’t doing any good anyways.)

It stopped just outside the Hub’s gravity well, and finally sent a message, but it wasn’t what anyone was expecting. The view screen showed an Adar model negotiator, much too pale for his genome, bleeding from his nose, with some weird bulbous alien perched on his shoulder like a bizarre deep space parrot. It was blue, with huge eyes on swiveling stalks above its head, and it had a tentacle wrapped around his back and neck. There would be long and hard debate over whether it was controlling him. “The secret is now officially out,” he proclaimed, and the message was being broadcast to all within range of the Tk’Tk’Skree transmission. “Negotiators are actually suicide bombers when things go completely to shit. As if it’s not bad enough that we spend our short lives feeling everyone else’s pain. I don’t think MoSys feels enough pain.” His eyes were now bleeding, leaving thick red lines down his cheeks that could have been tear tracks. “Let’s change that, shall we?”

The recordings left behind were not quite sufficient in explaining what exactly happened. After his threat he cut transmission, and everyone on the Hub save for a single group fell into comas.

The single group untouched were the gengineered fresh from the tanks, awaiting training, or awaiting assignment. They reported hearing screaming, but by the time they emerged into the station proper, all was quiet, and everyone seemed to be unconscious.

And no one would wake up.

Epilogue

It was funny how could you could spend such a long time with a person and yet never really know them.

Kvec liked to come and sit in Khal’s room, stare at Blue’s empty tank, and wonder what happened.

It was six months ago when the corporate population of MoSys Hub fell into comas – they were still there as far as he knew, alive but totally unreachable – and Khal apparently died of what was called a “terminal cranial event”, some kind of code for the brain tissue meltdown that killed many a Negotiator. It wasn’t clear what killed Blue, although it was assumed she had simply been out of water too long.

Debate had raged about what Negotiators were, and it continued unresolved. MoSys claimed they were simply negotiation and communication “tools”, not weapons, but what Khal had accomplished proved otherwise, and MoSys were having great difficulty spinning it into something benign. That didn’t keep them from trying.

The situation between MoSys and the Tk’Tk’Skree was precarious. War hadn’t been declared, but mainly because each side wasn’t completely certain about the other side’s weapons. It was an uncomfortable stand off, and any day it could erupt into something nasty and irreversible. But doubts about the abilities of the negotiators were keeping the Tk’Tk’Skree from killing them all … for now. How long that would last was unknown.

Life had gone on for them, and Khal had been right – they had dropped far below MoSys’s radar, namely because they had a billion more worrisome problems than a stolen ship with a rogue crew. Someday they might care again, but the heat was currently off, and they managed to enjoy it for a while.

Running scams were a bit harder without him, but so far they managed. Gen still didn’t get how the “junkie squid fucker” turned into a weapon of galactic destruction, but no one talked too much about Khal anymore; it was just too uncomfortable, and no one knew what to say.

He did miss him, possibly more than most. He – and Kvec always felt weird thinking of himself as a “he”, a soft meat term that just didn’t apply to his people – could talk to Khal like no one else. Oh, he could communicate with the others, send them messages and see responses in return, but it wasn’t the same.

He had some hope, though. Khal was one of a type, and there were other types like Khal out there, just with different names. And different abilities? Perhaps; perhaps not. It was that doubt that was holding an uneasy truce, that was keeping people from engaging in mass extermination of negotiators. They were also going rogue in record numbers, although MoSys officially denied this – but even they were afraid to bring the hammer down on their own creations. They’d created something that scared even them, and they weren’t sure they could contain it.

They were in the far colonies now, and Kvec had some hope they’d run into a rogue negotiator of Khal’s genotype. They wouldn’t be the same, but it would still be nice to have someone he could really “talk” to.

Dar’s voice came to life over the comm. “Gen and Skr’Takk are arguing again. Can you break them up before they maul each other ?”

Kvec nodded and gave a thumb’s up gesture to Dar’s embedded eyes. Skr’Takk was still with them, still planning to assassinate her traitorous sister, but right now it seemed like a pipe dream. Mainly she seemed to be waiting to see if the Tk’Tk’Skree declared war on MoSys; she seemed to believe her sister would be vulnerable if this occurred, but Kvec couldn’t follow the logic. The funny thing was, when Gen and Skr’Takk weren’t arguing, they got on fabulously, and Gen seemed interested in becoming the mercenary leader of Skr’Takk’s army. It was the best of both worlds to Gen apparently – violence and money.

Kvec left Khal’s quarters, and mused over the fact that as unsettled as things were on a universal scale, things had never been better for those on the Nyorai.

He just wondered why it didn’t make him feel any better.

The End