Teratovore

Cassy is not the first nor by any means the last human to develop an emanant nature. But with the advent of emanant detection technology and science as heralded by the events of Teratovore, humanity eventually learns how to provoke that development in random individuals in a given human population. This is a product of the initial successful campaign to cause and control the generation of new emanants.

In other words, humanity starts breeding emanants. (While some emanants have been breeding humanity - though Synthia was unaware of the extent of that.)

Humans who become emanants just do that, when it comes to the whole inner universe thing that Cassy has going on. There may be lots of speculation as to how and why, but no one is able to figure it out. At least, not for the foreseeable future. It makes them much harder to detect, even for humanity's emanant detection technology.

Greg and Ayden remain fully human, with human normal lifespans. But Synthia's protection helps them live full lives through the turmoils of the 21st century United States.

Greg does transition, taking it/its pronouns, getting an orchiectomy, and taking low doses of estradiol and progesterone (as available). It doesn't shave, and doesn't go out of its way to look particularly masculine or feminine, and just starts wearing clothes that are even more its style. It is considering a name change, but is leaning toward deriving it from Greg somehow.

Greg’s house was a small bungalow, almost a mobile home, nestled in a tiny property in the middle of a nearly rural suburbia. Which doesn’t really distinguish it from most houses and neighborhoods in Gresham, honestly. The “dining room” was a linoleum covered section of the living room next to a sliding glass door. And the kitchen was demarcated from that by a counter.

We sat around the table with tea. Even I had some. It was pleasant enough as a sensory experience. Something I could focus on when trying to avoid coherent thought.

I was also literally hollow. To take my Synthia guise with any solidity, I needed to focus that solidity on my outer edges. It felt weird.

Cassy elaborated. She knew her stuff about neurodiversity, but this was a corner of it that wasn’t part of her special interests. Just something adjacent. Though I could tell by her feelings and tone of voice that that was changing.

“I need to read up on it some more, of course,” she said. “But also, I don’t think I work the same way as most other people. Like, of course I don’t.” She looked at each of us, but I was looking at my tea, dreading where she was going with this. She continued, “Anyway, the more important thing is that when I eat another monster, it eventually becomes an alter. Or a headmate, I guess. So, right now, I’ve got Felicity and a couple of little enthalpiphages I ate a few days ago. And, psychologically, they’re separate from me. But they’re still kind of me. We don’t just have the same body, the same human body. As far as we can tell, we have the same emanation. The same emanant energy, whatever you call it. Which isn’t like before, when Felicity was riding me like she did other humans.”

“That’s all weird to me, but I guess it makes sense,” Greg offered.

Ayden just nodded, working his mouth and frowning.

Milk was in a glass on the kitchen counter and remaining silent, soaking up all this new knowledge and feeling very satisfied about it. I didn’t trust it, but I still didn’t feel threatened by it. I didn’t think I was physiologically capable of feeling afraid of it, and that concerned me.

Cassy just clearly didn’t care about it at all.

“Chord is on his way,” she said, pushing her mug around on the table. She seemed far less hesitant to admit that than I felt was warranted. “Eventually, I’ll have a Chord in here. Felicity and I are planning on teaching him a few things. We’ll have to see how that goes.”

“Shit,” Ayden said. “What does that mean?”

Cassy shrugged.

I felt I had to ask, so I pushed myself to do so, “Will he be able to front freely?” Then, for the sake of Ayden and Greg, in case they weren’t familiar with that term. “You know, take over and do things?”

Cassy smirked and gave a small, single chuckle, “Nope. I’m pretty solidly in control. I don’t know if it’s because I’m not actually traumagenic, and we don’t work based on triggers and that sort of thing. Or what. But, this is my system. I’m the host and I’m in charge of it. But, they do have their own wills. I can’t stop them from being assholes in my head. I just don’t have to listen to them.”

I looked pointedly at her and concluded, “So you let Felicity speak to me back there on the trail.”

“Yeah…” she admitted.

“I think I’m going to say ‘no’ to her proposal. Or is it your proposal?” I told her.

“What are you talking about?” Greg asked.

Cassy looked at him, “Well, Felicity is pretty happy with her new situation. She’s safe. She’s untouchable by Chord, even when he becomes an alter. And she kind of likes me, I guess. She says she’s finally in a situation where she can be friends with Synthia without being compelled to betray her. I can keep her from doing that, if need be.” She folded her lips into her mouth for a moment and glanced at me. “So, she also thinks it would be a good deal for Synthia, too.”

Greg frowned.

“I don’t get it,” Ayden said.

Greg asked, “How so?”

I sighed and answered for Cassy, “She eats me, and then I become a headmate. She’s a pretty powerful emanant now. She’s gained a lot of energy from eating Felicity and Chord, and a lot of knowledge. And, she’s really well hidden, basically stealth, with the emanant equivalent of a wave motion gun for feeding. Anyone who gets too close to her is in serious danger.” I was still looking down at my tea, and I tapped my fingernails on the laminate table top. “I would be quite safe in there with her. Safer than I am now.”

“Oh, that sounds like a really shitty deal, though,” Greg said. “I could never do that.”

It was my turn to shrug, “I’ve been eaten before, now. I was gone. Milk remade me. So, like, existentially? I could endure that.”

“Yeah, but you wouldn’t be you,” he said.

“No, I would be me, and that would be the problem,” I looked up at him. “I would have all of my memories and motives and reflexes, but I’d be in the body of an obligatory teratovore. Cassy could do the eating, of course. But, I’d have to be OK with that, and I couldn’t do things my way anymore. Even though I’m not even sure what that is now.”

“You are still you,” Milk spoke up.

I glared at it, “I haven’t been acting like me.”

“Yes, you have,” it contradicted me.

I scowled silently. I didn’t have the energy to verbally banter with anybody, let alone the guilelessly blunt Milk.

“I wouldn’t sweat that too much,” Cassy said, glancing sideways at me. “It kind of makes sense.”

“I don’t know,” I grumbled. “There’ve been a lot of memory stealing and altering teratovores at work around here, and I fell prey to at least three of them, by my count. For all I know, I’m really not who I used to be. Especially after what that one did. It could easily be lying.” I gestured at Milk.

“Well, yeah, but OK. How have you been acting differently?” she asked.

“Charging into danger heedlessly,” I said. “I do not do that. And at the grain silo, I found myself walking right into it even though I didn’t want to. It was like someone was controlling me without my consent. Maybe Fate Vine.”

“Hm,” she nodded.

Greg and Ayden both watched us discuss this with wide eyes.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I was acting like this before I got eaten, so I don’t know.”

“Well,” Cassy said, playing with the table top with one finger. “My therapist once pointed out that we don’t really know what we’re capable of doing when we encounter a situation we’ve never experienced before.” She shrugged with one shoulder. “And from what I’m learning, I think that applies to emanants as well as to humans.”

I furrowed my brow and looked at her, and acknowledged, “OK, yeah. I can see that. Nothing about the last two months have been typical for me.”

“Don’t doubt yourself too much,” she suggested. “Wait a while, and see what your new norm is. At least, that’s what my therapist suggested. Don’t make big decisions when you’re in a crisis.”

I surprised myself with my own laughter. I fell back in my chair, lifting my head and let out a string of giggles and guffaws that were honestly really satisfying, but startling. And it took me a few moments to realize why I was doing it.

By the time I spoke, both Greg and Ayden were smirking and looking at each other, too. And Cassy was smiling and feeling satisfied with my reaction. It was kind of infectious. I guess the tone of my laughter hadn’t been derisive in any way.

“That… OK,” I said. “Be that as it may. That being an excellent reason all on its own to say no to Felicity’s idea. The real reason I’m saying ‘no’ is because I made a promise to you all.”

“Oh?” Greg asked.

“Yes. And I still plan to keep it,” I said. “I’m weak, but I’ve got a lot of options right now. I can do things I would never be able to do as part of Cassy’s system. I have Milk’s lineage. It’s older than me, and manifested in a time when the vacuum for new emanants was big.”

“I can take on many adaptations,” it confirmed. “And so can Synthia.”

I nodded in its direction, “And I have the knowledge of all my own tricks and Fate Vine’s. If I’m not wrong, I can have my way with computer systems like I never could before, if I can get the energy to do it. And I can influence bureaucracies in a similar way. I can secure you income from almost nowhere. I can keep the police off your backs. I can make sure your housing is secure. And with Cassy’s help, I can keep other emanants from fucking with you. Together we can survive what comes tomorrow, if I remain what I am right now.” 

I left out how Fate Vine’s memories taught me how to alter the minds of humans. That would be a last resort, if even that. Saved only for our enemies, which I guess we actually have. Though, I suppose, altering the path of bureaucracies might entail doing that on a group level.

I’d have to think about that.

The idea left a bad taste in my mouth. But I’d do what I needed to do to uphold my promises to these humans.

It’s just.

I had truly changed in the last couple million years, and in the past couple months.

I found I wanted to be equals with these three. And failing that, I wanted to be family with them, however fleetingly in the case of Greg and Ayden. If I could figure out a way to preserve their memories on the advent of their deaths, I think I would with their permission, and I suspected I might be able to.

Greg let out a big breath, and Ayden held out a hand for him to grab if he wanted. Greg took it. Then they both gave me exhausted, worried, but relieved looks.

“I think I’m ready to believe that,” Greg said. “And holy shit that would help.”

Ayden squeezed Greg’s hand and then let go and said, “Yeah. Me, too.”

Cassy nodded slowly in that way that moved her shoulders forward and back again, with hooded eyes as she considered what I’d said.

I glanced at her and said, “Sorry Felicity, but while I do trust Cassy way more than I ever thought I would for a teratovore, I do not trust you and I don’t think I ever will. I’m not sure I want to share a head with you.”

Cassy, or Felicity, shot me a hurt look.

“However, you’ve opened my eyes to a lot about the world I’d been ignoring for way too long,” I told her. “Thank you for that.”

She gave me a wry, pained smirk, and said, “Well. Eyes are kind of my thing.”

---

She wasn’t exactly wrong. And her influence on the world hadn’t waned as much as any of us had thought. She couldn’t jump to anybody else’s psyche anymore. Not for a while, at least, not while Cassy still had a human body and couldn’t figure out mitosis or adaptation. But the ripples of Felicity’s presence continued in a chaotic way.

In the following months, as the new administration terrorized absolutely everyone with its incompetence, raw hatred, and wild audacity, while I focused on feeding by being a customer at grocery stories – when I was not hanging out in a power station – we all saw Felicity’s glyphs spread and become more numerous.

Eventually, we even saw them on TV clips that were shared on social media, from across the country.

People were speculating on what they meant.

Too many groups and graffiti artists took credit for them, and none of their reasons made much sense.

The consensus was that they were the new “Kilroy was here” or anarchy symbol, something anybody could make that was a vague reference to its original meaning. In this case, maybe a meaning that was like the common yearning for a meteor to strike.

A meaning that said, “Monsters are watching.”

Which, of course, dovetailed “nicely” with the monster hunt that eventually did form half a year later.

A new kind of monster hunt. One where science itself had finally been allowed to not only prove the existence of emanants, but learn to begin to harness and exploit our energies.

And between Chord and the memories of Fate Fine, we were uniquely prepared for that. We survived it and thrived in a weird way that deserves its own book.

But that’s not how I finally came to trust Felicity.

Whether we worked on big things or small, regardless of whether we were doing anything to alter the course of history, it was the day to day work of living with her, through my friendship with Cassy, that finally did it.

Chord took more work.

It was after all that when, one day that the four (or more) of us were enjoying a sunset from Ayden and Charlie's front porch, Chord turned to me and said through Cassy’s mouth, “You could have just reported my scheme to the Overlords of Portland, you know. They would have crushed me for you.”

---

previous

But they drew no more substance from me. 

They had no time to do so, yanked free of me along with all the others that had remained from my gauntlet.

And that’s when I realized that I had lost all sense of emotions around me before. During my marathon, the consumption of my being had drowned out all that I’d been eating for myself. So many of my senses had begun to dim, but that was the first to go. And now it returned in a burning flash.

The Swarm was panicked.

Cassy was a rich mix of determination, fury, horror, victory, fear, and quickly satiating hunger. As always, despite being an emanant, her emotions were complex and heady, slamming into my body and being like a storm.

The Overlords of Portland who were near enough for me to feed upon and sense them were aghast with trepidatious curiosity.

And the liminal teratovores that had been brought to bear against me, who were following in my wake, were pulling up short in surprise and terror.

As my spin slowed, I was able to focus on the side of Cassy’s face that I could see, and it looked like her mouth was wide open. She had the stance of someone pantomiming a huge cinematic superhuman inhale, but air was not what was moving.

The Swarm was.

It may have been projecting a manifestation of countless oversized insects, but it was still one being. And a part of it had come too close. And apparently, everyone could sense and maybe even see it being pulled past them from all corners of the property.

Cassy’s feeding, and the Swarm’s demise, took longer than I expected. 

Perhaps that was my sense of time being dilated by crisis, but I also noticed a few nearby teratovores become bored with it and look at me. Hungry eyes began to consider whether they could make it around this new threat to get to the wispy, melt-in-your-mouth morsel on the other side of her. Me.

I was still so tiny, but from the emotion thrown my way, particularly from Cassy, I gained enough weight to root my feet on the ground again and stop my spin. It didn’t matter, but I found myself facing the way I’d come. Perhaps I’d managed to land that way on purpose.

And then, against old instincts, I sidled over to my half human teratovore friend and hid behind her legs, now barely reaching her knees I’d shrunk so much.

I still looked like nothing that had ever walked the Earth before, and I wasn’t paying any mind to my form. There was too much to keep track of now, but it was also a moment of relative rest. I was too busy taking breaths of ambient emotion to care.

And then the last of the Swarm was drawn into Cassy’s mouth and I saw her stance change. Taking a real breath, she turned her head to sweep a gaze across all the monsters before her, to settle on the gigantic sea monster looming above her from the river. Maybe simply because of its size, she chose to address it as the leader of our adversaries.

I felt her smooth, breathy voice as a honeyed hum throughout my physicality as she said, “You can be next, if you like. There’s enough room in here for all of you.”

Words I had never expected to come from her, but unmistakably in her voice.

The Mesozoic sea monster blinked.

I could sense the other Overlords, the ones who were further away, crowding forward, pushing the liminals up against us or out of the way, to get in on the conversation. And Cassy waited for them to stop moving, appearing to me from my diminished vantage to cast a meaningful glance at anyone who got too close, halting them in their tracks.

The national guard were an afterthought by then. The helicopter still circled, but at a safe distance since the oversized plesiosaurid beast had emerged from the river. And with the change in demeanor of the monsters around them, with a gap surreptitiously provided up the main drive of the property, the troops retreated without retrieving their vehicles. It was clear that their weaponry had no appreciable effect.

Notably, the personnel in the surveillance van remained where they were, as far as I could tell.

When all the movement settled down and stopped, Cassy explained things further, “Chord is gone. Gresham is now mine. I will honor the old pact as if I made it with you, better than Chord was planning to do. I now know the full extent of his plans, and what you expected of him. I will happily answer any of your questions, but even after that meal I’m pretty sure I’m still hungry.” She looked around at them, and then crooned through what sounded like a tight lipped smile, “So, maybe think twice before crossing the streets in my city. And. Oh.” She turned her torso to point down at me. “This one? She’s under my protection now.”

I was perhaps too discombobulated with relief and confusion to pay much attention to the short conversation that occurred after that.

I felt a little more than disconcerted that my entire world seemed to be dominated and shaped entirely by monsters that ate other monsters. To the point that I’d had to become one to survive what had just happened.

I still wasn’t actually a teratovore, though. I don’t think I’ll ever be one.

I don’t have the reflexes.

Nor the audacity.

---

Walking unmolested through the Willamette Greenway toward the intersection where we’d meet Greg and Ayden, once they untangled themselves from the worst of the traffic, we remained in silence for a while.

To avoid alarming any people we encountered, I was slowly transforming my projection into the form of a German shepherd. Something that could be a little threatening, but normal, a dog a woman might have for protection. But that we were walking calmly away from that up north was itself something that would have unsettled some people. Should have unsettled them. Given them pause, at least.

But I couldn’t feel those emotions yet. Not from humans. It would take me some time and energy to switch back to that. I was using Cassy’s roiling emotions to fuel my current modest transformation, which still took longer than I was accustomed to. I’d need to settle myself into a power station and utilize Milk’s trick to get back up to a tiny fraction of my former speed and power.

I was just beginning to feel the air and ground again, when Cassy looked down at me and asked, “Are you OK?”

It was such an absurd question, I missed a step and had to skip to keep my pace.

Of course, she meant, was I OK aside from all the obvious. Did I have a kernel of OK inside me?

“No,” I said, in monster speak to avoid confusing the absent onlookers. Then I realized I had the wherewithal to explain. “I don’t like what the world has become while I was busy playing with my favorite humans. And I don’t like what I’ve become in order to deal with it.”

“Yeah, that’s a mood,” she muttered, looking back up to the darkened trail ahead of us.

It was lit by street lights, but it wasn’t like daylight. There were plenty of shadows. It didn’t bother me, but I could feel a hint of caution from Cassy. A human reflex.

It was kind of weird to feel that. And, specifically, to feel that while our positions were reversed from the last time we’d walked together.

Now she was protecting me. And while I highly doubted she’d gained enough experience from consuming Felicity, the Swarm, and apparently Chord, to match my own, she’d held her own in a way I don’t think I ever could.

She clearly now knew more about local emanant politics than I did. Or, she carried herself like she did, and maybe that’s all that was needed.

Well, and a powerful vortex of consumption for a gullet.

“How about you?” I asked, glancing unnecessarily up at her.

“We’re…” she paused and corrected herself. “I’m still making sense of things.” She remained quiet for several steps and then sighed. “I don’t like eating, you know? Not really even before, all this. But this kind of eating feels wrong. I’m a killer now. A murderer. Even though they’re monsters, they’re people. And I know just how much of a person each one is after I eat them. And I think I’m dissociating about it. But, uh. There are side effects, too. They kind of make up for that, but in a weird way.”

“You sort of become them,” I offered, though I’d caught that slip and thought I knew what was actually going on. “You get their memories, and also their behaviors and ways of thinking. It’s what happens to me. It’s hard to stay yourself, but they don’t exactly end. I get it.”

It was both an offer for her to accept an explanation she could use as cover if she needed to and a prompt. It worked more as a prompt.

“Yeah, that’s the first part of it,” she said. “But, uh… OK, so I get their memories and motives and all that, but not their abilities. When Felicity fed herself to me, I couldn’t jump into other people’s minds, and I still can’t. And now I can’t change other emanants like Chord could.” She looked over at me meaningfully, but I’d caught the meaning from her words before she did so. “But I don’t think my brain makes sense of the new memories and identities very well. It doesn’t accept them. But they also don’t die. I know more faster, but I’m still me.”

“I guess that makes sense,” I said, somewhat distracted by the emanant activity around us. I absently thought my suspicions were correct, but I wasn’t thinking about the ramifications. Our immediate safety felt more important.

Although the Overlords of Portland were not following us, and were making way for our retreat to Gresham, we had escorts. This organization amongst emanants was more orderly and regimented than I was used to seeing, or even contemplating. And it unsettled me.

Humanity had really influenced us.

And I knew from Fate Vine’s memories that our kind were more deeply entangled in humanity’s destiny than I’d known. Far more deeply.

And what had been here, with Chord’s little fiefdom, and what still was, with the Overlords of Portland, was so tiny. Just a sample of the political structure of the world.

Tomorrow would be the inaugural address of the President of the United States, a man who was reviled and feared by my friends and so many others. An obvious figurehead of a sweeping social movement built on a cultish long game of bigotry, exploitation, and highly questionable theology. And normally, I’d ignore that sort of thing. Such movements in human history have been frequent and fleeting to me (and an unfortunate source of sustenance, to be honest). But now I knew that everyone around me who was aware of things suspected that even his supporters and organization had emanant influences.

And, yep, that sparked an uncomfortable memory that hadn’t been mine before. Fate Vine had been one of them. And, so had Chord by partnership.

And this shift in politics would probably affect me personally. And certainly my human friends, of course. I was actually more worried about them, and how I could protect them, this time around.

The whole thing felt like the beginning of a new extinction level event, even if it might not be quite that.

Oh.

Oh, shit.

There was that thought again.

That surveillance van, if it had been part of Fate Vine’s machinations, had been equipped with new technology to detect and measure emanant presence.

What could that lead to?

I found myself looking back the way we had come.

“You seem really jittery,” Cassy said.

“It’s sort of my natural state,” I said, only half aware of my reaction. “I usually hide it better, though, I guess.”

“You’re so small.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “I’ve lost so much of myself. I’m hardly here anymore. I need to find a source of energy so I can at least run when I need to.”

“Mm,” she acknowledged.

“One of those power stations that make a lot of buzzing noise would be a good source for me,” I told her. “There’s a lot of waste in those things. And it turns out that since Milk, uh, reconstituted me, I’m an enthalpiphage now. I’m still an affectivore, too. And a teratovore now, as well. But, uh, I’m basically Milk but with my memories instead.”

“I remember you explaining that earlier today. When we were still planning.”

“Right.”

She reached down and scratched behind my ears as if I was a real dog. It felt annoyingly good. “We can get you there. We can do that. Maybe we can even hunt down Chord’s livestock and feed them to you, if you’re comfortable with that. They’re mostly you, after all.”

I cringed, and looked up at her, “You’re okay with that idea?”

Cassy shrugged, “No. But we could still do it. Maybe you could just eat them partially, get your energy back, but leave them free to be themselves.”

“Maybe,” I reluctantly agreed.

Then I heard another voice come from her. A familiar one. And she was looking down at me with a raised eyebrow and a smirk I’d seen before.

“There is another option,” Felicity said. “A way that Cassy could protect you more securely while we hunt down your lost energy. It’d be an even bigger change for you, though.”

---

previous

All I could do was continue to run in circles, turning right as I came upon another one of the Overlords of Portland blocking my path.

The next one appeared to be a small bald man with bare feet in a hospital gown, all drenched in water. And not far from him, up another drive out of the property was a figure covered in bandages from head to foot, with burn scars showing where they’d peeled off. Up in the park to the East of the silo, on the edge of the cliff overlooking the property, a ghostly woman hovered, surrounded by apparitions of more women, all dressed in provocative clothing. And, like the Swarm or when I had been the cloud of eyes, that was one whole emanant with multiple projections.

There were others that were further back that hadn’t quite joined the circle yet. I could feel them. But they didn’t need to be there. Unless I took to flight again, geography of the terrain kept me hemmed in as much as their compatriots did.

And more and more of the liminals that were hiding amongst the national guard were showing themselves and causing chaos.

They weren’t just chasing me, either. Some of them were terrorizing the humans and making even more of a spectacle. And that, too, made it difficult for me to maneuver and keep moving with any speed, because when the humans were more distracted by the other monsters they didn’t necessarily see me coming in time to get out of the way.

But once I got into the rhythm of it, as around and around the long, long building I ran, I did have some time to think.

Not that it mattered much. I couldn’t see a way out, and I felt that I was doomed. 

But witnessing all this humanity in fear and distress reminded me of what I’d told Cassy, Ayden, and Greg about the likely upcoming monster hunt. And that in turn reminded me of the promises that I had made to them, and how I was failing them.

I’d learned a lot about them in the last couple years, and a lot more in the last couple of months.

I’d become aware of their personal hopes and fears, and how imminent some of them were with their national political developments.

My presence and influence had ultimately led to them losing their jobs.

And even if I discounted my sense of responsibility toward Cassy for introducing her to Felicity and ushering her suddenly into the world of emanants, I’d committed myself to protecting the three of them from the rest of the world, and I found I really cared about that a lot.

And here I was, participating in something that would likely make things so much worse. Just before losing myself to a constructed monster that was barely even a Supraliminal, and who’d really only existed for less than a month.

If I did make it out of this somehow, I’d have to change my strategy and tactics.

I’d need to focus on my people, and lead them to somewhere safe, so that I could help them shelter the oncoming storm.

And also so that I could regain my energies.

Between my own skills and adaptations, and the knowledge and abilities I could mimic from Fate Vine, I could be a very powerful ally for them. We could go anywhere.

Anywhere, so long as the Overlords of our destination would tolerate us, that is.

That was the huge rub, and my memories from Fate Vine told me it was a dangerous one. But, I had gone quite a long time unnoticed myself, and Cassy was naturally stealthier than anyone I’d met. It wasn’t an impossibility.

If I could somehow survive this.

---

The two humans drove their truck directly for the North Steel Bridge, and that was unacceptable. It was especially unacceptable as it brought Milk close enough to confirm that all seven of Portland’s Overlords were present.

They should have gone to the bridge to the south and worked their way around to a safer side street. It would have made more sense with the traffic. They could have been more help to their friends that way. And they wouldn't have been so close to the danger.

So Milk rushed the engine block of the machine and sapped it of most of its heat, accelerating its collection of entropy catastrophically, causing the engine to just stop. The tiny explosions that occurred within it to make it spin ceased happening just a moment before the battery went dead and the oil froze. Right before the vehicle reached the bridge.

Greg brought the truck to a skidding, fishtailing halt near the side of the road, cussing at the locked up rear wheels, and the other traffic swerved, narrowly missing him.

And then something very large with a long neck loomed out of the river just to the north of the bridge, and everyone’s driving got even worse.

Milk stayed with the truck. It could sense enough from here, and Greg and Ayden were too distracted to leave the cab.

After Greg gave up trying to restart the engine, Milk started working to reverse the damage it had done. There might come a point where having a working vehicle would keep them all alive. There was some structural damage it couldn’t fix, however. But it might be able to safely keep the engine running despite that damage while it was present.

It wasn’t too sure about this because it hadn’t worked with very many modern vehicles, preferring its cell phone towers. But it could try.

---

On my third circuit of my little racetrack of doom, I saw fewer humans and more monsters in my way. More guns were firing as the people with them must have retreated to safer positions around the perimeter and established good firing lines. But there were a few wounded stragglers trying to crawl to safety here and there.

The cacophony of it all roared on, as the gunfire and helicopter settled into a rhythm, but the monsters that tried to hunt me or block my path increased their cries and yowls of frustration and hunger.

I had my feeding frenzy, but it was all focused on me, and the Swarm had spread itself out over the whole property. I was running into as many mosquitoes as I was outrunning.

I'd started growing hollowed out horns and spikes, giant proboscides here and there all over, to puncture and feed on any monsters I could slam into. But that didn’t compensate much for what I was losing to the Swarm.

As I bowled my way around the processing tower to the north, greeting baldy and the burned man, I shouldered my way through a wolf-thing and considered my options yet again.

If I became a cloud of eyes, I'd be too slow, and the Swarm would overwhelm me quickly.

If I became Milk, I could slide into a vehicle to hide there, but that would still only slow the inevitable as I couldn’t get anywhere the Swarm couldn't. I'd just reduce my surface area that was exposed. And the more corporeal monsters could set to tearing the bus or truck apart.

Maybe I could dive into a storm drain and hope there was enough water down there to hide under it.

Enough of a reprieve and I could take the time to throw up a domain and get the leverage I needed to not only survive, but maybe turn the tide. But I was no longer Sewer Teeth or any other form that could squeeze into a tight enough space. I was optimized for running, and the needed transformation would slow me down too much.

It became harder and slower to reconfigure myself with every quantum of energy I lost, either from exerting myself or from being eaten.

But I had to find a moment to try.

And then, just as I was dodging between the buses and the surveillance van in the big lot along the east side of the complex, I noticed something.

Polybius was just gone.

There was a big gap in the perimeter there, and the others weren't immediately moving to fill it.

The sea monster and host of ghosts did move to close it a little, but they seemed reluctant to approach that space.

I had a thought.

Maybe they were herding me to that path.

Maybe Chord had finally arrived, and he lay waiting down the train tracks there, beyond my range of senses.

It'd be smart to do that with how desperate and weak I now was.

And I felt like I had no choice but to comply.

If Chord got me, I might continue to exist in some way, temporarily his thrall.

But if Felicity could throw off his control multiple times, maybe I could too.

I didn't like that future for me. It seemed worse than ceasing to exist. But I found myself leaping for it anyway.

Was that Milk's programming?

Around the last SUV and through the bear-rhino, scraping the beast with my horns and sapping it of a little strength as I felt the last vestiges of my own energy flag like a keening hollowness in my center, I saw who stood there instead of Polybius.

Cassy clapped her hands and beckoned me forward with a rolling motion, knees bent, like someone calling her dog or egging on a child in a race.

I bowed my head and spent the last dregs of my energy sprinting toward her.

If I could just make it to her…

---

previous

“Like what the hell? Some men we are, right?”

“I’m sorry Ayden, but you’re alone in that particular existential dilemma. I think I’ve renounced my manhood,” Greg swirled his shitty tequila. “But, yeah, we did that. And it doesn’t sit right. Gender notwithstanding.”

“I don’t want to say we could have kept her from going,” Ayden suggested. “But we should have fucking argued with her.”

“We should have.”

“Why didn’t we?”

“Well, you know,” Greg looked back at him. “I think I’m still in shock about the whole fucking thing. Too dazed for words.”

“Yeah, I don’t think I’m not, either.” Then, having said that, Ayden looked up at the ceiling as if to consider the words he’d spoken, to see if they made sense. After a bit, he nodded and took a performative sip of his drink.

“I do feel like we should do something,” Greg said.

“Like what?” Ayden asked.

Milk watched this conversation unfold from the low but covert vantage of an outlet near the hallway to the bathrooms.

Part of the reason that it had chosen to accompany Ayden and Greg to this location was that it was central enough to downtown Portland that it could keep an eye on the movements of most of the local Overlords.

The preliminary planning sessions with Cassy and Synthia had brought up the likelihood that Chord must be coordinating with the Overlords of Portland to set up his trap for Sewer Teeth. But just how involved those Overlords would be was still a big question. And their reactions to the trap being sprung would be critical to how Milk itself participated in things.

And, if one of those Overlords noticed it and confronted it, that would give it a chance to talk to them, or it would run. It was good at running.

In the meantime, it studied these two humans that Synthia seemed to care about.

Greg was tapping the table in thought for a while, watching the T.V. above the bar, which was now showing the opening scenes to Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai.

“We could keep my truck warm and ready for a getaway,” he suggested.

Ayden tapped the table back once in response and said, “We should have suggested that back in Salem.”

“Yeah.”

“Messaging Cassy now might give her trouble.”

“Let’s do it anyway, in case she messages us.”

When they moved to Greg’s truck, Milk moved too.

It could pursue two goals at once, at least for a little while.

---

As I slowly transformed my body for speed while running, the Swarm harried me. It could have surrounded me and consumed me entirely within the building, but apparently it had been instructed to merely chase its prey outside. At least at first.

The building was long, and the chase was excruciating, with my pace increasing incrementally with every step, and my motive deepened with every niggling bug bite. But by the time I reached the fire escape door near the entrance to the control room, I was bounding on arms that were quickly becoming feather covered wings, and hind legs like those of a greyhound.

To become something of a battering ram, I’d transformed my head into something that more closely resembled a pachycephalosaurus, with a domed crown of reinforced bone.

The door slammed open with a bang and I leapt out and spread my vestigial wings, letting feathers continue to sprout slowly all over my body.

I was able to control my dive more than glide to the ground, turning to the right, away from and around the building. The speed of that movement took me away from my adversary very quickly, though, and gave me some reprieve. But once it caught up, I could only hope my feathers would stymie its bites. Emanants don’t ever work quite like physical beings, after all.

And as the helicopter wheeled around the north side of the building where I was, searchlights tracked me from below and I was greeted with gunfire. And I could see I was about to land between a couple of dark buses that had carried a number of military personnel. Troops, I guess, many of whom were right below me.

To the left of them from my vantage, I caught sight of a van in the same colors with numerous antennae and other sensory equipment on the top of it.

If I could have transformed fast enough, I might have flown away with the speed of a hawk, faster than the Swarm, or whatever it called itself. But now I needed to adjust for a rough landing and some expedient ground travel. And the bullets that were being thrown at me were distracting.

Just distracting. Kind of painful, but not really doing me any more damage than the darts had done.

Most of them missed, of course.

Bam!

Ground.

I rolled, dodged, pounded the pavement with padded feet and calloused knuckles and worked myself up to an horrendous speed toward the south, weaving between vehicles and people. And I heard the Swarm whining down behind me over the shouts of scrambling soldiers.

I did my very best not to touch a single human, but I had no idea what the Swarm would do. And I couldn’t control it.

Did I want it to keep chasing me and leave the humans alone? That’s what it would probably do. But if these humans were part of Chord’s greater plan, who knew what was slated for them.

Oh.

I forgot they were riddled with emanants already.

When I passed the last cluster of people before a dark dash down the railroad leading along the river to the south, one of them lept at me with animal limbs and widening jaws. If I hadn’t been distracted by the Swarm behind me, I could have dodged a little further away from that one. It hadn’t exactly been covert to me.

I rolled with the blow, skidding and twisting up and over it as it bowled me over and slammed down on the other side of me with its claws and teeth in my sides. I leaned all of my weight into it when it was my turn to be on top of the ball of limbs and tails, and that was enough to make it let go.

I managed to land on my feet and start running again before it could get up, but I’d lost precious lead and felt several mosquito bites in my flanks as the whine of the Swarm roared above me.

And then I saw why I might not be leaving this property.

There was what looked like an old arcade cabinet right in the middle of the train tracks, under the North Steel Bridge, barely visible in the shadows of the trees on either side of the passage in the quickly darkening night. Only, it loomed in the Strands.

Although there was no storm, and the sky was relatively clear, the surface of it flashed briefly as if illuminated by lightning.

Polybius.

It seemed to have just appeared there.

And I decided to go nowhere nearer than that, dodging around the corner of the huge old silo to dash toward the water, even though that would take me through another knot of vehicles and armed people.

My dive had managed to take me almost all the way down the enormous length of the building, it was so tall and maybe I had affected a bit of a glide. Still, I’d had to hit the ground and start running. But if I could make it to the water, then perhaps I could lose the Swarm that way.

The soldiers in front of me couldn’t fire their weapons for fear of hitting the soldiers behind me, but they fucking did it anyway, they were so terrified of what they were seeing. And then one of them near the back of their group suddenly grew in size and stature to resemble something like a cross between a bear and rhino, and then adjusted its stance to block my path.

Behind it, something rose from the river water that I hadn’t seen for millions and millions of years, and much larger than it had ever been at that.

So the water was out as a means of escape.

And now there was no denying to all of Portland and the rest of the United States that there were monsters. The rest of the world would probably take some convincing. Maybe.

I thought I heard the helicopter panic.

Taking quick stock of my surroundings, while monster mosquitos started biting into my haunches with alarming frequency, I could see that I was suddenly surrounded by seven very large Supraliminals, besides the one that was chasing me.

The Overlords of Portland had taken interest.

---

As it followed Greg and Ayden into the parking garage where Greg had parked his truck, Milk noticed a couple of the local Overlords pass by.

They were making their move, and ignoring it.

The others were likely approaching the site of the trap from the South and the East, and it would miss them.

This didn’t bode well for Synthia or Cassy.

If they were moving in that close, then they would be vying to control the outcome, maybe even working together, despite the impacts that would make on the local population.

Normally these emanants stayed spread out enough to keep their thralls and commoners calm and functional. Concentrating their numbers like this would throw the whole city into chaos for the time being. But it also meant that they were invested enough in the results that they didn’t care about that.

This made it very difficult for Milk to help Synthia or Cassy directly. It made it very unlikely either of the other two would survive the night. Well, Synthia in particular. Cassy could probably escape with ease if she stayed out of it.

Instead, Milk would observe to learn what to do in the aftermath.

If humanity was inordinately exposed to emanant presence, perhaps it could work to mitigate that damage.

Perhaps Greg and Ayden could be useful in that regard.

Or, Greg’s truck could provide a handy ride to get a better vantage, at least.

But while it hung back to wait for them to get inside the cab, they paused on each side of it, looking over at each other.

“We’re not going to just sit and wait in the truck right here, are we?” Ayden asked.

“No,” Greg said. “I was thinking we should get closer.”

“To watch, right?”

“For a lot of reasons. The closer we are, the faster we can help.”

“Sure.”

Milk rushed forward and slid up the left rear wheel to wind itself around the axle and work itself up into the chassis of the vehicle as the two people climbed in.

Foolish, foolish creatures!

If it couldn’t save Synthia, it could at least keep Synthia’s friends from getting hurt.

It would do its best. Perhaps by disabling the truck before they got too close.

It didn’t know why it cared in particular, just that it did.

Maybe its behavior had been altered by the memories from Synthia it had preserved within itself. It would have to think about that. It would have to decide if that bothered it. It had certainly experienced such things before, but this time the mechanism was affecting it in a moment of crisis.

That could be a problem.

Otherwise, being able to eat and co-opt memories was an important adaptation for survival. It was part of why it had managed to exist for so long.

---

previous

She furrowed her brow and looked up at him, gesturing toward the human activity taking place downriver around his trap, “I was thinking I’d talk to you about that. If you don’t mind. I’m curious about what you’re doing now.”

“I’m not in the habit of divulging all of my motives to underlings and adversaries,” he told her, and waited perfectly still. He remained ready to either flee or strike in an instant. “So, I do not think I will indulge you in that.”

She shrugged and seemed to look down at herself, fingering the grain of the wood planks she was sitting on, then she glanced up again and asked, “So, reproductive rights? Huh?”

Felicity would not ask about that. Nor in that way. She knew that part of his plan. So he waited for her to elaborate.

“I think it’s interesting that you are fighting for your right to reproduce, while the country we are in is about to inaugurate a President who represents a whole faction of people who want to end my right to not reproduce,” she squinted up at him, tapping the dock with her index finger. She glanced down the river and sighed, “Woo, that was a mouthful.” Looking back, she continued, “I just… Monsters are interesting, and I feel like this isn’t exactly a coincidence. You remind me of the Quiverful Movement. Though, like, while your situation is different, your motivation is totally the same. You ever heard of that?”

He withheld his answer. Of course he had. Through Fate Vine, he’d been involved in enough human politics that the Quiverful Movement had caught his attention. It had been a totally separate thing, something a portion of humanity had started in parallel to his own campaign. And she was right that the motives were similar. A faction of humans were trying to control the world through increased reproduction. But, whatever. It did not matter.

What was more of a concern was what was happening to this person in front of him.

It seemed that Felicity had made an ally of this host, and they were switching off while talking to him, pretending to be one person. He’d heard the shift in her manner of speech, and seen the changes in her posture and expressions. It seemed to go back and forth. Sometimes mid sentence.

He very much wanted to swallow her and find out how she’d done this.

But he couldn’t risk that her threat was genuine.

Perhaps what he could do was kill the host and force her out.

She slapped her knee, and declared, “I totally think you should be able to reproduce, though. That’s a right. If you can do it, you should be able to. But maybe not for the reasons you have. And this isn’t at all addressing the other things you go about doing, Chord.” She smiled up at him. “Like, if you were a human, you’d totally be a eugenicist and a white supremacist, wouldn’t you. And you’d still be called a monster.” She shook her head. “At least by my friends, anyway.”

He wondered if he asked her a question, would she bother to answer it honestly. Sometimes she seemed guileless, and sometimes she seemed like, well, Felicity. He decided to ask and see what happened, “Are you trying to distract me?”

“What? No,” she blinked. Then she made a weird little forced grimace, eyes wide, eyebrows high, like she was presenting something awful to him. And then she said, “I’m trying to talk myself into getting rid of you. If you want, you can help. I’m just. I’m not quite sure I like my options.”

That seemed to have bizarrely worked. He should keep her talking. It might be amusing what she said. It might help him decide if she was bluffing. 

“How would you ‘get rid’ of me?” he asked.

“Oh, like, I could just eat you. That’s the easiest,” she waved a hand. “But, then, I’d get all your memories, because I work that way, and I really don’t want those. They seem gross. I’ve always been picky about what I eat, anyway. I’ve never had snake. It’s kind of hard to try new things.” She snickered to herself.

He’d been letting his tail grow longer, dipping into the water, and reaching across with it, under the pier. He was pretty sure he was going to drown her now. And she didn’t seem to have noticed, which pleased him. But he still felt a great deal of concern about what she could do.

In theory, she’d have to make eye contact, and he was avoiding that studiously. But everything about her was new and different, and disturbing.

She continued talking, though, “What I really wish I could do, though my whole brain is telling me it’s impossible, is just, you know, talk you out of being you. Like, maybe if I just sit here and go over the philosophy of existence and the nature of monsters with you, maybe you’d change your tactics and become one of those reformed villains who joins the heroes. Or something.” She scrunched up her nose and briefly showed her top front teeth with a curled up lip, and then shook her head. “But I don’t want to work with you. You suck.” Then she beamed a grin, “But, you know. You’re a monster. It’s not like you’re a person, right? I mean, Synthia was a person. But she spent a lot of time amongst humans. She sort of became one. Like not physically, or metaphysically, just socially. Emotionally. But is that the metric we really want to use? It leaves room for all sorts of fascism.”

She was babbling, but this felt like a pause. A moment where she’d think about what she was saying.

His tail, with its ropy prehensile tip, was now rising up out of the water on the other side of the dock. “You’re a monster too,” he said, by way of prompting and distracting her.

She slowly rolled her eyes and sighed melodramatically, “Yeah.” Then she bounced and slapped both of her knees. “Hey. I’m new to this monster thing. And maybe you could tell me what to expect! Like, we could call it a trade. Maybe for amnesty. You could explain to me what monster politics is really like, and what kind of pressures you face on a century to century basis. Like, what does it take to survive with all these Overlords everywhere? And maybe that could convince me to let you live!”

“Why don’t I give you your first lesson?” he asked. His tail was ready to strike, held back over the river like a whip.

“Chord!” she snapped.

She'd sobered up, her body going rigid with a frown. Despite her cross-legged posture and her previous demeanor with the body language of a careless juvenile human, she’d suddenly become a very stern and angry Felicity. Her full age, experience, and power showed, even if it was lesser than his. He knew then that this was her.

“Yes?” he asked languidly. Something was causing him to hesitate. He should have just drowned her right then, but he had a niggling fear that it wouldn’t go well for some reason. So, he hid that fear with casual confidence and the single word question, showing he was in control and not in a hurry to do anything.

She looked him right in the snout, brow furrowed so intensely it must have been cramping, and asked, “Do you have a fucking death wish?”

---

Apparently, they’d sat down near the end of the Eastwood flick, and now Seven Samurai was playing. Just the opening credits, so far. It hadn’t been all that long.

Ayden held up his cheap whiskey, which he’d only taken a few sips of, and said, “You know how when Synthia takes us out, nobody needs to pay? She has this magic credit card or something?”

“Yeah?” Greg responded.

“Well, without her paying, this is my last whiskey for the month.”

“Same,” Greg said, even though he was drinking a bad tequila.

“I think I’m going to have to crowdfund to get by on unemployment,” Ayden added.

“We all will.”

“Do you think Cass will need it?”

“She’s still human, even if she’s also an emanant,” Greg answered.

“Right. Right. Just thinking,” Ayden looked over at him. “After tomorrow, I might not even be able to get a job ever again, for all I know.”

Greg scowled, and then softened his expression, “It’s probably not going to be that bad right away, Ayden.”

“We don’t know that.”

“True. Could be that bad for us specifically.”

“It’s not like we’re highly desired specialists in our field.”

“Right.”

“It would be fucking nice if we had Synthia’s magic credit card, like, all the time.”

---

Everything was going wrong. I wasn’t getting anywhere conversationally with this emanant, and I now strongly doubted that I could win against it in a fight. I decided to pull out.

Maybe it wouldn’t chase me if it could also hear the humanity that surrounded us. And maybe it couldn’t detect me except when I was communicating with it via monster speech.

I started backing up through the duct that I was in, a downward slope that the great auger in the middle of the silo bin would feed with grain in the past. A few yards and I’d encounter a maintenance hatch that I could finesse open. I hoped to be quiet enough that I wouldn’t tip the other monster off to what I was doing. 

I spoke to it no more.

But then I started hearing a very high pitched keening noise coming up from below me, and kind of panicked.

I scrunched up beneath the hatch and put my entire energy into pushing it outward.

With a screech of screaming catastrophic metal fatigue, bang and then an horrendous clattering noise, I sprang from the hatch and bounded onto the operator walkway that ran through the top of the building.

As I undulated and slid at a surprising speed toward the operator’s room and the nearest exit, an enormous and growing swarm of one inch long mosquitoes boiled from the pipe behind me.

It was faster than I was.

It had more mouths than I did. Many, many more mouths. Proboscides, in fact.

Chord had stolen my own trick, and now I had to figure out how to survive it on the fly.

---

previous

He did not see the disturbances in the Strands he expected for the presence of Sewer Teeth yet, but he also wasn’t quite close enough to his trap to be sure.

This suited him just fine, as he was planning on getting closer. He had a particularly decent vantage point in mind. He needed to be far enough away that Sewer Teeth wouldn’t sense him, but close enough to act when he got the signal from his bait. If he absolutely had to, he could grow his physical form to a substantial size capable of covering a lot of ground quickly. But swimming would be the best, if he followed the flow of the river, for both speed and stealth.

This was why he’d been let off upriver of the old grain silos, and further away than he’d intended to rest, so that he wouldn’t tip Sewer Teeth off to his presence.

To get where he intended to go, he slithered over to one of the pillared supports of the bridge and climbed it. Then he climbed along the underside of the bridge, like a sticky worm. It was a trivial feat for him, and he made the distance quickly.

And then, when he was over the Willamette Greenway boardwalk, he let go and dropped to the surface below him, wiggling in the air to increase his terminal velocity. He didn’t need to land particularly gently, but he preferred it.

From there, he made his way northward, keeping to the side of the walk, away from the attention of any passing humans, until he found the pier he was looking for.

At that time of the evening, there were a few people about, but he was able to stay mostly out of sight. It helped that there was a loud helicopter patrolling the river and drawing people’s attention upward.

And once he was wrapped around a piling that supported the pier, he blended in with the color of the wood.

If someone had noticed him, it wouldn't have been the worst disaster. He could have fled easily. Or done something alarming to scare them away, and no one would believe their story.

Such was the way of things.

He found himself considering the world as it had become. The world he was hoping to tame.

Everything was so tense now.

Prior to the rise of humanity, there really hadn't been much structure to anything. There hadn't been the language to organize things by. Yes, language had existed, humans were not unique in the ability to talk. Not by an epoch or two. But the complexity of their languages were powerful and new, and a tool by which Overlords like himself began to grip the world in a way they couldn't before.

Even without manipulating humanity itself, the gift of their language brought layers of abstract thought that allowed an analysis Chord found enticing and fascinating. It was ultimately what had led him to develop his ability to take apart, alter, and reconstruct other emanants.

He owed that to humanity.

But as he'd perfected his techniques, the rest of the emanant world calcified into a complex and chaotic stalemate between Overlords who were even more ambitious than he had been.

And many times over the ensuing centuries, he'd nearly fallen to the machinations of their conflicts. The many various ways he'd just escaped becoming collateral damage to the skirmishes of others only served to drive one thing home to him.

He needed to gain as much control as he could without the others noticing.

If he couldn’t secure Gresham, though, or a place like it, he'd always be under someone's foot. He had to start somewhere. And the advantage of Gresham was that it was in the shadow of Portland. People and emanants alike tended to forget it was a separate political entity. So he'd ingratiated himself to the Overlords of Portland by promising that he'd keep it for them as an Eastward buffer between them and the rest of the world.

Up until recently, he'd done a pretty good job of that, too. While also hiding his greater plans from his patrons.

He mused about how, before humanity, emanants really hadn't had any sort of hierarchy. It had been a very different world back then, which really wasn't all that long ago really.

Humans accelerated and complicated everything.

Before long, humanity's science would discover and verify emanant existence. And then begin to examine it in a way that even Chord could not yet achieve. Efforts to keep them ignorant would fail, and everything would change even more.

Even more than his scheme to secure the right to reproduction, he anticipated that.

He was hoping to harness that effort, that force, for himself, so he could reshape all of emanant kind in his image and finally be safe.

It was a dream.

Maybe he'd achieve it.

But first, he had to clean up the little mess that Synthia’s presence had made of his fiefdom. Or, perhaps, if this particular trap was tripped in just the right way, he’d get both balls rolling at the same time.

Oh, interesting.

The helicopter had started circling the abandoned industrial plant, but he hadn't seen any sign of Sewer Teeth. Something was happening there, but the Strands had remained undisturbed and there was no signal from his bait.

What had happened to Sewer Teeth?

Had it been compromised by someone else? Reduced? Was it hungry for more power, and reaching for his bait in hopes to regain what it had lost?

Or was something more complex going on?

He felt a faint fluttering in the Stands near him. Within striking distance, but there was nothing there. Nothing of significance.

Just a human standing on the pier a few paces away from him, watching the helicopter. They were wearing a knit cap with a big pom-pom on it, a puffy blue coat, jeans, and Uggs. And they had their hands in their coat pockets.

Normally, Chord wouldn’t even bother to note such details, which were meaningless to him most of the time. But he was looking for any reason or sign for why or how they could have influenced the Strands as they had.

Normally, he would be able to see even the parasites and psychic riders that typically accompanied a human.

There were none.

That itself was somewhat spooky.

It distracted him from making his move toward the trap he’d set, to investigate what was happening there. But, if Sewer Teeth wasn’t there yet, then he could wait. And this was now more important.

He studied the human for another moment, but to no avail.

Then the human looked right down at him, smiled, and said, “Hi, Chord.”

---

Greg and Ayden were seated across from each other at a random table in the bar area of the Ranch Room. It seemed like the best place to be. Lots of people around. Loud enough they could talk without being overheard much. Something they could drink to soothe their nerves. And probably not a known haunt of Synthia’s even though she’d been there before.

Or so they had reasoned in Greg’s truck on the way out of Salem.

It was, actually, not all that far from where Chord’s trap was supposedly set up.

But they both agreed with each other that there really was nothing they could do to help, except rush out to give Cassy a ride if she needed it. And maybe Synthia.

So, both their phones were on the table, waiting for a text or call.

They were fairly silent about everything for quite some time. Their drinks next to their hands.

Part of it was also that they were both in a little bit of shock over the fact that the next day was the 20th already. Inauguration day. And in the drive up, they’d established that, and fretted about what could happen. And could not decide what it meant.

To hear that particular President say something about what the U.S. thought was happening in Gresham did not seem like a good thing in any way. And neither of them wanted to imagine what would actually be said.

Mercifully, the Ranch Room wasn’t one of those places that had T.V.s all over the place, and the one that was running silently over the bar with subtitles was just playing old reruns of bad Westerns.

They watched Clint Eastwood say something and spit.

“Do you think Cassy’s doing that right now?” Greg asked.

“Not her style,” Ayden replied.

“Yeah, no. Not even now, after, you know…. But, Synthia, maybe though?”

“Who knows?”

“Yeah, who knows?”

---

“No?” I asked.

“No,” it repeated.

“You don’t talk.”

“I do not.”

I laughed at both it and myself, and then asked, “Can you get at me from there? Or, are you stuck in there?”

“Why should I tell you?” it asked. 

I could still feel determination radiating from it, but this conversation wasn’t really telling me what that determination meant. I figured that it was simply prepared to act in the way that it had been meant to act once I triggered the right condition. But I wasn’t learning what that condition was from the exchange of just a few words.

I thought I did learn that it took words and thoughts very literally, and was reminding me that what we were doing wasn’t “speech” by many common English definitions of the word. Not that we were speaking English, but I’d used an emanant thought that was more in line with the word, out of habit. I kind of wanted to educate it on the matter, but there were slightly more pressing concerns.

“I don’t know,” I said, conversationally. “Perhaps you could lie to me in order to get me to trust you, so that you could catch me off guard.”

“That’s not necessary,” came the reply.

“What if I told you I was just here because I sensed you and I’m curious about what you’re doing?” I asked, to see if I could get any kind of change in its emotions.

It responded with, “You can do that.”

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“You are not fooling me,” it told me.

“Why not?”

“Thralls do not knowingly approach Overlords just to talk,” it explained. Mirth radiating from it briefly, to be replaced again by determination. “And if you sensed me from beyond this building, then you know I’m an Overlord.”

“Hardly,” I changed tacts and taunted it. “You’re pretty small for an Overlord, don’t you think?”

I was pretty sure I could retreat faster than it could pursue me, but as we were talking I was subtly altering my outer layers to make that more efficient, turning all my myriad of proboscides into tiny legs with hooks on the ends of them. The extra flexibility and stretch of them would allow me to use them more quickly with less muscular effort.

I also started adding a sort of ink jet to my snout, but using it would expend energy I didn’t want to lose. Especially if I expelled ectoplasmic ink at enough force to propel me, which I was still planning on doing if necessary.

In any case, I’d decided to change my plan entirely from acting as a teratovore, even in defense.

“I am bigger enough than you,” the other monster boasted.

“That’s true. I can’t argue with that,” I admitted. “What do you think I’m here for, then?”

It grunted, “I will find out.”

“You are not very fun,” I observed.

“I do not wish to be fun,” it replied.

I kind of felt like I was talking to myself in a way. Like a version of myself when I was grumpy or tired and not really engaged with conversation. And it made me feel like I was in Felicity’s shoes when she'd been trying to get a reaction out of me.

Though, she’d given me this dry and dour treatment, too, when she’d been my parasite.

I wondered if I could get it to talk at greater length by saying something really naive and mutually embarrassing. I started thinking about what that might be.

And as I considered that, I heard the sounds of people shouting under the constant roar of the helicopter, which had retreated a little. In any case, my sense of hearing wasn’t the kind of thing where one sound could overwhelm another so easily. I could count the voices, and the number of boots that ran about on the concrete and up metal stairs and across metal causeways.

I realized I might need to speed things up.

---

Chord didn’t talk. He merely lifted his head and readied himself to act, carefully watching this person’s body language. And he also made a point not to look into their eyes.

He considered swallowing them to find out what they were and how they worked.

If they were a simple human, they’d just pass right through, slightly more traumatized than before.

But if they were any kind of emanant, even one riding a human, he would be able to take them apart and examine them at a memetic level, and then put them together however he liked. And he was pretty sure he could do this even if he could not currently sense their emanant nature. His internal senses were so much stronger and more acute. It was almost as if he could sense quarks with his gut.

In any case, by not talking he was putting this person in the unenviable position of trying to attack from the defensive. By choosing not to talk, he exerted his power of autonomy over them while also giving them nothing to work with. And to try to get him to divulge anything, they would feel the need to talk more. And in doing that, they would impart information to him.

The person just sat down, though, cross-legged, arms resting on their knees and frowned at him, examining him back.

It was a relaxed posture, in total disregard to the danger he represented.

To emphasize the threat he posed, he allowed himself to grow to about twelve feet in length and rose to tower over them.

They worked their mouth and watched him do this with a look of bored curiosity.

Then they had the audacity to say, “I don’t want to eat you. I’d rather just talk. So, if you could hold back from trying to swallow me right now, I think that would benefit the both of us, and not just you.”

Was that a threat?

Did that sound like Felicity just now?

---

previous

Still, it took me several minutes to make it to the surface of the pier and start galumphing over to the easiest chute to enter, which ended about three meters off the ground.

The one nearest me came all the way to the concrete slab that the supports for the structure were bolted to. I could have used that, but I would have had to bend the metal up with my snout and then I’d have to contort even more to fit through the then twisted and creased chute. And now that the helicopter had its spotlight on me in the deepening dusk, I wanted to give its crew a little show.

It certainly had humans on it, who were probably recording the event on all sorts of instruments, and that would lead to some interesting and alarming developments later. Probably something Chord was hoping to leverage, I imagined. But a glance at it using my monster senses also showed that it was host to several minor enthalpiphages, as helicopters often are, numerous epialivores in the crew, and what I guessed was a teratovore blatantly pretending to be a human being.

I was still not occupying the Strands, and so I would not trigger anyone’s sense of them, like Sewer Teeth might have done. The only clues to the monster I was stalking that something was up were the sounds of the helicopter and the small procession of military trucks coming down the drive to the silo.

The monsters might have been communicating with each other somehow, but I didn’t detect anything like that, and Milk had taught me how.

There were definitely hints of anticipation coming from the emanants all around me, though I wasn’t close enough to truly feed on any of their emotions yet. The monster in the grain silo was alert to the action, even if it might not know what was going on.

The plan was for me to confront it and draw it out into the open where I could see if I had what it took to take it down on my own. And, if not, then Cassy would join in. I thought I might do this by suddenly squeezing most of myself into the strands when I was up next to it, and then running.

It was at the point where I was stretching up toward the nozzle above me that I started to have second thoughts about the whole thing. Well, more second thoughts than determination. I’d had second thoughts since formulating the plan, but I’d been deliberately holding them back. I thought I’d considered them and given them plenty of voice in shaping our schemes and contingency plans, but I was wrong.

Balancing on my fluke and bracing my clawed flippers on the supporting girder, I had the tip of my snout inserted firmly in the human-shoulder wide chute above me, when I momentarily froze with indecision. That portion of me was enough to start undulating my hide and squeezing up into the chute, but every wavicle of my being seemed to want to just run to the other side of the world. Or maybe find a nice rocket to hitch a ride on to spend some time in orbit. If I truly was an enthalpiphage, if for no other reason than that I was now a child of Milk, then I should be able to make that work.

I could spend some time in a remote place absorbing absurd amounts of energy, and regain what I’d lost, at least.

Part of what threw me for a loop was that I could see that this Supraliminal in the grain silo wasn’t even the size that just one of those flying boars should have been after sharing equal portions of my energy.

That meant that that energy was somewhere else out there, and not where I could recover it. And if Chord had taken it for himself, facing him would be particularly dangerous, since that would combine my old strength with his cunning. I had no idea how old he was, after all, but he seemed much older than the boars, and probably older than Felicity, at least.

And if I were him, I would have taken that energy.

Also, I hadn’t gotten a signal from Cassy, nor sensed her in any way.

Though, she was probably staying away because of the military presence.

A sudden pinch in my left haunch got me moving again. And as I moved, I felt two more, and just barely noticed the repeated report of a rifle over the sounds of the vehicles around me. Even before that part of my scraped against the side of the chute, dislodging them, I could tell that I’d been hit with darts.

Just like Sewer Teeth, I wasn’t using eyes, but I did have a sense of vision that I’d concocted via other means that worked better than the limited range of vision of humans that I’d been imitating before. It was similar to when I had been a cloud of eyes. I saw the shape of the projectiles as they hit. And I could feel the fluids that the darts had pumped into me flow and diffuse through my odd projected physiology, doing absolutely nothing.

I’d been startled into running from the chopper, even though it posed no real threat to me, and now I acted as if I was once again committed. I thought to myself that I might as well learn everything I could about the situation, and that meant investigating the bait.

So I wormed my way up the chute at a very satisfying pace, watching the dimly lit opening above me grow bigger as the one below me grew smaller. And when I reached the top, I squeezed past a large and horizontally aligned auger to find myself in a covered work area that amounted to a long and thin building atop the girder scaffolding of the dock. The auger was set in a u-shaped, open topped chute that ran from one end of the building to the other, with machine controlled gates at each of the vertical loading chutes. A walkway, to the right of this from where I was oriented, must have allowed workers to observe and operate the machinery.

The walls were lined with windows that began halfway up the walls and extended to the ceiling, and it was dark enough out now that the helicopter was shining a searchlight in through them at me, illuminating the space I was in.

It was moving to try to get a better angle, probably so that the glare of the light didn’t bounce back at it from the glass in the windows.

And this brief moment of rest and its illusion of safety gave me a moment of increased clarity.

I noticed the dust that covered everything. I saw it dancing in the light where I’d disturbed it with my movements and presence. The place still smelled of musty old grain, even though it had been over a decade since its use, but also of oil and metal. I heard almost everything going on in the property outside the building, but muffled now that I did not have direct contact with the outer surface of the tube I’d been in. And I saw that I’d have to go down to the far end to find the right chute to navigate to the silo bin I wanted to get at.

But I also saw the whole situation for what it was, what had led up to it, and my place in it, so much more vividly.

I wasn’t going to get that feeding frenzy I was maybe hoping to trigger. That wouldn’t happen.

There was too much control being exerted locally. Not just over the population of the emanants, but also humanity.

From the very start, from that initial wink, Felicity had been manipulating me on behalf of Chord, who had been working with Fate Vine to control Gresham completely in preparation for a broader regional move.

And to do that, Chord had been operating with the permission of the Overlords of Portland, hiding much from them, in order to remain safe. I knew this because I was now also Fate Vine. Milk had left me those memories, or enough of them that I could see all of this clearly.

If I let myself, I knew almost entirely what his plan had been, and how Fate Vine thought Chord would act now.

And I saw, too, that since this was a trap set for Sewer Teeth, that if I approached it like Sewer Teeth at all, I’d be caught in it.

Cassy, who was now also Felicity in the same way I was also Fate Vine, hadn’t given me her signal, which meant that we hadn’t crossed paths, and that I was on to my plan C. And my plan C sucked. It didn't actually exist.

I felt a pang of worry that Cassy had been hurt, and almost berated myself for letting me help in this foolish endeavor. Except that I’d already come to the conclusion that there had been no way to stop her from helping without hurting her somehow myself. And, I had felt I needed the help.

Still, it was all a bad idea. A really, really bad idea.

I was smaller than I had been in millions and millions of years. I was weak and vulnerable. But I also had some abilities, flexibility, and a whole bunch of knowledge that none of the other emanants around me had.

The most important thing I could do was anything and everything to preserve that knowledge, so that later I could use it to do more than just survive.

And what I was in the middle of now looked a lot more like a foolhardy and rash act of sabotage, performed in a false sense of desperation.

But now I was in the middle of it.

I suspected that Milk had also manipulated me, and that I was doing exactly what it wanted me to do for some reason it had not divulged. I was, after all, at this point, its creation.

It had eaten the last of me to preserve my memories, and then claimed to have given me all of those memories when it recreated me. It hadn’t even implied that it hadn’t given me more than that, such as false memories, and it hadn’t occurred to me to ask.

But while I was thinking about this, I found myself moving down the walkway anyway.

Which was… alarming.

I’ve had plenty of times where I’d felt somewhat apart from myself, as if I was watching myself do things. I’ve imagined, once I’d learned of the human concept of a subconscious mind, that I probably had one, too. But in this particular circumstance, after everything I’d recently been through, while questioning the validity of my own existence, experiencing it now was especially disconcerting.

I wanted to take the time to analyze my situation more and plan my next moves better, but I wasn’t giving myself the opportunity to do that.

Instead, I found myself working my way through the chutes and ducts of the complex, past more augers and gates, valves, and such, to come to the top of the silo bin the bait was residing in. It was a top loading and unloading bin, with an auger running down the middle of it to remove the grain that it had once stored.

I managed to stop myself before reaching the end of the duct I was in.

I had full lucidity again. Less falsely acute awareness but full control of my actions. And I had a choice.

The old plan was to do a hit and run. Basically slap the other monster and then dash away. A really stupid idea.

If I could push myself to run now, to find a place to hide and regain my power, I could reconfigure myself to do some pretty amazing and powerful things I’d learned from Fate Vine.

But I was here, now.

I had the opportunity to learn something more.

This close to the other monster, who seemed to still be waiting for something while radiating the simple emotion of anticipation, I could examine it in more detail.

I saw how it filled the Strands almost perfectly evenly, and how its presence in the monster realm was larger than necessary. Unless I poked my nose over the lip of the chute I was in, I couldn’t see how it filled the silo bin, however. It smelled like a teratovore, but I didn’t know if that was one of my genuine senses or just a hunch I had. And there was something else about it that felt odd, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

I didn’t have any fingers at the moment, anyway.

In my current existence, I was a child of Milk. I had inherited its set of abilities, and what it could adapt to being. And, although I’d tried to reconfigure myself to be what I’d been before, plus some new abilities, I just didn’t know what my actual limitations were anymore, or if I was remembering anything correctly.

I couldn’t trust myself.

Were my long set of memories telling me I usually ran in times like this mine, or was that something that Milk had given me? Was my impulse to charge right in regardless of what I was thinking something that Milk had given me? Or was it something I’d always had that was now unfettered by some governing trait that Milk had withheld?

And while I thought I knew which memories I had were actually Fate Vines, I couldn’t be certain. Did any of my current behavior come from it, even if I thought I was fighting those impulses and reflexes?

I couldn’t really get any reliable information from what I already knew. I needed to learn more to help me figure things out.

And here I was, surrounded by emanants and human military agents, facing a monster that was too small to have been more than a tiny portion of my former self, and yet that dwarfed me in my current state.

This left me with one final, reasonably safe thing I could do to gather information here before moving on.

“Do you talk?” I asked the other monster.

I could feel its emotion switch from anticipation to determination.

It spoke, “No.”

---

previous

“Why not?” I demanded.

“Secrets,” it replied. “Memories. Uncertainty.”

I scowled at it, visibly to the others.

“What’s wrong?” Ayden asked, now used to watching me interact with Milk.

“It’s being mysterious and opaque,” I told him.

“Milk is usually opaque, isn’t it?” Greg asked.

“Not like that,” Cassy said, gesturing at the other monster. She’d heard and understood it, too.

Greg jerked his head up, “Can we trust it?”

“I don’t know,” I said, making my voice tense, directing my voice at Milk. “Can we?”

“You cannot,” Milk replied, and then it seeped away into the Strands before I or Cassy could react, and was gone.

And that rattled Greg and Ayden significantly, even though they couldn’t hear its response. The way that Cassy and I reacted, almost jumping at it, informed them enough of what had happened, and watching a glass of Milk empty itself without being drunk or spilled was disturbing.

To me, it was like seeing a squid squirt a cloud of ink and jet away.

For a few minutes after that, we all felt like our plans were completely derailed and nearly called them to a halt.

But Greg wanted us to regurgitate what it had said exactly, and when he heard “Secrets. Memories. Uncertainty.” he scowled and nodded. And it having said that we couldn’t trust it seemed to clinch his assessment for him.

“It’s security,” he said. “We’re all messing with things that can play with memories, steal them, rework them, alter them, read them, and all that. If either of you get eaten, whatever plan you’ve made between the two of you is sunk. If Milk is going to help you, to be backup, it needs to hide how it’s going to do it. Or even whether or not it will.”

Ayden pointed at him, jutting his finger in Greg’s direction a few times, “But. If it’s been setting us up, it’s gotta hide that as well.”

Greg scoffed. “If Milk saved the last of Synthia from Chord’s last trap, then why would it be setting us up?”

I sighed, “To catch Cassy for Chord. It really doesn’t track with what I know about it. But, I don’t know that much, and I’ve already been burned by someone I thought I knew. And Cassy is special and weird, and hard to recognize. And she’s dangerous. And Milk really wanted to meet and examine her, which it has now done. If we want to be cautious about it, that’s what we’ve got to look out for.”

Cassy slid back into her corner and looked down at the table with hooded eyes, pouting and rubbing her palm over the table top. Her feelings were more curiosity than fear, though. “What happens when I die? I mean, when my body dies?”

Both Greg and Ayden looked suitably uncomfortable with that question.

“No one really knows,” I said, before either of them could speak. “As an emanant, that you’ll be free of your body’s bonds is anyone’s most obvious guess. Someone out there probably knows that for sure. But I’m guessing you’re asking about your own personal inner dimension and any chance you might unlock adaptations. But, if you don’t just, like, become your own separate little universe, cutting yourself off from this one, you’ll probably be a lot easier to eat.”

She grimaced at me, blinking repeatedly, “And I bet anybody who knows about me is hoping they’ll be able to do that.”

“I guess you’ll have to trust me when I say not me,” I replied to her.

She smiled sadly and said, “Felicity read you well enough that I do, actually.”

“I’m not the same person I was before I ate Fate Vine, though,” I reminded her.

“That’s. Not. Getting us anywhere,” Greg scolded us.

“Look, I feel trapped here, now,” Ayden spoke up, adjusting how he sat, eyes full of fear. “Like, Greg and I are just human beings, but you care about us, right? I want to be able to go home and can’t, but I’m worried about staying here alone now, too. Can’t we be used as leverage against you?”

“Then we go somewhere else without telling these two where,” Greg said. Then he pointed at me and Cassy in turn. “And you two, think of some backup plans for if the other gets taken, eaten or not. And don’t tell each other. We stay here until you say you’ve figured it out.”

Cassy nodded, emanating mollified emotions, and then smirked with pride and amusement at Greg, “Synthia and I each have millions of years of memories of survival and political strategy. Mine came from Felicity, but I’m getting a grip on it. And you just cut through our crap with the obvious.”

“Less bullshit to confuse me,” he grunted. 

“And we thank you for it,” I told him.

“Also, it’s elementary infosec,” he added. “It’s what Milk just did.”

We nodded solemnly in acknowledgement, and then we all did what we said we’d do, and more.

And I decided to take a fun little disguise that probably wouldn’t fool anyone who looked at the Strands.

---

Chord started getting signals from his thralls that Sewer Teeth was in town again and on the move, headed right for his kill box.

He decided he needed to close the trap himself, so he started following.

---

Considering how small and weak I was, I really shouldn’t have been the bait. But, we needed bait, and it wasn’t going to be Cassy or anyone else.

However, Milk had helped me to prepare for this.

I was a nasty little killing machine, which I deeply hated being. But, if I kept my focus on how I was going to survive a cunning ambush by a highly successful predator, I remained functional about it.

Getting Cassy into town without Greg or Ayden helping required the bus. So, we sprang for a ticket with my talents instead of actual money, and I tagged along in the luggage compartment. The hilarity of it was that we went from Salem to Portland on the bus, then to Gresham via the MAX, and we passed by the site where the bait for us was supposed to be.

It allowed us to case the place briefly. We both saw the Supraliminal residing there. There was definitely something there.

It was also informative to see the liminals that were riding the MAX shy away from it as we rode by. They didn’t leave the train, but they definitely swayed in place. And not all of them did. Only about nine in ten were affected by the Supraliminal presence. And neither Cassy nor I triggered any of them, of course.

On the MAX, I was riding in Cassy’s backpack. She’d let me out in a toilet somewhere in downtown Gresham, and then head off in her own direction to make her way back to the Portland site. She’d probably get there before me, but we weren’t communicating with each other about those specifics.

Plan A was that I would do all of the work, if I could. Plan B would be that she’d be my backup. But we had worked out some signals to use if we got near each other, so if we didn’t see those signals we’d each keep our Plans C in mind.

Milk was Plan X. We weren’t relying on it at all, and we were even allowing ourselves to think of it as a potential threat, and worry over it. An intensity of emotion could make a particular memory more prominent, if it should be absorbed.

Fear would keep us both alert, too.

Fear was healthy.

And holy shit was I afraid.

Taking the form of Sewer Teeth didn’t really assuage that fear, nor my discomfort upon being flushed down a toilet. Even without eyes, and with a semblance of Sewer Teeth’s nose, I still had all of my senses as I’d configured them before taking that form. And those senses were acute.

My sense of sight instead came from every surface of my being, resulting in a similar experience to being a cloud of compound eyes. But also, the sewer smelled like a sewer. Not that I perceived that like a human did, either. Feces are not a threat to me. But since I like to pretend I’m a human, I don’t like the smell anyway, and being surrounded by utter darkness in a cramped space was disconcerting.

It all felt like alarming danger. And I had to rely on my other senses to get around.

Also, as a reasonable facsimile of Sewer Teeth, I could elongate and squish myself like a Stretch Armstrong, and I felt the inner surface of the pipes pressing against my sides and back. And if I didn’t move with the water, I affected its flow, even if I let some of it flow past and around me.

This, of course, just made my presence more authentic. And I traveled through the sewers until I found a decent exit point in a bathroom somewhere else that was closer to Portland than from where I started. I burst forth from a gas station restroom and galumphed very publicly toward a storm drain, which would afford me a better path to where I was going. And from there, I’d occasionally surface to get to a different part of the storm drain system.

This scared humans and emanants alike, and may have alerted the government presence to my movements. But I figured it was something Sewer Teeth might do as a way of taunting Chord, just like I wanted to do myself. I didn’t think Sewer Teeth had been ignorant and thoughtless, exactly. I thought it had been cunning, if maybe a bit full of itself. Milk had suggested as much.

And that’s how I drew a troubling train of potential assailants and enemies toward the rows of massive tanks, snaking pipes, and encompassing walkways, all rendered in concrete and steel just off the east side of North Steel Bridge. If you’ve ridden the MAX across Portland, you’ve seen it, and you know what I’m talking about. And if you look on a satellite map, you’ll see it as a long thin building at an angle near the waterfront, surrounded by other structures attached to it.

And there was a monster in there waiting for me. A monster I was fairly sure had been constructed from one or more bloated flying boars.

Milk had warned me that if Chord had set that place up as a trap, he’d have to have done it with permission from the powers that held Portland. So, I’d be surrounded by those at least somewhat loyal to our target. But whether they’d jump in if needed, or just sit and watch with amusement however it went, we really didn’t know.

I want to be clear, I wasn’t doing this out of any sort of altruism or concern for the world, or even just Gresham. I was ultimately doing it for myself, because I didn’t want the world that Chord was trying to make. And if he was to succeed, ceasing to exist sooner rather than later seemed OK to me.

But also, I’d already ceased to exist once. The idea bothered me less than it used to.

I hardly recognized myself any more, and I wasn’t sure when and how I’d finally passed that point of loss.

I managed to skulk through the city drainage system right up to the corner of North Interstate Street and Rose Quarter Terrace, basically smack in the middle of the Rose Quarter Transit Center. And by the time I got there, it was nearly dusk, the golds and pinks of a sunset painting the buildings around me.

Even before I erupted from the storm drain to consider my options, I could see the bulk of my target filling the Strands below me.

I did make quite the scene. That was, after all, part of my plan. I wasn’t being subtle or a surprise. And cars and pedestrians panicked and scattered around me as I completely ignored them.

I had this idea that if I could trigger a feeding frenzy, I could draw the Supraliminal out to be picked off by a swarm of other teratovores, while I then ran away. Or, maybe I could lead the feeding frenzy right into the industrial complex to where the Supraliminal waited.

All a terrible idea, but I was weak and small and very experienced at running and hiding, even if I hadn’t really been doing much of that lately.

Unfortunately, the crowd of pursuers following me were likely loyal to Chord and part of his trap, but I was hoping to leverage them, too, to make the frenzy more likely.

And if Chord was here himself, I guessed I’d just try to turn the tables on him and eat him myself.

The idea repulsed me as much as ever, but I didn’t really see that I had much choice. I could use the energy, too. I’d lost so much.

But now I was presented with a question, a set of choices.

The abandoned industrial site was a concrete grain silo with forty bins in a double row under a peaked roof, with a tower of processing bins at the north end. It had a set of walkways, conveyors, and chutes on the water side, over a set of train tracks. The chutes were designed to empty grain into either the ships that would have docked in the river there or train cars. They could be switched and configured for either purpose.

And my target was sitting in one of those forty bins, a single huge cylinder the size of a multistory building itself situated near the center of the row nearest the river. Ten stories tall, or something like that. I just glanced at it.

I could just charge across the streets and down the steep, bramble covered embankment, and then across the train tracks below, bringing chaos with me. Or, I could dive back into the drain system to make my way to the river, and sneak up through the chute system to drop into the occupied bin. Or, maybe I could make a dash for a nearby restroom and try to access the place via the sewers. The complex certainly had bathrooms in it.

The ridiculous boldness of my plan and my current stance in the middle of the street both telegraphed a heedless dash across open ground.

But I was struck with my own well worn reflexes, and I hopped back down into the storm drain.

The helicopter that had been following me flew low overhead in a rush of blades.

---

previous

It’s possible that I’d scared all the surrounding emanants more than I’d scared humanity, though.

Anyway, Ayden was in Salem with me and Milk to help us hone our plans as information came in, and also to man the phone while I conversed more deeply with Milk. In addition to that, he’d been trying to grill us about Korean folklore.

It seemed that his way of dealing with the revelation of monsters was to develop a new special interest in one of his ancestral cultures. A totally fair and understandable thing to do. He’d have a lot more to talk about with Cassy, too. Her interest in horror movie monsters and general folklore overlapped with that a great deal.

And I’d certainly love to watch Korean horror and fantasy with the both of them, myself, at least.

But, I’m afraid I wasn’t a very good resource for the questions he had been asking, and neither was Milk.

Still, I was learning more about Ayden’s personal history than I had in the two years I’d known him leading up to this. And I appreciated that a lot. And so, I was trying to help him as much as I could. Such as when he’d asked about the bulgasal, a rather famous Korean monster. I’d agreed that its origins seemed to have corresponded roughly to a monster hunt I remembered, but I couldn’t confirm if it had been an actual emanant in any way or even the cause of the hunt.

After looking at that text message, though, he didn’t look like he’d ask any more folklore related questions soon.

I decided to acknowledge his report by saying, “I was afraid of that.” 

I hadn’t been. I hadn’t been thinking about it. But, I felt that response would be the least alarming and worrisome to him. And everything had clicked into place when I’d heard it.

“What does Milk think?” he asked.

Milk couldn’t talk English or any verbal language. Not in its current configuration, which it seemed unwilling to alter. So I had to translate for it. It understood him just fine, though.

“Ephemeral lifeforms will pass,” Milk replied.

I told Adyen, “It’s not overly concerned for its own wellbeing, or mine.”

“Oh, goody,” Ayden sighed.

“I wonder –” I started to say, but our phones buzzed again and Ayden looked at his, so I stopped.

He got a slightly more vexed and more interested look on his face, and reported, “Cassy says she’s now seen a teratovore working as a Homeland Security agent.”

“Not local,” Milk said.

I contradicted it, “No, it could be. Or, local enough.”

Ayden squinted at us, but seemed to suss out what Milk had said from my response.

We were seated around the table in my diner booth domain, again. We’d gotten some food from a nearby fast food place, for Ayden, but he wasn’t even picking at it. He just sipped his milkshake occasionally.

Milk was in its customary glass, set a fair ways away from the food and milkshake.

“It could be one of Chord’s agents, but we won’t know for sure until we dissect its memories, I think,” I added.

Ayden nodded and typed in a text to Cassy, probably relaying that message.

Then, with a concerned look, he said to me, not really for the first time, “This is such slow going.”

“Yeah, I imagine it is,” I agreed. “For me, I kind of have to fight to experience it slowly, of course. But, watching you eat your burger helps with that.” I gave him a nice smile, to let him know it was supposed to be a gentle tease he could ignore.

He snorted, then mock scowled and said, “You’re not feeding off human emotions again, are you?”

“Nope, not yet. Probably going to switch back to that after things settle down again, though,” I replied. “I prefer it that way. I like to be close to humans. I like to feel like I’m maybe one of you. You’re good people.”

“Sometimes I really can’t see that,” he frowned and pouted, and then slurped his drink. “A lot of times. How are we ‘good people’?”

“Compared to emanants?” I asked, pausing only briefly before continuing. “Ah. Recent events and your personal experiences are going to make this a hard argument to make. Humans can really be so fucking cruel to each other. But, Chord is evidence that emanants can be, too. I’m afraid of sounding like a trite social media post if I explain in detail, Ayden. But, in all of my existence, I’ve seen more community and mutual support between humans than I have between even the most herd-like of emanants. We don’t bond with each other like you do. We don’t have the biological drives to do it. And only the thinnest of circumstantial ones.”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

I replied, “For the most part, we don’t reproduce. We don’t need to, and it’s seen as a threat on the level of weapons of mass destruction. Like, for us, reproduction actually reduces our diversity, and increases control that a single emanant may have over their area of the world, so we’ve got kind of a cold war going on about it. And the need to reproduce and raise your young has led you to evolve a whole bunch of emotions and behaviors that we just haven’t developed or explored.”

“You learn well,” Milk told me.

“Thanks,” I responded to it in monster speak.

Ayden truly scowled and asked, “If you don’t reproduce, how are more emanants made when you’re killed?”

“We spring into existence,” I said. “New emanants fill the void left by destroyed emanants. Kind of like how subatomic particles spontaneously spawn in a vacuum in opposing pairs. But different. Some people used to call it spontaneous generation, but erroneously attributed it to things like rats and flies. And our circumstances, the shape of the voids we fill, shape us.”

“This is why older emanants are more flexible,” Milk told me.

“Oh, of course,” I said out loud. “Milk says that’s why older emanants like me and it are more flexible, and can change our adaptations and such.”

“Oh,” Ayden said.

I looked at Milk and asked it, “How old are you, anyway?”

“I do not count years. Older than life,” it replied.

I pointed a thumb at it and said, “It’s at least twice as old as I am. I think. I’m guessing.”

Ayden grabbed a cold fry and evaluated it, “I guess I’m lucky to be friends with you.”

“The luck goes both ways,” I said.

“How so?” he retorted skeptically, popping the fry into his mouth and chewing on it angrily.

“You’re a rare and fascinating individual who has a lot to teach me about humanity, and I could have missed you if I’d blinked at the wrong time,” I told him. “More or less.”

He tightened his lips after swallowing the fry, “That sounds like a platitude.”

“It’s gonna. I can’t help it,” I admitted. “The circumstances are against me, but my feelings about it are genuine anyway.”

“Cool,” he nodded and pursed his lips. “I can accept that, I think. Also, I don’t mind being luckier than you are. I could use the boost.”

“That sounds like a good way to look at it,” I said.

He smiled wanly, “So, for old times’ sake, what were trilobites really like?”

Milk said to me, “Alive.”

I told Ayden, “Like really cute bugs.”

“That’s the kind of thing I like to hear,” he grinned, grabbing a bunch of cold fries.

---

While they drove past the high school toward Hayward Grocery, two low priority points of interest that could still house traps, Cassy found herself distracted by the lime green vinyl dashboard of Greg’s truck. She really only had to glance in the direction of each building once as they passed it, so she had time to lose herself in her human senses. It made her feel better, more herself, to reach out and touch textured things.

It was so clean. Faded, old, but free of dust or grime and otherwise unmarred.

She wondered how old the truck was. It had a stick shift in the steering column.

Tilting her face toward Greg without taking her eyes off the chrome trim of the dash, she asked him, “Between your gorgeous robe, your house, and this truck, how come you were working groceries?”

“Burnout,” Greg said immediately. Then he chuckled, “I inherited the house and truck from my parents. So that’s luck. The robe, I bought. I was in my twenties during the dot com boom, and was able to mask all sorts of shit I really shouldn’t have. Unlike a lot of my coworkers, I put a lot of my money into savings. I’m not rich by any means. I no longer have any retirement. But I’ve been using that money since my burnout to keep the things I value in good shape. Took most of my thirties with lots of therapy to get to the place where I could work at all again.”

“Oh.”

“I’m like one of those trans women who seemed to actually have male privilege when they were in the closet, only I’m not a woman,” he awkwardly quipped.

She really didn’t know what to think of that, but she said, “Sure. I mean, masking neurodivergence or orientation is kinda similar I suppose. And if you’re not cis, then…”

“Yeah, maybe,” he said. “No hits?”

“None,” she reported. Hayward was busy with people and a small flock of obvious affectivores, but nothing that stuck out to her.

“What’s next on our list?”

“Utilities, I think. TRIMET,” she replied.

“I feel like we’re not going to get much from those places either,” Greg grumbled.

“Agreed,” she reached out and stroked the dash slowly again. “I think I need to sample some of the wildlife. And I really don’t want to.”

“Oh? How’s that?” Greg asked like it was the most natural conversation.

She sighed and took a deep breath. She didn’t look forward to doing this in any way, but she couldn’t logic her way out of it. “If they’ve been altered by Chord, I might be able to tell from their memories. I might even be able to figure out what he’s planning next that way.”

“Good call. Where to, then?” Greg asked.

“Same places, only I get out and do my thing, I guess.”

---

Some time later, after Ayden had finished his food and Milk and I had given him an education on the evolution of life that he really couldn’t get anywhere else, our phones buzzed a couple of times.

It was from Cassy, of course.

The first message was, “I hate being a teratovore.”

The second message read, “Every other emanant in Gresham is part of a trap for someone. I almost tripped it. We’re coming back to Salem now.”

Ayden and I shared a Look. Milk radiated an emotion that matched that look.

An hour after that, as we were greeting Greg and Cassy in front of the shop, Cassy told us, “It’s a mosaic of memory fragments. When you consume enough of them, they trigger a flashback and an impulse to go to Portland. Greg wasn’t having any of it.”

“Please elaborate,” I said.

Greg walked around the front of his Truck, shoving his hands into his coat pockets. “I’ve been watching how you and Cassy act when you start talking about memories that weren’t yours. I don’t like it. She started acting weird, and I decided to veto her directions.”

“The flashback really felt like it was my own, though,” Cassy said. “Like, despite it coming from before I – I guess – awakened? I remembered seeing a vulnerable ally of Chord’s while in Portland once. It was headquartered in an abandoned industrial site. And I guess I sort of attributed it to one of Felicity’s memories.”

“Except you weren’t exactly talking like her, either,” Greg said. “Which is really what tipped me off.”

“I really wanted to go and eat it, too. Intensely,” she added.

“Exactly.”

I stated the obvious conclusion for everyone’s benefit, “So, it’s a trap set for a lone teratovore that absorbs memories.”

“Who could that be for?” Ayden asked. “You? Didn’t you say you died? And Milk pretended to be Croc-face to confirm your death?”

“‘Die’ is such a weird way to describe the end of one of us,” I turned to Ayden. “But, yes. Chord is supposed to think Croc-face is still at large, and that it maybe betrayed him. But who knows, really?”

“Can you take advantage of that?” he asked.

“Milk was hoping we could, yes.”

Milk mentally nudged me from its place near my feet, “You’re full of ancient secrets. You have old tricks and reflexes that you’ve long forgotten because you haven’t needed them. But Chord is as old as you, and now he towers over you.”

“I know,” I told it. “But I have you and Cassy.”

“Maybe,” it said.

I felt like clapping my hands again, like some sort of team leader, so I did, then declared to everyone “Alright! Let’s see what we can do with this!”

---

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