Fledgling(26)

“I do. I’m not entirely sure that it’s my idea, but I do. What will I become, though? What have I become? You said she’ll … find a mate. What happens to me then?”

“You are her first symbiont, the first member of her new family. Her mating can’t change that. She’ll visit her mates and they’ll visit her, but you’ll live with her. No one could separate the two of you now without killing you, and no one would try.”

“Killing me …? Why would I die? What would I die of?”

“Of the lack of what she provides.”

“But what—?”

“Come into the house, Wright. I’ll see that you get all the answers you need. You might not like them all, but you have a right to hear them.”

We walked from the side to the front of the large house. Iosif’s community was clearly nocturnal. The Ina were naturally nocturnal, and their symbionts had apparently adjusted to being awake at night. There were lights on in all the houses, and people—human symbionts and their children, I guessed—moved around, living their lives. A red-haired woman was backing a car out of a garage. She had a small, red-blond baby strapped into a special seat in the back. Two little boys were raking leaves, and pausing now and then to throw them at one another. They were my size, and I wondered how old they were. A little girl was sweeping leaves from a porch with a broom that was almost too big for her to manage. A man was on a ladder, doing something to the rain gutter of one of the houses. Several adults stood talking together in one of the broad yards.

Wright and I followed Iosif into the biggest house and found ourselves in a room that stretched from the front to the back of the house. Wright’s whole cabin might have filled a third of it. There were several couches, several chairs large and small, and several little tables scattered around the room.

Iosif said, “We meet here on Sunday evenings or when there’s something that needs community-wide discussion.”

There was a broad picture window on the backyard side of the great room; it ran across the top half the wall from one end of the room to the other. At one of the end walls, there was a huge fireplace where a log burned with much snapping and sparking. Books filled built-in bookcases on the two remaining walls.

In a corner near the fireplace, two men and a woman—all human—sat at a small table, their heads together, talking quietly. There were steaming cups of coffee on the table. There was no light in the room except the fire. Iosif walked us over to the three people.

“Brook, Yale, Nicholas.”

They looked up, saw me, and were on their feet at once, staring. “Shori!” the woman said. She came around her chair and hugged me. She was a stranger as far as I was concerned, and I would have drawn away from any possibility of a hug, but she smelled of Iosif. Something in me seemed to accept her. She smelled of someone I had decided was all right. “My God, girl,” she said, “where have you been? Iosif, where did you find her?”

Both men looked at me, then at Wright. One of them smiled. “Welcome,” he said to Wright. “Looks like Shori was able to take care of herself.”

Iosif put his hand on my shoulder as the woman let me go. “Is any of this familiar to you? Do you know these people, this house?”

I shook my head. “I like the room, but I don’t remember it.” I looked at the three people. “And I’m sorry, but I don’t remember any of you either.”

All three of them stared at Iosif.

“She was very badly injured,” he said. “Head injuries. As a result, she’s lost her memory. And she was alone until she found Wright Hamlin here. I’m hoping her memory will return.”

“Don’t you have your own medical people?” Wright asked. “People who know how to help your kind?”

“We do,” Iosif said. “But for Ina, that tends to mean someone to fix badly broken bones so that they heal straight or binding serious wounds so that they’ll heal faster.”

“You don’t want to see what they mean by ‘a serious wound,’” one of the men said. “Intestines spilling out, legs gone, that sort of thing.”

“I don’t,” Wright agreed. “Shori told me she had been badly burned as well as shot. But she healed on her own. Not a scar.”

“Except for not knowing herself or her people,” Iosif said. “I would call that a large scar. Unfortunately, it’s not one we know how to fix.”

“Did I have friends here?” I asked. “People who might know me especially well?”

“Your four brothers are here,” he said. He looked at the three humans. “Look after Wright for a while,” he said. “Answer fully any questions he asks. He’s with Shori now. He’s her first, but he knows almost nothing.” He took my arm and began to lead me away.

“Renee?” Wright said to me, and I stopped. It eased something in me to hear him call me by the name he had given me. “You okay?” he asked.

I nodded. “Yell if you need me. I’ll hear.”

He nodded. He looked as though my words eased something in him.

I followed Iosif down a long hallway.

“These bedrooms belong to me and my human family,” he told me. “They’re the three you just met and five others who aren’t here right now. They’ve all been with me for years. Eight is a good number for me, although at other times in my life I’ve had seven or even ten. I’m wealthy enough to care for all of them if I have to, and they feed me. They’re free to hold jobs away from the community, even live elsewhere part time, and sometimes they do. But at least three of them are always here. They work out a schedule among themselves.”