Fledgling(28)

“You’ll need more than two humans.”

“I don’t like the others that I’ve been using. I needed them, but I don’t want to keep them.”

He nodded. “It goes that way sometimes. I’ll introduce you to others. I know adult children of our symbionts who have been waiting and hoping to join an Ina child. Some of them can’t wait to join us; others can’t wait to leave us. But before you meet them, you’ll have to spend the next week going once more to each of the ones you don’t want. You’ll have to talk to them, tell them to forget you, and become just a romantic dream to them. Otherwise, chances are they’ll look for you. They don’t need you, but they’ll want you. They might waste their lives looking for you.”

“All right.”

We began to walk again. He said, “I’m taking you to see your youngest brother, Stefan, because you were close to him. You spent the first twenty-five years of your life with him at your mothers’ community. The two of you were always phoning each other after Stefan moved here. While you’re with him, though, don’t mention Hugh Tang.”

“All right.”

“Did you kill Hugh because you’d gone mad with hunger? Did you eat him?”

“… yes.”

“I thought so. He was Stefan’s symbiont. He had met you several times, and Stefan chose him to be part of the search party because he knew Hugh would recognize you. I’ll tell your brother what happened later.”

We entered one of the smaller houses through the back door. In the kitchen, we found three women working. One was stirring and seasoning something in a pot on the stove, one was searching through a huge, double-doored refrigerator, and one was mixing things in a large bowl.

“Esther, Celia, Daryl,” Iosif said, gesturing toward each of them as he said their names so that I would know who was who. Two of them, Esther and Celia, had skin as dark as mine, and I looked at them with interest. They were the first black people I remembered meeting. And yet the genes for my dark skin had to have come from someone like these women. The women turned to look at us, saw me, and Esther whispered my name.

“Shori! Oh my goodness.”

But they were all strangers to me. Iosif told them what had happened to me, while I examined each face. I could see that they knew me, but I didn’t know them. I felt tired all of a sudden, hopeless. I followed Iosif into the living room where he introduced me to my youngest brother, Stefan, and to more of his human symbionts—two men and two women. The symbionts left us as soon as they’d greeted me and heard about my memory loss. I did not know them, didn’t know the house, didn’t know anything.

Then I did know one small thing—something I deduced rather than remembered. I could see that Stefan was darker than Iosif, darker than Wright. He was a light brown to my darker brown, and that meant …

“You’re an experiment, too,” I said to him when we’d talked for a while.

“Of course I am,” he said. “I should have been you, so to speak. We have the same black human mother.”

I smiled, comforted that I had been right to believe that one of my mothers had been a black human. “Did I know her?”

“You were her favorite. Whenever I did something wrong, she’d shake her head and say I wasn’t really what she had in mind anyway.” He smiled sadly, remembering. “She said I was too much like Iosif.”

“And someone murdered her,” I said. “Someone murdered them all.”

“Someone did.”

“Why? Why would anyone do that?”

He shook his head. “If we knew why, we might already have found out who. I don’t understand how this person was able to kill everyone—except you. Our Ina mothers were powerful. They should have been … much harder to kill.”

“Could it have happened because humans thought we were vampires?” I asked. “I mean, if they thought we were killing people, they might have—”

“No,” Stefan and Iosif said together. Then Iosif said, “We live in rural areas. People around us know one another. They know us—or they think they do. No one had died mysteriously in my mates’ home territory except my mates themselves and their community.”

“I don’t mean that we have been killing people,” I said. “I mean … what if someone saw one of us feeding and … drew the wrong conclusions?”

Iosif and Stefan looked at one another. Finally Iosif said, “I don’t believe that could have happened. Your mothers and sisters were even more careful than we are.”

“I don’t believe humans could have done it,” Stefan said.

“I was burned and shot,” I said. “Anyone can use fire and guns.”

Iosif shook his head. “I questioned several of the people who live near your mothers’ community. There was nothing wrong, no trouble, no suspicions, no grudges.”

“When I went to the ruin today,” I said, “someone had been there. He was human, young, unarmed, and he’d walked all around the ruin. Did you notice?”

“Yes. He prowls. He lives in your general area but down toward the town of Gold Bar. He’s sixteen, and I suspect he prowls without his parents’ knowledge.” He shook his head. “We combed the area very thoroughly. He was one of the people we checked. He didn’t know anything. No one knows anything.”