ST Issue 03

O Sister Where Art Thou
It started when they were chasing Lieutenant Larceny -- there was the giant submersible-jet with its guns and its cargo of evil Meta-Nazis, and there was the brand new pilot. Cheshire only saw her for a moment but he knew the smell, the sound of her rasping voice. His little sister. Ivy. First time he saw her she was keeping the other girls from panicking as they were being taken from the Child-Pens. ''Stay calm. Keep track. Look for a chance to get away.''

She had been his name-partner when the Moreaus took their old names and gave them the new ones based on their stupid broken-Esperanto number game. He used to be Trip, and she was Tria. She kept the memory of her birth name, Susan, and tried to get him to remember his, but he only remembered the Moreaus and their great kindness in getting them all away from the slavers. (Theatre. It was all a performance, they staged the whole thing. They even drugged themselves to ensure that their feelings were genuine while they were performing for their future animal-hybrid slaves. That was one of the things that broke Felix from his conditioning -- when he "saw" them talking about having to take the drugs so they could stand to treat the freakish brats like beloved children. That was just before they decided to dissect him to find out what went wrong, so he had to return to his body while their drugs were kicking in. Ana's tears of joy at finding him awake and sitting in the fish pond smelled of chemicals.)

Felix decided to go to the island. She might be there, yes? No. She wasn't. Her scent was long-faded when he finally got back after four weeks... after he had gotten confident with the long jump. Now, he could go literally anywhere on the planet, if he knew where it was approximately, but not to where she was, because he didn't know where she was.

He tried to make a 'signature' for her, so he could go to her. He found himself almost in Antarctica, almost in the Sahara, almost in Kiev with soldiers shooting. He snapped back to Skyway to his warehouse. Tengu poked him with a stick.

"Are you sleeping or meditating? Why do you keep fading away?" She dragged him out to the tatami and made him practice fighting, slapping him with the stick every once in a while when he lost focus.

He went back to the Moreau's island after practice. Where the house had been, there was wreckage, but the smaller servants' quarters were still standing. In Mother Ava's Garden, the fruit trees had been cared for, but the garden of lovely and poisonous herbs had been removed, and instead, there was a neat row of graves. None of his brothers or sisters was there, but he saw the names of the ones who had been buried. There was a headstone with five names on it, one of them his. He found the groundskeeper Villum, a strange young man with a head injury who had been healed by the Moreaus of a seizure disorder that was threatening to kill him. He resented them and adored them and refused to clean their grave marker. Villum explained the tombs. The two tall ones, the Moreaus, they'd had their own crypts prepared for years, a practical matter. Then, on the left, six graves, on the right, six more, and in a single cenotaph, five names for the bodies too badly burned to be identified. They'd used the ID cuffs on their ankles, when there were ankles.

The dead on the right hand: Jake, Jane, Lance, Lisa, Oren, Ophelia. The wolf pack. They had been the friendliest of the family, tightly knit and interdependent.

The dead on the left: Anna, Davis, Dani, George, Greta, Felicia. The attack squad, alligators and the other tiger, and they had been neatly mowed down with high speed chain shot that was so fast, Felix had almost fallen to it himself.

In the group cenotaph ... he had wanted to throw off pursuit. He'd slipped his own ID bracer on one of the normal guards who had been so badly burned it wasn't possible to tell what he was. The others listed there, Bea, Carl, Evan, Neal, and this one human guard, had all died in a white phosphorus blast. He felt slightly dirty for having used the body of the unfortunate man, Giyyam or something like that, in such a way. The human had tried to be a friend to them, but of course the Moreaus didn't like that kind of thing. All love and loyalty was to be for them alone.

Regret made Felix uncomfortable. He started to scrape his name from the marker with a metal rod from the wreckage of the house. Only sixteen dead. Only half of them.

"I saw you put the name band on my friend. It was not a bad thing," Villum said. "He thought you were wonders of nature, you animal people. He was charmed by you.  He wished he could be you in particular."

"They really messed up everyone they touched, didn't they?" Felix said to Villum in a quiet rasp. He left the half-scarred name there, so the ghost wouldn't be deprived.

"I am alive because of them. I am thirty-five, no? I have been thirty-five for nearly twenty years. I no longer have the seizures but if I leave this island, they return.  The same for many of us.  If we could have children... perhaps they could escape.  But the Moreaus did not want that."

Villum went back to killing the poison flowers. Felix phased, down into the under-basement, the one that only the Guardians had known about (and the Moreaus) and found the bug-out room empty, all the supplies gone, the cash he'd left behind also missing, which was good.

The only thing now was to find out where they were.

Alvin, the last gator. Barton and Eve, the remaining eagles, with their rocket packs. Candy, Ivan, Kevin, and Ivy, four of the six Cougar scouts, most of them had been away, which is why Ivy's appearance disturbed him so much. Kate the Cougar had vanished on a mission, a month before the attack, and the others were searching for her.

Hal and Honey. They might be together somewhere. The honey badgers. They were wild and fierce and biteful and did not care what the Moreaus told them to do once they had merged, but the control collars had kept them until Felix stole them during the invasion. And Marc and Mary, the Flying Foxes, and Nancy the eagle. He wasn't sure at all where they might have gotten to... they had been in the area. Their packs were gone.

....