Free Fledgling by Octavia E. Butler Page A

me suddenly. “Did you see the man in the helicopter?”
    He put his face into the pillow, whimpering. “I saw him,” he said, his voice muffled, barely understandable.
    “When did he come? Thursday night?”
    He looked up at me, gray-faced, and rubbed his neck, not where I had bitten him, but on the opposite side. “Yeah. Thursday.”
    “Did he see you, talk to you?”
    He moaned, face twisted in pain. He seemed to be about to cry. “Please don’t ask me. I can’t say. I can’t say.”
    The man, the male of my kind, had found him, bitten him, and ordered him to guard the ruin and not tell anyone why he was doing it. But what was there to guard? What was there to shoot a person over?
    In spite of myself, I began to feel sorry for Raleigh. His head probably did hurt. He was torn between obeying me and obeying the man from the helicopter. That kind of thing wasn’t supposed to happen. Just thinking about it made me intensely uncomfortable, and, of course, I didn’t know why. I waited, hoping to remember more. But there was no more, except that I began to feel ashamed of myself, began to feel as though I owed Raleigh an apology.
    “Raleigh.”
    “Yeah?”
    “It’s all right. I won’t ask you about the man in the helicopter any more. It’s all right.”
    “Okay.” He looked as though he hadn’t taken a breath for too long, and now, suddenly, he could breathe again. He also looked like he was no longer in pain.
    “I want to meet the man in the helicopter,” I said. “If he comes to you again, I want you to tell him about me.”
    “Tell him what?”
    “Tell him I bit you. Tell him I want to meet him. Tell him I’ll come back to the burned houses next Friday night. And tell him I didn’t know that you … that you knew him. If he asks you any questions about me, it’s okay to answer. All right?”
    “Yeah. What’s your name?”
    Good question. “Don’t bother about a name. Describe me to him. I think he’ll know. And don’t tell anyone else about either of us. Make up lies if you have to.”
    “Okay.”
    I started to get up, but he caught my hand. Then he let it go. “That thing you did,” he said, touching the spot I’d bitten. “That was really good.”
    “It will probably make you feel weak and sick for a while,” I said. “I’m sorry for that. You’ll be all right in a couple of days.”
    “Worth it,” he said.
    And I left feeling better, feeling as though he’d forgiven me. Whoever I was before, it seemed I had had strong beliefs about what was right and what wasn’t. It wasn’t right to bite someone who had already been claimed by another of my kind. Certainly it hadn’t been all right to drain Raleigh to the point of sickness when he wasn’t truly responsible for shooting me. Why on earth would one of my own people take the chance of being responsible for a pointless shooting, perhaps even a death?
    I jogged back toward the ruin. Eight chimneys, much burned rubble, a few standing timbers and remnant walls. That’s what was left. Why did it need guarding? The guarding should have come before the fire when it might have done some good.
    Finally, I jogged over to the unblocked part of the private road, coming out where Wright and I had parked the night before. I heard him coming—heard him stop down at the gate, then start again. I waited, making sure it was his car and not some stranger’s. The moment I recognized the car and caught his scent, I could hardly wait to see him. The instant he stopped the car, I pulled the passenger door open and slid inside.
    He was there, smelling worried and nervous. And somehow he didn’t see me until I was sitting next to him, closing the door.
    He jumped, then grabbed me and yanked me into a huge hug.
    I found myself laughing as he examined me, checked my leg, then the rest of me. “I’m fine,” I said, and kissed him and felt alarmingly glad to see him. “Let’s go home,” I said at last. “I want a hot bath, and then I want