Free Shadowplay by Laura Lam

are not, and that I never know how people will react if they find out.”
    He nodded. “Was that why you hid it from Aenea?”
    Aenea. Her easy laugh, the sound of her voice. Her dark eyes, the soft curl of the brown hair about her temples, the shape of her smile. I squeezed my eyes shut.
    “I had sixteen years of being told that if anyone found out, it’d be shameful. The first boy to discover what I was…” I would not tell Drystan that it had been his younger brother, Damien. That would just be too bizarre. “He… He didn’t react well. I was afraid that Aenea would be the same. But I took the choice away from her to decide for herself. I paid the price. But not as much as she did.” I balled the fabric of the quilt in my hands.
    I didn’t want to talk about Aenea. I kept my grief tightly controlled so I could make it through the days, and I didn’t want it to break free. But it would, in little ways. Going to bed alone, when often she’d come to visit me in my cart on the beach and we’d fall asleep together. Remembering something she’d find funny and being unable to tell her. Those stabs of guilt and grief I could not protect myself from.
    “How did you feel? When you… discovered what I was?” As soon as the question left my lips I wished I hadn’t asked it. I held the tip of my tongue between my teeth.
    “Surprised.”
    I said nothing.
    “How many others are there like you?” He said the words carefully, as if worried they would cause offense.
    I shrugged, striving for a nonchalance I did not feel. “A doctor gave me to my adopted parents, so I don’t know where I came from. I was trotted to plenty of others during my youth. There are other disorders, but they haven’t come across anyone quite like me.” How strange yet liberating to discuss this so frankly. I never had, except with Cyril, who had known almost his whole life what I was. Drystan seemed only curious and interested.
    “What do you think that means?”
    I frowned at him.
    Drystan shrugged a shoulder. “What I mean is, do you think that’s significant? That you might be the only one?”
    I swallowed. “I don’t think I am. I merely think it’s rarer than the other forms they’ve come across.”
    Drystan had that look on his face when he wanted to say something else but was not sure if he should.
    “You can say it.”
    “Do you… think you might be a Chimaera?”
    I did not like this turn of conversation.
    He sensed he had offended me. “You called yourself a Kedi that night,” he said, defensive.
    “It’s as good a name as any – I’m not sure what else to call it. The doctors never shared their official diagnoses with me.” I had taken to calling myself Kedi after Mister Illari gave me the figurine, but I did not know if I fully embraced it.
    “They’ve been gone for millennia, if they ever really existed at all,” I said.
    Drystan made a noncommittal sound.
    “What?” I asked him.
    “Nothing. It just reminded me of something I read at university.”
    I looked at him expectantly. He shook the hair out of his eyes.
    “It was a banned scientific paper looking at birth anomalies in the past century. They seem to be on the rise. Babies born with scaled legs, a tail, webbed toes, that sort of thing. The report said the findings were skewed.”
    “There you go.”
    “Some say it’s a conspiracy to keep it quiet because they don’t want to upset the public.”
    “And what happens to these babies?”
    “They’re operated upon to fix them,” he said blithely and then winced at the look on my face.
    “Sorry,” he said, “I forgot.”
    “It’s nothing.” I hunched my shoulders.
    “I didn’t mean it, Micah. And a tail is different from–”
    “A dick,” I said, shortly.
    He didn’t bat an eyelid. “Well, exactly. If I’d had a tail removed, I don’t think I’d miss it. The other, however…”
    He shocked me into a laugh, dispelling some of the tension. We were so close to each other on the bed.