Free alt.human by Keith Brooke Page A

factionaries. Many mutual ties of finance, favour and manipulation.”
    Callo was nodding. “!¡ dread ¡! It’s coming here,” she said.
    I thought of the night on the terrace at Villa Mart Three, the kiss. She hadn’t even met my eye since my return.
    “!¡ earnest ¡! It is,” said Saneth. “!¡ directing-juniors ¡! You must protect your own. You must protect what you have that is special and sacred.”
    “!¡ hesitant ¡! I saw it all in Satinbower,” I said. “They must have slaughtered hundreds in the crowd, and flattened whole blocks.”
    Saneth paused, and I realised she-he was consulting some data-source. “!¡ factual reporting ¡! Thirty-six humans were killed during the incident. One additional death by heart failure could not be directly attributed. One building was damaged. This was the Satinals’ clan-nest on Red and Hythe.”
    “So I exaggerated...”
    Saneth slowly turned that mod eye to face me. I felt as if the eye’s tiny black pupil was drilling through me. I swallowed, chilled, even though I knew there was some kind of phreaking involved, subtle mood-shifters making me feel tiny and insignificant before the ancient, lauded one.
    “!¡ admonishing junior scholar ¡! You must be required to consider this with due gravity,” the chlick said slowly. “Those of your type in Angiere learned to do so. !¡ inappropriate humour ¡! There are better ways to learn than the way they learned.”
    “!¡ confrontation ¡! Why?” I asked. “Why are they doing this?”
    It was Marek who answered. He seemed to be the leader of the four refugees, a tall man, with sharp bones and a trimmed line of dark beard down his jaw. “This is what we have been trying to establish,” he said. “But with all due respect” – he nodded to the chlick – “how can we possibly know what is in the mind of an alien?”
    “!¡ concurrence ¡!” clicked Saneth. “!¡ humouring junior ¡! Just as it is hard for one such as we to see what occupies the mental processes of the human variety.” She-he said this like a man talking to a lesser being, to a dog or a goat.
    “So why...?”
    “!¡ authority ¡! As Marek says,” said Callo. “It’s almost impossible to understand. Saneth knows a little, but there are so many factions and species. We observe their actions, we see what they do, but we do not see why. They want to weed us out. They want to find some of us and kill the rest. It’s like some kind of harvest.”
    “Others just appear to want to kill us,” added Marek. “All of us, regardless of who or what we are. It is as if humankind is a pest to be eradicated, a nuisance. That’s what ended up happening at Angiere.”
    “!¡ tentative ¡! Maybe they’re scared of us,” I said.
    Marek barked a short laugh, but was silenced by an impatient slap-click from Saneth.
    “!¡ encouraging junior scholar ¡! It is a possibility that they are scared of what you might become,” the chlick said. “It is a possibility that they are scared that you may be special. Lauded-one Saneth-ra contains within both the she and the he; what potentials does the scholar pup Dodge and those who are like him hold within? It is a possibility that they fear that you may be what they could never be.”

 
     
    Chapter Eight
     
     
    S PECIAL.
    Let me tell you about special.
    Hope was special. That girl with the honey-brown bangs and the look in her eye that would stop a man in his tracks with his heart racing and his mouth dry. The girl whose memories started with darkness and an explosion of voices in her head. The girl with no pids, no identity, nothing. The girl who had survived an attack that had turned a seaside hospital into a lake of melted black glass.
    Hope.
     
     
    T HERE WAS A road leading away from the beach, and she walked along its blistered asphalt surface. The road was narrow as it cut through the dunes, away from a small parking and recharge area. On leaving the beach, the road was bounded by tall, dark hedges