Arch stalks his way around the side of the house, with Dill strutting behind him. If only he had a way to communicate with the humans, this night could wrap up more quickly. Not that it wasn’t entertaining to watch the humans struggle with their limited senses and unlimited information at their fingertips, but when you can smell the rats in the walls…
Anyway, the fox follows his nose to the small open window leading down to the basement where many small animals gathered. Arch turns around and puts a claw to his snout, mimicking the human’s signal for silence. It was time to see how these tiny critters were pulling all their little tricks.
He crawls down low, sliding his belly on the ground as he just pokes an eye and an ear around the corner. A cluster of rats, surrounded my birds, squirrels, and other creatures he never learned the names of, all gathered around in the basement.
Come. You speak the human language, do you not?
Damn. He wasn’t spotted. Not by conventional means anyway, they must have one like Anea, and one that can send thoughts like Bail.
He squeezes through and stands before the conjugation of fellow divs. He waits for Dill to squeeze his fat ass through and flutter to his side.
Yes. I understand you. How deep does your telepathy go?
‘Surface level.’ The herd of animals clear away from a gray owl backed by the cluster of brown and black rats ‘Only the thoughts you send out can reach me. You’re an agent of the humans, are you… Hold on, your friend wants to join.’
‘Oh wow!’ Dill sounds in his head. ‘This is what telepathy feels like! I love it!’
‘Yes, we’re with the humans.’ Arch continues, ‘They mean no harm. Just curious about what’s been going on here.’
‘No humans are harmless, young fox. We ask that you get them to leave and never come back. This is our shelter. One of the only places left we can be safe. Once you do that, you are more than welcome to join us, as a fellow animal.’
‘Hard pass. Don’t think I can get them to leave. We don’t have a telepath, so communication is limited. Unless you want to talk to them yourself?’
‘Regardless. The offer still stands. If you are willing to keep our secret, then we beg of you to join us. If we openly communicate with the humans, they will certainly take an interest in this place, and never leave us alone. Vague fear and superstition have kept them back so far, we can’t sacrifice that advantage.
We can never forgive the humans for what they’ve done. We would like to show you why you can never trust humans, if you’d consent. Maybe then you will change your mind, and stop living as a pampered pet.’
‘Humans are nice!’ Dill interjects. ‘Every human I’ve met! You just gotta give them a chance. Talk to Anea. I’m sure y’all will get along.’
‘He’s the pampered pet.’ Arch says. ‘I’ve lived among the humans. Good and bad. You just have to find the right ones.’
‘Open your mind to us. Words are insufficient. Let us all see your relationship with the humans.’
Dill and Arch look at each other. His mind holds too many of his friend’s secrets. If these guys are violently anti-human, he shouldn’t get involved. He doesn’t know how their powers work. There’s no telling what could happen, but he didn’t think they were hostile.
‘What do you mean, open my mind?’
‘A quick demonstration.’
Suddenly, a flash of a man standing before him in a cabin stands out in his mind. Like a dying memory or a dream he’s freshly waken from. Arch got the impression he was someone else in that dream. And that man in that warm and safe cabin was his master and friend.
‘Another. Try not to fight it, and it will become clearer.’
When the second memory comes. Arch decides to embrace it. Now as clear as if in a daydream. In this dream, he is the gray owl standing before him. Thinking himself wise and sure with a plan for the future. Content and happy with his friend, Arnold. They were going to be partners in his vision for the future-
Arch suddenly decides to snap out of the dream, just to see if he can. The gray owl steps forward again.
‘Our friends, the rats Joel, Jacob, Jean,-’
‘We’ll be here till dawn if you want to name them all.’
‘Yes well, we’ve taken to calling them The Clan, though they don’t like it. They connect us all, let us share our thoughts and experiences directly. We can immerse ourselves into a collective conscience, and we can break away at anytime, just as you’ve done.’
‘Okay… You go first.’
‘Very well.’ The owl turns to the rats.
Images start flooding back into Arch’s mind’s eye, the little spot where he can visualize and imagine. He was right, words were insufficient… When all was said and done, he could only remember flashes and moments…
The owl and the man in the cabin… Animals being taken as pets and companions after the meteors fell… Working along-side humans or living among other divs in the woods and hills… Then the humans got hungry… A famine fed by war swept through the countryside… humans butchering the big docile ones first, then whatever stray animal they could find, regardless if it was div or not.
Arch whimpered… watching his friends die when all he could do was fly away… They flee into the woods and gather their strength… raiding the towns to save what few friends were left…
Then the humans came into the forest…
The Clan spared Arch that image, but not the aftermath… Everyone goes into hiding… some find refuge with ‘good’ humans, but the scars run too deep. They can never fully trust the humans again. There were still too many hunters in the woods.
One by one, they come across a clan of rats, perfecting a unique ability over the years, now ready to put it to some use. Some young humans have decided to start gathering in the rat’s home. The place that they sheltered fellow animals during winter. Now the humans wanted it for themselves.
So they call a meeting with a few divs, they show everyone the full extent of their ability. Whenever they link their minds together, they accidentally produce a sound that humans can’t hear, but slowly drives them out all the same, without affecting animals. With practice, they can control and direct this sound. So long as they have one of The Clan present, any animal, so long as they’ve been touched by Aether, can join in the mind link.
Their final trick, a rat scratches a young girl, and a spider crawls onto her hand while she sleeps and steals the color from her skin with a unique ability to change the chemical composition of her venom, creating something the human can show her friends to scare them away.
Finally, the images stop. The clarity fades, but not the feelings.
‘Okay…’ Arch says ‘My turn.’
He skips over his first years of life, past the part where he drank from that river, past the painful transformation as his brain grew to comprehend and understand and imagine. The pain of migraines and lightning.
He skips to the part where he wanders into town with his old friends, fellow divs that suddenly found themselves sentient and clueless. The people there were used to his kind. Even if he couldn’t talk, they saw he wasn’t a regular animal, so they put him and his friends in a shelter full of fellow divs in the middle of town. Run by a kind woman and her son.
They gave him a job helping power their town, with a guy who saw him as nothing but a science experiment, always pushing him for the optimal outcome of output and efficiency.
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Suddenly animal-divs couldn’t go out without an escort. They all had to stay hidden because hunters were about—the kind that took you away to be sold, not to eat. So people kept him and his friends hidden for months. They all grew use to it while they learned to use their powers.
Then the shelter gets shut down. Everyone goes to find humans to live with. Arch goes to live with his boss. Shortly after, word comes in that an army of mercenaries and bounty hunters is coming from the city. His friends run and hide, but his boss assures him that he will protect him. And the town still needs Arch to help keep the power on, so he stays.
Then the mercenaries grow closer. Bounty hunters scour the streets. His boss still uncaring and callous. Arch is scared and practically alone. So he leaves in the middle of the night.
He makes it past one town, then another, then steel jaws clamp around his leg. Arch tries to spare these people the pain of white hot steel piercing his flesh, but he can’t stop it. He exhausts himself, trying to rip his own leg from the trap as the humans grow closer.
He blacks out as the silhouette of his captor looms over him… only to wake with a bandaged leg, lying next to the backpacks of the humans. He keeps his ears open and finds out these humans are furious, and lying in wait for the real hunters to come by.
The images start coming quicker and quicker… Touch and Rachel setting the divs free… The stone man talking to him… petting him… training him… encouraging, never demanding… asking him questions, even if he can’t answer… teaching him random lessons and things about the world… how to take care of himself… reading to him… Rachel smiling down at him… buying him the food he likes… the smugglers withholding food from the hungry family… trapped in a new city… everyone exhausted… Touch and Rachel storming into the apartment with a little girl in tow… stalking and zapping down enforcer after enforcer so they can be free…
Touch in danger. Robot hounds… Metal teeth and claws. All my power, no effect… useless… Touch looking down at him, glad that he’s okay… Holding him close… Scolding him, not for being useless, but for being reckless and exhausting himself.
Anea, bright and loud, talks to him just like Rachel and Touch do… as if he were human like them… tries to force him to wear little clothes… Stalking silently through the streets, watching over Anea and Rachel and Touch. His friends…
Then, before he can stop himself, a final image. Not a memory, but a fear yet to be realized. He imagines all the little creatures here turning on his friends, ambushing them, clawing and biting Rachel and Anea. The rats using their sound to get to Touch.
Then he imagines the scenario that’s been running through his head since he climbed down from the window. The group before him grows hostile, intent to hurt his human friends. Arch goes after the predators, the ones big enough to hurt Anea, while he zaps the rats to death, only to get overwhelmed by the smaller creatures. He might be able to fight his way out. He has enough juice saved up. But Dill…
Arch freezes and stares at the owl…
‘No need to worry.’ the owl says ‘We understand your fear. It’s only natural. We have similar reservations of you. We just hide it better.’ then he swivels his big eyes to Dill ‘Now you?’
Arch could smell the fear on the giant chick. This was obviously too much for him.
Then he takes a step forward and starts flooding everyone’s mind with his memories of being raised on a farm. A shelter for divs out in the country. An easy life of being clean, fed, warm, loved. One of his earliest memories of the black-haired Asian woman coming by every week to come play with him.
Then one day she stopped coming. And Dill suddenly didn’t want to play with anyone anymore… Tara and James saw this, tried to explain it to him… then all of a sudden he was in a van, the door opens and he jumps into Rachel’s arms, an explosion of warmth that brings the girl to tears.
They are almost never apart… Being carried through the beautiful countryside… He likes this better, even if his best friend is traveling with a scary man made of stone and a fox… The handful of kids that would play with Dill while they were smuggled through the Wastes… Those kids going hungry… sight of the stone man about to rip that big guy apart in the semi-truck… Rachel coming home from work exhausted, only to curl up with Dill and sleep… Rachel talking to him, asking what he wants, what he thinks she should do… The lectures from the stone man on what to do if this or that happened… Running through the dark streets and grimy tunnels while he pokes his head out of Rachel’s pack… Dill chirping and bouncing and showing Rachel the two butterflies dancing by the river… Metal dogs right behind us! Snuggling with Anea… Anea giving him a little sweater… The little girl crying on the balcony while Rachel holds her… Storming the snack table…
‘I see.’ the owl says. ‘We have very different experiences at the hands of humans.’
‘Humans. Animals.’ Arch says. ‘All people. We all make our choices. We are those choices. So, what are we going to do? Anea’s been watching over us this whole time. She practically knows everything already.’
‘… We’ve decided. We can trust your humans. But no others. How good can she lie?’
Anea is standing by the door to the basement, watching the storm of auras below her. She could only vaguely tell what was happening. She couldn’t concentrate knowing Arch and Dill were down there with that… thing… Like a virus that occupied the minds of the creatures down there. A uniform stain embedded within their individual psyches.
They weren’t being forced into it. No one was fighting it. She saw Arch could snap out of this group aura the second he wanted to without a struggle.
Then… All the auras… The pain…
Anea shakes her head. She can’t run. She can’t let this consume her. She has to stay with it. She has to watch over them.
“What’s happening?” Becca asks.
“Arch and Dill are talking to it. Whatever’s down there is in a lot of pain.”
Jacob takes her by the hand. “Are you okay?”
Anea squeezes his hand tight. “I’ll be fine.”
Keeping his hand in hers, she dives back in and embraces the horror and pain. Accepting it, studying it, facing it. She could see the individual auras send their impressions out into the shared one, and the shared aura impress back on every individual. Like some kind of two-way communication…
When it all stops, Anea has to sink down to her knees and sit on the floor.
She squeezes Jacob’s hand as it starts up again. She recognizes Arch’s psyche takes center stage, pumping his personality into the collective stream of conscience.
This torrent felt much more real. It had ups and downs and variety and song. It felt more like a story, not an all out assault of negativity and horror. Then she feels a familiar pattern poke its head out of the torrent.
Touch. Anea gasps. He’s thinking of Touch and Rachel… and me.
He’s showing whatever this is his life story.
One story ends, and Dill takes the stage. His story is much more bouncy and bright. Shattered by heartbreak and healed by reunion. Optimism depressed with worry and empathy and powerlessness. Fear, awe and joy and fear again. Then it spreads out into contentment and joy and mischief.
Then a pause, the network of auras chatter among themselves, a consensus forming in seconds. Anea feels a pressure slowly reach out from the basement.
Greetings.
Anea jumps.
We are your ‘ghost’. We would like to talk.
“What’s happening?” Jacob asks.
“Your ghost. It’s talking to me.”
‘Hey Anea…’
‘Hey Anea!’
“Arch!? Dill!? I can hear you!” Anea’s face pulls into a broad grin and warm tears start streaming down her face.
‘But I can read their motivations and intentions!’ Anea throws the thought at the owl like a brick. ‘Lying to them is stupid, and it won’t work. They’ll both help you keep your secret! Let me do the mind link thing! I’ll show you what I mean!’
“What now?” Jacob asks.
“Your ghost is asking for a convoluted plan where a simpler one will do.”
‘Fine, show us.’ the owl sighs.
After Anea gives a very thorough lecture on her powers, and analyses her memories of the sibling’s auras. Everyone decides to let the two siblings in on the plan. They can’t join the mind link, but the owl can use his telepathy with them. Becca and Jacob are more than happy to help.
Since they were both too stubborn to let it go, they would both help keep the secret. They wouldn’t try to scare people away from the haunted house, for that would attract people to come see for themselves, but they would stand by and help deal with anyone as stubborn as they were.
‘We can ask Aespid to reverse the scar.’ The owl says to Becca.
‘No, I like it. Consider it a mark of trust… But if you were trying to scare people away, this was the worst way to go about it. It did get my brother involved, after all.’
The owl sighs. ‘Yes, well, we’re still trying out new things.’
The animals decided they weren’t going to tell the human kids the full extent of why they were in hiding. They let them assume it was because of bounty hunters and traffickers and the like.
As Anea and the rest of the group are walking to Jacob and Becca’s house, Jacob notices Anea is quieter than usual. He looks over and sees the girl drawn into her own thoughts.
She looks over at him.
“What’s up?” He asks.
Anea stops. Jacob and Becca look at her. Arch peers from the shadows.
“Becca, do people ever hunt animals around here?”
“I mean, they used to. Food was scarce during the war…”
Becca’s blue eyes grow wide.
“No… you don’t think…”