“The poor will suffer the most. They always do. I know it sounds cliched, doesn’t it? There goes Leela, still so affected by her childhood, by her own memories of being on the street.”

“I wasn’t going to say that.”

“But people like you always do. You look at me and think, isn’t it time she stopped talking about it? How to talk about poverty even—all my words standing in the open like young cellphone towers.” When Leela speaks again, her voice is rough. “Before I became one of the poor, I want to say I saw them everyday and felt it, saw it but I walked past on the way to school or back and saw nothing.”

“You were a kid,” Ryz says.

“There is a temptation here to insert wan faces, to say look at the physical signs. As if there needs to be proof, visuals before we understand. Things spelling out this is what it looks like—hunger manifested. Brittle yellow. Stomach pain. Yes there were children. There was sky and fishermen’s nets hanging between poles. Bodies upright. Bodies prone. Can you imagine, a woman like you from fancy lil village 6, what happens to the body in hunger?”

That’s not fair, I think.

Leela is in a state. She seemed fine when we dropped off the egg at Leviathan yesterday. It seems like an unusual species so we thought that would be best and despite our lack of leads on Emi, it had caused some excitement, a minor reward for all our hunting. And weeks later, nothing has happened to me so I’m guessing the Bhulg guy was mistaken about Emi passing on anything to me. We both agreed that he had been fanciful, perhaps, and parted in a good mood so I was surprised when she called me earlier today, frantic, babbling about a gang of vigilantes in the city, convinced they have something to do with the shape-shifting potion and Emi.

Desperate for leads, I got in my car despite a roaring headache and hightailed it to Ryz’s house where I was met with Leela ranting and unable to focus. It’s been an hour and I’ve got nothing useful out of her.

“I saw a child lying face down on the street once. Like she had appeared out of thin air.” she says. She is talking about the last time-spill. It is not a story most people want to recall.

It was the year of the wolf moon. It hung low in the sky with its glittering ferocity, reminding people every night of the prophecy. It had been foretold that the next time-spill would happen under its watch but it had been a century since an inexplicable time snag reset the earth so there were those who scoffed at it. Still, at street cha stalls and in smoky bars, the fears gathered and proliferated. There were whispers over the mead they drank in those days. Conspiracy theories abounded.

There are few records left from that time but hybrids like Leela can live a long time, the only living witnesses to how things went down. It was the little things at first. Small cracks in the structures that held life together. Mildly collapsed governments, tectonic shifts, quantum particles behaving in unpredictable ways. Once the momentum picked up though, there was little anyone could do. Continents went under or merged with each other. Strange species started to appear. One small country was wiped out by a new kind of worm. The wars and riots that followed wiped out most people. Most survivors became migrants and refugees, roaming the planet in search of pockets of peace, food, and in the end, water.

It has taken half a century to build Trièste again, only one of three or four lands that managed to retain some semblance of their old selves. It bears this legacy. A constant anxiety running through the veins of our people. How long before the next time-spill? And would we be so lucky next time?

Leela’s reaction is not uncommon among those who saw the old days and lived to tell the tale. Like all hybrids, she is ageless in appearance. Her weight has been steady since her thirties. Her hair is still luxurious brown. Her face never changes. Such elixir of youth would be in high demand if it could be passed on. Since that has been deemed impossible—and there have been many unhappy experiments on hybrids over the years to arrive at this conclusion, she is as close to being worshipped as is possible in a godless state. Oh, we mention the old gods often—Bastet and Ra, Shiva and Vishnu, Athena and Zeus and Odin—but their use being declared null and void in Trièste means all manner of worship is banned. Religion is recognized as farce, pantomime, myth. The stuff of make-belief.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Leela’s rambling, on the other hand, is about things all too real. The scourge of poverty that spread across lands and the ghastly destruction in its wake. It is hard to imagine anyone living through that and not being frozen in a state of perpetual horror. Hybrids are known to be less emotional than humans but it has taken a toll on even the strongest of them. In any case, there are only a handful of them left in Trièste. Much in demand at headquarters, they all work as informants, spreading their telepathic net across the country. And if sometimes they break down and weep, it is tolerated, even revered, as a sign of wisdom. I wonder how much her temporary transformation unnerved her yesterday. It’s known to be rare. She seemed to take it in stride at the time but maybe this is some sort of delayed response. She is crying now, her face flushed, her hands quivering. I glance at Ryz, wondering if she needs to be dragged to emergency care, given a sedative. Once in a while, such extreme measures are required.

He raises an eyebrow at me and gives the slightest shake of his head. His lip curls in a half-sneer. I can tell he thinks I’m too trigger-happy with meds. I don’t need the judgement right now and I almost erupt in frustration but Leela’s next words stop me.

“I heard something last night. Not like usual. More than usual. A multifarious whispering, many voices shouting, a stampede. I don’t know what I was hearing. What was it? Why won’t someone tell me? It’s never happened to me before.” Her eyes look wide and wild. A child’s eyes.

Avoiding Ryz’s eyes, I take her hand. “We’ll figure it out,” I say. “I’ll look at some of the Old Texts at headquarters. Maybe there’s something in there that can help us.”

“Now,” she whispers. “Please go and look now.”

I am buried in the Old Texts for the rest of the day, wading through tomes on ancient languages, algae types and tree forms. If the texts have some order to them, I have yet to figure it out. A few hours of reading has led to nothing on eggs or shape-shifting girls so when the salamander lights up with a message from Pali, I am happy for the distraction but my relief quickens to worry. There are no words at the other end, only a frantic breathing which sends a ghastly finger of ear poking my insides. Before I can find out where she is, the line cuts off. There is no answer when I call back.

I can sense Pali easier than other people but she is miles away. I come my eyes and possibly grunt with my efforts because I open my eyes to see two school kids laughing at me. Teenagers. Whatever. I try again. After ten minutes of this, I am no closer to knowing where she is. Frustrated, I hope out of seat and pace for a bit. The teenagers giggle some more. One of them points at my salamander and mouths ‘crazy’ to the other. I make an evil face at him and stumble out into the murky evening. I try to remember what Pali told me of her plans for the week and can’t—why wasn’t I paying more attention? I try her number again. Nothing. Not even a ring. It is getting dark. Panicking now, I decide to try Kala Bazaar—it’s where Pali likes to go some evenings when she’s had a hard day at work.

As I walk to the car, an owl hoots, its long cry piercing the night like a dirge.

The salamander buzzes again and it is Pali’s voice, low and almost unrecognizable. She mumbles an address and I am already flying through freeways, past neighborhoods I know, not exactly Kala Bazaar but just beyond, towards the east where the grit becomes less glamorous, where tourists are warned not to venture. I am calling out mentally even though I know she can’t hear me. The streetlights are a joke after a point. The doors are a confusion. Many of the houses here don’t have numbers or they are obscured by age and dirt, mere smudges of address. I find an approximate number but not the right one. I slam open the door to a flurry of women in the midst of what looks like a seance. The next door opens to three men playing cards. Panic is making my vision blur. I have never heard Pali sound like that. I felt her terror in my bones. The streets are a whirl, a maze. Then, through the finest crack in a window, something, an essence of a known person, and I follow the scent like a visc-hound.

When I burst in through the door, Pali is sitting by a pool of blackish substance. It is oozing out of a wound in the chest of the man lying next to her. Her eyes are vacant as I help her up, ignoring the stench emanating from the black ooze. I postpone all questions. It is not the time. “We have to go,” I say as calmly as I can. “Come on, come on.”

As we shut the door behind us, I start a small fire to burn the house and everything in it.