by S. M. Beiko
Arnas watches, numb, as they shape a spinning, shifting column, the amorphous forms of the river hunters shrieking, laughing, as they split into hundreds, streaming out of the dome and over the city like a fume.
They are loyal only to their sleeping mother. They now know their prey. And so their hunt begins.
The Severed Rabbit
“Like I said, I really have no explanation for this,” said my young Pakistani doctor as he pulled the light away from my spirit eye. I blinked, trying to dispel the spots twinkling in my vision. The doctor looked fresh out of med school, so I wondered what few “explanations” experience had given him. Probably not the one I had and was unwilling to tell.
He smiled all the same. “I think in cases like these, though, it’s a moot point. The eye is healthy and there’s been no residual damage, which is extremely fortunate. It’s discoloured, yes, but changes in pigmentation can happen post-infection. It’s not common, but obviously possible.”
“But she’s had this infection for years!” said Deedee. “I don’t know how many rounds of drops or treatments or surgeries we considered. And it just cleared up overnight? Aren’t you at all concerned about a recurrence?”
“It’s not likely.” He shrugged, adding the CT results to my thick file. “But we’ll keep an eye on it. Eyy!”
Deedee groaned but smiled. I wasn’t as charitable, my eyes rolled so far back I could practically see my brain. This guy was way too young for dad jokes. “Anyway,” he said, “Roan’s got youth on her side. Youth equals a robust immune system capable of tackling anything the body throws at it. It’s as simple as that.”
“I’m just concerned,” Deedee went on as I swung myself down from the examination table. I knew they wouldn’t find anything, unless modern medicine had advanced to the point of detecting the astral plane. The Veil, Sil had called it. I wandered out of the exam room, crossing the waiting area into the hospital hallway to people-watch. Gurneys that were surgery-bound, patients meandering with their IV poles in tow, nurses pushing around equipment and supplies. Nothing out of the ordinary.
I took a breath, shutting my eyes and telling myself to focus. I pushed aside as much as I could in my mind, and when I looked back out into the hospital, it was with a sharper perspective.
There were more of them than I expected amongst the run-of-the-mill humans. Members of the Five, I mean — Denizens. I saw a doctor pass by, but laid over her face was that of an Owl, sharp gaze penetrating, head swivelling and bobbing as she walked purposefully towards another room, clipboard under one arm. I saw a Seal in a patient bed in the hallway. His skin was shining grey, and he was attended by a pup — a young, curvy girl who held his hand (flipper?) and probably assured him he’d be seen soon.
There were Rabbits, too, and lots of them. Coming in and out of rooms, watching clocks or televisions in the waiting area, eyes darting and bodies tensed for flight. I wondered how fast their hearts were beating, and if anxiety was common amongst the Rabbit Family. I thought of Arnas and winced.
I was grateful that the visions of blood-soaked, ruined rabbits had taken a back seat. I’m sure there was enough death in this hospital to fill years of visions, but I focused on the living and breathing, keenly observing them as they passed by. It was the first time I felt like a fox, watchful from my den of secrets as the others moved around me, a part of the scenery. Foxes wait. At the moment, I didn’t know what I was waiting for, but when he looked up from signing something at the nurses’ station, I felt my chest go still. It was just a man, a random stranger, and as he walked by he didn’t even glance my way. But I felt his heat, and saw the air of a fox suspended over his body. For the briefest second, I caught my reflection in the bank of windows on the other side of the hall, and as he passed, we looked almost related. Two Foxes crossing paths. We didn’t even sniff.
I watched him turn around the corner and disappear. I desperately wanted to follow him, to find out if maybe we were related (unlikely), but I realized, as my heart fell, that I longed for my own kind. That I’d always try to find family wherever I could, and would defend it to the death when I found it. And this is probably why the loyalty of the Five was so divided. All of us willing to protect our own at the cost of the others.
“Hey,” said a voice behind me, breaking my concentration and setting everyone back into their normal human façades. I whirled to meet the eyes of the stranger but had to look down to find them.
“Oh. Hey,” I replied to the wheelchair-bound boy in front of me. It was the new guy from my class. His name totally escaped me, but I guess I had a good excuse: mental breakdown mid-introduction can do that to a person.
He obviously remembered me, though. “I think we’re in a class together,” he said, semisheepish, as if too considerate to say any more. “I’m Barton.”
I shook his proffered hand. “Roan. Yeah, you just moved up, right?” I swallowed, hoping that I wasn’t about to be bombarded by more bloody visions. I didn’t feel up to being carted off to the psych ward when it was so close by. I could feel it coming on though, something on the fuzzy periphery of my spirit eye’s vision. I concentrated, and there it was, the double vision of Barton’s face: I saw Rabbit in him, but this was different than when I’d identified the others. The essence of him as a Rabbit wavered like a mirage, like bad television static, flickering so faintly that as soon as I had seen it, it was gone. I could still see the others from earlier in the background, so it wasn’t my spirit eye losing reception. I glanced quickly at his jeans, which were pinned back at the knee. I remembered the Rabbit suffering and bloody on the floor of my classroom, a giant blade having just sliced its legs away as though it had been harvest time.
I swung back into the conversation, hoping I hadn’t been silent for too long. I could feel sweat beading on my forehead, and I smiled. “Well, it’s a pretty easy class, to be honest. Let me know if you need any help, though, I’ve got kind of a tutor group going. Not like they pull their weight, or anything.” I saw a flash of movement down the hall at the nurse’s station. A woman looking up, nervous. Another Rabbit. And when she looked directly at me, her colour seemed to drain.
She changed tack and was suddenly coming towards us. I don’t know what made me blurt what I did, but I couldn’t help myself. “Barton this is going to be a weird question but . . . Have you been having weird dreams lately? About rabbits?”
He frowned at me for a second, then looked over at the nervous woman, now waylaid by a doctor a few feet away from us. She was nodding in their conversation, but she kept looking over at us, twisting and untwisting her purse strap.
Barton faced me again, lowering his voice. “How did you know?”
She was breaking away. I had to act quickly. I’d had only two major insight-visions into people with the help of my new eye, and I felt that meeting Barton was significant. I wondered if my new awareness of my foxiness had heightened my gut instincts. Barton had a prescription folded in his hand, and I snatched it from him.
“What’s this for?” I said, darting to a sign-up sheet pinned to a nearby bulletin board, yanking the pen-on-a-string from its moorings.
“More pills. To help me sleep at night.”
I scribbled my phone number on the back of it and passed it back. “I have a feeling we’ve been having the same dream. Sort of.” He looked blankly at the number, then stuffed it into his pocket. “I think it’s important that you keep having them, even though they’re, uh, kind of awful. Maybe lay off the pills for a while?”
“Barton.” The woman — I assumed Barton’s mother — was suddenly there, had her hands on his wheelchair. “Who’s this?”
“Oh, this is Roan, Mom. She’s in my new English class.”
I held out my hand, but she just looked at it and started turning his chair away. “That’s nice,” was all she said. “We have to go, honey. Transit is waiting downstairs.”
“Mom, I can wheel
myself,” Barton argued, but she seemed determined to get away from me as quickly as possible. He turned around quickly. “See you in class, Roan.”
I waved back weakly. I hope I wasn’t wrong about him, or that I’d just made an idiot out of myself for talking about wacko things even my best friend didn’t believe. I felt my phone go off in my back pocket — speak of the devil. Phae had been texting me all day, but I was ignoring her. Too much had happened for me to forgive her just yet. I wondered if I’d ever get the chance to prove I wasn’t completely off my rocker.
I hadn’t noticed Deedee behind me. “Was that Mrs. Allen you were talking to?” she asked.
“Huh?” I twitched, startled. I looked back at Barton and his mother as they slipped into an elevator.
“That’s Rebecca Allen and her son. It’s too bad. They’ve had a lot to deal with. Birth defect, that’s what happened with his legs.” I raised an eyebrow. I wasn’t so sure it could be explained away that easily, as with most things I’d come across in the last couple of days. Deedee went on. “He’s a pretty gifted athlete, though. He’s got a lot going for him. Shall we?”
As we made our way to the elevators, I asked, “So how do you know so much about them?”
“Arnas grew up with Rebecca,” she said, pressing the down button. “They were pretty close. Almost like family.”
Like family, I thought, remembering my first vision and Arnas’s bleak face when he saw my newly minted eye. An image of a Rabbit over his face.
Family, huh? Maybe Deedee wasn’t far off.
*
Arnas was nowhere to be found. Probably holed up in his office, doing god-only-knew-what. I was keen to avoid him for as long as I could, his episode with my photo fresh on my mind. With Deedee downstairs, Phae’s texts going ignored, and rabbits haunting my brain, there was only one person I wanted to see right now.
“Sil?” I hissed as I entered my room. She wasn’t in her usual spot. I had a package of smoked salmon bunched in my hand, hoping it’d help ply some hard-won information out of her.
I tried puzzling out where she might be and how I’d find her discreetly. She was either hiding out in the summoning chamber (though she knew I couldn’t get in there without her), or . . .
When I reached Cecelia’s room, I darted into a spare room across the hall to avoid a nurse wheeling out soiled bathing supplies. I’d gone from one hospital to another, it seemed. The nurse gathered everything up and started for the laundry, so I took my opportunity to tiptoe into the sickroom. I shut the door.
“Sil?” I whispered again. If she was in here, she would be somewhere the nurse couldn’t catch her. Sure enough, her giant tail flicked from under the bed, and she emerged, shaking herself with a yawn.
“Napping?” I said, unwrapping the salmon and offering her some. I put it on the floor and she ate quickly.
I finally got a reply between mouthfuls. “Observing.”
“Seems like we’re on the same wavelength,” I said, taking some salmon for myself.
“Oh? How was the doctor?”
“Educational,” I sighed, wondering if Barton would keep my number out of his mother’s reach. She didn’t seem too eager for us to be in touch. “I decided to practise with my spirit eye. There are a lot of you animal-types wandering around. Rabbits especially.”
“That Family has a habit of being overly prolific.” Sil licked the salt from her muzzle and pawed her jowls for leftovers. “And those who are of the Five that retain their human bodies prefer to be called Denizens. And I’m not to be grouped in with them.”
I faltered at her insulted tone. “Why’s that?”
Sil twisted her head towards my grandmother lying quiet — but clean — in her sickbed. The heart rate monitor beeped. “Because I’m something else entirely.”
She leapt onto the chair at the bedside, peering down at the old woman. She sniffed.
“And will I ever know what you are, exactly?” I knew she was powerful, that she commanded fire and could go past this plane easily into the next. And I knew that she was probably as ancient as the Ancient-thing she came from. But I wondered what had called her here, who had sent her. If she had any family, or a home, or if she was just some entity that had reached out from the nothing to help me for her own purposes.
“Just consider me a guide. That’s all I’m here for. To help you grow into your power.” Sil placed a paw on my grandmother’s smooth hand lying palm down over the coverlet. “I knew Cecelia.”
I took greater notice of my grandmother then. She looked barely there, barely breathing. Maybe the end was coming soon. “Knew her? Were you close?”
Sil barely moved but to sniff. “I was her guide, once. In a way. But she didn’t think she needed me. Cecelia was very powerful. Stubborn, but stronger than any Fox that then lived. She was the Paramount of the Fox Family.”
I frowned. “Of the Foxes here, in the city? Or . . . are there more?” I hadn’t stopped to think that this is how it was in the rest of the world; continents near and far chock full of these Denizen people just wandering around with powers. It was an enormous machine coexisting with humans — and here I was, the faulty, uncertain cog.
“She was leader of them all,” Sil replied.
The entire world. Why was Sil being so direct?
“The role of Paramount isn’t one given based on age. It is awarded on merit: power, experience, the ability to perceive Ancient’s will and act as its conduit in this world. She started out as the Ascendant, one of many training for the role, and then was chosen to lead. She had to visit each clan, mediate disputes, defeat darklings. Train younger Foxes to come into their powers.”
“That’s why she travelled . . .” I could feel my chest getting tight again. The resentment took hold faster than usual. “She went out of her way to help strangers but didn’t bother with her own grandkid.”
Sil finally pulled her paw away and looked up at me. “There was nothing she could do. Once Cecelia had taken on her role, she had more responsibility beyond her family, had to see to it for the greater good. And once you were marked with the sigil of the Moth Queen, she could do nothing to interfere. She only wanted you to live your life, oblivious to the world that cursed you.”
“Curse is right.” I wiped the grease from the salmon onto my pants. I tried not to show as much anger as I felt. But I laughed bitterly all the same.
“What a piss-poor excuse,” I seethed. “She could’ve broken the rules, could’ve trained me to fight back. She could’ve helped me. I’m obviously going to need it.” I paced to her letter-strewn vanity. “Do you know what it’s like, being the kid with the dead parents who probably committed suicide? When everyone else is trying to live up to their parents, I was living mine down. I needed her. I needed anyone. Instead she has her errand-dog do the job she wasted years neglecting. I mean, I know she and my mom didn’t see eye to eye, so it’s not really a stretch that she wouldn’t want anything to do with me, either.
“Face it, Sil. It wasn’t just ‘duty’ or the ‘greater good.’ She stayed away from lack of interest. Figured a postcard every now and then was enough. Fine. She can die alone.”
Like me. The thought rose up hard, but I pushed it away, slapping the twine-bound letters on the vanity table and letting them topple over. I turned to go; the air was getting too close in here.
“Your grandmother should’ve done more for you,” Sil agreed sadly. “But you’re not alone.”
I stopped and looked back. Sil had come off the bed and to my feet in the span of a moment. I couldn’t help smiling at her wry little face, her wide eyes that snared something in me since the first night I saw her. I tried to let the resentment go, but my muscles were still tight where the possibility of disappointment — and death — weighed them down.
“And what’s going to stop you from leaving, too? I’m not really a sure investment for you.”
/>
She shot into the air in one of her trademark vertical jumps and landed in my arms — a perfect ten. That penetrating little snout was pressed into mine. “We are bound by fire,” she said. “Spirit to spirit, nothing can break it.”
I sighed. “I can think of a few things that can put even an inferno out. Like a river with a score to settle.” I huffed. “But . . . well, I just hope the fire’s big enough.” I put her down, trying to feel better. “Anyway, I’ve got food, so you’ll stick around, I think.”
I was glad to know I’d have a sidekick (even though I felt more like hers), but we’d had enough drama for now. I had come in here to talk to her about the hospital, anyway.
“Listen, Sil. There’s this one kid in my class — Barton Allen. He’s definitely a Rabbit, but . . . there’s something off about him. His legs are sort of, um, missing and —”
The floor in the hallway creaked, cutting me off. Sil froze, too, taking the cue from my nod to bolt around the bed and out of sight. I pulled the door open and found myself nearly bumping into Arnas’s narrow chest. How long had he been there? What had he heard?
The first thing to catch my eye was the thing hanging around his neck on a leather string, something I hadn’t seen before. (He wasn’t the jewellery type.) It was a curious brass sphere that had a clasp, as though it could be opened — as though it had something inside it. I looked away, finding his blank eyes frowning down at me. He seemed determined, and that was also new.
I cleared my throat, pushing my hair behind an ear. “Um. Hi, Arnie.” He hated when I called him that. Good. I slipped around him into the hallway.
