Ayden looked at his phone, sighed, seemed to defte, and put it away again. It took him a few moments to put his words together, but he eventually addressed me to say, “Cassy says you may have helped destabilize U.S. foreign retions.”

  My first reaction on hearing that was to take it as a joke, just by the words alone. But, I saw his face and his posture and the whole set of actions leading up to it, and I also had kept reasonable track of contemporary politics and technological advances. And, I concluded Cassy was probably right, actually, and that Ayden wasn’t exaggerating or warping her text message.

  I would have framed it a little differently, putting the actual bme squarely on the politicians taking advantage of my anomaly. But that was mostly a matter of pride. The truth was, I’d been careless and affected humanity way more than I’d intended.

  And I’d been lucky. I’d been vulnerable and very visible, and nobody had come to eat me.

  It’s possible that I’d scared all the surrounding emanants more than I’d scared humanity, though.

  Anyway, Ayden was in Salem with me and Milk to help us hone our pns as information came in, and also to man the phone while I conversed more deeply with Milk. In addition to that, he’d been trying to grill us about Korean folklore.

  It seemed that his way of dealing with the revetion of monsters was to develop a new special interest in one of his ancestral cultures. A totally fair and understandable thing to do. He’d have a lot more to talk about with Cassy, too. Her interest in horror movie monsters and general folklore overpped with that a great deal.

  And I’d certainly love to watch Korean horror and fantasy with the both of them, myself, at least.

  But, I’m afraid I wasn’t a very good resource for the questions he had been asking, and neither was Milk.

  Still, I was learning more about Ayden’s personal history than I had in the two years I’d known him leading up to this. And I appreciated that a lot. And so, I was trying to help him as much as I could. Such as when he’d asked about the bulgasal, a rather famous Korean monster. I’d agreed that its origins seemed to have corresponded roughly to a monster hunt I remembered, but I couldn’t confirm if it had been an actual emanant in any way or even the cause of the hunt.

  After looking at that text message, though, he didn’t look like he’d ask any more folklore reted questions soon.

  I decided to acknowledge his report by saying, “I was afraid of that.”

  I hadn’t been. I hadn’t been thinking about it. But, I felt that response would be the least arming and worrisome to him. And everything had clicked into pce when I’d heard it.

  “What does Milk think?” he asked.

  Milk couldn’t talk English or any verbal nguage. Not in its current configuration, which it seemed unwilling to alter. So I had to transte for it. It understood him just fine, though.

  “Ephemeral lifeforms will pass,” Milk replied.

  I told Adyen, “It’s not overly concerned for its own wellbeing, or mine.”

  “Oh, goody,” Ayden sighed.

  “I wonder –” I started to say, but our phones buzzed again and Ayden looked at his, so I stopped.

  He got a slightly more vexed and more interested look on his face, and reported, “Cassy says she’s now seen a teratovore working as a Homend Security agent.”

  “Not local,” Milk said.

  I contradicted it, “No, it could be. Or, local enough.”

  Ayden squinted at us, but seemed to suss out what Milk had said from my response.

  We were seated around the table in my diner booth domain, again. We’d gotten some food from a nearby fast food pce, for Ayden, but he wasn’t even picking at it. He just sipped his milkshake occasionally.

  Milk was in its customary gss, set a fair ways away from the food and milkshake.

  “It could be one of Chord’s agents, but we won’t know for sure until we dissect its memories, I think,” I added.

  Ayden nodded and typed in a text to Cassy, probably reying that message.

  Then, with a concerned look, he said to me, not really for the first time, “This is such slow going.”

  “Yeah, I imagine it is,” I agreed. “For me, I kind of have to fight to experience it slowly, of course. But, watching you eat your burger helps with that.” I gave him a nice smile, to let him know it was supposed to be a gentle tease he could ignore.

  He snorted, then mock scowled and said, “You’re not feeding off human emotions again, are you?”

  “Nope, not yet. Probably going to switch back to that after things settle down again, though,” I replied. “I prefer it that way. I like to be close to humans. I like to feel like I’m maybe one of you. You’re good people.”

  “Sometimes I really can’t see that,” he frowned and pouted, and then slurped his drink. “A lot of times. How are we ‘good people’?”

  “Compared to emanants?” I asked, pausing only briefly before continuing. “Ah. Recent events and your personal experiences are going to make this a hard argument to make. Humans can really be so fucking cruel to each other. But, Chord is evidence that emanants can be, too. I’m afraid of sounding like a trite social media post if I expin in detail, Ayden. But, in all of my existence, I’ve seen more community and mutual support between humans than I have between even the most herd-like of emanants. We don’t bond with each other like you do. We don’t have the biological drives to do it. And only the thinnest of circumstantial ones.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  I replied, “For the most part, we don’t reproduce. We don’t need to, and it’s seen as a threat on the level of weapons of mass destruction. Like, for us, reproduction actually reduces our diversity, and increases control that a single emanant may have over their area of the world, so we’ve got kind of a cold war going on about it. And the need to reproduce and raise your young has led you to evolve a whole bunch of emotions and behaviors that we just haven’t developed or explored.”

  “You learn well,” Milk told me.

  “Thanks,” I responded to it in monster speak.

  Ayden truly scowled and asked, “If you don’t reproduce, how are more emanants made when you’re killed?”

  “We spring into existence,” I said. “New emanants fill the void left by destroyed emanants. Kind of like how subatomic particles spontaneously spawn in a vacuum in opposing pairs. But different. Some people used to call it spontaneous generation, but erroneously attributed it to things like rats and flies. And our circumstances, the shape of the voids we fill, shape us.”

  “This is why older emanants are more flexible,” Milk told me.

  “Oh, of course,” I said out loud. “Milk says that’s why older emanants like me and it are more flexible, and can change our adaptations and such.”

  “Oh,” Ayden said.

  I looked at Milk and asked it, “How old are you, anyway?”

  “I do not count years. Older than life,” it replied.

  I pointed a thumb at it and said, “It’s at least twice as old as I am. I think. I’m guessing.”

  Ayden grabbed a cold fry and evaluated it, “I guess I’m lucky to be friends with you.”

  “The luck goes both ways,” I said.

  “How so?” he retorted skeptically, popping the fry into his mouth and chewing on it angrily.

  “You’re a rare and fascinating individual who has a lot to teach me about humanity, and I could have missed you if I’d blinked at the wrong time,” I told him. “More or less.”

  He tightened his lips after swallowing the fry, “That sounds like a ptitude.”

  “It’s gonna. I can’t help it,” I admitted. “The circumstances are against me, but my feelings about it are genuine anyway.”

  “Cool,” he nodded and pursed his lips. “I can accept that, I think. Also, I don’t mind being luckier than you are. I could use the boost.”

  “That sounds like a good way to look at it,” I said.

  He smiled wanly, “So, for old times’ sake, what were trilobites really like?”

  Milk said to me, “Alive.”

  I told Ayden, “Like really cute bugs.”

  “That’s the kind of thing I like to hear,” he grinned, grabbing a bunch of cold fries.

  While they drove past the high school toward Hayward Grocery, two low priority points of interest that could still house traps, Cassy found herself distracted by the lime green vinyl dashboard of Greg’s truck. She really only had to gnce in the direction of each building once as they passed it, so she had time to lose herself in her human senses. It made her feel better, more herself, to reach out and touch textured things.

  It was so clean. Faded, old, but free of dust or grime and otherwise unmarred.

  She wondered how old the truck was. It had a stick shift in the steering column.

  Tilting her face toward Greg without taking her eyes off the chrome trim of the dash, she asked him, “Between your gorgeous robe, your house, and this truck, how come you were working groceries?”

  “Burnout,” Greg said immediately. Then he chuckled, “I inherited the house and truck from my parents. So that’s luck. The robe, I bought. I was in my twenties during the dot com boom, and was able to mask all sorts of shit I really shouldn’t have. Unlike a lot of my coworkers, I put a lot of my money into savings. I’m not rich by any means. I no longer have any retirement. But I’ve been using that money since my burnout to keep the things I value in good shape. Took most of my thirties with lots of therapy to get to the pce where I could work at all again.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’m like one of those trans women who seemed to actually have male privilege when they were in the closet, only I’m not a woman,” he awkwardly quipped.

  She really didn’t know what to think of that, but she said, “Sure. I mean, masking neurodivergence or orientation is kinda simir I suppose. And if you’re not cis, then…”

  “Yeah, maybe,” he said. “No hits?”

  “None,” she reported. Hayward was busy with people and a small flock of obvious affectivores, but nothing that stuck out to her.

  “What’s next on our list?”

  “Utilities, I think. TRIMET,” she replied.

  “I feel like we’re not going to get much from those pces either,” Greg grumbled.

  “Agreed,” she reached out and stroked the dash slowly again. “I think I need to sample some of the wildlife. And I really don’t want to.”

  “Oh? How’s that?” Greg asked like it was the most natural conversation.

  She sighed and took a deep breath. She didn’t look forward to doing this in any way, but she couldn’t logic her way out of it. “If they’ve been altered by Chord, I might be able to tell from their memories. I might even be able to figure out what he’s pnning next that way.”

  “Good call. Where to, then?” Greg asked.

  “Same pces, only I get out and do my thing, I guess.”

  Some time ter, after Ayden had finished his food and Milk and I had given him an education on the evolution of life that he really couldn’t get anywhere else, our phones buzzed a couple of times.

  It was from Cassy, of course.

  The first message was, “I hate being a teratovore.”

  The second message read, “Every other emanant in Gresham is part of a trap for someone. I almost tripped it. We’re coming back to Salem now.”

  Ayden and I shared a Look. Milk radiated an emotion that matched that look.

  An hour after that, as we were greeting Greg and Cassy in front of the shop, Cassy told us, “It’s a mosaic of memory fragments. When you consume enough of them, they trigger a fshback and an impulse to go to Portnd. Greg wasn’t having any of it.”

  “Please eborate,” I said.

  Greg walked around the front of his Truck, shoving his hands into his coat pockets. “I’ve been watching how you and Cassy act when you start talking about memories that weren’t yours. I don’t like it. She started acting weird, and I decided to veto her directions.”

  “The fshback really felt like it was my own, though,” Cassy said. “Like, despite it coming from before I – I guess – awakened? I remembered seeing a vulnerable ally of Chord’s while in Portnd once. It was headquartered in an abandoned industrial site. And I guess I sort of attributed it to one of Felicity’s memories.”

  “Except you weren’t exactly talking like her, either,” Greg said. “Which is really what tipped me off.”

  “I really wanted to go and eat it, too. Intensely,” she added.

  “Exactly.”

  I stated the obvious conclusion for everyone’s benefit, “So, it’s a trap set for a lone teratovore that absorbs memories.”

  “Who could that be for?” Ayden asked. “You? Didn’t you say you died? And Milk pretended to be Croc-face to confirm your death?”

  “‘Die’ is such a weird way to describe the end of one of us,” I turned to Ayden. “But, yes. Chord is supposed to think Croc-face is still at rge, and that it maybe betrayed him. But who knows, really?”

  “Can you take advantage of that?” he asked.

  “Milk was hoping we could, yes.”

  Milk mentally nudged me from its pce near my feet, “You’re full of ancient secrets. You have old tricks and reflexes that you’ve long forgotten because you haven’t needed them. But Chord is as old as you, and now he towers over you.”

  “I know,” I told it. “But I have you and Cassy.”

  “Maybe,” it said.

  I felt like cpping my hands again, like some sort of team leader, so I did, then decred to everyone “Alright! Let’s see what we can do with this!”

  theInmara