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She has freed her arms from her towel and is sitting propped up in bed, her toes waggling back and forth happily as she consumes her nutrition. She is, I realize, absolutely adorable.
“This is so good,” she says. “I bet a burger would go really well with this. You know, meat and vegetables, and cheese between two buns.”
“I’ll get you a steak,” I say. “Stay there.”
She’s not going anywhere, not in that cozy, blissed-out state. I feel very much the protective provider. I want to keep her nice and safe and well fed. I want to bring her the best of everything, and to see her deeply happy.
I have to remind myself that I never wanted to have a human pet, and that becoming attached to this one is a bad idea. My job is to keep her alive and stop her from adding to the overall chaos of the ship. And now, to get her some meat.
* * *
The ship’s stores always contain a generous amount of human food, but I have to ensure the source of it. The villagers who occupied the ship for a short period of time have contaminated some of our stores because of their feral habits when it came to consuming certain types of flesh. Those humans, simple and silly as they seemed sometimes, considered our species a potential food source. I spent hours going through removing what they considered to be fine flesh and giving it a proper send off. Euphorians are not food, especially not for a lesser species.
Are humans a lesser species?
Again, I feel a little twinge of misgiving.
Humans are dangerous. They may look soft and sweet and simple, but they contain multitudes. They are predators without tusk or fang or claw. They are wickedly intelligent, and their ability to function in groups makes them almost unstoppable.
Once upon a time, we considered our forays to Earth a type of conservation. We were attempting to save this species from what appeared to be almost certain destruction. Now I am beginning to wonder if they ever needed our help at all. Perhaps we inserted ourselves where we did not belong, and in doing so, sowed the seeds of our own destruction.
I am not given to paranoia, and yet everything about our current trajectory fills me with a sense of palpable doom. The frozen steak in my hand comes from an Earth cow. I know it is not the flesh of my own flesh, or blood of my own blood, but there is something about holding this cold lump of flesh in my scaled hand that makes me pulse with deep concern.
The cooking process is quick and simple. Apply salt and heat. Easy. Done.
Take it back. Feed my pet. Make her happy. Easy. Done.
“Oh my god. That smells amazing!”
I watch as Stella tears into the flesh, her relatively soft and small teeth still making very short work of the beast’s meat. Humans have been surviving in a world of monsters from the very beginning. They evolved as weak, hairless mammals who had lost the ability to retreat to the trees. They should never have survived. They should be a footnote in the fossil record.
And yet they are not.
One is sitting tucked up in bed in my room, and a good dozen on board the ship, milling about with their latent aggression barely under control.
* * *
Iknow it is probably a waste of time, but yet again, I go and talk to my brother.
“Arkan.”
“Hmmm?”
“We cannot deliver an army of aggressive humans to Euphoria.”
“Of course we can. They are our humans, Kahn. You worry too much.”
“They could turn on us at any moment, attack us, potentially kill us, and take both women for themselves.”
“Obviously, we wouldn’t let that happen,” he says.
“What makes you think the two of us are more powerful than an entire crew of Wrathelder, which they already wiped out?”
“What makes me think the two of us are more impressive than a Wrathelder crew? Listen to yourself, Kahn. One of us is more impressive than a Wrathelder crew. I know our family has taken a few psychological hits lately, but don’t forget who you are. Don’t forget who we are. Brothers who hold the destiny of Euphoria in our hands.”
He’s drunk on his own sense of importance, and he is making a terrible mistake. I am no longer certain that I am going to be able to cover for the magnitude of the chaos that is coming our way.
8OLD FRIENDS
