Rob Thurman - Doubletake

Then I smelled meat cooking. Burning. That had seemed wrong to me. Food and fire, they shouldn’t mix, should they?

Waste of flavor, waste of blood. I didn’t know why I’d thought that. But wasn’t it true?

Sheep. It was what sheep did. I pulled my knife from under my jacket. Sheep, yes, but I smelled their rage and fear soaking the air. The rage I’d dismissed.

The fear I embraced.

It had been a good day, but unfortunately for Niko it turned into an aware day. I liked aware days.

But no one else did.

Niko had said something to the group slowly surrounding us. All men. I didn’t listen to it. “No, Cal.” That was said to me. That I did try to listen to. Tried. Tried. Tried. He’d taught me to recognize my name again. “No knife. Our clan.” The women and children had fled inside their RVs. I hadn’t caught it all, understood it all, or recalled it all.…It didn’t make a difference. The result was the same. I’d heard him say, “Help.” More sounds. “Kidnapped. Killed.” And finally, “Family.”

For some reason that word I had known clearly. “You are our family. Help us.” Knew it because my two years of imprisonment had imprinted on me that those words were only to be laughed at. Weak and worthless. The Auphe had no family, did they? I couldn’t remember, but if they had…instinct told me that if they did and one of that family pulled up lame, you…they…would eat that brother or sister. And those sheep gathered around us…they were born lame. Lame as a species.

Then Niko had said something that shocked me, even in my condition.

Beg. “I’m begging you.”

Fuck the Auphe. I had family. I had a brother and these sheep had made him beg .

The men had completed their circle and I had turned to rest my back against Niko’s. Watchyourbackwatchyourbackwatchyourback. Alwaysalwayswatchyourback. You took down more that way. They moved closer and that had been when Niko had gotten his answer.

“ Armaya khul! Beng! ” He’d been the biggest of the men, their leader. If it had been now, I could tell you if his hair was curly or straight, if he had a mustache or not, but then…humans had looked all the same—alien. Wrong. Puny…

Prey.

Except for Niko. He was the only one after two years in Tumulus, Auphe-world without the balloons and funnel cakes, who I could actually see in detail. He stood out sharp and clear. The rest? The blur of sheep? Who could tell one from another? Who cared if you could?

“ Doshman! ” Another, bigger one had lunged at us with a blade in his hand, then back again quickly when I shifted my gaze to him and grinned at him gleefully. That…oh, yesss, that I recognized. A sheep making threats. It was funny. It was so goddamn hilarious.

“ Johai! ”

The words, they were filthy and full of scorn. They hadn’t had to be in English or Auphe for me to know that. They had spit on us as well, forking the evil eye at me; Niko had taken it much more to heart than I did—eighteen years old with a dead mother, a desperately damaged brother, begging for help. Niko who never begged. Niko who had thought all our family couldn’t be as bad as Sophia.

Niko, who had been surprised in the very worst way.

“ Marime! Bi - lacho! Za! Za! ” Their leader had thrown out his arm to hold back the rest of the flock and spoken English to Niko. “You are Vayash. Cast off the monstrous bino . Or better, kill the mad beast and return to your clan.”

I hadn’t forgotten or missed a single word of that, I think because I’d seen the look on Niko’s face when he’d been given the choice. I was lost in a fog, but that look and the words that had caused it had managed to part it to let me see and hear clearly.

“You are the monsters. We don’t need your help. We don’t want your worthless damned help.” Niko’s voice had burned with betrayal and hate. Two emotions I knew better than any others. I’d known them when the Auphe had taken me. I knew them a thousand times more intensely when I’d returned.

Niko didn’t hate. Niko wasn’t like that. He wasn’t like Auphe. He wasn’t like me. I heard myself snarling. These sheep had made him hate.

I’d made a sound of anticipation and before Niko could swivel, I met the nearest two who had charged me at the moment of Niko’s defiance of the head sheep. I buried one’s own blade in his shoulder and mine in the other’s thigh. Don’t kill. Don’t kill. Don’t kill. Niko wouldn’t want me to kill. But it was hard, hard . I wanted it. Wanted. Needed.

Niko…

I snarled, but honored my brother, not the Auphe. As both men fell, I settled for laughing. I had known then and now that it hadn’t sounded anything like a human laugh.

I hadn’t cared. They were lucky it had started out as a good day before shifting to an aware one or I would’ve gone for their throats with my teeth and done more damage than they could have with their pigstickers. Eight years ago I’d barely understood anything around me. I hadn’t been right—in my head, in my soul. No, I hadn’t been right at all, far from it. The world had been twisted and strange and it was months before I would see it for what it was again.

If I ever truly had.

When Niko had pulled me back into the car ahead of an armed but uneasy mob, I’d said my first and only words of the day.

My voice had been rusty from rare use, but insistent, and the words were my first real step back toward sanity—toward Cal. “Don’t hate. Don’t beg. Not you.”

Because my brother had been better than that. Better than those sheep. Better than me.

He still was.

That encounter with the Vayash had in part made Niko what he was now: honorable if you deserved it, the unforgiving steel of his sword if you didn’t. That would always be a part of him. Thanks, in a large part, to that and this bastard I’d attacked at our door.

The one last thing I did remember…Sophia hadn’t taught us Rom. Not the language of our clan or the overall language of all clans. While he could guess from the tone what those words had implied, that wasn’t enough for Niko. Two days later we had stopped in a library. After an hour on the Internet, he’d taken me back to the car and I thought, in that one moment, that he’d been glad I wasn’t coherent enough to ask him what those words had meant. In the years since, he hadn’t once told me, and I hadn’t asked. He also hadn’t learned any more Rom; Niko who ate knowledge and languages like they were Wheaties. He would have nothing to do with it.

It didn’t make a difference if Kalakos was his absent father or not. He was Vayash and that damned him as equally in Nik’s eyes.

Kalakos nodded once. “I heard what happened, but I was not there. I swear it, Niko. I would not lie to you. Like Sophia, the clan is too small for me. I roam and I rarely see them. If I had been there, I would’ve spoken for you.”

Yeah, right.

“And I never came to you before”—prior to the Auphe’s taking me, before Niko’s second or third or fourth or seventh birthday—“as I found out about you when you were two years old. I didn’t know I had a son until then. But I thought your mother the better choice for you. The life I lead, constantly on the move, the work I do, not so different from yours, it wasn’t any life for a child.”

That… that was worth a fucking comment or two. “You thought Niko living with Sophia…a bat-shit crazy, abusive bitch of a mother, was a better life for a child? Is that your story?” He was a liar. He’d slept with her, he knew her, he knew what she was—a sociopath. People don’t change that much in three years. He’d known and he hadn’t wanted the responsibility of a kid, of Niko, any more than Sophia had. He’d just made it out in time before Niko entered the world—or a booze-soaked hell. With Sophia it was the same thing.