The enforcer dragged the master’s new slave through the building’s parking garage. Between cage and stairs leading up, its legs had gone all wobbly at the knee, no longer able to support its insubstantial weight. It didn’t bother trying to hold the bound and gagged human upright but pulled him along by the back of the neck, like a bundle of rags, toes scraping across the concrete.
“Put him back in the trunk,” the master said, then slipped through the side door of the limo.
The enforcer’s brethren followed. Their combined weight made the long wag sag on its springs.
It lifted the parcel up with one hand and dropped it onto the pile of autoblasters. The human moaned through the duct tape around its mouth as it was rolled face-first against the wheel well.
After adjusting the heap of weapons, it slammed down the trunk lid. The black tint of the rear windows obscured its view into the limo. Likewise, those inside had no view out.
The passenger-compartment doors stood open in invitation, but the master hadn’t ordered it to join them. Flicking out its tongue, it tasted the scent trails its kin had left behind.
The others hadn’t seen what it had seen at the train platform.
If they had, they would have been feeling the same pull. It turned from the rear of the limo and raced back for the long room, bare feet slapping the concrete. If the other brethren had seen what it had, they’d be running alongside. But without the power of speech, it had no way of describing the passengers in the subway train opposite them—the perfect copies of them all, including the two brethren who had died in the street.
It had glimpsed them again across the long room with the cages, through the twinkling lights, beyond the blurred curtain. And the pull had become almost unbearable.
The connection it felt to its own had nothing to do with a shared experience—being hatched from the same clutch of eggs, buried in the same yard-deep hole in damp sand, crawling together upward, into the warm light. It had no memory of its birth or the circumstances surrounding it. It had never seen one of its own kind born. It had only seen them die. It didn’t know its father or its mother or if it had either, for that matter. It knew nothing of the history of its parents or the history of its own species. And the capper: it didn’t know it was missing anything. It lived only in the present, taking in information, reacting to it.
They were called enforcers by the master, and guardians, too, but they didn’t have names of their own. They couldn’t have spoken them even if they did; they lacked the physical wherewithal, the proper voice box and musculature to form intelligible words. What they had were odors, scents unique to each and superkeen senses of smell and taste inside nostrils and on the surface of the tongue and interior of the mouth. From the day of their hatching and for their whole lives after that, they had soaked in a stew of each other’s dripping sweat. The intricate intermingling of individual scents was a constant reminder that they existed as a sum of parts, that they were not alone, that they belonged to one another.
When a component of the swarming, filial aroma was lost, it felt as if a limb had been struck off; worse, as if a part of their hearts had died. It left a wound that never healed—unlike the wounds created by the softies’ blasters. The softies, who stood waiting so patiently to be pulled apart. When it snapped the softies’ bones, pulped the warm, pliable flesh, drew forth the slippery things inside them, they stayed broken. Their answering bullets gave it no pain. There was no gushing blood. And the chunks of hide lost to blasterfire were not lost for long. Its divots were already growing back.
It opened the door to the stairs and started down.
It possessed no cunning, except in the sense of anticipating the movement of its intended prey. It didn’t see what it was doing as betraying or tricking the master. It didn’t fear the consequences of the act, because it couldn’t foresee any. Besides, it wasn’t afraid of death for itself, only the death of its brethren, which it would suffer over and over with every intake of breath for as long as it lived.
The master did not control the brethren by fear. It controlled because it was the master. It had always been the master. One sniff had told them that. Just like one sniff had told them who they were. The master had always given them purpose and direction. The master understood their needs. Obedience to the master was an automatic response. If the master had said “Get in the limo” it would have obeyed the command without question. But the master hadn’t said anything.
It was a creature of simple function and operating parameters: a guardian, an enforcer. Protect this. Kill that. The twin poles of the possible. It couldn’t frame the concept of an indeterminate or intermediate outcome; it didn’t know what a “gray area” was, but it was in one now.
It reached the bottom of the stairs and ran, all the way to the long room’s entrance. Without hesitation it opened the door. The machinelike placidity and composure it felt even in the heat of battle was gone. It could taste the empty place in its heart. A creature that did not bleed was bleeding.
When it entered the room, the brethren on the other side of the shifting curtain failed to notice; they were busy stuffing a squirming white-coated human feet first into a cage. The two lost ones were there. Alive again. The why of that was another concept beyond its ken. At that point nothing short of death could have stopped it from crossing to the far side of the room, not even the master’s direct command. The yearning for completion was too strong.
As it stepped up to the barrier, showers of sparks descended, the floor shifted under its feet, the grinding noise became a roar that shook it to its core. Bits of newly regrown hide fell away like crusts of dried mud in a heap around its feet. In response to the sensed threat, its internal eyelids automatically snapped down. When it took the next step, passing through the curtain, the grinding shut off. The blurring and the shooting stars vanished. Its hide crackled and snapped against its endoskeleton as if electrically charged.
The first breath it took was a reunion. It had never felt such joy.
The brethren turned from their work to stare; they seemed stunned by its sudden appearance, which was understandable because they had no wounds of their own to heal; on this side of the room, the family was whole, every scent layered in its familiar place.
It wanted nothing more than to get in a pile with its brethren, to sweat and sleep in unconscious bliss. But it suddenly felt a different sort of pull. A pull that had nothing to do with scent memory. It wasn’t an interior impulse; it was just the opposite, as if something from the outside was pushing it from behind. Literally pushing it. The bare soles of its feet began to slip on the concrete, and the invisible hand at its back kept pressing until it was skiing across the floor, unable to change direction, to stop or slow the acceleration.
It looked up to see a mirror image of itself, its perfect double, not thirty feet away doing the same thing. Arms windmilling for balance, they helplessly slid toward each other like two magnets on a sheet of ice.
As their bodies closed the distance, it saw the shock and terror in its own eyes.