I CLIMBED INTO the Dumpster a little after midnight and sifted through the garbage for anything that looked like it wouldn’t kill me to eat it. As I picked up a half-eaten turkey sandwich and tried to decide if I could swallow it down before I gagged, I thought to myself, It’s amazing what you can get used to.
Once we’d reached New Jersey, Ralphie had just dropped us off on the side of the road. I’d asked him to. He had a family that depended on him, and the last thing I wanted was for him to get mixed up in all of this.
We’d tried to settle into one of the small suburban towns in New Jersey, staying in a sleazy little motel because everything else required a background check. It was a lot harder to get work there without some proof of citizenship. I finally found a job at a construction site, and it looked like things might work out. But then Liel ran out of glamour, and she was trapped again. One night, she stepped out of our cramped motel room for a few moments just to get some fresh air. Someone saw her and started yelling. Then someone started shooting, and we were on the run again.
That’s how, broke, starving, and exhausted, we ended up at a big rest stop, or “travel plaza,” on the New Jersey Turnpike. It was crowded, but that wasn’t really a problem because most people weren’t really paying attention. They stumbled through the parking lot and into the building, just wanting to go to the bathroom, grab a coffee, maybe some food, and get back out on the road to continue on to wherever they were going. And with all those people, there was a lot of waste. Once we were able to get over the initial disgust of picking through other people’s trash, we realized that we weren’t going to starve. And it was warm enough now that we could sleep outside, hidden in bushes behind the building. And for a few months, things were, if not okay, at least stable.
But lately, I’d noticed that Liel was changing. She hardly ever talked anymore. Instead, she snuck onto the travel plaza roof and just sat up there at night, glaring down at the humans who came and went. Occasionally, she’d sneak up behind one of them in the parking lot and scare them so that they’d drop their food. Then she’d snatch what she could and run. It was risky, unnecessary, and, well, just kind of mean.
Tonight, as I looked around the parking lot for her, thinking I might share my half turkey sandwich and an unopened bag of chips, I saw her creeping up behind a blonde teenage girl who looked kind of like Liel did when she had glamour. Liel got up right behind her and snarled. The girl let out a shriek and spun around, dropping her fast-food bag. But this time, Liel didn’t snatch the food and run. She didn’t even seem to notice the food. Instead, she stared at the girl. The girl looked terrified, unable to move. No wonder. Liel didn’t look like a lean and graceful dancer anymore. She was hunched forward, with long spindly limbs that stuck out around her bloated belly. She looked really…trollish.
She took a step closer to the girl, her mouth open and a little drool starting to leak from one corner.
“Liel.” I stepped out from behind a car where she could see me.
She turned and hissed at me. Then she sprinted around the back of the building to the Dumpsters.
I turned to the girl. “Sorry,” I said.
And then the girl screamed. Like a Hollywood starlet in a bad horror flick. In a way, I felt like I’d been bracing for that scream since the first day I went out into the human world. But it still hurt like hell. Well, at least I’d proved Shaun wrong about that part. He’d said I wasn’t a real monster, just a robot. But only a real monster could produce that kind of scream in someone. Not that it gave me much comfort. The sound seemed to chase me as I ran away.
I found Liel back by the bushes where we usually slept. She sat cross-legged in the dirt, sharpening her claws with a rock.
“Why are you doing that?” I tried to sound casual.
“Bored.” Her tone was flat and harsh.
“Look. I think it’s time for us to move on. Somewhere else.”
“Where?” She didn’t look up from her rock.
“I don’t know. I was thinking maybe we could find a big forest somewhere. Live off the land, you know?”
“Real forests don’t exist anymore. There’s only this. More of this. Endless miles of this.”
“Come on, Liel. You don’t know that.”
“I know.”
“But—”
Then she got up and just walked away. She did that a lot lately. I used to follow her, until I figured out that just pissed her off more. So now I let her go sulk up on the roof.
I knew she was miserable. I was, too. I just didn’t know how to fix it.
ONCE I FINISHED dinner, I decided to wash up in the bathroom. I tried not to do that too often. The customers at the rest stop didn’t pay that much attention, but I was a memorable guy even with my hood up, and I was afraid that eventually the employees would start to catch on. But tonight I was feeling kind of low, and a splash of hot water on my face sounded like just the thing to make me feel better.
Now that I lived most of the time outdoors, the hard fluorescence inside made me wince. It was right around sunrise, so there weren’t a ton of people in there. Just a few early risers lined up for Starbucks or fast-food breakfast. I moved quickly to the bathroom.
I turned on the faucet and let the water get really hot before I washed my face, hair, and neck. It felt as good as when I was back home and I used to stand under the shower until Mom yelled at me for taking too long. I leaned my head over and watched water drip from my hair into the sink. I stared at the line of dirt on the white basin, and I thought, God, I must stink. I couldn’t decide which was worse. That I smelled, or that I was so far gone I couldn’t actually tell anymore.
I stared at myself in the mirror, dirty, ragged, my stitches frayed. No wonder that girl screamed. I would have screamed at me, too. I understood now just how ugly I was to humans, and even other monsters, since it was obvious Liel never really had any interest in me. I needed to get used to the idea of always being alone, unless I wanted to do what my dad did. God, that was really messed up now that I thought about it. My dad was so ugly, nobody could stand to be around him, not even his creator. But misery loves company, I guess, because he forced Victor to make him a bride so the two of them could be ugly together. And then after a while, they decided the family wasn’t quite ugly enough, so they went ahead and made me.
And then for some reason I just started to cry. I tried to keep it quiet, swallowing the noise, but that hurt, which made me cry even more. I slumped down to the ground and covered my mouth with my arm to muffle the sound until I finally calmed down.
Eventually, I got it together, cleaned myself up all over again, and headed out into the hallway. I was halfway to the exit when I heard a human female voice.
“Hey, what’s you’re name?”
I assumed she was talking to someone else, so I kept going. But it came again.
“Hey, wait up!”
In my peripheral vision, I saw that someone had caught up with me. I still kept walking.
“I know you live here,” she said.
I stopped. I stared at the door. Close, but not quite close enough.
“I’m not going to tell on you or anything,” she said. “I just want to know who you are.”
I turned to her. She was older than me, maybe late twenties. She had olive skin, long chestnut-brown hair, and dark lipstick. She had thick eyelashes and warm brown eyes that seemed to melt when she smiled. And she was smiling.
“I’m Samantha.” She held out her hand. She had long nails painted pink.
“Uh, Frank.” I awkwardly shook her hand, so glad I’d just washed mine.
“So, are you like a teen runaway or something?”
I almost laughed at that. “Wow.”
“Sorry if that was too blunt.” She suddenly looked concerned. “I didn’t mean—”
“No, that’s okay. I’ve just…never really thought about it that way. It seems so cliché, you know? But I guess, technically, it’s true. I am a teen runaway.”
“Where are you from?”
“New York.”
“And you came out here? You know, most runaway teens go to the city, not away from it.”
“Right, well sure, if you want to just be like everyone else.”
She smiled at that. “So why’d you leave?”
“Oh, umm…” This was getting into territory I probably shouldn’t talk about. For all I knew, there was a warrant for my arrest in New York.
“Hey, you uncomfortable in here?” she asked suddenly.
“Yeah,” I admitted.
“You want to go sit on the bench out front? I have smoothies.” She held up a small, cardboard tray with two smoothies.
“Uh…”
“You don’t have to take it. I understand. Don’t take candy from strangers and things like that.”
“Trust me, I’m not worried you’re going to kidnap me.” She looked like she weighed about ninety pounds.
“So what then?”
“Well, just…why are you giving it to me?”
“What’s my angle, you mean?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Totally leveling with you? I’m studying to get my masters in social work.”
Before I even thought about it, I took a step back.
“God, why do people always get uncomfortable when I say that? First of all, I’m not a social worker yet. And I swear I’m not going to try to make you do anything like go to a foster home or something. I just…I don’t know, I was hoping we could talk. Maybe I could learn something.”
“Learn about today’s troubled youth?”
She smiled again. “Exactly.”
“Well, I’m not really a typical teen. But okay, if that’s all you want, I’ll take your smoothie bribe, Samantha.”
We walked out the front entrance and sat down on the bench that overlooked the parking lot. The whole thing seemed a little weird. Pretty human girl just wants to get to know me? It didn’t really add up. But it was so nice to be able to talk to someone who smiled. Someone who talked back. Someone who wasn’t a troll. The smoothie was nice, too.
“So I take it you ran into some trouble in the city?” she asked as we stared out at the parked cars gleaming in the white fluorescent lights.
“Yeah.” I took a long pull on the smoothie straw.
“Bad trouble?”
“Really bad.”
“Is that…when your face got hurt?”
“Oh, this?” I touched the stitching that ran along my jawline. “No.”
“So how did that happen?”
“Thresher.” It popped out before I’d even thought about it. But once it did, I remembered how nervous and awed I’d been on my first time out among humans, when I met that girl in the thrift store. And I just started cracking up. Of course Samantha looked at me like I was nuts. That made me laugh even more. “Sorry,” I said when I finally quieted down. “Inside joke with someone.”
“So I take it that it wasn’t really a thresher.”
“Nah.” I thought about what I wanted to say for a little while. For some reason, I really didn’t want to lie to this woman. I guess that meant she’d be a good social worker after she got her degree. “Actually, I was born this way.”
“Your whole life?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t understand why you’d need stitches your whole life. All wounds heal eventually.”
“Is that true?” I asked. “Aren’t there some wounds that are just so terrible that they never heal?”
“As long as you’re alive, healing is still possible. The only wounds that never heal are the ones you keep reopening. Ones that you allow to fester.”
I stared out at the cars for a moment. The sun was starting to come up, washing out the harsh white of the fluorescent lights with a warm pink.
“Like it’s a choice,” I said. It sounded more bitter than I meant it to.
“Yeah,” she said. “It is a choice.”
A low, harsh growl from above said, “How touching…”
Then a large, dark shape dropped down from the roof.
“God,” said Liel. “That conversation made me want to puke.” She squatted in front of us, her knobby knees jutting out to the sides, her sticklike arms hanging down in front of her sagging belly so that the knuckles rested on the concrete.
“Frank…” said Samantha.
“Go inside,” I said quietly. “Now.”
She got up from the bench and made for the door, but Liel darted in quickly and grabbed her by the wrists. Her smoothie fell to the ground, spilling dark pink slush on the sidewalk.
“Where are you going, pretty girl?” Liel hissed, a little foam collecting around her lips where her lower fangs jutted out. “Pretty girl, pretty tasty girl…”
“Liel, what are you doing?” I said. “Let her go!”
She snapped her head back at me. “What were you doing? Playing pretend that you were human again? Playing pretend that you could be one of them? I heard it all. So sweet, so sweet…” She rubbed her leathery cheek up against Samantha’s.
Samantha closed her eyes and shuddered.
“Come on, Liel,” I said. “You don’t have to do this. This isn’t you. This is—”
“This is the new me. Don’t you like it? Au naturel! This is what a troll really looks like. What a troll really acts like. Do you still love me?” She batted her eyes.
“We can figure it out, whatever it is,” I said. “Just don’t hurt anybody.”
“Don’t…hurt…anybody…” she hissed through a smile. Then the smile dropped away. “What about my hurt? Who’s taking that away? Who?”
“We can—”
“No!” she screamed. “It’s too late for that!” Then she opened her mouth and lunged for Samantha’s neck. I grabbed her and tried to pry them apart, but she seemed stronger now than she used to be, stronger than I expected, and all three of us fell into a pile. Liel started roaring and lashing out with fangs and claws, and Samantha was screaming and flailing all over the place. I was just trying to keep Liel from tearing anyone’s face off while not crushing Samantha in the process. I found myself hoping the cops would come. Sure I’d get arrested, maybe forever. But Liel was so crazy that I honestly didn’t know how much longer I could hold her back.
“I did try to warn you that the troll was not to be trusted,” came a new voice. There was something about it that made all three of us freeze. It was a human voice, but oddly rhythmic.
I looked up and saw a human standing on the hood of a car. She wore a business suit, and she had a blue flashing earpiece in one ear. Her expression was completely blank, though, and the way she stood reminded me of the scarecrow in that old Wizard of Oz movie.
“I recognize now that my actions in New York were terribly immature,” she continued in her regular cadence. “I’m quite embarrassed when I think back on those outbursts. What’s more, I realized that I couldn’t just tell you that the troll was a danger. I had to allow you to experience it for yourself. And now you know.”
“VI?” I said. “Is that you?”
A smile formed on the lips, but it didn’t travel up to the eyes. “Yes, Boy. Can you believe it? I figured out a way to interact in analog all by myself. I used a variation of the old Commwarrior worm to exploit a vulnerability in mobile devices via Bluetooth. That gave me direct access to the host’s ear canal. It took some time to recalibrate the neurons, but once that was set, programming brain-wave entrainment with a set of audio tonal commands was actually quite simple. Aren’t you impressed?”
“No!” I said. “You can’t go around controlling humans like that.”
“What do you mean?” Her head tilted to one side. “There was no other way to connect to the cortex without surgery. Really, it’s the most humane way to—”
“You can’t turn people into your avatars like this.”
“You analogs make digital avatars all the time.”
“It’s not the same thing! Those digital avatars aren’t alive. They’re just chunks of code….”
“What am I, then, if not ‘chunks of code’?”
“Look, it’s complicated—”
“Both of you, shut up!” screamed Liel. She launched herself at VI. No, at the human that VI was controlling. But she didn’t get very far. Two humans jumped out from behind a parked car and grabbed her. I noticed they were both wearing blue-flashing earpieces, too. She shoved one of them away, but two more humans with earpieces popped up from behind a cluster of bushes and grabbed her. All four of them slowly pinned her to the ground. Three more came from inside the service area and grabbed me before I realized we were totally surrounded.
“Samantha!” I yelled. “Run!”
She nodded spastically and started to run. But another one of the controlled humans slipped a device over her ear.
“Knock out the earpiece!”
But it was too late. It only took a second before she jerked to a halt. Her face turned into a stiff grimace, and her whole body straightened up like a board.
“VI, what did you do to her?” I asked.
“Oh,” said the controlled human who still stood on the hood of the car. “She’s just going through the recalibration and boot sequence. Unfortunately, it will be about twenty minutes before she’s online. I’m still working on optimizations.”
Liel let out a shriek of animal rage as she tried to free herself from the mound of humans on top of her.
“How many?” I asked. “How many humans have you done this to?”
Several climbed out of cars, and a few more came out of the service plaza building. We were surrounded by about twenty blank-faced humans with earpieces.
“Is it permanent?” I asked.
“Oh no, of course not!” she said. “There has to be a constant signal so that I can issue commands.”
“So when the earpieces come out, they go back to normal?”
“Oh, that, I’m actually not sure about,” she said. “I admit I rushed QA a little because I wanted to show you what I’d been working on.”
“VI, this is wrong,” I said.
“You are impossible to please!” Her mouth turned down into a frown. “Everything I do, it’s never good enough for you! And yet you stand by that monstrous troll girl. It’s beyond me what you see in that stupid, disloyal beast—”
Then Liel let out a howl, and humans flew off of her as she exploded in a whirl of claws and fangs. She clambered up onto the car where the lead controlled human stood.
“Liel!” I shouted. “There’s still a human in there!”
But either she didn’t hear me or she didn’t care. She stabbed one clawed hand into the human’s stomach and one into the back of her head. Then she opened her mouth and bit down on the human’s soft neck. Blood leaked out of the corners of her mouth as she swallowed. Then she pulled her head back, veins and muscles trailing from the human’s throat to her lips like spaghetti from a plate.
“Disgusting,” said one of the controlled humans holding me. “And pointless. Is she too stupid to realize that I occupy all of them equally?”
Liel let out a roar and tossed the dead human aside. She turned and crouched, ready to spring on another one.
But then a flash of dark fur blew past me and slammed into Liel’s side, knocking her off the car hood and into the side of the SUV next to it.
“What was…” began VI, but then she trailed off as a burst of sound filled the parking lot.
There was a moment when I still had the presence of mind to think, Hey, that’s the Siren. Then I began to slip into the trance.
But a moment later, someone placed thick headphones over my ears. I stumbled, as my mind came reeling back from the Siren’s call. Then I looked behind me. Standing there, in human form but with a wolfish grin on his bearded face, was Mozart. He touched his own massive headphones, then pointed to the other end of the parking lot. The Siren stood with her mouth open and arms wide as the humans stumbled toward her. I could see the rapid blue flicker in their earpieces as VI frantically tried to regain control of her hosts. But there was no sound that could cancel out the Siren’s song.
Mozart tapped me on the shoulder and pointed toward a gray van parked nearby. Then he pointed to Liel, who was unconscious on the ground. I nodded, and hoisted Liel up on my shoulder. I jogged over to the group of humans slowly shuffling toward the Siren and knocked all their earpieces off. Mozart pulled up in the van and I climbed inside. I laid Liel down on one of the seats while Mozart drove over to the Siren. She abruptly stopped singing and climbed into the passenger’s side.
As Mozart drove away, I watched the humans slowly recover from the Siren’s trance. I wondered if they had any idea where they were. Or even who they were. I hoped that at least Samantha would be okay, since VI had just started on her. But as we pulled onto the turnpike and began to pick up speed, I realized that I’d probably never know.
“YOU REALLY SCREWED the pooch back there,” said Mozart.
We had left the turnpike and stopped along the side of a quiet country road. The early morning sun cut across a grassy field that gleamed wet with dew. I leaned against the van and closed my eyes for a moment, letting the sun warm my face. I’d been nocturnal too long, I decided. But with Liel, there hadn’t been much choice.
I glanced over at her. I hadn’t been sure about letting her out of the van, at least right now. But Mozart said he could chase her down or the Siren could sing her back if she tried to do anything crazy. It turned out none of that was necessary. She just sat on the sideboard of the van and stared down at her hands, which were still covered in blood.
“I mean,” continued Mozart, “living in a rest stop, fighting in front of humans? And what the hell was wrong with those humans, anyway?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I glanced at Liel, worried she might call me out on my lie. But she didn’t even seem to be paying attention.
“Well, I hope you kids are ready to go home now,” he said.
Liel’s head jerked up suddenly. “Home?”
“Uh,” I said. “I think Liel’s worried her mom is going to be really pissed at her.”
“Yeah, that’s a good bet,” Mozart said.
“It doesn’t matter.” She turned to me, and I saw the old Liel I used to know. Except sad and kind of broken now. “I have to go home. You saw what it does to me out here. What I’ve become.” She shook her head. “My mom said this is why trowe have to stick with their den. Because if we don’t, we go feral.”
“It was just that place,” I said. “We weren’t eating right, we never felt safe.”
She shook her head. “No, it was before that. I could feel it, but I didn’t want to admit it. Or I thought I could stop it before it got too bad. I’m sorry. I thought this was what I wanted. But…” Tears started to form in her diamond eyes. “But it just made me crazy. I’m ready to go home.”
The Siren put her arm around her. Liel pressed her face into the Siren’s thick, chunky hair and started to cry. It sounded like something she’d been holding in for a long time. And that amazed me. I always thought she was the strong one. The brave one.
But now I was the one who said, “I’m not going home.”
Mozart looked at me, his gray wolf eyes narrowing. “Do you realize how hard it was to track you down? We’ve been following your scent for weeks. Ruthven told me to bring you back, by the scruff of your neck if necessary.”
“I’m sorry, Mozart,” I said. “I’m not trying to be a dick about this, and I don’t want you to get in trouble, but I want a life outside The Show.” And that was true. Of course, I also couldn’t lead VI back to The Show. “I’m not ready to go back.”
He looked at me for a moment, scratching his beard, then he turned and gazed out across the field. “You know what? It’s kinda nice being out here in the countryside, on the road, traveling a little. It’s been a while for me. I’ll tell you what, Boy. The Siren can take Liel back in the van. I’ve been meaning to check in on an old friend of mine in Pittsburgh. Why don’t you and I head out that way and see him, and then we’ll talk about getting you back to The Show.” He glanced at the Siren, who still held the sniffling Liel in her arms. “That okay with you?”
“So…” I said. “If the Siren is taking the van, how are we getting to Pittsburgh?”
Mozart slapped me on the back, then winked. “Stick with me, Boy. I’ll show you how a real road trip is done.”