Book One – Chapter 15

Yu had listened in silence as she expanded on her philosophy. Humans, she believed, were creatures incapable of thriving in idleness. They required constant threat — a persistent edge of danger to tether their chaos, be it an actual physical threat or an imagined one.

“It must not overwhelm them,” Tria had continued, her gaze faraway. “But it must linger, just at the periphery of their awareness. There, where perception blurs with fear, where the mind merges imagination and undeniable truth into one. That fear will drive them. Keep it alive, and they will produce, they will obey, they will survive …”

In core, humans were primitive beasts dressed in the guise of people. They mimicked tairan behaviours and, on occasion, even appeared sensible. Almost reasonable. But those fleeting moments of imitation had been the downfall of many tairan settlements before the Human Restrict Act. Tria’s pragmatism, cold as it was, had preserved her habitat from such ruin.

Yu knew all this. Well, it was more that he had no opinion on such things, and Tria had strong opinions on everything. Thus, with many things, he just took and very much internalised whatever perspective she gave him. Except for her opinions on him, of course. She was always dead wrong on him. With the humans, though, he had seen the effectiveness of her methods and had accepted their logic.

Yet, as Yu watched Fallem and the escorting party that night, he could not help but draw comparisons between Tria’s humans and these companions of disparate races, who had so suddenly and readily bonded over shared peril and victorious bloodshed. They tore into the wapa’s flesh with the exuberance of champions, their delight and camaraderie swelling with what Yu could only describe as delusional satisfaction. One might think they had stormed the Albweiss itself and slaughtered every last Shaira that walked the earth.

And the very reason that Yu felt so profoundly excluded, not that he minded, at all, but still, was not just that they had so disturbingly bonded through their struggle like a tribe of dumb humans, and again, he did not mind that at all — it was because Yu had been excluded from the fight entirely.