Book One – Chapter 19

It was not like he had done that regularly. Or too often. It definitely did not happen on purpose. Never with intention. The watching. You could hardly avoid it when you lived on the estate. The humans were just right there, always within reach, all the time, and so what did it matter if he had watched that one girl, sometimes, or another female, or a male, of course, he had also watched males, just as much, or any human, obviously, because their sex did not matter, obviously, why would it? Yu had just watched them at random, when he had been, well, bored or something, because what option did he have, when everything else was do this or learn that or insult of your choice in Tria’s voice.

Yu turned back to the window slit. He looked the female up and down, as though staring hard enough would peel back the forgery and expose her real origin, or the reason to lie about it.

For decades, the habitat had held roughly two hundred humans at any given time. Until seven years ago, when Tria had released the funners, that is. The beasts had decimated half, before the males brought them down. Even so, with the deaths by drowning and childbirth now reduced, and with the young no longer given to the bormen, the population had recovered swiftly. By the time Yu had left, the count had already climbed back towards one hundred and fifty. With such numbers, Yu could of course not recall every face, certainly not from four years past. But if this female had been given to a borman then, for whatever reason, she would have been seven years of age. It would have made her one of the rare children who had survived the funners slaughter. Yu was sure he would have noticed her. He would have remembered. Those distinct tairan features would have marked her apart.

And yet, apart from her tairan traits, there was nothing remarkable about her. Nothing — except that she was here at all. Still, Yu’s eyes clung, compelled and repulsed in equal measure, as Bubs drew ever more fragments of bone from the torn leg. Since Yu had started watching, it had been an endless harvest of tiny white shards, one splinter after the other without pause.