In the end, after a lot more talking and some frivolous dismissals from Susan, Ayden and Greg agreed to help Cassy look for Synthia. Maybe they were just humoring her, or they were genuinely trying to help her ease her mind, but they pointed out that they all needed something to do that maybe felt important while also rallying for a job hunt.
They could pretend they were keeping an eye out for help wanted signs while driving around town.
But the very first thing they did, that very afternoon, was do a ride-by of Chord’s ranch. Felicity had known where it was, in order to heed Chord’s beck and call, and it would have been where Synthia had gone, if she was going after Chord. Fate Vine had also known where Chord’s ranch was, and Synthia had absorbed its memories.
Cassy wanted to see if she could at least sense the aftermath of that encounter, or the presence of either Chord or Synthia. And maybe, if Synthia was still scouting the pce and poking around for weaknesses, she could warn her away from it.
She reassured the boys that Chord wouldn’t detect her. Synthia had told her that something weird about her emanant physiology made her hard to recognize as what she was even a couple yards away. But if Synthia had been able to detect Fate Vine from several blocks away, then surely she’d be able to see signs of Synthia or Chord from the road.
But it turned out that either she didn’t know what she was looking for, or she hadn’t inherited Felicity’s senses with her memories, or no one was home.
As they rolled down that stretch of road, they couldn’t actually see any of the ranch’s buildings through the trees. The drive was curved in such a way as to obscure the view. And Cassy remembered what Synthia had taught Felicity about the Strands, but couldn’t figure out how to look at them.
She did, however, see several emanants lurking around the perimeter of the property. Mostly small and harmless looking enthalpiphages.
And she agreed with Greg, before he even said anything about it, that rolling up Chord’s drive to get a closer look was not a good idea.
Still, the early defeat crushed her spirits, and as the week progressed she continued to lose hope that she’d find Synthia.
Taking a grand tour of the city, which was no small pce, really impressed upon her just how much humanity was clustered around this long stretch highway and MAX line. So many houses and apartment complexes. So, so many parking lots with stores and restaurants scrunched in around them. Way too many cars.
But, she also got to watch as the density of emanants increased by the day, because it took them several days to complete their search.
They would drive around for a few hours every day, meeting at either Cassy’s or Ayden’s house first, and then end at either Work Source or the Library to help each other job hunt and apply for unemployment.
Frankly, Cassy wanted to give up on the employment thing altogether. It didn’t make sense to do so. She still had a body to take care of. But it felt extremely unfair that she could now remember living through vast swaths of human evolution, and could see herself existing through millions more years of it, but, for now, she had to eat food.
It did feel more than a little weird to her that she found herself thinking about that directly, instead of daydreaming about thinking about it.
But whenever that dilemma crossed her mind, she couldn’t figure out if what had happened was that she’d somehow become immortal but with mortal needs, or if she’d suddenly allowed herself to truly experience a taste of mortality.
The more she thought about emanant affairs and what she knew of them, the more she felt like she was Felicity finally free of Chord’s machinations for the first time since she’d ventured near Gresham.
If failing to find Synthia was disheartening, job hunting was utterly demoralizing.
The timing with the economy and the political climate was the absolute worst, especially for Ayden, who was trans and not white. Not that any of them felt they had any promising prospects.
They’d each had the prior experience of taking months to find work before, and it was still just over a week into the work of it this time for them. But by working together, treating it like an old school study group, it was easier to scour the listings and connections they each had. And it soon looked like they each might have to start looking for work out of town. If it could even be found there.
Between the corporate price gouging of groceries, which was bmed on inftion, and the threats of the incoming presidential administration, it seemed like nobody legitimate was legitimately hiring.
Most of the listings they found that any of them were qualified for looked like scams written by Large Language Models (or “AI” as the industry insisted on calling it).
And anything vaguely scrutable had application processes that were onerous at the least, and downright ableist to impossible in most cases.
Of course, when they traded notes they concluded, as per common wisdom, that they had usually gotten jobs in the past by word of mouth. So their work quickly turned to contacting friends and acquaintances to let them know they were looking. But they still had to go through the motions of applying cold to various listings, because they needed to meet the requirements for unemployment benefits.
Worksource offered other activities that counted toward that, though, but they weren’t quite ready to go to csses and shit like that. That felt demeaning and humiliating for some reason.
Also, that first week was called a “waiting week” and didn’t count, except that they still had to go through the hoops of applying. And that was absurd and convoluted. They each had to verify their identities through a two step process involving the postal service that the incoming President had sabotaged during his previous term.
At one point, Greg mumbled something about being fired for trying to start a union, and how that was supposed to be illegal. But Ayden had groaned in response, saying that adding wyers on top of job hunting was just too much.
And Cassy just couldn’t even bring herself to comment.
They’d been in the middle of Worksource during that conversation, each at a separate computer doing their own searches, wearing face masks to ward off COVID and the flu. And Cassy had been just so tired and bewildered by this mundane human activity that had always agonized her when she’d had to do it.
But then there’d also been a couple of enthalpiphages pying in the network, zipping between the different computers like they were involved in a game of tag. And she was trying to figure out what they were doing, instead of actually searching for work she knew wasn’t there.
The pce was also riddled with affectivores, monsters kind of like Synthia, but small and as simple as the enthalpiphages that had her attention. People came here to be frustrated, hopeful, bored, and discouraged, and that drew entities that fed on those emotions.
She did not, however, see any predators about. Or, at least, she didn’t recognize any.
Her sense was that that was fairly normal, actually.
Teratovores would want to let their prey thrive and grow and feel safe in most pces, so that they would have plenty of energy when they were finally ambushed. Prowling the smaller feeding grounds like this one was safe for smaller teratovores, because anything too big that came through with any regurity would just scare off the prey. But hunting here too often would have the same effect.
These were Felicity’s memories, of course.
And they were memories in a setting that got her thinking about Chord again.
As she watched the dancing enthalpiphages, she found herself wondering what Chord would have done to them if he’d had the chance to alter them.
Would it have been worth it to him to work on such small and inconspicuous emanants that could so easily be eaten by something rger?
And, if so, would the changes to them have something to do with the game they were pying?
She could maybe find out by eating one of them.
But she wasn’t sure she was ready to do that so frivolously.
She didn’t really feel hungry for feeding that way. It just sometimes felt like a perfectly OK thing to do, despite any other ethical or emotional misgivings she might have. But, she felt like she wanted to save that kind of act for something bigger and something more deserving of annihition.
Something like Chord, if she could get the jump on him. Or Croc-face.
Sewer Teeth?
Sewer Teeth was what Chord had called it.
Chord.
When she’d first come to – when Felicity had first come to town, Chord had successfully baited and swallowed her in a way that didn’t make any sense for who she remembered herself to be. She could have sworn she hadn’t ever been the kind of emanant that could be swallowed in that way. But there was that memory. And she’d come out the other end of him different.
But different in a way that she couldn’t remember, because her memories of her entire past matched what she was now. More or less. It had taken a while for them to make sense, really. A period of recovery, during which Chord had whispered to her and fed her and talked to her about his pns and needs for her.
These were deeply unpleasant things to think about, but there they were.
“What’s wrong, Cassy?” Ayden asked her.
Greg looked up to see her face and hear her answer.
She frowned and scowled and said, “Mmm. Felicity stuff. Icky fshbacks.” She scrunched up her face as if trying to squeeze the memories of the sensations out of her head. It really just held them firmly in pce. Then she looked around, wondering what people would think if they overheard what she wanted to say. She bit her lip. “Stuff I wish I could talk to Synthia about.”
“Ah,” Ayden nodded thoughtfully. Then he gestured at his computer screen and asked, “Is it at least better than this shit?”
“No,” she told him. “I feel vioted in a way I can’t really describe.”
“I’m so sorry,” Greg rumbled. “Hey. You guys want to take a break and talk about me for a bit? Like, go somewhere else and, um, help me figure something out?”
Ayden raised an eyebrow, almost smirking, and asked, “Is it that gay shit?”
“Not here,” Greg growled quietly.
“Right. Shit,” Ayden straightened up. “I’m game. How about you, Cassy?”
“Yeah, let’s do that.”
Later, in Greg’s dining room, after a somewhat lengthy truck ride while trying to coax Greg to start the conversation, but also reassuring him it was OK to take his time, they sat around his table with coffees in hands and a box of Tagalongs between them.
“I’ve been making noises about this before,” Greg finally said. “You both know what I want to talk about. But, this job hunt thing and everything else that’s going on is making me think I need to do something.”
“I get that,” Ayden nodded. “I’m sure Cassy has had a simir experience, too.”
“I’m not trans,” Cassy said. “Not really, anyway. Just gay. But, uh…” She realized what she’d been about to say about gender and sexuality didn’t feel relevant anymore. Her own past felt alien and insignificant. “Woah.” She put a hand to her head. “Maybe I should just listen. Is that OK?”
Greg creased his brow but nodded and said, “Sure. I mean, I think I’d rather do most of the talking, if I can get myself to come out with it.”
“Mood,” Ayden said.
“Yeah,” Cassy agreed.
“Like, I’m not getting any younger or healthier,” Greg said. “And this country is turning to shit for the kinds of things I want to experience, I’m realizing. You know? And, uh. I feel like I’m saying this all out of order.” Ayden appeared to be about to say something, but Greg held up his hand to stall him. Then he swallowed and took a breath to say, “I don’t know what I’m doing, or exactly what I need to do, but I just know I gotta do it. And, if monsters are a real thing, and you’re really getting to experience what that’s like first hand, Cassy, I just. I’m. I’m not a woman. OK? I’m not trans like that. I know that. But I need something really different. And maybe that’s different hormones, but that’s scary. You know? If they turn out to be right for me, and then they get… they get… taken away?”
Cassy saw that he was definitely shaking now, and his next breath was shuddery. Oh, yeah, she’d felt that. Not about gender, or even about sexual orientation, but about, well, her thing. Her monster thing. Which she’d never been able to really expin to anybody before, no matter how often she’d tried.
Ayden was nodding. And he said, “You’ve obviously been thinking about this a lot and doing your research. So, I’m just going to say a couple of things you need to hear hear, from a friend, Greg.”
“Yeah, go for it,” Greg sighed.
“I see you,” Ayden told him, leaning forward and putting his hand on the table between them. “I hear what you’re saying, and I believe you. You have a human right to be who and what you are, whatever that is, and I will help you fight for it. We both will. You’re important, and we’re family. Got that?”
Greg rubbed a tear from his eye with his thumb and looked down at a cookie that was on the table near his coffee, “Yeah. Thank you.”
“And, you lead us,” Ayden said. “We’ll help you, and be there for you. We’ll answer questions. But don’t let anyone tell you how to do what you need for yourself.” He looked up at the ceiling for a moment, then continued, “Something other trans people told me when I first came out that I think is really important, whether you just change your name or you do more than that, is that you’ve gotta do things at your pace, for yourself, for your survival. And coming out to yourself and people you trust is all about your survival. You’re already doing right by yourself. But there’s no timeline. There’s no right way to do it. You can take all the time you need. But once you know you need something, or are just ready to try it, reach the hell for it. Don’t hesitate, it’s yours to have.”
“Even if they won’t let me have it?” Greg asked, obviously aware and embarrassed about how he sounded like a child asking the question, but pushing it out anyway.
“Yes. Even then,” Ayden replied.
theInmara
