Wait. Slow down. Running away from this in a stolen automobile is, like, the worst possible response to this. Stop acting like a total psycho.

  When had I started framing everything through the lens of 'damn, I really did just go and kill that guy?' Well, probably when I went and killed that guy, I thought. But no one else knows what happened. There were no witnesses. Stop assessing things like a toddler who doesn't have a theory of mind. The more that I thought about it, the less it looked like a murder. No one knew I was an Anathema in hiding—that was the entire reason I panicked and hit the guy—which meant there was no motive.

  It looked like someone had been driving a bit recklessly and crashed through the barrier, followed by someone else stopping to see what happened before taking an unfortunate tumble. Which is essentially what happened. The only thing missing was the part where I freaked out and hit him. That was a pretty important part, sure, but it also didn't make any sense without the very specific context of the bigger secret I was now hiding.

  The context of my Anathemaness was necessary for a murderous intent to be on the table. At worst, it would be a case of us being all confrontational, maybe we were yelling at each other and that got him distracted, maybe I did slap him—either way, it was either an accident or some kind of, what, manslaughter? I wasn't a lawyer. How would assault turned deadly usually get categorized? Second degree murder? I wasn't sure. It wasn't even like I was joking him out or anything like that. I just gave him a little punch and, well, maybe he was standing a bit too close to the edge to begin with.

  That was a far cry from cold-blooded murder, and it still didn't even make much sense. Less than a minute after miraculously surviving crashing a car over a literal cliff into the ocean, the driver scurries back up the sheer, vertical drop, just to grab the other guy and throw him over as well? It was completely ridiculous. By all rights, I should be down there as well right now. Which means he stopped, went over to look, then slipped and fell. Simple.

  Yes, I'd hit him, but it wasn't like I tore his face off or made his head explode. Whatever injury I gave him could probably just be attributed to the fall. He did land down on the sand face-first. One tragic accident following another. But you know what would make it look like I was some kind of person-murdering psycho on the run? Stealing his phone and car and running off to—where, even? Where would I even go?

  It was a truly horrendous idea. The best way forward was to drop back down, get his phone, and make my own emergency call. This wasn't going to be fun—I'd gotten myself into a major hassle for no good reason, but there were better and worse ways out of it. Gotta do what you gotta do. After looking in both directions just to make sure there was still no one else around, I materialized my claws again.

  It would be easier to take a running jump into the water, but... I wanted to test something for the future. Instead of a running leap, I dropped straight down over the edge, twisting in midair and clawing at the cliff face with one hand. The idea was to slide down walls using my claws like some kind of—hell, I don't know. Ever seen a swashbuckler stab his knife through a mainsail? It didn't end up working too great—I attributed that to the bumpiness of the natural rock. I mostly ended up just banging my hand against it and slamming down on the sand anyway.

  Ugh. So much for that. It might have been a failure, but I wasn't convinced it couldn't work. I bet it would work a lot better on a flatter surface—like a building. A bunch of random rocks and dirt had landed on top of me—collateral debris from my hand banging against random shit. It kind of contributed to the miniature rock-slide falling over the edge story, so that was good. Something less good was the way I found myself covered in sand. I hated sand. Loathed it, even.

  I stopped ranting about it to people after they started mocking me with the same stupid pop culture reference, though. Also, it did make me look messier. That was good, because I didn't want to draw too much attention to how I'd survived a crash like that. There was nothing I could do to sustain any minor injuries, not with my stupid Anathema regeneration, but being dirty, wet, and covered in sand would hopefully make it look less ridiculous.

  I had injured myself with my ill-attempted wall sliding maneuver, but it was almost finished healing. It wasn't nearly as bad as what I'd done to myself like an hour earlier. Even that had only taken a minute or maybe a bit more to fix itself. Right. Now it's the part where I look for Bungee Guy's phone.

  Bungee Guy—yeah, that was what I was going to call him. The main thing I knew him for was causing me problems by falling off the edge of a cliff. I could have also called him 'Cliff Guy' or 'Mister Samaritan'—the first one wasn't as memorable as Bungee Guy, though, and the second was more than he deserved. In my most humble opinion.

  Upon retrieving the phone, I saw that it had turned off. The screen went off, I mean—it was locked, that was the word. That was okay, though, because it should still have a way to make emergency calls. Sure enough, it wasn't hard to find the emergency services call feature. Sadly, the connection looked super weak. That was typical for these in-between stretches of coast. Places along the west coast tended to have good internet service, but only in the big cities. Go just twenty minutes out in any direction and the signal becomes utter, complete, total, and all-encompassing dogshit.

  It even tended to be pretty crap in the smaller vacation and tourist towns. A real shame, but thankfully not so bad that I couldn't dial the funny three digit numbers.

  God, what do I even say? I'd only called an emergency once before this, and that was for an incursion years and years ago. I had the same problem then that I did now—I struggled to figure out an appropriate way to act. In both cases, I was supposed to be experiencing some kind of traumatic, my-life-is-in-danger stressed out shit. I ended up just rambling the first time, going for a mostly coherent but kind of rattled tone. I figured I might as well try the same thing here.

  I'd learned not to lean too far away from my actual response to things. There was a reason I had to figure out how I was 'supposed' to behave in situations like this—failure to do so really would start to freak people out. I couldn't come across as mostly unbothered and uncaring. That being said, putting on a super elaborate, dramatic, ultra-emotional act wasn't needed. It was fine to get by with an emotionally numbed, 'retreat back into her shell' kind of stress response. It was honestly just more convincing while taking less effort.

  Honestly, I kind of zoned out by the time the call ended. I definitely couldn't have repeated back to someone whatever it was I said. That was part of the point, though—it helped with the quiet shock, distant gaze vibe I was going for.

  It ended up taking about ten minutes for the first vehicles to start arriving. I knew that because I kept track of the time on the lock screen of Bungee Guy's phone. In that time, I found a decent rock to sit on. I ended up staring out at the ocean. My actual instinct was to walk around looking at shit—take the unexpected chance to peer at another dead body, see if there were any cool caves, or go check out the damage to my car, now that it didn't seem liable to randomly explode. That wasn't what I should be doing, though, so I sat on the rock.

  Also, I didn't want Bungee Guy to make me any hungrier than I needed to be. The hunger was a constant—it never went away, and I didn't know if it might continue to get worse. I'd mostly been ignoring it—well, that was a bit of a lie. I'd been ignoring it in the sense of focusing on other things and not dwelling on it. It was impossible to ignore entirely, though, as it was my new, constant companion that didn't seem like it would ever go away.

  Which was also a lie. Just eat a little bit more and it won't hurt you anymore, I wanted to tell myself. Just a little bit more. You're so hungry. That means you need to eat, right? It would be good for you. You'd feel better if you stopped fighting the hunger, if you let yourself do what was natural, if you just gave in and let yourself

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  eat.

  No. You're lying. It didn't matter how much I consumed. It would never go away. The hunger wouldn't even leave me when I was neck deep in other Anathema. It was like fire. It would burn and burn and burn until there was nothing left—or until it was snuffed out. I can't let that happen. It didn't matter how strong I was or how strong I might be able to get. The moment I stopped caring and let my appetite run free indefinitely would be the moment I set a timer for my demise. Think how much more you can eat if you do things the slow, cautious, intelligent way.

  The answer, I knew, was way fucking more. So much. So much more, forever and ever and ever until the end of time! Using that higher understanding to turn my hunger against its primitive, unthinking greed was what kept me sane. And what will continue to keep me alive.

  David arrived about an hour after the emergency response crews. The cliff had been an obstacle the whole time, but I was now back at the top, sitting in some kind of folding chair. It was what I imagined you'd get if you asked medical equipment people to build a camping chair. Fucking weird, but actually not uncomfortable. It was kind of funny, watching several different people trying to wrangle their tactical rope ladder. It took them like ten times longer than it would have taken me to just scale the thing again.

  To be fair, they also needed to get people and equipment down to check on Bungee Guy. He was definitely dead, I could have told them that, but they had to go check anyway. They also had to work on getting him back up the cliff. It was kind of silly, I thought, since they could have just chucked him into the ocean and let the nutrients cycle. It certainly would have been better for the coastal ecosystem than all the dissolved CO2 and bits of plastic.

  They were never going to do that, though, because people were weird about other, dead people. Even before the whole hatching thing, I'd never truly understood the human affinity for burial practices. Grinding up burnt bones to stick in a jar, sticking them in special boxes that ended up stored underground all together in the same area, or wrapping them up in crusty tatters to stick in a stone case—it all seemed pointless. A complete waste of time, resources, and whatnot. Like, the compost heap is right there, people.

  I wasn't even being a hypocrite. I'd never given a single shit about what might happen to my body after I was done using it. Besides. Returning the molecular resources you borrowed from the rest of the biosphere sounds plenty spiritual to me.

  That being said, it wasn't like I was bitter that I didn't get to eat it.

  Regardless, EMTs or whatever they were weren't the only ones to arrive at the scene. There were also police and some kind of news van. Thankfully, I managed to get the EMT folks as a shield. Not from the police, of course, but at this point I was less worried about them than the reporter assholes. Ironically, the boys in blue proved handy there as well, and they never got a chance to talk, or, as far as I could tell, even film me.

  As for the fuzz—well, it felt like things went alright. It didn't feel like I was the suspect of a crime, at least, although I wasn't going to assume that meant I'd gotten away with it. They asked me a bunch of questions, of course, and I didn't bother doing any kind of 'I plead the 5th' nonsense. In fact, I bluntly admitted that I had been driving rather recklessly, that I was both speeding and distracted. It would be a bit hard to explain how the car ended up where it had otherwise.

  Also, the best lies tended to be largely truthful. Keeping it both simple and as honest as possible was the most effective way to get away with the one nugget of falsehood you couldn't compromise on. It worked especially well when you could add in something that was embarrassing, shameful, or just reflected poorly on you in general. The principle behind it was that it made you seem inherently more honest—the kind of person who owned up to their mistakes—made your whole story feel truthful—why would they lie about that—and cast a sort of implicit doubt on the idea that you might be hiding anything else unsavory. You did already confess, after all.

  Yes, I'd still gotten myself in a completely unnecessary mess, in the end, but some kind of eventual traffic citations and a spike in insurance payments was nothing compared to the trouble that would come from being a literal Anathema who just killed a man to keep her true nature a secret. Unfortunately, now I had to deal with David.

  I couldn't help but brace myself. I didn't expect him to get physical or anything like that—he never did, and there were literally EMTs and police officers nearby. Not to mention the assholes with cameras. I don't think he wanted any more negative publicity than he already got in quarterly shareholder meetings and from radical leftist opinion pieces.

  To be fair, it is kind of funny that 'hey, we get that there are Anathema, but you're also literally profiting off arming oppressive foreign regimes and helping our own government maintain modern imperialism' is some kind of radical, extremist position. Sucks for them, though. Maybe they should have tried their own hand at war profiteering if they wanted to have any real political or cultural power.

  But, to my surprise, David just ran over and hugged me. Momentarily surprised, I tried to reevaluate the situation and figure out what was going on. It was not at all the reaction I expected.

  "God, I'm so glad you're safe." I just kind of sat there and got squeezed. He pulled away quickly, though. "Sorry, I know you don't like physical contact." That was true, but I'd been too surprised to really focus on it. I probably would have been more aware of my dislike of people touching me, had my sudden Anathema puberty or whatever not made a crushing hug feel like, well, not much force at all.

  "I've just been so worried about you—I was going to let you rest, after Daniel brought you home last evening, but then you just disappeared, and I had no idea where you were..."

  Sensing an opportunity, I silently reached over to his coat sleeve and tugged the man back over. I also scooted over in the chair, trapping us into a somewhat awkward, but not uncomfortable, half-hug. The fact that I resented human touch so much contextualized this moment into a super duper special, adoptive uncle father slash child emotional moment. The chair thing was actually pretty high—my feet were on a sort of step stool thing attached at the legs—which meant he was able to rest his chin on my head. "That Katherine girl said you told her you were headed to the hospital up there?"

  Oh, wait, what? How does he know Katherine? I assumed Dad told him, and they'd somehow gotten in touch? I guess he's also assuming I'm going to be seeing more of her, so he snagged her number. Damn. Say what you would about David Huntingfield—the man was good about keeping on top of all kinds of mundane, contact information, scheduling, planning, and other lame organization type stuff. Sure, you might think the director of any decently large company should be good at that stuff, at a minimum. I knew from real, personal experience that it was not the case, however.

  Competence tended to correlate only weakly with position at the upper levels of the corporate world. David just happened to be one of the ones who was actually somewhat good at various important things. Personal organization was a fairly minor skill on that list, but it was one nonetheless.

  I also started to realize what was going on. From his perspective, I'd been drugged and kidnapped by literal Anathema cultists, survived through a whole incursion outside of any bunker, awakened as a Guardian, saw people eaten and maimed, and now I was having some kind of stress reaction and rushing off to go visit the other people who I'd struggled through it all with at a hospital.

  Then, because I wasn't in a good state of mind, I ended up going a little too fast. I was distracted, and it almost got me killed. Instead, by some miracle, I got out of it unhurt—only to then witness a man slip and fall to his death right in front of me. Holy shit.

  I'd been completely wrong in the way I'd approached predicting the outcome of this. I wasn't in trouble at all. No, I was the poor, innocent, traumatized baby girl—and I don't think I could have cooked up something better if I'd consciously tried. It does have a tendency to work out that way, huh?

  It was a recurring theme by this point. I'd fuck something up, start trying to do damage control on the assumption that I was in big time trouble, but then I'd somehow come out of it as the poor, mistreated victim. It didn't always work—now that I really thought about it, all the times I could remember something similar were times where I fucked up, started doing damage control, almost reacted in a way that would have been catastrophically worse, but then chilled out a bit.

  Hmm. Food for thought. I was so glad I didn't do something majorly stupid, now, like fleeing the scene in Bungee Guy's car.

  What now, though? I smelled an opportunity, and now that David was here, I didn't intend to waste it.

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