As I stepped out onto the very poorly lit floor of Hayward grocery, where the use of infrared cameras at night was leaned upon, to make it clear the store was closed, I thought about what my ret existence had bee.

  In my experience, what you focus on tends to alter your perception of time, unless you have something neurological going on.

  So, for instance, while amongst humans, if I spent my time fog on the broader political strokes and developments of their civilizations to be better aware of what they might have in store for me, time would pass much more quickly than when I focused on interpersonal retionships, which I much preferred to do tely.

  And, here, I’m talking about decades or turies feeling like days, v.s. days feeling like years. Whereas, prior to mixing with humanity, there were tray past where it felt like millennia had passed by like seds.

  Those were the times I had a fairly safe perewhere, with healthy and deeply honed personal habits, and was focused on the march of evolution itself.

  So today had been a very long day for me and it wasn’t even over yet. I wasn’t letting go of it.

  In part, I found myself afraid of what the day might bring.

  I stopped and listeo the store.

  I’d left one of Felicity’s eyes o two sets of doors I’d passed through. There weren’t many pces out here I could do it where it would have much impact before being ed up. Of course, the person ing would bee a potential host, but they’d already have seen the one on the manager’s door.

  So I put a pseudodomain down where I was standing as I sed my surroundings.

  I retty sure we were alone in the building. No security guard.

  Spooky. It wasn’t a 24/7 store, but there was always a shift of workers in it. We usually used closed hours to restock. So, this was an unusual state for the pce.

  I moved to the butchery department, and found that all the meat had been discarded or put away. Good. That was normal.

  In dairy, the fridges and freezers were still w, partially lit.

  The frozen aisles were still in order. The ice cream, peas, and french fries would keep for a bit.

  I left psuedodomains in each of those pces.

  And then I made my way to the produce se, passing by my favorite front ter on the way.

  Before I got to my final destination, I decided to log into my till just to cheething else. Which I tried to do.

  And couldn’t.

  Not without a special versation with the puter again.

  Shit.

  I put a pseudodomain and one of Felicity’s eyes down in my cashier’s stand, the eye right on the keyboard, below the security keyhole. And then I left and quickly made my way back to the manager’s office by way of the produce aisle.

  Which was delightfully, and weirdly infuriatingly, empty.

  Back at the manager’s puter, I scoured the whole system, as I’d done when I’d first weedled my way into this business.

  There were no trae.

  all.

  None of the ges I’d made to the system were left.

  Someone had spent all day expertly hunting down and scrubbing all evidehat I’d ehis building, ever. Well. I’d have to check security footage for that, which I couldn’t do from there. But all numerical and malware evidehat I’d ever been there was gone.

  A job that very, very few humans could do in that short of a period of time.

  I’d left a kind of a string I could pull to do the same job in a matter of seds, to cover my tracks, actually. But it hadn’t been the kind of thing that could be activated with a and or aable file or anything like that.

  You had to be a moo pull it.

  It’s possible a monster had pulled it.

  But, if so, why?

  And who?

  “Felicity, did you do this?” I asked.

  She was still grumpy, “Do what?”

  “Pull my ripcord and erase my evidence of being here,” I indicated the puter system.

  “No.”

  I had no way of knowing if she was lying or not. Well, not a way that I sidered ethical or desirable, anyway.

  I could try to eat her a her memories. But then she’d no longer be there to be my partner in crime and, well, whatever she was now.

  If she could cheer up and bee cooperative and maybe evehusiastic about her position, she could bee quite the force. She had me to proted feed her, when she couldn’t do her own feeding, and she could still wahe world via her eyes and her hosts. And I’d have a possessive teratovore who could do my spying and my dirty work, while I lumbered about and soaked up humanity’s excess energy.

  But I didn’t feel like trying to vince her that that was fair. It would be coercive on my part, sidering I seemed to have all the power in our retionship now.

  It occurred to me that maybe she could try to get at my vitals again by possessing a host and looking into my eyes once more. And I’d have to be careful of that. But I didn’t think that’s the kind of thing she’d go for, really. When we’d met, she was motivated by her hunger, as we all are, and that’s taken care of now. And her seotivation was her own safety. She preferred the ambush to stalking her prey and chasing it down like Sharky, Felix, and Croc-face had been doing. And what better pbush from than the ter of an affectivore.

  “Felicity,” I suggested, “do you think my own eyes would work for jumping to your prey?”

  “Yes,” she admitted, sullen. “But I don’t o do that anymore. I’m already eating you. And you kill anything that bites you.”

  “Mm,” I protested. “Not necessarily anything. There’s always something bigger than you.”

  “Really.”

  “It’s always safe to assume so.”

  “So, what happens when I try to eat something bigger than you and I get stu it as well? Do I let go of you?”

  “Ah. Good question.”

  “Anyway,” she said. “This isn’t helping you figure out what happeo yin.”

  “Just sideriualities,” I told her, frowning at the puter monitor.

  “What are you gonna do ?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  I turhe puter off and pushed myself away from the desk to get up.

  Then I paused to message my friends, “I think I’ve been fired. Keep in touch. Let me know when your shift starts so I know how you’re doing. Something weird is going on. I’ll see you at Shady’s, maybe.”

  “That’s not your usual modus operandi, is it?” Felicity observed.

  “No,” I said. “Usually, I leave town immediately when something like this happens.”

  It ossible a human had scrubbed the mae. Possible, but extremely unlikely. It would take a lot of skill and experience, and an unusual amount of cooperation from the aging puter system. And it also required a human who had been directed to do that instead of preserving the evideil it roperly recorded and catalogued, and handed over to the authorities, which would have taken longer, usually.

  Either way, though, human or monster, whoever had dohis had my number, my literal phone number, aher my pirate at would be , or they’d e after me somehow. Or, well, they’d e after me somehardless.

  And that always meant leaving town.

  Not this time.

  I had walked several blocks before I realized that I was not only not avoiding storm drains, but going out of my way to step over them.

  I already knew where I was headed.

  It wasn’t so te that there weren’t copious cars and the odd pedestrian, but nothing was unfamiliar or out of pe as I walked, and I no longer watched with the hyper alerthat had been my habit of survival.

  I might have been angry.

  “You’re hunting for Croc-face,” Felicity observed.

  “I don’t suppose I interrogate it,” I growled. “Do you think it’s the type that talks?”

  “There are all sorts of ways it could talk,” she reminded me.

  I was hyperfocused on its mouth and what I wao do with it. I was having fshbacks of it eating that poth iheater and chasing Felicity and sg the shit out of Josephine. But I also had some kind of hunch that it was reted to my erasure from Hayward’s puter systems.

  She was right.

  Language isn’t typically the purview of most monsters. But that’s like saying the same thing about lifeforms. Most bacteria don’t talk.

  But most mohat mix things up with talking animals end up learning their nguages after a while. If they exist long enough to do so. Some few monsters are maed with nguage already, because sometimes lifeforms, and especially humanity for some reason, are a force that creates monsters.

  “You haven’t adopted my nguage,” Felicity said. “Even though you like it.”

  I stopped walking and turned my head to the side, looking up in the air.

  “‘Emanant’?” I asked.

  “You’ve been using ‘monster’,” she specified.

  I thought back over our ret versation. When did I say ‘moo her?

  She took the initiative and tipped her cards, “You’ve been thinking it to yourself since you left the store.”

  “You read my thoughts?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  That was unfair and unnerving, because I couldn’t read hers.

  “You o learn to do the same,” she added. “You read mine if you try. We’ll work more closely, with more trust, but still stay separate, if you do.”

  I blinked, “How?”

  “I don’t know, you just fug do it,” she said.

  I grunted and started walking again.

  “You’ve already made a lot ress,” she tinued. “That you’ve figured out how to hear my projected thoughts means that you have the e to go deeper. And you’ve already done shit in front of me I couldn’t dream of doing before. Frankly, I’m terrified of you.”

  We’d reiterated a lot of our first big versation ba the Ran the night before, so she once again knew just how old I was. And so did Greg, if he believed me. I’d also divulged what I’d doo survive that long, again, ging my mode of feeding so that I could survive off of other emanants without actually eating them, duriimes oh.

  But, if she’d been reading my thoughts, she knew more by now.

  “I think I want you to be the oo eat Croc-face,” I said. “Hopefully, I teach you how to absorb memories before you do that, too.”

  “You care.”

  “You know I do,” I snarked back.

  We were now standing before my old wooded lot. The one I’d just abahe night before.

  “Why do you care?” she prodded.

  “Why are you asking?” I spped back.

  I felt her shifting her position withihen she said “Because I want to see if you dredge up more reasons than you’ve already been thinking about. I want to know everything I’m dealing with.”

  “I guess I’ll say them out loud, then,” I replied.

  “Go for it.”

  So, as I walked into the lot, adjusting to pensate for the darkness, I spoke, “I still don’t trust you, but that’s momentarily irrelevant. I have power over you until you find a way that I don’t. So, I feel responsible. I might not have trapped you iionally, just as you probably didn’t attack me on purpose. But the fact remains that I’ve got you trapped. And if I want to maintain the best possible retionship with you, I o make sure your needs are met. And one of your needs is to be whole, to have your memories back. And there’s only one way to do that.”

  It didn’t take long to get to where I used to have my clearing, my st domain. By the time we were doh my speech, we were there.

  “I’m going to put my domain right back here,” I decred. “I’m tired of things being taken away from me.”

  “Is that why I ’t escape you?” Felicity asked.

  “You know damn well it isn’t,” I barked.

  “I do not.”

  “You read my thoughts,” I reminded her.

  “But not your innermost motives,” she said.

  “I demonstrated to you why I couldn’t expel you. You saw what I saw.”

  “I saw what you wao show me,” she retorted. “Or what you thought you saw, which is funally the same thing. Try it again now that I read more of your thoughts.”

  “You really want to escape from me? To be separate again?” I furrowed my brow. I wasn’t incredulous, really, even if my phrasing and tone implied that. I mostly just wao have a firmation of her sent tain. But maybe I really didn’t want to give her up.

  I had to think about that some more.

  She remained silent for a few seds.

  I let her think while I recreated my old domain and tore down the one I’d put up iher greenway. I left up the pseudodomains that were in Hayward grocery, though. They were serving a purpose.

  “Maybe I don’t,” Felicity finally mumbled in my mind.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  She waited a moment and then suggested, “Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer?”

  theInmara