Going home part 3
S-Class was one of those classifications people liked to use casually until an actual S-Class existed nearby. The Danger Rank system was mostly an estimate of what a hybrid body could do if things went badly. F-Rank meant you were considered almost harmless. C-Rank meant an ordinary person should run instead of trying to be brave. B-Rank was where bodies became reliable weapons in their own right, which was why Kira and Mom belonged there. A-Rank meant containment procedures, specialist teams and the sort of weapons police departments did not normally keep in patrol cars.
S-Class meant the procedure might fail anyway.
There had been a handful of confirmed cases in the United States during my lifetime, and even fewer that remained famous afterward. A regenerative amphibious hybrid in Louisiana had survived enough gunfire to turn a failed arrest into a three-day evacuation before military units killed it. Somewhere in the Midwest, an engineered burrowing organism had collapsed several kilometers of highway and swallowed enough infrastructure that an entire town had to be abandoned while they hunted it underground. One incident in the Rockies involved a hybrid whose defensive biological discharge kept igniting vegetation around itself faster than responders could approach.
Different creatures. Different circumstances. None of them were comic-book villains trying to destroy civilization. That wasn't what S-Class meant. It meant that if the situation became hostile, normal answers stopped being enough.
The Matriarch had already survived Arcadia's answers for twenty-eight years. And unlike most S-Class cases, she reproduced. That was the part I kept returning to while I drove.
Hours of walking through the Hill Country became considerably less impressive once I had an engine. I had traveled far enough from home that the drive still wasn't short, especially on rural roads at night, but distance compressed differently from behind a steering wheel. Places I'd crossed exhausted and limping earlier passed my headlights in minutes.
Kira gradually returned to something resembling consciousness behind me. Not quickly.
Kira: "...water."
I reached for the bottle in the cup holder, remembered she was several meters behind me, and put it back.
Leona: "You would immediately pour it into your nose."
Kira: "Mouth works."
Leona: "Your entire body barely works."
Kira: "Mouth... strongest organ."
I looked at her through the mirror.
Leona: "That is unfortunately believable."
Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.
She attempted to raise herself on one elbow. This time she actually succeeded. Progress. Her hair looked terrible, one pointed ear was folded awkwardly against the side of her head, and her eyes still had the unfocused quality of someone whose brain was receiving information by mail.
Kira: "How long?"
Leona: "Not long enough for you to be useful."
Kira: "Mean."
Leona: "You called my breasts medium ten minutes after waking from chemical unconsciousness."
Kira thought about that.
Kira: "...accurate."
Leona: "Go back to sleep."
She smiled weakly and let her head drop onto her coils again. The farther east we drove, the more emergency traffic appeared. Patrol vehicles passed us westbound. Then ambulances. Then a military convoy carrying sealed equipment I didn't recognize. Nobody stopped the stolen GHCA truck. The markings on its doors apparently functioned as camouflage better than anything I could have designed on short notice.
Radio traffic deteriorated steadily. The swarm had spread beyond the Arcadia grounds. Nobody had confirmed the Matriarch herself on the surface yet. I decided that qualified as the night's smallest piece of good news.
By the time familiar fences appeared beyond the headlights, the sky had begun to lighten faintly behind the horizon. Home. Seeing it should have been comforting. Instead I immediately started calculating how much we could fit into vehicles.
Truck. Mom's car. Farm supplies. Food. Water. Tools. Fuel. Whatever documents mattered. Forget furniture. Forget anything replaceable.
I turned onto the property and drove much faster down the familiar road than Mom would have approved of. Gravel sprayed beneath the tires. Porch lights were already on, along with several lights inside the house. Of course they were. Mom hadn't been sleeping.
I parked close to the porch and killed the engine. For a moment I just sat there. The house looked exactly the way I'd left it. That seemed offensive somehow.
I had left as a one-meter Domestic rabbit with six homemade drones and a bent walking staff. I had come back driving a stolen government truck with an unconscious lamia in the rear, three drones effectively gone, a laptop containing an illegal transformation serum, four retractable spider limbs hidden inside my back and an S-Class biological catastrophe expanding behind me. It had been a long night.
I opened the door.
Leona: "Mom!"
The front door opened almost immediately. Mom came through it so quickly that her green coils struck the frame.
Elara: "Leona?!"
She had been crying. I saw that before anything else. Her eyes were red, her hair poorly tied back, and she still wore the same clothes she'd apparently thrown on when she realized I was gone. She slithered across the porch and down toward the truck, looking past me immediately.
Searching lower. Searching for white ears. A small body. A rabbit.
Elara: "Leona? Where is she? Are you with the Authority? Is she hurt?"
I stopped. Of course. She didn't recognize me either.
Leona: "Mom."
Elara barely reacted. Her eyes went toward the truck.
Elara: "Kira!"
She saw the orange coils through the rear window and surged forward.
Elara: "Oh God, Kira!"
Leona: "She's okay. Mostly. They tranquilized her."
Elara stopped. Slowly. Her head turned toward me. I watched recognition try to happen and fail. Blonde hair. Blue eyes. Human ears. Adult human body. No rabbit anywhere. Her gaze traveled across my face again.
Elara: "...how do you know that?"
That hurt slightly more than I expected. I stepped closer.
Leona: "Because she tried to fight half the retrieval team to get to me."
Elara stared. Something changed in her expression. Not recognition yet. Memory. My voice. The way I stood. Maybe the way I was holding Dad's bent staff. Her eyes dropped to it. Then came back to my face.
Elara: "No."
I smiled a little.
Leona: "Hi, Mom."
She went completely still. Her mouth opened. Nothing came out. Her eyes moved instinctively toward the top of my head where two white rabbit ears should have been. Then down toward my legs. Back to my face.
Elara: "...Leona?"
Leona: "Yeah."
Elara looked at me as if I'd just walked out of a photograph taken a month earlier. For once, my mother had absolutely no idea what to say.