The Things We Leave Buried
Lamias were Civil Class.
That distinction mattered.
Mom and Kira were stronger than I had ever been even before the truck rearranged my anatomy. A healthy adult lamia could crush bone with her tail, move surprisingly fast over open ground, tolerate injuries that would put an ordinary human in a hospital and, depending on the particular bloodline, grow large enough that architects learned to take corridor width personally.
None of that made them Domestic.
The Global Hybrid Classification Authority liked reminding everyone that Civic Class and Danger Rank were separate systems. A lamia farmer could be Civil Class and B-Rank, meaning she possessed reliable lethal physical ability but still enjoyed ordinary citizenship. She could own land, vote, work, travel, raise children, inherit property and generally participate in society without someone filing agricultural health reports about her.
Mom was exactly that.
Civil Class.
B-Rank.
Farmer.
Mother.
Excellent baker.
Potentially capable of crushing a grown man's ribs without much effort.
Still a citizen.
I, meanwhile, was Domestic Class and F-Rank.
A nearly harmless dwarf rabbit with an engineering degree.
Apparently civilization found Mom less concerning.
The history behind lamias was messy, because everything involving hybrids eventually became messy if you looked far enough backward. Some snake-human bloodlines were old enough that nobody could say with confidence where the first stable lineage originated. Others came from medical conversions, military programs or laboratories that had been quietly absorbed into legitimate medicine once governments realized pretending they didn't exist had become impossible.
Mom and Kira had never chosen theirs.
They got their tails ten years before my accident.
I was eleven.
Kira was ten.
And I wasn't there.
I had been sick.
Nothing dramatic. Flu, probably. Fever, miserable throat, aching joints and the conviction possessed by every eleven-year-old that nobody in recorded history had ever suffered as terribly as I had.
The day was beautiful.
I remember that because I hated it.
Clear blue sky, warm sunlight, barely any wind. The kind of Texas day designed specifically to make being trapped indoors insulting.
Mom, Dad and Kira were supposed to be gone for a few hours. There was some appointment in the city, groceries afterward, then they'd come home before dinner. I had been left with soup, medicine, several stern instructions not to go into Dad's workshop while feverish and a promise that Kira would bring me something sweet.
Kira had shouted from the front door:
Kira: "If you die while we're gone, I get your stuff!"
She was ten.
That was already Kira.
Leona: "If I die, I'm haunting you first."
Kira: "You'd have to catch me!"
John: "Girls."
Kira: "She started it!"
I hadn't.
I almost never did.
That statement remained one of Kira's favorite lies for the next several decades.
Dad came into the living room before leaving and put the back of his hand against my forehead.
John: "Still warm."
Leona: "I'm dying."
John: "Tragic."
Leona: "Nobody respects my suffering."
John: "Drink the water."
Leona: "Cruel."
He smiled and messed up my hair.
I remember that.
His hand in my hair.
The smell of coffee and machine oil on his sleeve.
Ordinary things become sacred when you're no longer allowed to have them.
John: "We'll be back this afternoon."
Leona: "Bring popsicles."
John: "Already on the list."
Leona: "Good father."
John: "High praise."
Mom called him from outside.
Kira yelled something about being bored.
Dad gave me one last look.
John: "Lock the door."
Leona: "I know."
John: "And don't touch the soldering station."
Leona: "I know."
John: "And don't..."
Leona: "Dad."
He laughed.
John: "Right. Love you."
Leona: "Love you."
Then he left.
For years afterward, I hated myself for how casually I said it.
Eventually I stopped doing that.
You can't live if every ordinary goodbye becomes evidence in a trial against yourself.
But it took time.
I spent that morning sleeping on the couch.
Around noon, I ate soup.
At one, I watched television.
At two, I checked my phone.
No messages.
At three, I called Mom.
No answer.
At three-ten, I called Dad.
No answer.
At three-fifteen, I called Kira.
Nothing.
I wasn't worried yet.
Not really.
Adults were late.
Phones died.
Kira ignored calls simply because she enjoyed knowing someone wanted to reach her.
At four, I stood on the porch.
Sunny.
Warm.
Empty road.
At four-thirty, I went back inside.
At five, I stood on the porch again.
At five-thirty, I called all three of them.
At six, the sun had started lowering and something cold had settled beneath my fever.
I remember sitting on the front steps with a blanket around my shoulders because I was shivering. I watched every car that appeared in the distance.
Wrong truck.
Wrong sedan.
Wrong pickup.
Wrong.
Wrong.
Wrong.
When you're eleven, adults are supposed to return.
That's one of the basic rules of the universe.
They say they'll be home before dinner, and then they're home before dinner. Maybe late. Maybe irritated. Maybe carrying the wrong kind of popsicles.
But home.
The rule had never failed me before.
At seven-twenty, a government vehicle turned onto our road.
Not an ambulance.
Not police.
A dark GHCA response SUV.
I didn't know why that frightened me.
I knew what the Authority was, obviously. Everyone did. But Authority vehicles belonged on television, at registration centers, around major incidents.
Not our driveway.
I stood.
The blanket slid from my shoulders.
Two people got out.
A woman in a gray field uniform and a man wearing hospital scrubs beneath an open coat.
Neither of them was Mom.
Neither was Dad.
Neither was Kira.
I remember thinking:
They forgot them.
Children invent stupid explanations because the real one is too large.
Maybe Mom and Dad were at the hospital.
Maybe Kira had gotten hurt.
Maybe these people were here to drive me there.
The woman approached slowly.
Authority Officer: "Leona Voss?"
I nodded.
Authority Officer: "Is there another adult at home?"
That was the moment I knew.
Not what had happened.
Just that something had.
Leona: "Where's my family?"
The officer glanced at the man beside her.
I hated that glance.
I still hate that kind of glance.
Authority Officer: "There's been an accident."
Everything after that became strangely clear.
The fever disappeared from my awareness.
The sunset looked too bright.
The gravel beneath my bare feet hurt.
Leona: "Where?"
Authority Officer: "Outside Killeen."
Leona: "Where's my mom?"
Authority Officer: "She's alive."
I breathed.
Leona: "Dad?"
The woman didn't answer immediately.
I understood before she spoke.
Authority Officer: "I'm sorry."
No.
There should have been more to it than that.
There should have been thunder.
Something should have broken.
The sky should at least have had the decency to become cloudy.
Instead, birds were making noise in the oak trees.
Leona: "Kira?"
Hospital Worker: "Alive. Both your mother and sister were critically injured. They're undergoing emergency reconstruction."
I knew the phrase.
Everybody did.
Leona: "Hybrid?"
Hospital Worker: "Yes."
Leona: "What kind?"
He crouched slightly so we were closer to eye level.
Hospital Worker: "Serpentine. Lamia-compatible tissue gave both of them the best survival profile."
I thought about Kira.
Ten years old.
Tiny.
Loud.
Annoying.
Human legs kicking beneath the breakfast table that morning.
Leona: "Will they get their legs back?"
He didn't answer correctly.
Doctors become very skilled at doing that.
Hospital Worker: "The reconstruction is expected to save them."
I understood anyway.
I looked back at the road.
For some reason I still expected Dad's car to appear.
It never did.
Mom came home weeks later with a green-scaled tail and without a husband.
Kira came home orange.
She hated everyone.
That is the simplest description.
She hated doctors. The Authority. People who stared. Clothes she couldn't wear. Furniture that no longer fit her. Stairs. Doorways. Mirrors. People who told her the tail was pretty.
Especially people who told her the tail was pretty.
She was ten years old and had gone into a car with legs beside her father and come back without either.
Cruelty became useful armor.
Kira discovered early that if someone stared at her, she could make them uncomfortable enough to look away. If someone mocked her tail, she could find something worse about them. If someone treated her like a tragedy, she could bite.
Sometimes literally.
Mom adapted differently.
She buried things.
Dad was dead because the Authority said Dad was dead.
Kira was alive because the doctors had saved her.
Mom was alive too.
Therefore we were fortunate.
Therefore we should be grateful.
Therefore dwelling on the pieces that hurt was unproductive.
That was how Mom survived.
Kira attacked pain.
Mom domesticated it.
I learned.
I learned because Dad's workshop was still there.
Because machines made sense.
Because circuits did not tell me to be grateful.
Because a motor didn't care whether my family was normal. A piece of code didn't know what grief was. A broken irrigation controller didn't lie to protect my feelings.
It either worked or it didn't.
And if it didn't, I could find out why.
By thirteen, I had consumed everything Dad left behind.
Books.
Manuals.
Old university material.
Schematics.
His notes.
Then I ran out.
The legal internet became insufficient shortly afterward.
I should probably say here that I was not a responsible teenager.
There are sanitized versions of my childhood in which I supposedly learned advanced engineering through diligent study, public technical archives and wholesome intellectual curiosity.
Those versions are very flattering.
They are also lies.
I hacked things.
Government systems.
Corporate servers.
University networks.
Defense contractors when I was feeling particularly stupid.
I wasn't interested in money. I wasn't stealing identities. I didn't care about classified diplomatic messages.
I wanted textbooks.
Internal engineering documentation.
Prototype reports.
Manufacturing tolerances.
Drone-control research.
Abandoned patents.
Materials studies.
Robotics papers buried behind institutional access walls.
If a company spent twenty million dollars teaching a machine how to walk over unstable terrain and then locked the report behind a server because it might someday become commercially useful, teenage me considered that a personal invitation.
I taught myself programming properly.
Then electronics.
Then mechanical engineering beyond what school offered.
Then autonomous systems.
Machine vision.
Navigation.
Fabrication.
Materials.
Anything that let a machine perceive a problem and solve part of it without waiting for a human hand.
That was how the spiders started.
I liked spiders.
Almost as much as storms.
Again, people found symbolism in that later.
They were wrong about that too.
Spiders were simply excellent machines.
Eight legs gave redundancy. Low profiles improved stability. They could crawl through spaces wheels couldn't enter, climb surfaces that defeated tracks, distribute their weight, recover from losing limbs and carry tools beneath the body while keeping the top available for sensors.
Beautiful engineering.
Biological engineering, admittedly, but I wasn't picky.
My first spider drone could barely cross Dad's workbench without falling over.
The second made it to the floor.
The third climbed back onto the bench.
By sixteen, I had six designs I actually liked.
Reconnaissance first. Always reconnaissance.
Small machines with cameras, thermal sensors, environmental probes and enough onboard decision-making to avoid obstacles without me holding their hands.
Kira called them creepy.
Then started stealing them.
I eventually built a hidden compartment beneath my bedroom floor because she had discovered that a spider drone inside Mom's pantry could apparently entertain her for hours.
The world outside the farm gave me plenty of reasons to keep improving them.
America still existed.
That sentence required qualification by then.
The eastern and central regions were relatively stable. The federal government functioned. States functioned, mostly. Roads were maintained around population centers. The military still had reach.
But the farther west you went, the more maps became suggestions.
Beyond the Rockies, enormous regions had spent decades slipping between federal control, local governments, gangs, feral populations, hybrid enclaves, mercenary territories and communities that had simply decided Washington was too far away to matter.
Mexico and Canada had ceased existing as unified nations in the 1950s or so.
Other countries had fractured.
Some recovered.
Some didn't.
The modern world wasn't post-apocalyptic.
That phrase always annoyed me.
An apocalypse implies something ends.
Nothing had ended.
It had just become uneven.
One city had commuter rail and biometric grocery delivery.
Two hundred kilometers away, another community might maintain concrete walls because something descended from a military hybrid experiment hunted at night.
That difference existed because human beings had spent more than a century building laboratories.
Thousands of them.
Maybe more.
Governments built them.
Corporations built them.
Armies built them.
Universities built them.
Criminal organizations built them.
Private societies built them.
They went beneath hospitals, mountains, military bases, mines, factories, forests, deserts and cities. Some researched regenerative medicine. Some military enhancement. Some environmental adaptation.
Some did things nobody should have funded.
Then projects ended.
Funding disappeared.
Companies collapsed.
Governments changed.
Wars happened.
And proper decommissioning was expensive.
Removing experimental organisms was expensive.
Destroying biological archives was expensive.
Decontaminating underground levels was very expensive.
Filling three hundred meters of reinforced subterranean laboratory with concrete was obscenely expensive.
Locking the door?
Cheap.
So humanity became extremely good at locking doors.
Steel.
Concrete.
Warning signs.
Classified coordinates.
Maybe armed guards for a few years.
Then budgets moved elsewhere.
People retired.
Databases failed.
New administrations inherited old secrets nobody wanted responsibility for.
And the laboratories remained.
Quiet.
Waiting.
Most contained nothing useful.
Some contained nothing alive.
Some contained things that should have died decades before.
Every few years, someone found another one.
Sometimes scavengers.
Sometimes construction crews.
Sometimes feral communities had been living above one for generations without knowing it.
Sometimes a seal failed.
Those incidents were why western travel maps had so many places marked with phrases such as BIOLOGICAL HAZARD, RESTRICTED, UNVERIFIED, or my personal favorite:
STATUS UNKNOWN.
I'd always found them fascinating.
From a safe distance.
That night, sitting in my bedroom in Lampasas County, I began reconsidering the importance of that last part.
An hour passed.
Maybe more.
I spent most of it staring at an old photograph.
Dad had taken it with one of those cheap instant cameras he liked because he distrusted photographs that existed only digitally.
All four of us stood beside the south fence.
I was eleven.
Kira was ten.
It had been taken perhaps two months before the accident.
Dad had one hand on my shoulder.
Mom was laughing at something outside the frame.
Kira was making rabbit ears behind my head with two fingers.
The irony annoyed me.
Human Kira had skinny legs, scraped knees and too much hair.
Human Mom wore shorts.
Dad was there.
I looked happy.
I set the photograph down.
Then looked at the mirror.
White ears rose from my head.
Dwarf rabbit.
My face was still mine, mostly. Smaller. Softer around the edges than I liked. The surgeons had preserved what they could, but proportions changed when the skeleton beneath them changed.
My body looked ridiculous inside my old clothes.
The collar looked worse.
Gray polymer.
Registration plate.
I touched it.
Leona: "Asset."
The word tasted bad.
I'd found the documentation during the hospital stay.
Of course I had.
You do not give an engineer access to Wi-Fi and then expect her not to read every law affecting her future.
Domestic hybrids living on private agricultural property could be registered as household biological assets.
Not slaves.
The law was very insistent about that.
Not property in the old legal sense.
A regulated dependent biological asset.
Which was apparently completely different.
The language had been polished by committees until nobody responsible had to feel disgusting while reading it.
I stared at myself.
Leona: "Fuck that."
Downstairs, voices carried faintly through the floor.
My hearing had become annoyingly good.
I could distinguish Mom.
Elara: "...shouldn't have said it like that."
Then Kira.
Kira: "You told her the truth."
Elara: "She's frightened."
Kira: "She was already frightened."
A pause.
Elara: "You made it worse."
Kira: "She'll get over it."
I stopped moving.
Mom answered more quietly.
Elara: "What if she doesn't?"
For once, Kira had no immediate response.
I walked to the window.
The farm stretched into darkness.
Our farm.
Dad's workshop.
The barn.
Fields.
Fences.
Places I'd repaired.
Places I'd played.
Places where Kira had chased me when she still had legs.
This was home.
I loved it.
That was what made the decision hurt.
Because loving somewhere does not mean it is safe for you.
Sometimes that distinction takes people years to learn.
It took me one dinner.
I looked west.
Lampasas County sat near the edge of the Hill Country, where the land began changing character before the enormous distances farther west. Beyond us were ranches, small towns, old highways, military land, abandoned properties and, eventually, regions where federal control became thinner.
West meant danger.
West also meant space.
And old laboratories.
The thought arrived quietly.
A lab had done this kind of thing before.
Not this specifically.
But hybridization.
Conversion.
Reconstruction.
Every modern serum came from older work.
Somewhere, somebody had studied ways to override one hybrid line with another.
Maybe illegally.
Maybe unsuccessfully.
Maybe the research had been abandoned fifty years ago beneath a mountain.
But abandoned did not mean gone.
I touched one ear.
It folded beneath my fingers.
I hated the softness.
If there was a laboratory somewhere capable of changing me again...
I didn't care how far.
I didn't care how long it took to find.
A year.
Five years.
Ten.
I'd rather spend ten years looking for a way to become myself again than spend fifty being weighed once a month because somebody in an office considered me agricultural biology.
The fear arrived afterward.
West.
Feral territory.
Gangs.
Predator hybrids.
Collapsed towns.
Old experiments.
I looked at my reflection again.
F-Rank. Tiny. Weak enough that getting out of a hospital bed had been difficult.
If I went out there like this, I could die.
Worse, I could be caught.
Domestic escape laws existed too. Of course they did.
I looked at the collar.
The decision became remarkably simple.
Leona: "Then don't go out like this."
Engineer. Problem. Constraints. Solve.
I locked the bedroom door.
Then I moved.
The loose floorboard came up first.
Six spider drones rested beneath it in foam slots.
They were old by my standards but good.
Palm-sized.
Independent navigation.
Low-light cameras.
Thermal sensing.
Short-range mapping.
One by one, I activated them.
Tiny red optics blinked awake.
The familiar sound of servos filled the room.
For the first time since the hospital, something felt right.
Leona: "Hey, guys."
They didn't answer. They weren't intelligent. Not then. I still felt better.
I placed my backpack on the bed. Laptop. Tablet. Encrypted drives. Charging cables. Portable batteries. Solar sheet. Multimeter. Compact soldering iron. Hand tools. Wire. Connectors. Repair compounds. Water purification tablets. Medical kit. Food. Maps. A flashlight. Two changes of clothes.
I stared at the pile.
Too heavy.
Of course.
My new body couldn't carry my old emergency pack.
I weighed everything.
Reduced it.
Swore.
Reduced it again.
The laptop stayed.
Non-negotiable.
One battery instead of three. Smaller tool kit. No full spool of wire.
That physically hurt.
The spiders could carry some weight distributed between them.
Better.
I opened Dad's tool case.
His old metal staff wasn't inside.
That came later.
But there were lengths of scrap metal, old protective equipment and pieces from unfinished projects.
I looked at the mirror again.
Small body. Fragile bones.
Predators. Lamia sister. Feral territory.
The beginnings of another idea formed.
Armor. Not heavy. I couldn't support heavy.
Layered.
Reinforced where necessary.
Something difficult to bite.
Something even more difficult to coil around.
Spikes.
I smiled for the first time that evening.
Not because the idea was funny.
Because it was mine.
Downstairs, Mom called my name.
Elara: "Leona? Sweetie?"
I stopped.
For perhaps ten seconds, I nearly answered.
Nearly unlocked the door.
Nearly went downstairs and accepted the pie Mom had probably saved for me and the apology she was probably trying to construct.
I loved her.
I even loved Kira.
God help me.
But love didn't remove the collar.
Love didn't change the registration.
Love didn't make me Civil.
I looked at the photograph on my desk.
Dad.
Mom.
Kira.
Me.
Then at the open backpack.
The six spiders.
The pieces of metal.
The western maps glowing on my tablet.
Elara: "Leona?"
I spoke quietly enough that she couldn't hear.
Leona: "I'm sorry, Mom."
Then I turned back to the workbench.
I had no idea where I was going.
No laboratory coordinates.
No safe destination.
No guarantee there was anything west of Lampasas County except people and creatures perfectly capable of killing a four-foot rabbit hybrid.
But for the first time since the truck hit me, I had something better than fear.
I had a problem.
And problems could be engineered.
By midnight, my old bedroom no longer looked like somewhere a frightened daughter had gone to hide.
It looked like a workshop preparing an expedition.