Old Blood
Nobody knew where hybrids actually came from.
That sounds strange now, considering how thoroughly hybrid biology eventually became part of civilization, but in my childhood the origin question was one of those historical arguments that never really ended. Governments had official timelines. Universities had competing theories. Conspiracy forums had several thousand explanations involving aliens, forgotten civilizations, divine punishment and, for reasons I never understood, the British royal family.
The only part almost everyone agreed on was when hybrids began appearing in numbers large enough to become impossible to hide.
The late nineteenth century.
Sometime around the 1870s and 1880s, reports started emerging from military hospitals and private surgical institutes describing patients who had survived injuries they shouldn't have survived. Missing tissue had been replaced. Organs regenerated. Destroyed limbs partially reconstructed. Some survivors developed animal traits afterward: altered eyes, fur, unusual musculature, modified teeth, ears, tails. The terminology changed depending on the country and decade, but the principle remained recognizable.
Human bodies repaired using animal biology.
The first experiments weren't supposed to create new species. They were supposed to save dying people.
At least, that was the respectable version of history.
War accelerated everything.
War always does.
A soldier who had lost most of his face might live if surgeons rebuilt damaged tissue using compatible canine regenerative structures. A man whose legs had been destroyed by artillery might walk again after experimental equine integration. Reptilian tissue showed promise for traumatic wounds. Certain amphibian sequences produced regeneration results so dramatic that armies immediately decided the morally responsible response was classified research.
The first countries to use hybrid reconstruction gained soldiers who returned from injuries that would previously have killed or permanently disabled them.
Their enemies noticed.
Then their enemies developed their own programs.
Then somebody realized that if animal traits could repair a soldier, perhaps they could also improve one.
Better senses.
Greater strength.
Night vision.
Resistance to cold.
Resistance to disease.
Faster healing.
And after that, the rest of the century behaved exactly as you'd expect.
Everyone blamed everyone else for starting it.
France had records suggesting German experiments preceded theirs.
Germany had documents claiming Russian medical societies had already achieved stable integration.
Russian archives pointed toward private laboratories in Central Europe.
British reports mentioned unexplained patients arriving from colonial territories with hybrid characteristics decades before any known official program.
American researchers argued that isolated cases might have existed even earlier.
Then somebody would produce a preserved photograph, an untranslated surgical journal or a skeleton with anatomy that shouldn't have existed, and the entire academic argument would begin again.
Even the oldest documented experiments looked too advanced in places.
That was the mystery.
Someone had apparently figured out pieces of hybridization before anyone could identify who that someone actually was.
Dad loved that mystery.
John Voss could turn practically anything into a lecture if you gave him coffee and made the mistake of asking one question. Mechanics, genetics, agricultural engineering, old military history, electrical theory. He had worked in both biology and mechanical systems before settling into the farm life I remembered, though settling was probably the wrong word for a man whose workshop looked as if a university laboratory had collided with a tractor dealership.
Kira would have called him a nerd.
Actually, Kira probably would have called him a gigantic fucking nerd.
She called me one often enough.
I remembered sitting in Dad's workshop years before his death while rain hit the roof and he repaired a hydraulic controller that didn't strictly need repairing. I must have been eight or nine. I had found some documentary about early hybrids and spent dinner asking questions until Mom sent me to bother Dad instead.
Leona: "So who made the first one?"
Dad hadn't looked up from the circuit board.
John: "Good question."
Leona: "What's the answer?"
John: "If I knew that, I'd have a much more interesting job."
Leona: "You know everything."
That made him laugh.
John: "That is an extremely dangerous belief to have about your father."
I'd swung my feet beneath the workbench.
Leona: "But somebody had to make the first hybrid."
John: "Maybe."
Leona: "What do you mean, maybe?"
He finally looked at me.
There was a particular expression Dad sometimes got when we talked about hybrid biology. I didn't understand it as a child. At the time, I thought it meant he was about to explain something complicated.
Later, I wondered whether it meant something else.
John: "We assume hybridization began because somebody invented it. That's reasonable. But history isn't always kind enough to preserve the first step."
Leona: "So it could be older?"
John: "Could be."
Leona: "How much older?"
He smiled.
John: "That's the question, isn't it?"
Dad knew how to make an eight-year-old feel as though she had just been invited into an international conspiracy.
Leona: "You know."
John: "Know what?"
Leona: "Something."
John: "I know you're supposed to be doing homework."
Leona: "Dad."
John: "And I know your mother will blame me when she discovers you spent two hours asking about nineteenth-century battlefield genetics instead."
Leona: "Dad."
He laughed again.
Then he became more serious.
John: "The oldest official records aren't necessarily the oldest experiments. Remember that."
Leona: "Why?"
He turned the damaged controller over in his hands.
John: "Because governments are very good at recording what they want remembered."
A pause.
John: "They're even better at burying what they don't."
That sentence stayed with me.
At the time, I thought Dad just knew everything because fathers were supposed to.
Years later, when I began finding pieces of his life that had never belonged to the farmer I remembered, I reconsidered that conversation often.
But that was later.
That night, west of the farm, Dad was just a memory traveling with me beneath the moon.
For the first several hours, the escape was almost disappointingly easy.
I'd expected alarms. Vehicles. Kira crashing through the brush like an orange-scaled missile. Authority drones sweeping the roads. Something dramatic enough to justify the armor I'd built.
Instead, Texas gave me hills.
Lampasas County was beautiful at night when nothing was trying to eat you.
The moon hung bright enough to silver the limestone ridges. Cedar and oak covered the slopes in dark masses, broken by open patches of dry grass that moved in the breeze. The recent rain had cooled the air and left the soil soft beneath my altered feet. Somewhere far away, thunder rolled from a storm moving north, but above me the sky was mostly clear.
I stayed away from roads.
That slowed me considerably.
My projected walking speed had been embarrassingly optimistic. Before the accident, I could have covered ten kilometers without thinking much about it. In my new body, every hill became an engineering project. Short legs meant more steps. The armor added weight. The backpack added more. My muscles were improving after a month of therapy, but improving from pathetic still left a great deal of territory before reaching adequate.
The spiders helped.
I sent them fifty to a hundred meters ahead in a loose fan, three moving through the brush while the others rotated between cargo duty and reconnaissance. Their thermal cameras found cattle, deer, one sleeping ranch dog, several smaller animals and exactly zero abandoned laboratories.
An unacceptable failure rate.
Leona: "You're all fired."
Spider Two continued walking.
Leona: "No severance."
No reaction.
Leona: "Heartless bastards."
Talking to machines was an old habit. It becomes considerably less embarrassing later in life when the machines start talking back.
At the time, they were glorified tools with legs.
Still better company than nothing.
I stopped on a low ridge after perhaps two hours and drank carefully from the hydration tube. Below me, moonlight washed over an empty pasture divided by old fencing. A ruined shed leaned near a dried creek bed. Beyond that, low hills continued west.
My legs trembled.
I sat on a limestone outcrop and immediately regretted it because one of the armor spikes made sitting normally impossible.
Prototype flaw.
I shifted sideways.
Better.
The escape had already generated a list of improvements.
Reduce rear spikes.
Add hip padding.
Redistribute battery weight.
Better foot protection.
Find a way to keep my ears concealed without folding them uncomfortably for hours.
Become approximately three times stronger.
That last one might require more than fabrication.
I unwrapped one of Mom's pie slices.
Still good.
Of course it was.
Mom could probably bake a pie capable of surviving orbital reentry.
I ate slowly while looking back east.
No lights followed me.
That was good.
Probably.
It also meant Mom hadn't discovered I was gone yet.
That hurt.
I concentrated on the map instead.
My immediate objective was to reach a line of old service roads farther west before dawn. There were several abandoned utility sites in the area, none particularly promising, but one had belonged to a medical-agricultural company that disappeared during a merger thirty years earlier. The property had changed corporate names four times afterward before falling into county ownership.
Probably empty. Possibly useful.
Worth checking.
After that, I had several options.
Southwest toward old research territory around the Edwards Plateau.
Farther west toward increasingly sparse settlements.
North toward military land, which offered better infrastructure and far greater odds of being arrested.
I chose southwest.
The important part was movement.
Every kilometer between me and the farm made returning slightly harder.
That was intentional.
I packed away the pie wrapper and stood.
My legs protested.
Leona: "Yeah, yeah."
I started walking again.
For another hour, nothing happened.
Moonlight.
Hills.
Dry grass.
The occasional chirp of a spider transmitting terrain data.
I started feeling almost competent.
That was my mistake.
Competence is dangerous when acquired fifteen minutes before reality tests it.
Spider Three stopped.
The alert on my tablet vibrated once against my wrist.
THERMAL CONTACT.
I froze.
The drone was eighty-two meters ahead, positioned beneath scrub near the crest of the next rise.
Three heat signatures.
Large.
Bipedal.
Moving east.
Toward me.
I crouched behind a limestone shelf and opened the camera feed.
The image was grainy at first.
Then one shape stepped into moonlight.
Pointed ears.
Long muzzle.
Lean human torso beneath a torn jacket.
Digitigrade legs.
Tail.
Coyote hybrid.
Feral, judging by the lack of visible identification and the collection of mismatched equipment strapped around his body.
A second followed.
Female.
Taller.
Carrying something long over one shoulder.
Rifle, maybe.
The third moved behind them.
I zoomed.
Three coyotes.
My stomach tightened.
Coyotes weren't wolves.
That thought was not as reassuring as my brain wanted it to be.
A healthy coyote hybrid was still stronger than an ordinary human in several important ways, faster over rough ground and equipped with excellent night vision, smell and hearing.
My file said F-Rank.
Any one of them was probably C.
Maybe D if I was lucky.
Three predators.
One rabbit.
I slowly backed away.
One step.
Two.
A stone shifted beneath my foot. Tiny sound. Barely anything.
The coyotes stopped.
All three.
Simultaneously.
Every primitive instinct embedded in my new nervous system detonated.
My ears tried to rise beneath the hood.
My heart slammed against my ribs.
The female coyote turned her head.
Not toward the drone.
Toward me.
She sniffed.
Once.
Twice.
Then smiled.
Even from eighty meters away, I saw the teeth.
Coyote Woman: "Rabbit."
The other two turned.
I stopped breathing.
The spiders waited for instructions.
The coyotes started walking toward me.
Not running.
They didn't need to.
The largest one laughed.
Coyote Man: "That's a long fucking way from somebody's farm."
I tightened both hands around Dad's metal staff.
Three feral coyote hybrids approached through the moonlight.
Behind me was open hillside.
To my left, exposed pasture.
To my right, limestone and brush too thick for my short legs to cross quickly.
The armor suddenly felt very homemade.
The staff felt very light.
And for the first time since leaving home, the world seemed interested in finding out whether the letter F on my government file had been accurate.
Unfortunately, I already knew the answer.
It had.