Listen

Listen.

They lined us up then, along the edge of the pit. We stood shoulder-to-shoulder, shivering
because they had taken our coats. We stood silent, heads bowed, staring down into the freshly
turned earth. We breathed in the crisp winter air, and waited.

                                                      

They called us together, to the center of the town. They called us from loudspeakers mounted to the tops of their trucks, told us that if we came to the square, they would give us the
mercy of bullets, but that if we fled, it would be fire. A few of us ran. They were true to their
word. By ones and twos, and then all together, we came.

                                                      

It was done for holiness. They told us that much. It was God’s inscrutable will, a solemn duty, to be undertaken with sorrow rather than joy. They told us this as they killed us, but the
grins on their faces betrayed them. And we asked ourselves: would we have done the same to
them, if we could have? If chance or fate or Providence had placed the whip in our hands, would we have cut them down in their thousands, then millions? Would we have murdered their
children and burned their homes, taken their lands and their lives and their names, tried to
pretend that they never had been? We told ourselves we would not have, that our rule would have
been kind and our justice fair.

We told ourselves this, and it may even once have been true. But in the dark of the night
now, we know that it is far too late for justice. We have lost too much. If we could murder them
all, we would do it.

Listen.

I come from the north, from the cold, windy shore of a great, frozen lake. Ours was one
of the last towns to fall to the UnAltered. We had seen the news, knew what they had done as
they spread like a brush fire up from the south. We should have fled, should have crossed the
border into what remained of Canada. We should have never come back. But there was a base
nearby, and a loyal General. The UnAltered were a rabble, my father said, the products of
random inbreeding and inferior genes. The army would hold. And hold they did, along the
northern bank of the river, for a week, and then two. Every day, though, more soldiers crossed
over. The General was killed in his bed, and what remained of the army melted away.

I was eleven then, and Altered, but not to the eye. A bit taller, a bit stronger than I should
have been, and never once sick in my life, but I could have passed. My sister, though—sixteen
years old, with white-blonde hair and porcelain skin, clear blue eyes, and features symmetrical to
the micrometer. My father thought to disguise her, to dye her hair a mousy, uneven brown, blotch her skin with makeup, dress her in shapeless smocks. It didn’t matter. Our neighbors denounced
us on the very day that the UnAltered crossed the river.

Twenty years on, and I still dream of that day. From my hiding place in the attic, I hear
the shouted summons from the yard, then bare moments later the crash of the front door
shattering. I hear my mother’s short, sharp scream, and the bark of the rifles.

They failed to find me that day, but in my dreams I feel the heavy tread of their boots on
the stairs, hear the low rumble of their voices as they pace through the attic, looking for me. I
crouch in the black space behind the knee wall, trying and failing to stifle my sobs. Finally they
stumble on the hidden door, and I wake up screaming as a hard, calloused hand grasps my ankle
and drags me, writhing like a maggot, out into the light.

Listen.

We are few now, and scattered, but we are not gone.

We bear a mark, each of us, a stamp on our genes, put there by the Engineers who changed us. It is this that allowed the UnAltered to hound us, even after all the ones with visible
changes—the ones like my sister—were long dead. The scanners are everywhere, in airports and
schools and hospitals, and when the mark betrays us, we are killed, even now.

It is this mark that will save us.

A Destroyer is coming, like the tenth plague to the Egyptians, carefully prepared in our
last secret places. It will spread through the air and the water, through birds and rats and insects.
It will find the UnAltered wherever they hide, taking their first born, and also their last. Taking
their wives and their mothers, their daughters and sons. Taking all.

The mark on our genes will be lamb’s blood on our lintel. The Destroyer will pass us by. 

Listen.

Spring has come to the mountains now, and the long winding road to the valley is clear.
The net has been silent for almost a month.

The wide world is empty.

The wide world is new.

It is time, I think, to see what it has to offer.