Proteus-Chapter five

Chapter one

Chapter two

Chapter three

Chapter four

Chapter five

Human-River gapes as I dig through the hanging clothes.

“Nikola? You’re alive!” she gasps.

I don’t want to tell her about the proper way to kill us, about the one brother that died from a wound to the right spot at the back of the head, but how the rest of my siblings died when a sickness took them after the injury, or they couldn’t eat enough to heal properly.

River has been kind and fair, but I won’t tell her that.

“Protean,” I remind her, checking a shirt for how well the shoulders stretch.

“But you’re dead!”

“Protean.”

“But you weren’t breathing!”

“Protean!”

“He double tapped!”

“PROTEAN!” I shout, turned on her, secondary arms and hunting tendrils raised defensively.

She backs away, hand over her mouth, shaking slightly. My mandibles are open, revealing the sharp, squid-eater’s teeth along my lower palate, my figure hunched, spiked tail lashing the air. Her smell of fear spikes.

A sickishness turns my stomach. I don’t like the way she’s looking at me.

I go back to the racks of clothing, holding up a shirt with no sleeves speculative.

“You’re…you’re…you should definitely be wearing pants!” she mumbles, turning sideways and holding a hand at her eyes, like shielding from rain sideways.

I cock my head curiously. I didn’t need clothing until I needed to keep the cold away, or disguise myself, but humans, possibly derived from warmer climates, always seem to. The attendants at home always wore extra layers, namely a thin, white coat that would never insulate heat in any circumstances, white gloves, a blue face-hider and transparent eye-shields.

Diving into one of the boxes, she triumphantly throws an oversized pair of baggy, tough blue pants at me, which have enough room to accommodate my raised heels and clawed feet. The waistline rubs against my tail, fixed with a flick of my secondary claws, tearing open the seam so I can fit.

“What are you doing here?” she asks, tension in her stance.

“Leaving,” I answer simply, sorting through the racks with all four hands, hunting tendrils receded.

“No, I mean…” She shakes her head and sighs, then stares at the exposed flesh of my chest. “Sorry…he…um…he thought he was protecting me.”

Familial protection is common among animals. This doesn’t surprise me, and I can’t rightly be angry about it. How would I have reacted, if I had found one of my smaller siblings, in the company of an armed human?
Still, my ribs hurt and the healing skin across my chest itches.

“Here, let me help,” she states, approaching me from behind, looking up at the racks.

She reaches up to grab at the hooks, then pulls away, a look of vacancy in her eyes, which linger on my spine and shoulders. She stares from the greater spikes on my shoulders and hips, poking through the material in my pants, to the way my secondary arms connect seamlessly to my shoulders. A warm, soft-skinned hand is placed against the thicknesses where my tendrils sleep, almost sore from unfamiliarity with touch.

“Diamondback,” she mumbles softly, a string of syllables I can’t discern.

I purr softly and she seems to snap back to herself.

“Sorry, sorry, it’s just…” She makes a grunting noise in the back of her throat, and takes a hook from the rack and shows it to me, made from a thinner version of the material in my pants, with buttons down the front.

“I think you can get…one set through here, and then…”

I take the shirt from her and put it on, rotating my secondary arms beneath my primaries. I can’t button it properly like this, and it’s a bit tight with my secondaries folded against my back, but it will do.

“That works, too,” she nods, then goes back to her searching. “A hoodie? If you don’t need your extra arms…all the good stuff has been passed out already…”

Eventually she manages to gather enough to hide my extra arms and numerous spikes (likely a leftover from the tree runners), good enough to conceal my form but hardly practical for survival.

“I think we can get you to my wagon, and then you can lay low there until nightfall,” she explains, pulling the hood of a greenish intermediary between shirt and coat over my horns. Her eyes linger on my mandibles, twitching with nervousness rhythmically against my lower palate.

“Sorry scary,” I tell her consolingly, trying not to spook her, since humans frighten easily.

“It’s okay,” she replies evenly, pulling a cloth over my snout and then tightening a string beneath my chin to hold everything in place. “You’re in an unfamiliar place and you’re hurt. It’s okay to be afraid.”

I tilt my head in confusion, but she’s already checking outside the door.

“Alright, follow me, stay close, and don’t speak to anyone,” she orders, waving for me to follow.

It’s a painstaking crawl through the herd to get to her shelter. Humans don’t climb or leap, so direct paths are often beyond them, made all the more winding because she is deliberately avoiding her pack.

I jump, my hunting tendrils straining against the disguise, when someone shouts across the thoroughfare at us.

“You two better get inside! There’s a protean loose!”

“Thanks! We’re on it!” human-River smiles, her hand raised high as some sort of signal.

“You did good,” she whispers soothingly, patting my left hand, her eyes flickering over where my tendrils bulged through the fabric. I seem to have popped some seams.

Silently, I keep following her, until we reach a snubbed, yellow vehicle with black stripes and exposed rust. The front end has been hollowed out and replaced with a bench, and the windows along the front and sides covered.

She ushers me inside, into the shadows. This place smells like her, her space, her den. There isn’t much room, but it feels cozy, all she needs contained inside this little room.

“Over here,” she beckons, squeezing past me. At the back, there is a raised platform, layered with blankets and cushions, and she crawls over it to pull a shade over the window, balanced on her knees, her coat along her form.

“You can rest here,” she explains, hands over her head on a handle at the ceiling. “Keep the shutters closed and no one should see you.”

I climb into the nest that smells like her, a bit too high for my comfort, but soft and peaceful, like the incubator from the time before the tanks.

“I’m going to go get you some food,” she continues, pulling on the handle, revealing a metal shutter that encloses the nest. “Don’t open the doors or windows, don’t answer if anyone knocks.”

When she’s sure I’m in place, she pulls the shutter down, sending me into deeper shadows. My chest itches, sore under the knitting skin, and my ribs hurt. My tail flops against the footwall, and I am surprisingly at peace.
In the heart of a herd of feral humans.

My whole body tenses, but I close my eyes and take a deep breath, thinking of the smell of trees and fresh blood and distant tree runners. Until nightfall, patience.

***

The shutter opens, and my tendrils are at the neck of something warm that moves in the shadows.

“It’s me, Niko,” human-River pleads, her voice cutting through my dreams.

I pull my tendrils apologetically back inside my disguise. They came out of my sleeves, so didn’t do too much damage, which would be a disappointment, since River was so kind to offer.

I smell something warm, organic, pleasing but unfamiliar. River rubs at her neck, and I hope she doesn’t bruise.

“Wow, jumpy,” she muses, sitting a bowl of…something in front of me.

“Sorry scary,” I tell her, regretfully, feeling…grimy.

Ignoring me, she turns to the bowl. “Venison stew. It’s not the best…sorry about that.”

I pick up the bowl experimentally, finding it warm to the touch, but not alive-warm. It’s full of a brownish fluid that isn’t blood, but smells organic and meaty, with chunks of brown, discs of orange, and parabolas of green. My six nostrils take in the steam, which is pleasant enough, but I don’t know what I’m looking at.

“What’s wrong?” River asks, sounding alarmed.

I don’t have the words to answer, but I hold up the bowl and do my best with, “Warm?”

“It’s…stew. Have you never had stew before?”

I look at her blankly.

“Um…it’s venison—deer meat—put in a pot with water and vegetables, then cooked over a fire.”

I tilt my head to one side.

“It’s good. Sort of. Try it.”

She hands me a scoop-shaped utensil, expecting me to do something with it, and then watches me stare at the bowl, which I sniff again, before sticking the four tubes of my tongue into the fluid and take a hesitant sip.

It’s…salty. It tastes like meat, but…not. There’s a bitterness that might come from exposure to fire, but a spiciness that doesn’t come naturally to animal muscle, and some things that might be plants.

River looks a little pale, staring at my tongue with wide eyes and twisted mouth.

I retract my tongue back into my mouth and wipe my snout with the back of my sleeve.

“Is scary?” I ask cautiously, having trouble looking her in the eye.

“C-can I see it?” she asks quietly.

Perplexed, I open my mouth wide, opening my mandibles and dropping my lower palate, then stick out my prehensile tongue, split four ways at the end, each with a circular, tooth-lined opening, good for sucking blood.

“It’s like you have a lamprey hydra living in your mouth,” she blurts, making a noise that might have been a giggle.

“Can you taste with it? Them?”

“Taste,” I repeat, not knowing the word.

I pull my tongue back in, putting the bowl aside, still holding the metal scoop, and covering my snout with cloths. Humans are skittish and jumpy, and it wouldn’t do to frighten her in an enclosed space.

“Don’t like it?” she asks, looking down at the bowl. “I don’t blame you. Wilma’s…not a good cook.”

Self-consciously, I hold the back of my hand over my snout, still holding the scoop.

“Well, pull up your shirt, let me get a look at your chest,” she sighs, setting a white box (why all the boxes?) onto the nest and opening it up.

Obediently, I pull the fabric up over my chest and to just under my collarbone, exposing the scarred, sensitive flesh, thin and raw under newly-forming skin.

“You look like you just skinned your knee instead of got shot at point-blank,” River muses, rubbing something synthetic and sticky onto the tender skin, making me wince. “It might sting a little, but this’ll help prevent infection and scarring.”

When she’s done, she puts the little white tube back in the box, and waves at me to put my disguise back down.

“And you just…shake it off?” she asks. “Just get back up again after a few hours?”

“Protean,” I remind her amiably, looking at the bowl and remembering how hungry I am.

“Hmm, proteans,” she smiles. “Feared throughout the land, shapeshifting abominations that can call lightning from the sky, unafraid of death, and masters of Go Fish.”

My mandibles flex slightly, confused at her unfamiliar words.

“Thank you…um…I mean…my brother…” she mumbles. “If I was minding my own business playing cards, and someone I didn’t know put a hole in my chest and blew out my living room window, I’d be out for blood. So, um…thanks for not…hunting him.”

I tilt my head again, wishing I knew more about how humans speak. The ones at home rarely spoke directly to us, and it was Bismarck that was the best and watching and listening. This is one of very few times I’ve wished I was more like my brother, who always seemed to know what the humans were saying or doing.
I glance again at the bowl, feeling the emptiness inside. I’ve had to regrow a lot of flesh and bone, so hunger is a given, but if River is put off my by mouth and tongue, then I wouldn’t want to scare her in her den. A frightened human is unpredictable.

“I think I promised you English lessons,” she smiles, taking a seat on a tall box across from me. “Um…I don’t know where to start. I guess I could read to you?”

Before I can come up with a sufficient answer, there is a knock on the entrance. Before my tendrils can even respond, River has pushed me back into the nest, pulling down the shutter.

“In a minute!” she calls, tugging hard where the shutter won’t budge.

I hear the entry grind open, and the heavy footsteps of a male human.

“Get your gun and go get to the mess,” the familiar voice of the older one that came for River barks.

River sighs. “Is it the protean again? I’m telling you, if Mitch didn’t steal the carcass, the poor thing probably wandered off to die.”

“Ain’t the protean,” he growls. “We’re under attack.”