Fledgling

by Octavia E. Butler

“We Ina are sexually territorial,”

“We are not human, child. Male and female Ina adults don’t live together. We can’t.

I know that if I could have you all to myself, I’d stop for you again, even knowing what I know about you.” “That would kill you. Quickly.”

Question

Of course, I didn’t need permission to enter her home or anyone else’s.

I did find it interesting, though, that human beings made up these fantasy safeguards, little magics, like garlic and crucifixes, that would somehow keep them safe from my kind—or from what they imagined my kind to be.

“Is it my skin color or my apparent age that’s upsetting you so?” I asked.

“I’ve been called an elfin little girl.”

I’m a child according to the standards of my people, but my people age more slowly than yours,

“Do you mean that I smelled lonely?” “I think so, yes, longing, needing …” “I didn’t imagine that loneliness had a scent.”

Haha

Uh-oh ….

When they found out what had happened, they would have to find another Ina to bond with just to survive. Could I help? Was I too young? I was definitely too ignorant.

Someone had targeted my family. Someone had succeeded in killing all of my relatives. And if this had to do with the experiments that had given me my useful human characteristics—what else could it be?—then it was likely that I was the main target.

I didn’t know any Ina rituals, any Ina religion, any living Ina people.

Nicholas and Yale.

“Brook,”

Celia,

Hugh Tang

“We went to Seattle to shop and visit our relatives.

That, I realized, was what happened when a human became an Ina symbiont while she was still young. Wright would age slowly the way Brook had.

Arlington,”

They smelled almost Ina, and that was enough to make them unappetizing.

Question

the north fork of the Stillaguamish,”

it’s the name of a local Native American tribe.”

Haha a reminder

Haha

And this was the way a symbiont behaved when she was missing her Ina. Or at least this was the way Celia behaved—suspicious, short-tempered, afraid.

She was no more able to take comfort from me than Celia had been, and there was no comfort for me in either of them.

It was almost a relief to use my speed and strength without worrying about hurting someone.

me - where’s the editor?

Haha

Arlington.

“Why didn’t it help her save her mothers?” Celia asked.

Stefan

“Iosif

they could just as easily be ordinary human beings who imagine they’re fighting vampires.”

“And who have focused only on my family,” I said. “We don’t know that.

“I don’t want to do it. I don’t feel good about doing it, but I’ll do what’s necessary to sustain us.”

Ethics

She worries that I can’t take care of the three of you. I worry that I won’t always know how to take care of you.

Yes, convenient

My ignorance wasn’t just annoying. It was dangerous.

How could I take care of my symbionts when I didn’t even know how to protect them from me?

yet there was something deeply right about seeing them together as they were.

Celia

Hugh Tang.

Oriana Bernardi

I wanted that—a home in which my symbionts enjoyed being with me and enjoyed one another and raised their children as I raised mine. That felt right, felt good.

Haha

he came back recently to negotiate with Iosif for an introduction to you and your sisters.

Radu’s