Mirage by Julie E. Czerneda

Author:Julie E. Czerneda [Czerneda, Julie E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780756415624
Publisher: DAW
Published: 2020-08-11T00:00:00+00:00

Makings

OOLA lifts a trembling hand before her eyes. It should be hers, coming at the end of her arm, but it cannot be. They are wrong. No Sacrissee has claws tipping each finger, like short stiffened hairs.

She tries scraping them off on stone, but they are truly part of her.

They’d appeared when the hunters laid their hands on her.

Alone now, hiding behind crates and canisters, Oola watches the claws withdraw into the thick skin of her fingertips, leaving tiny orange drops behind. The drops kill.

She’d seen, heard the screaming, witnessed the agonizing deaths as the hunters—scratched by these claws, only that—tore themselves apart as if their skin was the enemy.

Frantically, Oola digs her fingertips in the litter and dirt of the ground, wipes them back and forth until certain they’re dry and the drops gone. Even then she’s afraid to be touched by her own hands.

What is she?

Or is the real question: how is she this?

She wasn’t always. Before her kingroup took her to Molancor, to the Humans, she wasn’t this. Oola remembers the prick of pins. She remembers soothing voices and sometime pain.

What have they made of her?

Another howl, no longer so distant.

Does it offer kinship? Are there others like her, escaped and safe?

How could there be?

But the sound is all she has left of hope.

Oola rises to her feet.

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