Monster, Finder, Shifter by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

Author:Nina Kiriki Hoffman [Hoffman, Nina Kiriki]
Language: eng
Format: epub

***

In shifter class the next day, the dead embryo-monster my teacher had given me sat in front of me unchanged while the rest of the class shifted their tiny corpses to look more human.

“Bertram!” said Neala, my teacher. I hadn’t even noticed her approach. “What is wrong with you?”

“I didn’t sleep well last night,” I muttered. I cupped my hands near the tiny corpse before me and thought its feathered hands human. I could shift Dark: fingers, toes, voice, face, all those things could be shifted for a little while, as I liked, because they knew how they were supposed to go, and when I gave them permission to shift back, they returned to their original shapes. I knew my shifts were stretching them sideways, away from natural.

I couldn’t do that to Siti’s brain. It didn’t know any other natural way than the way it already was. I had shifted it before it got set.

I turned the monster baby’s four-toed, taloned bird feet into human feet. Things were much easier to shift after they were dead. The systems inside them didn’t cling to familiar ways. Whatever animated them was gone.

“Good,” said Neala. “Have you been practicing? You’re so swift.”

“Yes.”

“Excellent. Work on the head.”

My dead baby had head spikes and a bird’s tail. It reminded me of Siti—before. I soothed the spikes from its head, but then I had to go and be sick.

“What’s the matter with you?” Neala asked. She had followed me to the outhouse, opened the door while I was still retching.

“Teacher,” I said. I left the outhouse and went to the bowl and pitcher by the back door of shifter school. I dipped water to rinse my mouth, poured some over my hands and soaped them.

“What kind of sickness have you brought to school?” Neala asked.

“It’s in my head, not in my belly.”

“What’s wrong with your head?”

I looked toward the creek willows. “Do you know shifts for thoughts?” I asked.

Neala’s voice had sharpened, and she gripped my upper arm so tightly it hurt. “Who have you been talking to?”

“No one! I have thoughts I wish I could shift. Is it possible?”

“It is forbidden.” She loosened her hand. “What are your bad thoughts? What’s troubling you, Bertram? How can one as young as you be so unhappy?”

I wished I could tell her. If the village elders knew what I had done to Siti before her birth, though, it would probably mean exile for Siti, and for me. Siti they might offer to the Shadows; I couldn’t let her walk there alone. Before that happened I would take her and run. But where?

The nearest village was Yahara, two days’ walk over the mountains, and I had heard people there were even stricter than they were here in Intil. They had no shifters. They let their monsters be born, and then disposed of them.

Beyond that, the nearest town was the city Pishtil, five days’ walk, in the lowlands. All rumors of valley towns said they were people without gods or morals.

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