Page 25 of Breed

“How long have you been away from the nursery?”

I shrug between bites. “Weeks?”

Thorn glances over at his manservant. I think how nice it must be to have someone who does things for you. The nurses used to do things for me, when matron made them.

“Sona, can you please check to see if I missed any notifications about missing whelplings?”

“No notifications have been received, sir. I can tell you that. It is very rare for a whelp to go missing from the nursery. My wife and myself have raised our own, of course, but…”

“Please check again, Sona. We may have missed something.”

“I never miss anything, my alpha, but I will check as you have commanded.”

I’ve not seen a saurian like Sona before. He has a big scoop running from the very top of his skull and ending in a sort of blunted protrusion behind him. His skin is green, sort of like mine, but has fewer scales. His features are softer than the alpha’s. Thorn is all teeth and tail and muscles. He is the biggest saurian I have ever seen, and he is also the nicest.

“Have some more,” Thorn says, nudging a plate of cakes over toward me.

A female reaches around and removes the cakes before I can take another one.

“He shouldn’t eat too much. He will make himself sick.”

“You know best, Allegra.”

Incensed, I snatch at the cake plate with both hands, filling my palms with as much cake as I can carry.

She laughs and pats my head. “There will be more. You will not go hungry again.”

She has a nice demeanor. Nicer than the nurses.

Everybody here is impossibly nice, and I don’t know why. There’s no reason for them to be kind to me. As my stomach works away, full of food, I start to think the way I have learned to think on the streets.

“Are you going to eat me?”

“What?!” Thorn laughs.

“Why are you being nice?”

“When I see a whelpling crawling into my trash day after day to eat, I get curious,” he says. “Sona! Get the matron on the line. I want to talk to that woman.”

“I’m not going back!” I stand up, preparing to run.

“No,” he says. “You’re not. But I want to know why you are here. I want to know what happened.”

Sona brings a tablet device that has a face on it. I recognize it as the nurse who became matron after matron died. She looks worried and confused to be faced by Alpha Thorn. I make a rude gesture at her when the tablet swings briefly around to me. Thorn lifts a brow at me but does not censure me for being bad.

“Matron, why do I have a little whelp here who has been left to wander the streets for weeks without so much as a missing report?”

“Oh,” she says, as if she’s surprised to be asked the question. “He’s not a normal whelpling. He’s aggressive. He was a danger to the others, and it was decided he’d be let go.”

Thorn’s jaw clenches. “How often do you decide to let young whelplings go, matron?”

“Not very often. One or two a year at most. Only if a whelpling shows serious antisocial tendencies that cannot be controlled. You might think it is cruel, but it better than the alternative.”

“And what is the alternative?”

“Under previous administrations, hatchlings like the one you have would be terminated at birth. Letting them go gives them a chance at survival.”

“Letting them go channels them into lives of desperation, crime, and gang activity,” Thorn says “We are a predatory species living in the bones of the greatest terror ever to exist. Your job is to nurture the instincts of our kind and prepare all manner of whelps for the world.”

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