Page 36 of Shaped to Be Yours

Chapter 8

RICKY

As frightening as it was knowing that people were going missing where I’d be spending my day, it was difficult to not be equally excited. I was doing real physics work! Real quantum physics work, with real scientists way more advanced in their knowledge than I was, both in human sciences and with discoveries and equipment completely foreign to me.

It had been nice to just meet them in the woods too instead of having to drive anywhere. They hadn’t gotten there through Jason’s backyard, thankfully, but used one of the paths accessible from the road. We’d spent some time adding signs warning about the “wolf” at all possible entrances, before getting to the real work.

Jason had almost escorted me in to the “danger zone” as he called it but had opted out of meeting the team. Researching him might be more helpful to the overall mystery than any of us knew, but I didn’t want to push him when there had been too much lately to upset him.

Especially after such a good night.

And morning.

I hadn’t gotten the chance to talk with Jason about my experience in the monster realm. After Whitmore left, we’d been more lowkey, spending time with his mom. And then… well, we got pretty distracted once we went downstairs.

I’d tell him today. If I could convince him to join me the next time we went, I knew I could convince him to submit to testing. His curiosity would have to win out, and it was the right call. I knew it was.

“Oof!” Kai flailed, tripping over one of the bags of additional sensors that we needed to stake in the ground.

I was ecstatic to study the naturally forming portal and to continue working with Zinnia and Beck, but today, we also had their nineteen-year-old son with us.

I was thankfully close enough to catch him.

“Careful! The ground’s uneven there, and we’re still organizing the equipment.” I helped Kai right himself, and though he generally seemed shyer than his parents and didn’t make eye contact as readily, he blinked his black eyes at me and smiled.

“Thank you, Ri… cardo?”

“Enrique, actually. But only myabuela, my grandmother, calls me that. Call me Ricky.”

“Ricky.” Kai nodded. His accent was fainter than his parents, but I could still hear the rolling purr to it.

He had the same kappa features as they did, with lovely longer fins like his dad, a teal base color, and a mix of magenta and pale pink stripes. He dressed very modern human looking likeany kid at the mall. Not that Elder Ridge had much of a mall. More a sprawling strip with a few dozen stores and a five-theater cinema.

It baffled me though that Kai wore a tank top, a sleeveless vest, and shorts like his parents, without anything else to bundle up with. It was only in the fifties for highs for this cool June weather, and this early in the morning, it was barely mid-forty.

“Aren’t you cold?” I asked, as we gathered the sensors he’d tripped over to start placing them.

Zinnia and Beck were on the other side of the cordoned off space, discussing things with our on-duty guards. They’d doubled the previously ten-by-ten area to give us more space to work. There was no current activity. No buzz in the air, nothing making my hair stand on end, and therefore, not much for readings when we’d arrived and gave a cursory scan.

When that might change, however, was only our best guess.

“This is cold to you?” Kai looked at his hands, his bare arms, and then at me, in my jacket and the scarf Sandy had loaned me before she left for work.

“Not too bad, but cold enough that I wouldn’t want to have bare arms and legs. In this realm, animals that I would have guessed would have similar body chemistry to kappas are usually ectothermic. But you’re not, huh?”

Kai blinked at me.

“Ectothermic?” I repeated. “It means not being able to generate your own body heat.”

“Oh! We can do that.” Kai watched me place the first and second sensor before starting to assist me, I assumed to see how I chose to space them. “A human at the facility asked if I was born from an egg in water. But of course not. The egg was in my mother. I was bornliveinto the water. Is that not what happens with humans?”

“The egg part, yeah,” I said. “And some humans are born in water baths, but we’re usually born in hospitals that are, um, very dry.”

“Oh. Forgive my ignorance! I am not as well-versed in such things as my parents.”

“You didn’t study science?”

“No. I focused on cultural studies.”

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