Page 15 of You Weren't Meant to Be Human
Crane closes the faucet.
Aspen and Birdie have a lot of faith in their sliding back door, and especially in the shoddy latch working in tandem with the don’t-kill-me bar jammed into the track. Crane can’t remember if the bar was put back in place when they came in yesterday. Is Luna tall enough to reach the latch? She can’t be. Unless she’s smart enough to drag over a box to stand on.
He waits for another sound.
Thinks he hearssomething.
Shit.
Crane slips out of the bathroom, quiet as he can to avoid waking the two so peacefully in bed, and eases into the hall.
The townhouse isn’t huge. There’s the washing machine behind a squeaky folding door, the HVAC closet that never closes all the way, Luna’s room at the end. Buying a house was a pipe dream, Aspen and Birdie explained once, and the delight of havingtheirplace is visible on every inch of the walls. The mortgage closing date written in pink Sharpie by the baseboard, Luna’s height etched by the stairs, houseplants allowed to anchor themselves to the paint.
Owning a house had always seemed insurmountably nerve-racking to Crane. The property taxes? The repairs? The responsibility? No thank you. He’d never given it more thought than that, though. Growing up, Sophie figured she wouldn’t own anything until her parents died and their four-bedroom colonial ended up in her name, maybe, if she could swing said taxes. See what it took for Aspen and Birdie to buy a place? A terrorist attack.
Crane peeks into Luna’s room.
She’s soundly asleep on her mattress, surrounded by stuffed animals and a glittery princess canopy.
Shit.
He slides the door shut and braves a glance down the stairs.
Nothing on the landing except a thrifted mirror. No light except the streetlamps dotting the parking lot, shining vague yellow that isn’t truly enough to see by.
If that’s it, then the least he can do is check the back door. Confirm it’s locked, that the noise was just the air conditioner churning in the middle of the night, then crawl back into bed. Curl up in a safe harbor until morning. He’s a grown man. He can do that.
Crane pads silently down to the landing and opens his phone—no messages from Levi, or Jess, just a few concerned questions from Tammy to ignore—to pop on the flashlight.
There’s a man at the bottom of the stairs.
The bullet of fear feels like getting turned inside out.
The back door is wrenched open, the latch is broken, and there’s a man staring at him. It’s not even Levi. It’s some fucker in black work clothes and heavy treads in the fucking July heat, the hood and neck gaiter leaving only a set of beady blank eyes exposed andwatching.
Except for the thick black gloves. The left one peeled back to show the hive-bite punched into the wrist.
In this moment, paralyzed with phone in hand, Crane is not thinking about the appointment at the Washington, DC, clinic he’s not making it to. There’s no moment when it clicks for him that he’s about to be stuck with a parasite anchored to his uterine lining, that the cells that will eventually become a heart are twitching in the first burgeonings of a pulse.
All he can think is that this is defector behavior. This is what he told Jess in the car last night.We kill you.
Aspen and Birdie and Luna don’t deserve this.
At the bottom of the stairs, the man who must be from another hive, a hunter from Virginia or rural Maryland, one of Levi’s buddies from the northern stretch of the mountains, does not move. The doorhangs open like a mouth. It lets in humid summer air and the sound of crickets, the distant rumble of late-night traffic from the highway two blocks west.
When this man speaks, he speaks with the hundred overlapping whispers of the hive:
“Come home.”
It’s been a while since a hive has had a real, honest-to-god defector. At least, a defector Levi’s had to deal with. According to Tammy, defectors used to be more common, but the way she sees it, there’s less to runtowardthese days. Put on the news for literally five minutes; who wants to be a part of that? Certainly not her, she said. She was fine staying right here, thank you. But every so often, Levi gets a call to be on the lookout for certain plates, or some poor bastard or another, and he always says he will, even if it hasn’t panned out in a while.
The last time it did, it was a boy from Tennessee. Right when Tammy stopped trying to convince Crane that moving in with Levi was a bad idea, when the apartment was still half-unpacked. A hive mother a few hours outside Knoxville—some Southern hives havemothers, it’s tradition apparently—rang up Tammy, said to let her enforcer know they had a runner. Tammy said we don’t got enforcers up here, but we do got a hunter. The hive mother said that’d do.
Lo and behold, Levi caught the guy passing through. Took out the lower leg with buckshot since it was the only ammunition he had on hand that day. Hoisted him up, wrapped up the wound in a garbage bag, and brought the boy home, like a friend who’d been out drinking too long.
Crane had woken up to the commotion, sliding out of their newshared bed (they hadn’t bought a used bed frame off Facebook Marketplace yet, so it was just a mattress on the floor) and plodding over to where Levi had dumped the delirious kid in the tub. All Crane could think, even with a sobbing, shred-legged stranger taking up their new bathroom, was that this place was so shitty that maintenance had painted the porcelain, whodoesthat, and the blood would fuck up the paint and never come out.
“You want him back?” Levi asked into his phone, jamming it between his cheek and shoulder so he could open a Bud Lite with both hands.
