Page 15 of Bred

Chapter Five

Talon

“What is she doing?”

“I believe she is entertaining herself. Humans seem to have agile minds and little tolerance for solitude.”

Shank is standing next to me, or Sir, as the little human knows him. He has a satisfied smirk on his face as he watches her vandalize part of her cabin. She’s peeling off the wall veneer and shaping it into rough figures.

“We observed this behavior in the juveniles of their species,” he reminds me, both pairs of arms crossed over his chest. “I believe they call it playing with dolls.”

It has been twenty-four hours since she was confined to quarters after what I have to admit was a solid thrashing from Shank, and she’s still not sitting comfortably, though she does appear to be quite bored.

Her mouth is moving almost constantly, even though there’s nobody there.

“Who is she talking to?”

“Herself, most likely. Humans like to talk. They do it for the least of reasons.”

I flick the switch to toggle audio. In seconds it is obvious she’s not so much talking to herself as she is entertaining herself.

“I’m Talon, I’m the captain of this ship and my tongue is like a snake,”she’s muttering in a deep voice.

“My name’s Army McArms, because I have twice as many arms as a normal man, and I’ll use all of them to beat you.”

“Oh, I love you, Army McArms,”she says, doing a higher-pitched version of ‘Captain Talon.’“Let’s kiss each other’s faces off!”

She pushes the crude creations together and makes kissing sounds.

“Oh, yeah! That was so good!”fake Talon squeaks.“Why don’t we go and abduct some innocent people who did literally nothing wrong and make them have our weird multi-armed babies!”

“No!”Army McArms replies.“Let’s beat them for trying to escape us like any sane creature would! We can make a whole drawn-out ritual around it and make them go insane from boredom in between!”

Shank turns toward me. “We so rarely get to see ourselves from the perspective of other species,” he deadpans.

Back on the video feed, our human captive is throwing us from the bed into what is described in high-pitched tones as a vat of slow dissolving acid, which Army McArms survives by drinking, while Talon succumbs.

“This punishment may need some recalibration,” I say, trying not to smile as I flick the audio back off.

“The idea is to impose reflection and contrition.”

“Instead, she’s taking our ship apart to play act us dying in nasty ways.”

“I believe only you died, sir. I drank the acid,” Shank says, his voice as monotone as ever.

Humans are very attached to their dramatics, I’ve noticed. They spend inordinate amounts of time looking at screens for stories. It’s not surprising that in the absence of any external media, Lyra created her own.

“Do you see reflection and contrition there, Shank?”

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