Not Quite Human

Aftermath

Four years and eighteen rebellions since the blood moon.
The cloaked boy stood in the shadow of a ruined building and waited. He'd gotten good at waiting. The last time he'd been made to do it somewhere like this, he'd been a different person entirely — jumpy and out of place, annoyed at a prince he hadn't yet decided to trust, with no idea what was coming. He almost missed that version of himself. Almost.

A demon from Ement passed nearby, tugging a leash and muttering about being late. At the end of the leash was a human — face down, moving on hands and knees, scars mapped across his body like crowded lines on a page, trying to keep pace and avoid another beating. The boy watched and felt nothing sharp. That was the part that stayed with him most, on quiet days — not the horrors themselves, but the fact that he'd stopped flinching at them. He'd seen the same things too many times. He knew he couldn't help. Not yet.
There had been feys who tried to rebel. Eighteen attempts in four years, each one a gesture more than a strike, executed by people who weren't ready, who couldn't make a dent in Quo's defences. Quo had no formal title — the demons of Ement hadn't imported their social hierarchies along with their occupation — but he held the power, called the shots, and had made that clear early. He'd built himself a grand castle in Crossuire, surrounded by what he called the Fields of Punishment, where he personally attended to anyone he considered a meaningful threat.
They had learned to live in the margins. Basements, cellars, the occasional abandoned hospital when they were lucky. Salvaging what they could, making do with very little. It was a small price for freedom, and it wouldn't be forever.
The voices in his head had been right about things before.
He watched the approach and felt the tightness in his chest ease slightly. Both of them had vanished before the blood moon — simply gone, as though the earth had swallowed them — and stayed gone for four years. He didn't know where they'd been or why they'd chosen now to resurface. It didn't matter. What mattered was that they were here, and that changed the arithmetic of everything.
They'd brought someone with him — a man Neil had never seen before, if man was even the right word. He was enormous, easily eight feet, with arms that hung past his knees in a way that reminded Neil, in the most impolite corner of his brain, of a chimpanzee. He hunched considerably, which may have accounted for some of it. Neil looked away before he could be caught staring. The stranger seemed to notice anyway. He broke into a wide, toothy grin and looked at Neil with the particular expression of someone waiting to be smiled at.
Neil smiled back. He couldn't help it.
No greetings were exchanged. No reunions, no words. Neil simply turned and walked, expecting them to follow. They did.
He led them to the Home.
It had been one of the finest hospitals in the region, once — a place built on the premise that people could be healed. That premise had expired with the opening of the gates. There were no sick people anymore, not in the conventional sense. The sick had been collected and processed early on, their remains repurposed in ways the demons found entertaining — forcing the survivors to consume what they knew to be left of their loved ones, and laughing at whatever was left of their faces when they did.
People ate. That was the worst of it and also the most human of it — the will to survive outlasting every boundary they'd thought was fixed. They'd learned not to hesitate when they were given instructions. The punishment for hesitation was always worse than the instruction. Always. Even when the instruction was unthinkable. Even when it involved their own children.
Neil knocked three times on the door of the Home and waited.
The door opened and he was immediately swallowed in an embrace that left no room for air, a kiss pressed to his forehead. They'd only let him go out at all because he'd insisted, because the voices needed following and he was the only one who could. They were protective in the way that people become when they've already lost too much — not unreasonably so, but more than he strictly needed now. He wasn't the same person they'd first decided to look after.
He stepped inside and looked at the room.
Most of them had been with him since the beginning — since the night he'd been dragged unwillingly into a world he couldn't have imagined, and they'd helped him find his footing in it. He took a breath and held it for a moment.
They were going to make it. He had to believe that. The nineteenth rebellion would be different — it had to be, because there was no twentieth waiting behind it, no more time to regroup and try again. The wound in the sky was still open. The needle of the clock could still be turned back.
He had to believe that too.