Pearl

Chapter Sixteen: Strangers

Lyly stared at the corpse, and it stared back.

The body sat slumped on the toilet seat of the single-stall bathroom of the rundown convenience store across the street from the only major bus station in town. Its feet sprawled out, nearly touching Lyly's new white sneakers, and its chin tucked into the neck at an odd angle that was forced by the toilet tank behind the head.

Lyly sniffed the air, measuring the rate of decay. 

Unlike the odors of the bathroom itself, the body was fresh. Likely the unhappy owner of this body had broken in to the locked bathroom at the rear of the building that very night, but had expired due to overstimulation. The eyes were half-hooded and glazed over, the lips slightly parted in a slack, open-jawed smile.

"Overdose" – the word popped into Lyly's head from the recesses of her borrowed memories.

She had come across this situation purely by accident, from a chain of events that had started just under a week ago.

She had been at home with Theodore and Cherry, curled up on the couch watching a show that, as far as she could tell, was about people who were pair-bonded and who were looking for a place to settle into despite seemingly already having one. Lyly, too, had acquired a place to settle and found their searching despite their own security fascinating.

And yet, like the paired adventurers on the screen who felt the need for change, Lyly had begun to grow restless.

Ever since that encounter with the Facility nearly three weeks prior, Lyly couldn't comfortably nest as she had begun to before.

This house was perfect: temperature controlled, full of soft places to curl up, and with large amounts of food prepared for her. What's more, the cook himself could serve as rations in a pinch.

And yes, the night that the Facility had found her she had eaten especially well. But despite the influx of fresh fluids, she hadn't been able to sleep at all in the following nights, as flashes of memories and long lists of names and numbers had reeled endlessly across her mind's eye.

It was the information that she had ripped from the mind of the researcher during her escape, triggered by the return of the Facility, but still jumbled and nearly inaccessible due to her haste and inexperience.

The implication behind the information, however, was clear.

The Facility had resources, more than she could feasibly eat in one night if they came her way again. This nest was no longer secure.

As if bidden by her train of thought, the tangled mess of information began to swell into her mind again and Lyly hugged her knees as the associated ache throbbed through her skull. Her hair rustled lightly, sensing through the air currents for the static, comforting presence of Theodore and Cherry, who sat behind her at the dining table.

She tipped her head backwards over the couch, studying Theodore as he sipped his after-dinner coffee and read the newspaper, which he was normally up and out of the house too early to do in the morning. Cherry was curled up on his lap, her soft puff of hair climbing around his chin like a beard.

The dogs might be useful, she theorized. The two carnivores had made a tacit peace with her in the time she'd been here, but it was clear that they were willing to target and destroy any threat that they deemed noncompliant. But they had no natural armor, and the Facility had lots of weapons.

Which left these two, the humans of her nest, who were defenseless. They were so low down the food chain they probably couldn't even eat a threat if any made it past her and the dogs.