“This is my house, young lady, and I’m asking you the questions,” her mother growls, growling like a pit bull, like something mean and hungry straining at its fraying leash. “What are you doing with all this sick shit?”
And the part of Sylvia’s mind that knows how to lie, the part that keeps her secrets safe and has no problem saying whatever needs to be said, takes over. “It’s one of my stories,” she says, trying hard to sound indignant, instead of frightened. “It’s all just research. I brought it home last week—”
“Bullshit. Since when does the network waste time with this kind of deviant crap?” her mother demands, and she taps the magazine again. On the cover, there’s a nude woman with firm brown nipples and the gently curved, corkscrew horns of an impala.
“Just because you don’t happen to approve of the changelings doesn’t mean they aren’t news,” Sylvia tells her, and hastily begins gathering up all the pamphlets and magazines. “Do you have any idea how many people have had some sort of interspecific genetic modification over the last five years?”
“Are you a goddamn lesbian?” her mother asks, and Sylvia catches the smell of gin on her breath.
“What?”
“They’re all a bunch of queers and perverts,” her mother mumbles and then snatches one of the Fellowship of Parahuman Evolutionists pamphlets from Sylvia’s hands. “If this is supposed to be work for the network, why’d you have to go and hide it all under your bed?”
“I wasn’t hiding anything, mother, and this isn’t any of your business,” and Sylvia yanks the pamphlet back from her mother. “How many times have I asked you to stay out of my room?”
“It’s my house, and—”
“That means I have no privacy?”
“No ma’am. Not if it means you bringing this smut into my house.”
“Jesus, it’s for work. You want to call Mr. Padgett right now and have him tell you the same damned thing?” And there, it’s out before she thinks better of pushing the lie that far, pushing it as far as it’ll go, and there’s no taking it back again.
“I ought to do that, young lady. You bet. That’s exactly what I ought to do.”
“So do it, and leave me alone. You know the number.”
“Don’t you think I won’t.”
“I have work to do before dinner,” Sylvia says, as calmly as she can manage, turning away from her mother, beginning to wonder if she’ll make it upstairs before she throws up. “I have a headache, and I really don’t need you yelling at me right now.”
“Don’t think that I won’t call. I’m a Christian woman, and I don’t want that filth under my roof, you understand me, Sylvia?”
She doesn’t reply, because there’s nothing left to be said, and the cold knot in her belly has started looking for a way out, the inevitable path of least resistance. She takes her briefcase and the magazines and heads for the hallway and the stairs leading away from her mother. Just keep walking, she thinks. Whatever else she says, don’t even turn around. Don’t say anything else to her. Not another word. Don’t give her the satisfaction—
“I know all about those people,” her mother mumbles. “They’re filth, you understand? All of them. Every single, goddamned one.”
And then Sylvia’s on the stairs, and her footsteps on the varnished wood are louder than her mother’s voice. She takes them two at a time, almost running to the top, and locks her bedroom door behind her. Sylvia hurls the stack of changeling literature to the floor in a violent flutter of pages, and the antelope girl’s large, dark eyes gaze blamelessly back up at her. She sits down with her back against the door, not wanting to cry but crying anyway, crying because at least it’s better than vomiting.
And later—after her first three treatments at the Lycaon Clinic in Chicago, after the flight to LA, after Fera Delacroix takes her hand and leads her into the murmur and half light of the hotel bar—she’ll understand that this afternoon, this moment, was her turning point. She’ll look back and see clearly that this is the day she knew what she would do, no matter how much it terrified her, and no matter what it would mean, in the end.
They sit in a corner of the crowded, noisy bar, two tables pulled together to make room for everyone, this perfect, unreal menagerie. Sylvia sits to the left of Fera, sipping at a watery Coke. Fera’s already introduced her to them all, a heady mix of changeling minor royalty and fellow travelers, and Sylvia has been sitting quietly for the last fifteen minutes, listening to them talk, trying to memorize their names, trying not to stare.
“It’s a damned dangerous precedent,” the man sitting directly across from her says. He has the night-seeing eyes of a python, and he drums his long claws nervously against the top of the table. His name is Maxwell White, and he’s a geneticist at Johns Hopkins. Her last year in college, Sylvia read his book, Looking for Moreau: A Parahumanist Manifesto. It’s made the American Library Association’s list of most frequently banned books seven years straight.
“What the hell,” Fera says. “I figure, it’s just fucking Nebraska—”
Maxwell White stops drumming his fingers and sighs, his long ears going flat against the sides of his skull. “Sure, this year it’s just fucking Nebraska. But, the way things are headed, next year it’s going to be Nebraska and Alabama and Utah and—”
“We can’t afford to be elitists,” says a woman with iridescent scales that shimmer faintly in the dim light. As she talks, the tip end of her blue forked tongue flicks across her lips; Sylvia can’t recall her name, only that she was recently fired from Duke University. “Not anymore. That asshole De Vries and his army of zealots is getting more press than the war.”
“Oh, come on. It’s not that bad,” Fera says and frowns.
“How bad does it have to be?” Maxwell White asks and starts drumming his claws again. “Where do you think this is going to stop? After these anti-crossbreeding laws are in place and people get used to the idea that it’s acceptable to restrict who we can and can’t marry, who we can fuck, how long do you think it’s going to take before we start seeing laws preventing us from voting or owning property or—”
“Maybe that’s what we get for signing a declaration of secession from the human race,” Fera replies, and Maxwell White makes an angry snorting sound.
“Jesus Christ, Fera, sometimes I wonder which side you’re on.”
“All I’m saying is I’m not so sure we can realistically expect to have it both ways. We tell them we’re not the same as them anymore. That, by choice, each of us will exist as our own separate species, and then we act surprised when they want to treat us like animals.”
“De Vries has already started talking about concentration camps,” a woman named Alex Singleton says; she glances apprehensively at Fera and then quickly back down at the napkin she’s been folding and unfolding for the past ten minutes. Alex Singleton has the striped, blonde fur of a tiger-lion hybrid, and six perfectly formed breasts. “Are you still going to be talking like this when they start rounding us up and locking us in cages?” she asks, and unfolds the napkin again.
“That’s never going to happen,” Fera replies, and scowls at Alex Singleton. “I’m not saying there aren’t a lot of scary people out there. Of course, there are. We’ve just given the bigots and xenophobes something new to hate, that’s all. We knew there’d be a difficult adjustment period, didn’t we?”
“You have the most sublime knack for understatement,” Maxwell White laughs.