The Montgomery’s red van pulled up to the side of the road on SE Second Street, under the Burnside Bridge. The shadow of the bridge in the dusk light cast a darkness that was near to that of nighttime. It was close enough, and no one paid attention to the beat up looking work vehicle. There weren’t all that many people around in this part of the neighborhood, in any case.

The back door opened a crack and a small dark red snake slithered out and landed on the pavement.

If anyone had bent over to examine it, they would have noticed some odd characteristics. It had a frill around its head that it would expand in a threat display. And it had a pair of little white horns. Just nubs, really, but they were undeniably there. And the end of its tail became particularly thin and somewhat curly, almost like a little roundworm that couldn’t stop wiggling.

Then the van moved on, turning into a parking lot to turn around and go back the way it had come.

Chord tasted the air and looked around.

He did not see the disturbances in the Strands he expected for the presence of Sewer Teeth yet, but he also wasn’t quite close enough to his trap to be sure.

This suited him just fine, as he was planning on getting closer. He had a particularly decent vantage point in mind. He needed to be far enough away that Sewer Teeth wouldn’t sense him, but close enough to act when he got the signal from his bait. If he absolutely had to, he could grow his physical form to a substantial size capable of covering a lot of ground quickly. But swimming would be the best, if he followed the flow of the river, for both speed and stealth.

This was why he’d been let off upriver of the old grain silos, and further away than he’d intended to rest, so that he wouldn’t tip Sewer Teeth off to his presence.

To get where he intended to go, he slithered over to one of the pillared supports of the bridge and climbed it. Then he climbed along the underside of the bridge, like a sticky worm. It was a trivial feat for him, and he made the distance quickly.

And then, when he was over the Willamette Greenway boardwalk, he let go and dropped to the surface below him, wiggling in the air to increase his terminal velocity. He didn’t need to land particularly gently, but he preferred it.

From there, he made his way northward, keeping to the side of the walk, away from the attention of any passing humans, until he found the pier he was looking for.

At that time of the evening, there were a few people about, but he was able to stay mostly out of sight. It helped that there was a loud helicopter patrolling the river and drawing people’s attention upward.

And once he was wrapped around a piling that supported the pier, he blended in with the color of the wood.

If someone had noticed him, it wouldn't have been the worst disaster. He could have fled easily. Or done something alarming to scare them away, and no one would believe their story.

Such was the way of things.

He found himself considering the world as it had become. The world he was hoping to tame.

Everything was so tense now.

Prior to the rise of humanity, there really hadn't been much structure to anything. There hadn't been the language to organize things by. Yes, language had existed, humans were not unique in the ability to talk. Not by an epoch or two. But the complexity of their languages were powerful and new, and a tool by which Overlords like himself began to grip the world in a way they couldn't before.

Even without manipulating humanity itself, the gift of their language brought layers of abstract thought that allowed an analysis Chord found enticing and fascinating. It was ultimately what had led him to develop his ability to take apart, alter, and reconstruct other emanants.

He owed that to humanity.

But as he'd perfected his techniques, the rest of the emanant world calcified into a complex and chaotic stalemate between Overlords who were even more ambitious than he had been.

And many times over the ensuing centuries, he'd nearly fallen to the machinations of their conflicts. The many various ways he'd just escaped becoming collateral damage to the skirmishes of others only served to drive one thing home to him.

He needed to gain as much control as he could without the others noticing.

If he couldn’t secure Gresham, though, or a place like it, he'd always be under someone's foot. He had to start somewhere. And the advantage of Gresham was that it was in the shadow of Portland. People and emanants alike tended to forget it was a separate political entity. So he'd ingratiated himself to the Overlords of Portland by promising that he'd keep it for them as an Eastward buffer between them and the rest of the world.

Up until recently, he'd done a pretty good job of that, too. While also hiding his greater plans from his patrons.

He mused about how, before humanity, emanants really hadn't had any sort of hierarchy. It had been a very different world back then, which really wasn't all that long ago really.

Humans accelerated and complicated everything.

Before long, humanity's science would discover and verify emanant existence. And then begin to examine it in a way that even Chord could not yet achieve. Efforts to keep them ignorant would fail, and everything would change even more.

Even more than his scheme to secure the right to reproduction, he anticipated that.

He was hoping to harness that effort, that force, for himself, so he could reshape all of emanant kind in his image and finally be safe.

It was a dream.

Maybe he'd achieve it.

But first, he had to clean up the little mess that Synthia’s presence had made of his fiefdom. Or, perhaps, if this particular trap was tripped in just the right way, he’d get both balls rolling at the same time.

Oh, interesting.

The helicopter had started circling the abandoned industrial plant, but he hadn't seen any sign of Sewer Teeth. Something was happening there, but the Strands had remained undisturbed and there was no signal from his bait.

What had happened to Sewer Teeth?

Had it been compromised by someone else? Reduced? Was it hungry for more power, and reaching for his bait in hopes to regain what it had lost?

Or was something more complex going on?

He felt a faint fluttering in the Stands near him. Within striking distance, but there was nothing there. Nothing of significance.

Just a human standing on the pier a few paces away from him, watching the helicopter. They were wearing a knit cap with a big pom-pom on it, a puffy blue coat, jeans, and Uggs. And they had their hands in their coat pockets.

Normally, Chord wouldn’t even bother to note such details, which were meaningless to him most of the time. But he was looking for any reason or sign for why or how they could have influenced the Strands as they had.

Normally, he would be able to see even the parasites and psychic riders that typically accompanied a human.

There were none.

That itself was somewhat spooky.

It distracted him from making his move toward the trap he’d set, to investigate what was happening there. But, if Sewer Teeth wasn’t there yet, then he could wait. And this was now more important.

He studied the human for another moment, but to no avail.

Then the human looked right down at him, smiled, and said, “Hi, Chord.”

Greg and Ayden were seated across from each other at a random table in the bar area of the Ranch Room. It seemed like the best place to be. Lots of people around. Loud enough they could talk without being overheard much. Something they could drink to soothe their nerves. And probably not a known haunt of Synthia’s even though she’d been there before.

Or so they had reasoned in Greg’s truck on the way out of Salem.

It was, actually, not all that far from where Chord’s trap was supposedly set up.

But they both agreed with each other that there really was nothing they could do to help, except rush out to give Cassy a ride if she needed it. And maybe Synthia.

So, both their phones were on the table, waiting for a text or call.

They were fairly silent about everything for quite some time. Their drinks next to their hands.

Part of it was also that they were both in a little bit of shock over the fact that the next day was the 20th already. Inauguration day. And in the drive up, they’d established that, and fretted about what could happen. And could not decide what it meant.

To hear that particular President say something about what the U.S. thought was happening in Gresham did not seem like a good thing in any way. And neither of them wanted to imagine what would actually be said.

Mercifully, the Ranch Room wasn’t one of those places that had T.V.s all over the place, and the one that was running silently over the bar with subtitles was just playing old reruns of bad Westerns.

They watched Clint Eastwood say something and spit.

“Do you think Cassy’s doing that right now?” Greg asked.

“Not her style,” Ayden replied.

“Yeah, no. Not even now, after, you know…. But, Synthia, maybe though?”

“Who knows?”

“Yeah, who knows?”

“No?” I asked.

“No,” it repeated.

“You don’t talk.”

“I do not.”

I laughed at both it and myself, and then asked, “Can you get at me from there? Or, are you stuck in there?”

“Why should I tell you?” it asked. 

I could still feel determination radiating from it, but this conversation wasn’t really telling me what that determination meant. I figured that it was simply prepared to act in the way that it had been meant to act once I triggered the right condition. But I wasn’t learning what that condition was from the exchange of just a few words.

I thought I did learn that it took words and thoughts very literally, and was reminding me that what we were doing wasn’t “speech” by many common English definitions of the word. Not that we were speaking English, but I’d used an emanant thought that was more in line with the word, out of habit. I kind of wanted to educate it on the matter, but there were slightly more pressing concerns.

“I don’t know,” I said, conversationally. “Perhaps you could lie to me in order to get me to trust you, so that you could catch me off guard.”

“That’s not necessary,” came the reply.

“What if I told you I was just here because I sensed you and I’m curious about what you’re doing?” I asked, to see if I could get any kind of change in its emotions.

It responded with, “You can do that.”

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“You are not fooling me,” it told me.

“Why not?”

“Thralls do not knowingly approach Overlords just to talk,” it explained. Mirth radiating from it briefly, to be replaced again by determination. “And if you sensed me from beyond this building, then you know I’m an Overlord.”

“Hardly,” I changed tacts and taunted it. “You’re pretty small for an Overlord, don’t you think?”

I was pretty sure I could retreat faster than it could pursue me, but as we were talking I was subtly altering my outer layers to make that more efficient, turning all my myriad of proboscides into tiny legs with hooks on the ends of them. The extra flexibility and stretch of them would allow me to use them more quickly with less muscular effort.

I also started adding a sort of ink jet to my snout, but using it would expend energy I didn’t want to lose. Especially if I expelled ectoplasmic ink at enough force to propel me, which I was still planning on doing if necessary.

In any case, I’d decided to change my plan entirely from acting as a teratovore, even in defense.

“I am bigger enough than you,” the other monster boasted.

“That’s true. I can’t argue with that,” I admitted. “What do you think I’m here for, then?”

It grunted, “I will find out.”

“You are not very fun,” I observed.

“I do not wish to be fun,” it replied.

I kind of felt like I was talking to myself in a way. Like a version of myself when I was grumpy or tired and not really engaged with conversation. And it made me feel like I was in Felicity’s shoes when she'd been trying to get a reaction out of me.

Though, she’d given me this dry and dour treatment, too, when she’d been my parasite.

I wondered if I could get it to talk at greater length by saying something really naive and mutually embarrassing. I started thinking about what that might be.

And as I considered that, I heard the sounds of people shouting under the constant roar of the helicopter, which had retreated a little. In any case, my sense of hearing wasn’t the kind of thing where one sound could overwhelm another so easily. I could count the voices, and the number of boots that ran about on the concrete and up metal stairs and across metal causeways.

I realized I might need to speed things up.

Chord didn’t talk. He merely lifted his head and readied himself to act, carefully watching this person’s body language. And he also made a point not to look into their eyes.

He considered swallowing them to find out what they were and how they worked.

If they were a simple human, they’d just pass right through, slightly more traumatized than before.

But if they were any kind of emanant, even one riding a human, he would be able to take them apart and examine them at a memetic level, and then put them together however he liked. And he was pretty sure he could do this even if he could not currently sense their emanant nature. His internal senses were so much stronger and more acute. It was almost as if he could sense quarks with his gut.

In any case, by not talking he was putting this person in the unenviable position of trying to attack from the defensive. By choosing not to talk, he exerted his power of autonomy over them while also giving them nothing to work with. And to try to get him to divulge anything, they would feel the need to talk more. And in doing that, they would impart information to him.

The person just sat down, though, cross-legged, arms resting on their knees and frowned at him, examining him back.

It was a relaxed posture, in total disregard to the danger he represented.

To emphasize the threat he posed, he allowed himself to grow to about twelve feet in length and rose to tower over them.

They worked their mouth and watched him do this with a look of bored curiosity.

Then they had the audacity to say, “I don’t want to eat you. I’d rather just talk. So, if you could hold back from trying to swallow me right now, I think that would benefit the both of us, and not just you.”

Was that a threat?

Did that sound like Felicity just now?