It made the most sense for this person to be Felicity, besides the fact that he couldn’t sense her at all. Of course, if she’d found a way to hide herself from him, that would explain why she’d been missing for so long. She hadn’t left town. She hadn’t been eaten by Fate Vine or Synthia. She’d gone into hiding somehow.

She had repeatedly shown she could shrug off his programming, too.

She knew who he was, and some of what he was capable of. So, she’d have the motivation to track him down and confront him at some point.

He decided to assume this was her until he was corrected.

But he also had to assume her threat was real, and that she’d learned a trick or two from Synthia, who was known for eating those who tried to eat her.

He did not relax or change his stance, but simply asked, “What do you want?”

She furrowed her brow and looked up at him, gesturing toward the human activity taking place downriver around his trap, “I was thinking I’d talk to you about that. If you don’t mind. I’m curious about what you’re doing now.”

“I’m not in the habit of divulging all of my motives to underlings and adversaries,” he told her, and waited perfectly still. He remained ready to either flee or strike in an instant. “So, I do not think I will indulge you in that.”

She shrugged and seemed to look down at herself, fingering the grain of the wood planks she was sitting on, then she glanced up again and asked, “So, reproductive rights? Huh?”

Felicity would not ask about that. Nor in that way. She knew that part of his plan. So he waited for her to elaborate.

“I think it’s interesting that you are fighting for your right to reproduce, while the country we are in is about to inaugurate a President who represents a whole faction of people who want to end my right to not reproduce,” she squinted up at him, tapping the dock with her index finger. She glanced down the river and sighed, “Woo, that was a mouthful.” Looking back, she continued, “I just… Monsters are interesting, and I feel like this isn’t exactly a coincidence. You remind me of the Quiverful Movement. Though, like, while your situation is different, your motivation is totally the same. You ever heard of that?”

He withheld his answer. Of course he had. Through Fate Vine, he’d been involved in enough human politics that the Quiverful Movement had caught his attention. It had been a totally separate thing, something a portion of humanity had started in parallel to his own campaign. And she was right that the motives were similar. A faction of humans were trying to control the world through increased reproduction. But, whatever. It did not matter.

What was more of a concern was what was happening to this person in front of him.

It seemed that Felicity had made an ally of this host, and they were switching off while talking to him, pretending to be one person. He’d heard the shift in her manner of speech, and seen the changes in her posture and expressions. It seemed to go back and forth. Sometimes mid sentence.

He very much wanted to swallow her and find out how she’d done this.

But he couldn’t risk that her threat was genuine.

Perhaps what he could do was kill the host and force her out.

She slapped her knee, and declared, “I totally think you should be able to reproduce, though. That’s a right. If you can do it, you should be able to. But maybe not for the reasons you have. And this isn’t at all addressing the other things you go about doing, Chord.” She smiled up at him. “Like, if you were a human, you’d totally be a eugenicist and a white supremacist, wouldn’t you. And you’d still be called a monster.” She shook her head. “At least by my friends, anyway.”

He wondered if he asked her a question, would she bother to answer it honestly. Sometimes she seemed guileless, and sometimes she seemed like, well, Felicity. He decided to ask and see what happened, “Are you trying to distract me?”

“What? No,” she blinked. Then she made a weird little forced grimace, eyes wide, eyebrows high, like she was presenting something awful to him. And then she said, “I’m trying to talk myself into getting rid of you. If you want, you can help. I’m just. I’m not quite sure I like my options.”

That seemed to have bizarrely worked. He should keep her talking. It might be amusing what she said. It might help him decide if she was bluffing. 

“How would you ‘get rid’ of me?” he asked.

“Oh, like, I could just eat you. That’s the easiest,” she waved a hand. “But, then, I’d get all your memories, because I work that way, and I really don’t want those. They seem gross. I’ve always been picky about what I eat, anyway. I’ve never had snake. It’s kind of hard to try new things.” She snickered to herself.

He’d been letting his tail grow longer, dipping into the water, and reaching across with it, under the pier. He was pretty sure he was going to drown her now. And she didn’t seem to have noticed, which pleased him. But he still felt a great deal of concern about what she could do.

In theory, she’d have to make eye contact, and he was avoiding that studiously. But everything about her was new and different, and disturbing.

She continued talking, though, “What I really wish I could do, though my whole brain is telling me it’s impossible, is just, you know, talk you out of being you. Like, maybe if I just sit here and go over the philosophy of existence and the nature of monsters with you, maybe you’d change your tactics and become one of those reformed villains who joins the heroes. Or something.” She scrunched up her nose and briefly showed her top front teeth with a curled up lip, and then shook her head. “But I don’t want to work with you. You suck.” Then she beamed a grin, “But, you know. You’re a monster. It’s not like you’re a person, right? I mean, Synthia was a person. But she spent a lot of time amongst humans. She sort of became one. Like not physically, or metaphysically, just socially. Emotionally. But is that the metric we really want to use? It leaves room for all sorts of fascism.”

She was babbling, but this felt like a pause. A moment where she’d think about what she was saying.

His tail, with its ropy prehensile tip, was now rising up out of the water on the other side of the dock. “You’re a monster too,” he said, by way of prompting and distracting her.

She slowly rolled her eyes and sighed melodramatically, “Yeah.” Then she bounced and slapped both of her knees. “Hey. I’m new to this monster thing. And maybe you could tell me what to expect! Like, we could call it a trade. Maybe for amnesty. You could explain to me what monster politics is really like, and what kind of pressures you face on a century to century basis. Like, what does it take to survive with all these Overlords everywhere? And maybe that could convince me to let you live!”

“Why don’t I give you your first lesson?” he asked. His tail was ready to strike, held back over the river like a whip.

“Chord!” she snapped.

She'd sobered up, her body going rigid with a frown. Despite her cross-legged posture and her previous demeanor with the body language of a careless juvenile human, she’d suddenly become a very stern and angry Felicity. Her full age, experience, and power showed, even if it was lesser than his. He knew then that this was her.

“Yes?” he asked languidly. Something was causing him to hesitate. He should have just drowned her right then, but he had a niggling fear that it wouldn’t go well for some reason. So, he hid that fear with casual confidence and the single word question, showing he was in control and not in a hurry to do anything.

She looked him right in the snout, brow furrowed so intensely it must have been cramping, and asked, “Do you have a fucking death wish?”

Apparently, they’d sat down near the end of the Eastwood flick, and now Seven Samurai was playing. Just the opening credits, so far. It hadn’t been all that long.

Ayden held up his cheap whiskey, which he’d only taken a few sips of, and said, “You know how when Synthia takes us out, nobody needs to pay? She has this magic credit card or something?”

“Yeah?” Greg responded.

“Well, without her paying, this is my last whiskey for the month.”

“Same,” Greg said, even though he was drinking a bad tequila.

“I think I’m going to have to crowdfund to get by on unemployment,” Ayden added.

“We all will.”

“Do you think Cass will need it?”

“She’s still human, even if she’s also an emanant,” Greg answered.

“Right. Right. Just thinking,” Ayden looked over at him. “After tomorrow, I might not even be able to get a job ever again, for all I know.”

Greg scowled, and then softened his expression, “It’s probably not going to be that bad right away, Ayden.”

“We don’t know that.”

“True. Could be that bad for us specifically.”

“It’s not like we’re highly desired specialists in our field.”

“Right.”

“It would be fucking nice if we had Synthia’s magic credit card, like, all the time.”

Everything was going wrong. I wasn’t getting anywhere conversationally with this emanant, and I now strongly doubted that I could win against it in a fight. I decided to pull out.

Maybe it wouldn’t chase me if it could also hear the humanity that surrounded us. And maybe it couldn’t detect me except when I was communicating with it via monster speech.

I started backing up through the duct that I was in, a downward slope that the great auger in the middle of the silo bin would feed with grain in the past. A few yards and I’d encounter a maintenance hatch that I could finesse open. I hoped to be quiet enough that I wouldn’t tip the other monster off to what I was doing. 

I spoke to it no more.

But then I started hearing a very high pitched keening noise coming up from below me, and kind of panicked.

I scrunched up beneath the hatch and put my entire energy into pushing it outward.

With a screech of screaming catastrophic metal fatigue, bang and then an horrendous clattering noise, I sprang from the hatch and bounded onto the operator walkway that ran through the top of the building.

As I undulated and slid at a surprising speed toward the operator’s room and the nearest exit, an enormous and growing swarm of one inch long mosquitoes boiled from the pipe behind me.

It was faster than I was.

It had more mouths than I did. Many, many more mouths. Proboscides, in fact.

Chord had stolen my own trick, and now I had to figure out how to survive it on the fly.