Arthur

The sight of the scarred fishman swam behind my eyes all the way back to our rendezvous point with the patrol. My jaw ached from clenching against memories, and the monster in my green shadows paced and strained against its bindings. Our soldiers had guards posted, and a sharp whistle range out at our approach. Birch exchanged the day’s pass phrase with Sokolov, one of his men, and we followed him back to an overgrown meadow that might once have been a crumbling bar’s parking lot. Our troops had spent “command team away” time napping and snacking, as professional soldiers anywhere will do when given a minute of downtime. Sergeant Jones, my second in command on the strangeling side of our operation, shook himself awake, took one look at me and got everyone up and moving.

“You’re not looking so happy, Captain,” Sgt. Jones said, putting our Jeep into drive and pulling back onto the dirt track we were patrolling. He was a big black guy who’d already been in the army for a while himself before he turned strangeling. Fine mahogany brown fur covered most of his body now, and he had bat ears and weird folds over the bridge of his nose. Minor Changes, as such things went. He was good at what he did and didn’t want to do a damn thing extra, so he delegated well and didn’t cause problems. It was just about everything you want in a subordinate officer, though he could have been a little more enthusiastic about our work. “Guess the boat was beyond recovery?”

“It was perfect,” I said, voice clipped. “Barely even rusted. Then an Elsecomer patrol flew in and took a couple shots at us. Sliced the SURC in half when they saw we wanted it.”

The trainee in back gasped. Recent inductees did a couple ride-alongs with the team leaders when they first started patrolling, and Hassan was with Jones that day. He was of Somali descent, from a family that escaped Minneapolis just before the Elsecomers took the city. He’d Changed on his seventeenth birthday and gotten incarcerated with us last month. His hair had gone translucent at the tips and rose from his head like heat waves, and his eyes had turned orange and pupil-less. He said he dreamed of empty places, and heat, and he would have cried for wanting them except his tear ducts had disappeared.

“Lucky you’re all still alive,” Jones said, shaking his head. “Coulda been worse.”

We all got out alive. Could have gone a lot worse.

“Freddy got clipped by one of their blasters. I had to give him mouth-to-mouth.”

Jones’ eyes went wide and I heard teenage retching noises from the backseat.

“Okay, you’re on watch for the next two weeks,” Jones said, grinning. “Self harm and warts, right?”

I leaned my head back and let out a long breath. Staying angry about the aliens was as useful as getting mad at clouds. But the fishman still preyed on my mind.

“What’s giving you that spooked look, Captain?” Jones asked, a few minutes later, yanking the wheel hard left to avoid a pothole.

I stared out the window, trees blurring past.

“Saw something in the river that brought up bad memories,” I said, my voice low. “Trying to figure out what it means.”

“Something with the Elsecomer encounter?” he asked, glancing at me briefly. “You’re the only person I know who’s survived two.”

“Three,” I corrected, my tone sharp. “You’re forgetting the Green Lady.”

Jones snorted. “Agree to disagree on that one, my man. Aliens don’t come with heavy Minnesotan accents. So? What’s bothering you?”

I hesitated, the words catching in my throat.

“Right after the Elsecomers sliced up the SURC, this… school of water monsters showed up. Swimming upriver. The elves swore a bunch and retreated. I recognized one of the monster fish from…” I closed my eyes, forcing the memory to surface. “From Twist’s dungeon.”

Jones’ knuckles went white on the steering wheel, and the Jeep swerved hard enough that we nearly went off the road.

“What do—” the trainee in the back started to ask.

“Kid, ears open, mouth closed,” Jones snapped. “Some aspects of this job are bad. Some, not all of you comes back from. First month Captain was with us, some mutant asshole with delusions of supervillainy caught a whole patrol and tossed us in a pit to use as lab rats. Experimented on all of us. That dungeon broke everyone who got trapped there, and Captain got us out and put us back together afterwards. Now, shut it.”

I swallowed hard, the taste of old fear bitter on my tongue.

“After most of you were gone, a man—a creature—came to talk to Twist one night. They spoke a language I didn’t recognize, but it seemed to be delivering a threat. After he left, Twist ordered me to hunt it down, kill anyone with it, and leave it something to remember the experience. Killed three, all like it but bigger, dumber. Then I sliced his cheeks open almost to the ears. Saw the scars today,” My breath hitched. Twist had briefly freed the thing that growled in my darkness, and it had enjoyed that hunt. It had enjoyed delivering those three heads to my master, and my skin shuddered in horror and longing, remembering Twist’s rewards afterwards. “That order… obeying that one freed Serena.”

Jones’ voice was quieter now, almost careful. “And this thing was with a large group of monsters in the river?”

“Yeah,” I said, my voice tight. “With others like it. Bigger. Worse. And the Elsecomers swore when they saw them. Not friendly swearing. They recognized them and were pissed off, but not entirely surprised. But they didn’t shoot, or try to threaten the fish like they did with us. Gave ‘em clear passage.”

Jones frowned, his eyes fixed on the road ahead.

“What does it all mean? What do the Elsecomers even want here? Why won’t they talk to us? Why do they seem to have some of the same enemies we do, at least… sometimes? But they deal with them differently? Why?”

“Captain, breathe,” Jones said. “We’re grunts on the ground here. We do the work, and then we go home.”

That isn’t enough. We need intel… we need answers. If we can’t figure things out, how can we fix any of this? 

We turned a corner onto an even worse road. A flock of brightly colored draclets burst out of a tall cottonwood in a rainbow of brilliant colors, squawking like parrots. We watched the little cryptids wheel and fly out over the river for a minute.

“What are those?” Hassan asked, fascinated.

“Pocket dragons. Draclets,” I said, taking a deep breath. “They’re an invasive exotic out of the stolen Cities. Annoying, but mostly harmless. They act like escaped pets.”

“Coooool. Do they breathe fire?”

“Nah. Their saliva is corrosive though, and they like chewing on rubber and plastic, sometimes metal,” Jones said. “Gotta keep ‘em off the cars. Little fuckers eat windshield wipers like licorice sticks.”

“You’ll probably stay with the gear when we go hunting off-road, to keep them off the vehicles,” I said, and his eyes widened. “No, not alone. We do everything with at least a partner. But they’ll go after the tires, window lining, wipers, and radio antennas.”

“Speaking of radios…” Jones said, glancing at me.

“The smugglers I mentioned have a guy with power over technology,” I sighed, tapping my fingers on the Jeep’s door. “The military wants him, bad. He’s blocked our radios, stolen our patrol schedules, and broken the code Lt. Birch came up with for covert communication. And whenever they’re passing through the Edgelands, we have to assume they hear every word we say on the radio. So keep that in mind if you need to use your walkie when they’re around.”

“Birch’s code was the Klingon language, Captain,” Jones groaned. “He shouldn’t have been at all surprised to have another obvious geek figure that out. Or tell him he had a flat forehead and his father smelled of elderberries.”

Which he considers the highlight of his Div 51 career. Half the reason we haven’t caught the smugglers is that none of my people want to, I thought, grinding my teeth internally. Especially since that guy said they were trying to figure out how to free us all.

As if strangelings can manage freedom.

“Captain’s hoping to catch the Green Lady when we’re hunting up North, but she might show up down here any day now,” Jones said. “She’s with the smugglers, and their runs are almost always on university breaks. We think she’s a student.”

Hassan blinked.

Yeah. I have trouble believing one of the invaders could be a local college kid, too. But the timing lines up.

Soon, that voice down in my darkness whispered, more in impressions than actual words. I felt claws stretch inside me. I’ll catch her soon. She’ll be after the giant, too. Then we’ll…

“That girl’s a public safety hazard,” I said, ignoring it. Better not to give the faery whispers any attention. They had too much power over me already. “Somebody’s gotta bring her in.”

“Still think you’re just trying to find a girl prettier than you,” Jones said, shaking his head, obviously glad for the change of topic. “Bet you don’t even know what you’d do if you caught her.”

I gritted my teeth. Jones was right, though. I had no idea what I’d do if I caught her.

I mean, arrest her, of course. But after that?

She irradianced me. She broke my life and turned me into a monster. She’s working for the invaders.

Well, maybe. I’ve never seen signs of her doing intentional harm.

But she’s a monster, like me, and monsters need to be killed or caged!

“Who’s the Green Lady?” Hassan asked.

“Captain’s hot blond nemesis,” Jones replied. “The ‘Green Lady of the North’. He goes frothing at the lips crazy every time she’s nearby.”

“Oh, actually, I think I’ve heard of her! With those free strangeling guys up by Duluth, right? They fixed some medical gear that saved my aunt. Have you actually seen her?”

“Yes, and being a connoisseur of the feminine…” Jones made a chef’s kiss to the air. “I mean, give me some curve on a woman, but scrawny blondes apparently do it for Captain. She’s a similar strangeling to him, but actually enjoys it.”

You fucking idiot, I thought. She’s dangerous.

“She’s not a strangeling. She’s an Elsecomer elf,” I snapped. “One of the Beautiful Monsters. And when you saw her, she was cuffing a bomb to your hand.”

“Captain blames her for his Change,” Jones said sympathetically. “It’s hard on him, having someone out there who’s both prettier than him and better at monster hunting.”

I bit my tongue and made myself count to ten. Jones looked sideways at me, trying to contain his grin.

Oh. He’s trying to pull me out of my bad mood.

“A bomb?” Hassan asked, aghast.

“We thought so at the time,” I grumbled.

“Her team was smuggling something into the Edgelands back in January,” Jones said, chuckling. “They do that a couple times a year. We knew they were out there; found ski and sled tracks. Captain senses her somehow, goes nuts every time she’s nearby. So we had multiple patrols out, and she blasted into mine like some comic book speedster, grinned, and cuffed what looked like a briefcase bomb to my wrist. Then she flashed away.”

“Shiiit…” Hassan said.

“It had a walkie talkie attached. We could tell there were electronics inside, and something that smelled like ammonium fertilizer. Guy on the walkie told us to hold our positions or it’d blow. While everyone was freaking out about that, they got past us,” Jones explained. “Captain eventually got me on one side of a fairly blast-proof door and had Gregor, he’s the big guy with rock skin, break the cuff. Guy on the radio said we’d had it, he was triggering his bomb. Gregor threw it as far as he could, and ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ started singing from the suitcase in mid-air.”

“It wasn’t funny!” I said, as Jones guffawed.

He and the rest of my troops had thought it was hilarious. And the monster hiding inside me had gone positively rabid with rage.

“It was the best Rick-Roll ever,” Jones said. “I laughed for two days.”

And I spent three days in the snow trying to track those bastards down before coming home with frostbite. Not sure how I even kept all my toes.

“Can I ask about how things work here?” Hassan asked. “Because we’ve got a captain and a couple of other officers, and Lt. Birch is supposedly in charge but Captain Hart seems to give all the actual orders?”

“Birch is in charge,” I said, though it still stuck in my craw a bit to say those words.

It’s safer this way.

“Captain’s in charge, and the lieutenant is alive despite all expectations purely because they work together,” Jones contradicted me. “But for the human authorities, Birch is in charge. Captain’s the one we follow into and out of battle. Birch is like his trainee.”

“Aide. I’m only a captain informally now,” I said. “The military doesn’t enjoy acknowledging how many people get irradianced in the line of duty, so they strip us of rank, change our names, and have moving public memorials for us. Then they toss us ‘walking dead men’ into the strangeling prison brigades. Apparently, I’ve got a very nice headstone down in Rochester.”

“We had cryptids killing our officers like flies before Hart got incarcerated,” Jones explained. “Consistently their first target. And hardly any privates lasted more than a year or two, on either side of the troop. The army wasn’t even sending trained officers anymore, just told the human part of the troop to elect leaders from the ranks. Then they bitched about how our incident reports were shit, so since officers didn’t last, the troop elected a nerdy kid fresh out of basic to make them happy.”

“You mean Lt. Birch?” he asked, glancing at the human soldiers’ junked out troop carrier lurching along behind us. We had stenciled Strangeling Brigade Goes In First across the hood; they’re our words now. The Changed troops used to get driven in at gunpoint on monster fights; now we go first because we’re better.

Or because it takes monsters to fight monsters, I thought grimly.

Our freckled, towheaded “leader” waved cheerily back at us. He’d pulled off the random ferns and forest junk he’d tried disguising himself with, but it hadn’t helped much. We all hoped very hard that someday he might look like an actual adult.

No one’s holding their breath on that, though.

“He got stuck with us because he wrote some sarcastic furry Trek fanfic featuring his old officers,” Jones chuckled. “Got sent over to Div 51 for insubordination. His heart’s in the right place, but his head’s somewhere off in the Delta Quadrant.”

“Birch was doing his best,” I said, sighing internally. “He just needed real training and some structure. We’re as effective as we are because he’s good at writing fiction.”

“He’s basically our liaison with the real army and human world now,” Jones explained. “It takes about five seconds here for the new human soldiers to realize they’re in much better hands with Hart leading the troop. He was already military and had full officer training, after all. Bit of a hero, in fact. It’s their lives on the line if they report the actual situation.”

“You mean there’s no one in this unit that volunteered for it?”

“Well, Birch enjoys himself,” Jones said, and I gave him a look.

“Dude pretends he’s on Away Missions while patrolling! He’s got a handheld voice recorder and keeps ‘officer logs’ of every outing! Then he writes fanfics based on them.”

Of course he does.

I pinched the bridge of my nose, trying to contain the headache blooming behind my eyes.

I NEVER want to learn what goes on in his stories.

“Human soldiers don’t get sent to Div 51 because they’re standard army issue,” I said, sighing internally. “We get the… ah… interesting ones.”

“He means the weirdos and misfits,” Jones said, shrugging as he swerved around another sapling growing in the middle of the road. “Works for us.”

It wasn’t inaccurate. I stared out at the passing trees, the weight of everything I’d lost with my Change hitting me again. I’d been “promising” once, fast-tracked into an officer career, with a solid family behind me and a fiancée ready to start a new one. The people I’d worked with had volunteered for service and been good enough to be placed in elite units. I had loved it.

I’d had a future. I’d had a life…

Inside me, something snapped, not a thought, but one of the bindings holding back my green shadows.

A bluejay shrieked a warning from a small tree growing right on the edge of the road, a sound that hit my ears and then unraveled into pure meaning.  The world dissolved into scent and sensation: smells of thawing mud and snow and sharp pinesap hit me, somewhere far away. I felt the monster in me bare possessive fangs; I couldn’t tell at what or who. Then my awareness vomited outwards, flooding through the landscape. I felt the trees and shrubs like they were my hands and fingers, the leafbuds bursting with life like my joy, the small wildlife skittering through branches and underbrush… and locked on to the cold, hungry patience of the ambush predator laying in wait for my patrol.

“Jones,” I said, my voice oddly calm. “Stop the Jeep. Now.”