nature
ˈneɪtʃə/
noun
inborn or hereditary characteristics as an influence on or determinant of personality.
A month passed. In the short time I had with Cal, that first month was the best. Before it all got complicated and crappy and people started dying. I never liked that shed or that garden, but I sometimes want to just be back there, like those early weeks.
I kept going to school, so that everything seemed normal. After dark I'd wait until my dad was asleep, then sneak out with some food and we'd talk into the night, trying to figure out what to do next. Trusting him didn't come easy, what with the image of that cop falling off the roof still fresh in my mind.
"I was born twenty five years ago," he'd said. "If you want to know whether you can trust me, go to the records office. Look up my genodate." He'd pleaded for me to allow him to stay in the shed, hidden away, at least until I'd checked out his story.
Truth is, I didn't have any real alternatives. Here was a guy, bigger and older than me, who had transformed from wings to horns right in front of me, shrugging off a bullet wound like it was nothing. Some of the feathers still fluttered about the shed when the door was opened, even though we'd disposed of the wing carcass before it started rotting. Having a graveyard out the back turned out to be really, really handy.
On the way to the records office I'd thought about the rest of his claims: that he'd grown up in an orphanage, having been rejected by his parents. I'd always wondered why my parents hadn't given me up; they certainly didn't seem to have ever enjoyed having a child. Cal had gone to an orphanage out in the countryside somewhere nice and quiet. It sounded pretty great - I'd always wanted to be taken away to an orphanage when I was growing up. Better to be among kids close to your age, rather than attempting to forge familial ties with your actual parents, who you had nothing to do with, least of all genotype. My dad was a fluffy little thing, about as far removed from my scaly squamatan nature as was possible.
The orphanage had treated him well, right up until the point it burned to the ground. That's when it had all gone wrong. The stress from the fire brought on his change, which attracted all the wrong kinds of attention.
At the records office I'd found a secluded cubicle at the back of the room, behind filing cabinets and the endless shelves. Thumbing through brown cardboard folders I'd picked out the dozen-or-so babies that had been born on the same date as Cal. Which pretty much assured that they'd have the same abilities.
There was nothing consistent about the recorded dates of death, other than that they all had them. All at very different times and in different places. Some had died during birth. Others as children, in accidents or domestic abuse incidents. One had died as a teenager, killed by a drunk driver while travelling the world before starting work. There was no consistency or pattern but none of them were still alive. None of the deaths on their own looked particularly suspicious, but Cal assured me that it wasn't a localised coincidence.
Cal wasn't his real name, he'd said. I pulled out the file for Jason Parks. Born locally to rich parents, who had placed him into the orphanage along with a substantial investment to ensure his and the orphanage's success. They sounded like nice people. Jason Parks was generally unremarkable, doing okay in his studies without setting the world on fire. Which is a bad turn of phrase, I guess, because he died when the orphanage went up in flames ten years back, along with most of the other kids and half the staff. It had been big news at the time, but I'd only been about eight so didn't really remember it.
Although most people are born possessing an obvious genotype, some abilities only became apparent during the change. It was basically a secondary puberty. Because why settle for one when you can have an additional embarrassing physical development? For me that meant that I only started generating my own venom around age twelve. Having that happen right around when I started getting interested in boys was all kinds of trouble. Nobody wants to be a bad kisser, let alone kill your crush with slightly over-enthusiastic smooching. It kinda put a dampener on that whole part of my life.
It was the fire itself which introduced Cal to his new life. Turns out the shift he'd done that first night wasn't a one-off. He could do it whenever he liked, aside from the off-putting pain and exhaustion it caused, going from one genotype to another. I'd never heard of anything like it. I was pretty sure it had never been known to happen before.
"I think I'm the only one left," he'd said, when I'd returned from the records office. "I've moved around a lot. Every town I've been, every country, it's the same. Nobody's noticed the pattern, or it's been suppressed, or something. A whole generation has been erased. They do it slowly, carefully, so that nobody picks up on it. They've spread it out over two decades. They're trying to find me."
Conspiracy always seemed like bullshit. No government or organisation was that organised. Even if they wanted to be like that, they'd just cock it through incompetence. It's better to think of our overlords as being idiots rather than evil, right? Whenever a shitty, stupid law got passed, that's what I told myself.
"Why are you telling me all this? Why me?"
"Because I'm stuck in your shed."
And there was me thinking that maybe I was special.
Because we weren't really sure what to actually do, after the first week we moved into talking about normal stuff. Favourite movies. Awesome bands. Places we wanted to go, people we wanted to do. It was like hanging out with a friend. A secret, on-the-run fugitive friend with some kind of magical shape-shifting power.
It was pretty great.
Aside from the burning orphanage. And the police. And the actual reality of the situation. As long as we ignored all that, it was just the two of us, in a shed, talking shit until four in the morning, every night, until the sky started to brighten or I heard a milk float buzzing down the road. It was like having an imaginary friend, without any of the brain effort.
Then one evening I got home from school, said hi to my mum, who was more-or-less asleep on the kitchen table, ignored my dad, and disappeared upstairs to my room with a hastily-made sandwich. From the window I could see the shed, and knew that Cal was in there, and could probably see up to my bedroom window through the dirty glass of the shed door. I just had to wait for it to get dark, which took an annoyingly long time as it was summer. Looking out at the unkempt, knee-high grass and jumbled collections of junk, I was glad for once that my parents had no interest in what happened out the back of their house.
I closed the curtains and got changed, out of my school gear and into something more practical and warm. Every night it occurred to me that I could just leave the curtains open a bit, but that just seemed weird. Kind of exciting, but not the right thing to do. I figured it'd spoil things, that me and Cal weren't heading down that path. I felt like a stupid schoolgirl just thinking it, but there was the thought, popping into my head every evening. The whole situation just read too much like those slushy romance novels I'd loved a few years back, I guess, where you'd have a girl getting into some kind of inappropriate, vaguely dangerous relationship, usually with an older guy. From the wrong side of the tracks, and so on.
After dark I tip-toed down and out to the shed, taking with me a bunch of snacks and some fresh water. Cal told me about his travels after the fire, when he'd first been trying to understand his new ability, without anyone to guide or help. There'd been a cop who had looked after him right after the orphanage, who had told him to watch his back and put him on the road. Sounded like a nice guy, but Cal didn't know his name or what he was doing now. He even thought that maybe in all the trauma he'd just made him up entirely.
He was still, even now, learning how to control the genoshifts (as he called them). At times of heightened stress a shift could be triggered, which is exactly what had happened just prior to the cops busting in on the Black Jasmine.
"I represent every fear," he said. "People don't understand me. They think I'm heretical. That I break the natural order. I disgust them. Our society is dictated by genotype, you know. What you're born as decides what you're going to do - squamata get great rates for joining the army, right? They lowered the sign-up age just for you guys."
I picked up a feather from the floorboards and pulled absent-mindedly at the barbs, half-forgetting that it had once belonged to Cal's body. "It's still up to us what we actually do with our lives," I said.
"Is it? It might feel like that on an individual basis, but look at the broader patterns. If you want to get into politics, how are you ever going to get off the ground? Literally. You think it's just coincidence that the wings run the show?"
Yawning, I gave him a hug and said goodnight. Too little sleep over the weeks had started to catch up with me. I shuffled my way back through the garden and gently pushed open the back door. I knew exactly how to turn the key silently, exactly how far I could push the door before it creaked. I crept in, yawned again, then shut the door.
The kitchen light flicked on, in all its harsh fluorescence. I spun around, actually letting out a sharp hiss.
There was my dad, standing in the doorway into the rest of the house, one hand on the light switch, his trademarked cane in the other.
"Where you been spending your nights, my little girl?" he said, grey fur ruffling up around his mouth. He lifted and pointed the cane at me. "You and me, Kay, we got to have a talk, me and you. And it's a long time coming. A long time."