The Superiors Read online

“Oh, I don’t know.” Draven looked at her and he felt himself fading from her. In his mind, he could see Lira turning into a snake, her jaws dislocating to fit him inside her mouth. That’s what she wanted, to devour him and put him at her mercy. He hated women like her, who didn’t want a man at all but a child who depended on them completely. He didn’t see that kind of man as a man at all.

  “Well? How long?” she asked.

  “I’ve taken her out, perhaps four or five times. We have a nice time. I haven’t lain upon her yet,” he said. He smirked at Lira. “And that’s all I’ve done with you. Do you imagine that makes us partners?”

  Lira glared.

  What did she expect? He’d told her from the start what he wanted, every now and then. Nothing permanent or lasting would develop. He’d thought she knew that. He’d spelled it out for her. He couldn’t help that she hadn’t paid attention.

  “I should have turned you in while I had the chance,” Lira said, spinning on her heels. She opened the door and then turned back to Draven. “You’re nothing but a sapsucker anyway. You probably like that stupid little sapien better than me. I should have known you were a freak when you had her in your bedroom. I should have you arrested for animal cruelty.”

  “Don’t get all human rights activist on me, Lira. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. I was just being honest.”

  “Fine. But next time I see your little Asia Minor around here, maybe I’ll let her know what kind of sicko you are. And if I see you dragging another sapien up here, I’ll call the Enforcers.”

  “Go ahead, Lira. Now get home, I’m tired and you’re tiring.”

  “Oh, go suck a sapien.” She stomped out, and Draven slid the door closed. He hated women who made him fight their will. He felt like he’d crushed himself so far down inside to escape her that he’d never come out, like sap trapped behind the bitter clog of an unhealed bite. Lira was the worst kind of neighbor. He should have known better than to court something so convenient. It only led to trouble. And now he had to go to sleep unsatisfied and alone.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The next time Draven went to see Cali, he arrived early. That evening he awakened with the tint of her taste on his tongue. Bouncers never received out-of-town assignments, so when he had one of his cravings, he indulged it. At least that time of evening.

  The sun still shone on the brick building beside his when he went in the kitchen to get a glass of water. After feeling around a minute, half blinded by the light, he found his shades. He stood wondering if he’d still get sunburned at that time of day. In a few more hours he had to work, but he had a little time to stay in and read until the sun disappeared behind the building. When it had, he put on a hat just in case, and kept his shades on, and went to pay a visit to his favorite little sap.

  The sun fell behind the horizon just as he reached the Confinement. Before going inside, he dropped his hat into the seat beside him and shook out his loose curls. He just managed to slip past Big Bonnie and into the compound without her seeing him. The guards hadn’t come on duty yet. The saps took care of themselves during the day. They escaped then, too.

  The day’s warmth still clung to the evening, and Draven lifted his face to the slight breeze and slowed his pace. He had an hour to kill before work, and he liked the evening hours more than most of his people. Before going into the barracks where Cali bunked, he lingered to enjoy the evening for a moment. Upon entering the building, he could tell with one breath that no sapiens had come in yet. He walked down the long center aisle looking at the hundreds of numbered bunks. When he reached the far end, he pushed the door and went out the same way he had with Cali the last time he’d come.

  Sapiens scurried about, in and out of the garden and another cinderblock building with chipped white paint clinging to the walls. He glanced around, realizing for the first time how much difficulty he’d have finding one sapien in the chaos of the Confinement. He had never come when they weren’t sleeping except when he’d worked as a Catcher, and he hadn’t looked for saps inside the Confinement then.

  He followed the general flow of traffic into the cinderblock building with all the activity. It smelled awful—strange and yet somehow familiar at the same time, the smells of food and water, mildew and mold, sweat and sapiens and their waste. Straight in front of him, a set of double doors stood open, and the smell coming from the cavernous room came out to meet him like an invading army. He pushed the air out of his lungs, held his breath, and walked into the wave of fragrance.

  Long plastic tables filled the room, stretching from wall to wall, most full of eating sapiens. He tried to ignore his general disgust for animals’ uncivilized ingestion process and scanned the crowd. Finding Cali among the tightly-packed saps proved impossible. He couldn’t find her by smell with so many other scents crowding in, so he held his breath, even though a panicky feeling always accompanied prolonged suppression of this habit. Of course he could hold his breath forever if he chose, but he abhorred the sensation. It always made him want to claw at his throat as if he could still suffocate as easily as a sap.

  He turned away from the mess hall and walked down the corridor towards the other sounds. The noises of the loud eating area faded a bit, and the smell of water and mold increased as he made his way towards the shower area. A momentary paranoia crept over him. He’d come alone, and was surrounded by so many sapiens. What if they decided to attack? He could defend himself well enough, but a group of them could inflict serious injury. Occasionally such incidents did occur, despite the threat of transfer to the blood bank.

  At the end of the corridor two doors stood open, one on either side. Inside, sapiens showered. Shadows filled the rooms. The dim light of evening came through the row of small open windows that ran along the building above the showers. Swarms of naked sapiens washed themselves under the spray of water. The rooms didn’t smell as bad as the eating area, so Draven breathed in, trying to catch a trace of Cali’s scent. Too many other smells, too many other bodies. He glanced at the mold growing around the corners of the room and along the floor, and then turned and went across the hall.

  The long room, more like a hall, had the same arrangements as the other. A few saps noticed him, and they shied away and turned, covering themselves with their night garments. Draven couldn’t help being amused. They showered in a room with hundreds of their own kind, and yet they were shy of him seeing them unclothed. And he’d be the last person interested in their nakedness.

  He smelled Cali a second before he saw her. She had come away from the shower dripping water like the rest of them, but she hadn’t seen him. She walked to the bench running along the wall on the opposite side from the showers and took up her dirty day shift and held it out for a moment before finding the inside in the failing light. She turned it inside out and began drying herself. The sapiens around her began whispering and nudging her, and finally she looked up.

  “Oh, hi,” she said. She turned away from him and finished drying herself and took up her night shift with its scattering of rips. She kept her back turned while she slipped it over her head. She turned and came to him, pulling her hair out of the neck of her garment on her way. The other sapiens stopped drying themselves to stare at her. Or perhaps him.

  “You’re here early,” Cali said, stopping in front of him and pulling at the hem of her ragged shift. It was worn so thin it didn’t conceal much. Two dark little circles with sharp peaks showed through where her nipples pressed against the fabric. Draven looked at the mildew along the base of the wall. Something about her nipples poking up inside her garment struck him as obscene, more than seeing her naked like the rest of them.

  He cleared his throat. “I wanted to find you before work.”

  “Well, here I am.”

  “Come away then, I would like to eat outside.”

  Cali followed him down the hall. “Can I get something to eat first?” she asked.

  He stopped and looked at her, and then at the darkening sky outside the
doors. “No.”

  She paused at the door to the eating area and looked in and then back at Draven. Her shoulders slumped, and she turned to follow him outside. “I have to be at work soon,” Draven said, then cut himself off, wondering why he felt the need to explain himself. She shouldn’t have even asked him a question. And he shouldn’t have to tell her the reason for anything he wanted—she should just do it.

  “Okay, well, where are we going? Can we just do it right here?” she asked.

  “No. In the garden.”

  She plodded after him. Once inside the fence, she turned and thrust her wrist up to his mouth.

  He smiled and pulled her hand down. “Let us sit.”

  She began to sit on the ground, in the dirt, with her clean clothes and freshly showered body, but he caught her up in his arms before she had completed the motion. “Come, I will carry you. Are you very tired?”

  “Very,” she said, submitting to his treatment without protest. He found a stack of rolled hoses beside one of the garden beds, and he sat on it, still holding Cali.

  “Have you been in the garden all day?” Draven asked.

  “Most of the day.”

  “You are sunburned.” Her skin, always unpleasantly warm, scalded him.

  She smiled a bit. “How do you know what a sunburn is? You’re not even awake during the day.”

  “Because I would get badly sunburned.”

  “How bad?”

  “Very, very badly.”

  “But you’re already tan.”

  Draven smiled. “That is just the color of my skin. I am not tan from the sun. I will be fast, and you may go eat.” He put his teeth to her shoulder, but her skin was so hot that a twinge of pain ran up into his teeth.

  Cali sighed and leaned her head back against his shoulder. “That feels good.”

  He pulled back without breaking the skin and pushed her away a bit so he could see her face. He knew some sapiens grew to enjoy being bitten, even crave it. He thought it a very unnatural reaction, and one he didn’t like. As much as he hated hurting them, he didn’t want them moaning ecstatically either. “What does?” he asked, still holding her away from him.

  “How cool you are. It feels good on my sunburn.”

  “Oh.” He looked at her for a few more moments and then pulled her back. “Then I will draw from here.” He put his teeth into her and she jerked harder than usual, then stilled and waited while he borrowed life from her.

  The heat of her skin under his mouth made her sap feel cool by comparison. But as he held her, he noticed that the scorching dry heat of her sunburn didn’t hold the same slightly repulsive quality as the usual cloying warmth of sapien bodies. It felt good, like lying on a hot rock to absorb the warmth after it had been in the sun all day. He ran his cool hands up and down her arms, wondering how he could have so much contact with a sapien without aversion.

  When he had finished, he took both her arms and held them up. “You have not been closed properly, again. Who does this?”

  “The same one,” Cali said. “He followed me here, the same as you.”

  “Who would do this to an animal? Does he know it hurts you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Have you told him?”

  “No. He doesn’t talk to me. I don’t know if he speaks this language.”

  “He has never spoken to you in any language?”

  Cali considered for a moment, looking up at the sky with a frown of concentration. “I don’t think so, no. Actually, you’re the only one who really talks to me.”

  “I am?”

  “Yes. The rest just come and eat and leave.”

  “I see.” Draven thought this over for a bit. He hadn’t seen many Superiors conversing with sapiens, but he assumed the ones who owned livestock did. If he bought Cali, he would want her to be happy so she would cooperate and not try to run away or become lazy. “Does it bother you that I make you talk to me?”

  “You’re not making me talk to you. You just make me…want to talk to you.”

  “How odd.”

  Cali laughed and he jerked back a bit, still startled to hear that sound from a sap. “What?” she asked, recovering her balance on his lap.

  “I’m not used to hearing you laugh.”

  “Oh. Well, I’m not used to hearing you laugh, either. But I like it when you do.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. It makes you seem almost…human.”

  He laughed at this, and so did she, and then they looked at each other. Her laughter always disconcerted him, and he realized how close she was, that she was on his lap and had been for a long while. His lap felt uncomfortably hot under her, and he had a sudden flash of her pulling on her shift and approaching him without collecting a pair of underpants from the communal basket. He stood abruptly, and neither of them said anything more while he carried her back and deposited her in the doorway of the eating hall. He left, still ruffled by the strange effect she had on him.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Cali woke when the Superior reached into her bunk and grabbed her feet. She liked to curl up as close to the top of her bunk as she could get, where none of the roaming Superiors would come by and grab her by chance. But the ones who already knew her and knew where to find her still came.

  When he bit her without saying anything, she knew it must be the Man Who Hurries. The other one always talked to her, and ever since she’d taken him out to the garden, he seemed to have a preference for that. She lay still while the Superior sucked on the back of her leg. He’d bite her any old place, not just in her arm like the Man with Soft Hair. She didn’t mind the leg bites so much, except when he got her right behind the knee, and then the little painful bumps rubbed on everything—the chairs when she sat down, the back of her leg when she squatted or sat on the ground, everything. And the Man with Soft Hair only took the lumps out of her arms, never her legs.

  Cali wondered what would happen if for once she just kicked this one right in the face. It probably wouldn’t hurt—people said Superiors had no feelings, physical or otherwise. She didn’t know if she believed it. It would be awfully sad not to ever feel anything. But then, they wouldn’t feel sadness either, so it might be okay. Still, this guy had left her so many bites, so many sore spots. Once, she’d taken her hand away from the Man with Soft Hair, and he hadn’t gotten mad. She’d been tired, just stretching, but she’d thought he’d get mad. She could kick this one in the face and just pretend she kicked out in her sleep. It would serve him right.

  Cali gave a big sigh, the kind she’d give in her sleep, and turned onto her side a little. She drew her leg up and made another little sleeping sound. Then she kicked him.

  He must have sensed her foot coming, because he moved away and even though she’d done it fast, she only grazed his chin. Then—smack!—he slapped her thigh so hard that the sound echoed through the whole long barrack with all the bunks. It sounded like a bone snapping, or a wall snapping in half. But he’d had his hand flat, so just his palm smacked her. And holy sap-crap, it hurt. Her skin burned so bad where he’d hit her that she thought it might peel off.

  Cali bit down on the inside of her cheek and tried to make her stomach stop shaking while he bit her again and finished sucking her blood. She knew she’d done something awfully stupid—she should probably be glad that he’d just given her a little slap. Or a big slap, but still. She’d tried to kick a Superior in the face. The thought of it was so incredible she couldn’t believe she’d actually done it. If her leg didn’t sting so bad, she’d have laughed.

  For a long time after he left, she couldn’t go back to sleep. Her leg throbbed. She had cramps. The whole night had turned out pretty bad. At least no other bloodsuckers came to her bed, and she finally got to sleep right before she had to get up again and start the day all over. At breakfast, Poppy asked why Cali had a limp, and when Cali told her, all her sisters looked at her like she’d grown bloodsucker teeth straight out of her head. It had been a pretty dum
b thing to do. And by the middle of the day, when the cooks brought the food out and everyone sat around eating outside, it seemed like half the people at the Confinement knew why Cali had a limp and the beginning of a hand-shaped bruise on her thigh.

  “You just ignore them,” Mama said when a couple snarky girls started bothering Cali about it.

  “I am,” Cali said, taking a bite of her corn pudding. Inside, the eating area got so hot during the day that no one wanted to go in, especially after the cooking warmed it up even more. In the mornings it was okay, and at night after a cold shower it didn’t seem so bad. By the end of dinner, though, everyone had gotten just about as sweaty as before their showers. Cali knew she was lucky she’d made it back, and she didn’t miss trying to stay up all night at the restaurants, or the constant biting. Still, she’d forgotten how hard Confinement life was. She’d had it easy at the restaurants, only having to clean and do a little gardening in the window boxes at the nice place.

  A few hours later, while she weeded, one of the boys kept looking at her leg. “Is it true that you kicked a bloodsucker in the eye?” he asked after about the tenth time she caught him looking.

  “No, I just tried.”

  “Wow. That’s really brave.”

  “I wasn’t thinking, that’s all.”

  “I’m Jonathan. I have a house and everything. All to myself. I built it over there, all by myself. My whole family has houses, and I’d been wanting one for a long time, and I finally got enough stuff to make a house.”