The Pit: Part 1.3: Avery Rebuilds
***
I am?
The feeling doesn’t translate well into words. All she knows is that she is, and what she is is she.
She still doesn’t have much control over the body, the thing that she lives in, the thing that moves her and hunts for her and kills for her so that she may stay as she is. The hunger still grabs her, and need is always fast and violent. When that happens, she retreats into the peace of ignorance and gives up her control.
But when it’s over, she loves the body in the ways that she can: she does not fight it, she rides along and sees through the eyes and feels through the hands, though she does not yet have names for these things either.
They just are. She just is.
Sometimes, when she’s moving through tall buildings that flow into the deep blueness of the sky, she finds that the things around her blur into indistinct shapes and colors that seem to smear together. There’s a feeling on her skin that she likes, a coolness that rushes over it and soothes the heat that she always feels after the hunger has been satisfied. The body is capable of moving like this for a long time before it has to stop, and as her awareness grows, she pushes it a little harder each day.
When she is done with that, when the body slows and her senses sing with a potent combination of exhaustion and power, she looks around and sees the colors of the city, though she does not yet know what a city is, or that it is beautiful. She only knows that the sky bleeds onto the buildings, blues, oranges, and pinks shining on glass and metal.
It is a long time before she remembers names for these things: speed, strength, beauty, pleasure.
These are the good things, the things that do not bring fear.
But there are things that do.
When she did not know better, she roamed in the open with the others that were like her, those that smelled of sameness and kinship. Instinct told her that they were safe. She did not know that there were others who were not like her, but who would hunt her. She only knew that sometimes there was a smell of freshness, of health and bone and muscle and skin. And where she smelled these things, she would find what she needed to keep the void at bay. She would find meat.
She was fortunate to learn of traps before it was too late. She watched as others like her, drawn to good smells that were not as they seemed, were tangled in netting and destroyed by tangled white bolts of electricity, or cut into parts by long metal blades. She watched as they stopped moving. She learned that sometimes the strong ones, the hunters, banded together and stalked through the streets, and at those times, it was not safe to be seen. Then she would find an empty, dark room in an empty, dark building, and she would wait until they passed. She wondered why the others like her did not do the same, why they could not tell the difference between the hunters and the meat.
(Of course, there is a third kind of being that stalks the streets. She averts her eyes when she sees them and finds other hunting grounds when they are moving towards prey that she has found. Something within her knows that they will not harm her – if she stays out of their way. But they are wrong. They smell wrong. They look wrong – their faces do not contort in anger or fear the way the hunters’ do, or the way the faces of her prey do. They do not run the way prey does, and they do not harm her kind the way the hunters do. But she has seen how they kill, and they are the most dangerous of all.)
Now she keeps to the shadows at night, out of the blue glow of the orbs that hang on their posts above the streets. She keeps to the parks in day, where she can hide in huge bushes covered in bright flowers and slip unseen through trees. She hunts and feeds and keeps herself strong. She is careful, quiet, and watchful, and keeps herself alive.
Slowly, her ability to name the things that inhabit her world grows.
She does not know it, but her mind is rebuilding itself, retracing pathways that it once knew.
It is becoming Avery.
***
Previous installments:
Prologue: The Awakening
Part 1.1
Part 1.2
