7. Rue

Rue

The horror I felt at knowing my father took my childhood manga drawing and created actual monsters was consuming. All I could do for the entire day was stare at the screens with mortification. How did that man not have a conscience?

I had nightmares of them peeling off my pages and chasing me around. You created us. This is your fault. Without you, we wouldn't exist.

Now I sat in the giant room by myself with a notebook in hand, staring at the giant television replaying the monster attacks. The monsters had left as suddenly as they'd come, as if there'd been a quota they'd needed to reach. Or a sign they were waiting for.

Over and over the moment they arrived and the moment they retreated played and I couldn't see what the trigger was. The only option was an internal signal, which made sense because every single monster retreated at the exact same moment.

It was twenty-four hours later, and they were still counting bodies. Not that it mattered. Around the world, all the biggest cities were hit. It turned out that every city with a population over a million, which meant there were over 500 cities attacked. The death toll was nearing a billion. We were talking about almost 10% of the world population.

Millions of people across the entire world! Dead.

And these were my monsters. I was responsible for creating them.

Every time I looked up at the screen, I saw one of my monsters and started making notes about it in the notebook. I wasn't sure how many notebooks I'd filled as a kid; I'd never thought to count them. But I'd estimate I went through more than a dozen 100-page notebooks over six years or so. That means there were likely more than a thousand creatures I created.

I wasn't sure what taking notes was going to afford me. I didn't know when they'd come back out. But if I could tell everyone what I knew about each, then maybe we could come up with a plan to stop them next time.

Because there would be a next time. Silence didn't go through the trouble of making my monsters real to only use them once.

As I sat staring at the screen, despair filled me. I'd been here half the morning and had only noted a couple dozen creatures with all the details I could recall about them. That's it. Less than thirty of what was probably over a thousand. There were so many more, but it had taken me six years to imagine them all. It would take me at least that long to catalog them again. So far, I had something like twenty-eight.

The mountain we were facing just became clearer. There was no way we were going to scale it. There were far too few of us compared to the shit Silence was prepared with.

"Hey."

I jumped at the voice, spinning in my seat to look at the two men that just walked into the room. One was vaguely familiar, I'd probably seen him over the last few days. The other I recognized as Iker .

"Hi," I said as they approached.

"What're you doing in here?" Iker asked, glancing at the news coverage while the second man with striking blue eyes took a seat at the table.

I sighed, glancing down at my notebook. "Writing down everything I can remember of these creatures," I said. "But… there were a lot."

Iker took a seat too. "There were. It didn't look like there were two of any one kind."

"I'd noticed that, too," I said, shaking my head. "It's like they were a limited-edition collection. One and done. Collect them all."

"Maybe that's the answer. We need to collect them and contain them somewhere," the second man suggested. When I looked at him for too long, he grinned. "Shiloh."

"Thanks. I've been told a lot of names."

He laughed. "Yes, you have."

"That's not an awful idea. There are plenty of uninhabited islands around the world," Iker said.

"We'd have to get them there. Any suggestions on that?" Shiloh asked.

"How many do you think there are?"

I winced at Iker's question. "I was just musing about that. At least a thousand, but I fear that's a rather conservative amount."

"It is," Iker agreed. "Over 500 cities were attacked. If there were only 1,000 beasts, that means two per city at the most. From the videos we've seen, there were a lot more than two."

"That means either you grossly underestimated how many you drew, or there's more than one of a kind," Shiloh said.

"I'm not sure which is the better scenario," I admitted. "Both seem horrifying."

"Yes, but it means your notes are going to work for more than one animal."

I sighed, glancing down at the page where I'd half drawn one of the last beasts I'd seen. "This feels like a waste of time. "

"Is that what your gut is telling you?" Shiloh said.

Chewing my lip, I stared at the crude drawing for a minute before nodding. "Yes."

"Why?"

I shook my head. "I'm not entirely sure. Either because I made them flawless, or because any flaws I created were erased, or… something else."

"We're big about listening to your gut," Shiloh said. "What do you feel we should do?"

Picking my gaze back up, I stared at the screen for a minute. If I were my father, what would be my next move?

"Do you think this was considered a successful attack?" I asked.

"Yes," they agreed in unison.

"But do you think Silence would agree it was a successful attack?"

Neither man answered me for several minutes as we watched replay after replay of scenes from around the world. All the super cities. All the mega cities. Demolished. They looked like warzones. There was simply nothing left but crumbling structures. Injured people and bodies. No one was there to help, so more died by the minute.

"I'm going to say yes," Iker said finally. "I shudder to think that they could see that"—he gestured to the screen—"as anything other than the devastation it was."

"What if their goal wasn't that, though?" I asked. "You said you've attacked two facilities, right?" Both men nodded. "What if their goal was to draw you out?"

"I would hope they're smarter than to think we'd split our ranks like that."

"But they're going to know this is going to feel like a blow to you anyway. It does, doesn't it? Even if you're not relying on humans in any way to counteract Silence." I could tell by their expressions that I was right on.

"What if this isn't necessarily an attack on humans?" Shiloh offered. "What if this is mental warfare? We know humans are nothing but tools to them, but we have humans here. In our families. Humans we love. I can't tell you how many times I saw Obry in their faces as they died."

Iker shuddered. "I agree. I saw Jex and Raleigh all over the place. Every broken body looked like them. It was a fucking mind trip."

"I bet it has made you more protective. More hesitant to move when it means putting them at risk," I pushed.

"You're on to something," Iker mused.

I shrugged. "Maybe. I'm just…"

"Talking it out," Shiloh said, laughing. "I can't tell you how often we do that. Hoping to find the answer."

"Kind of frustrating," I grumbled.

Both men huffed.

"What do you think their goal was? Did they reach it?" I asked.

"Does that matter?"

"I think so. If they didn't achieve their goal, they're going to try again. If they did, they're going to move on to something else. So did they achieve it? If not, we know what their next move is—they'll try again. If they did…" I trailed off.

"I'm going to say they did. Whether their goal was to destroy the cities or kill a billion people, they managed both. I can't see how they'd achieve anything else by trying again," Iker said. "Every single city with a population over nine figures has been wiped completely off the map."

"Okay then. What is their next move?" I said. "You have to think on a wide scale. What will they do next?"

"I think we need to find the answer to your first question before we can answer that," Iker said. "What was their goal?"

"Let's just say it was to kill the humans. If we take the tale of Shambala literally and twist it to what we know Silence is after—killing everyone they don't believe should live—then the answer is murder. Humans are too weak. Apex monsters are too strong. Humans are the easy prey right now, so their first phase is to kill them off."

"Then they're going to attack the next largest cities," Shiloh offered.

"Or cities in general. Anywhere there's a concentrated population," Iker amended. "Okay, we have a hypothetical answer. How do we test it?"

I laughed. "I don't know. How do we kill flawless monsters?"

"But they can die," Iker said. "They weren't present in the first facility we took down. Either they weren't being… bred there, or they just weren't there for whatever reason. But they were at the second. And we did kill them."

"How?" I asked. "No, wait. Which?"

"I have no idea. We'll get Bronte to tell you about them. I think that poor man still has nightmares," Shiloh said.

"They can be killed," I mused, my attention turning back to the television. I wasn't truly seeing it. Just staring absently. Letting the images play on my subconscious. "Are there any reports at all that someone somewhere managed to hurt one of them?"

Iker took out his phone and started searching. After we got back from the first meeting of the masses the day I arrived, I turned off my phone entirely. Just in case. The idea that my father had installed something on there terrified me. Made me sick to my stomach.

The question constantly running through my head was, is he going to kill me now?

But then, he'd had to know for most of my adult life I didn't support or agree with Silence. I stopped being useful to him two decades ago when I stopped creating monster animals for him to make real.

And I'm still alive. What does that mean?

"There are a few," Iker finally said. "Nothing to truly note. Minor injuries that only caused momentary pause. Definitely nothing mortal and no deaths. "

"I'm not entirely surprised," Shiloh said. "Not only were the humans taken by surprise with barely any time to respond, but they were using human fire power. We know their firepower is rarely useful against monsters."

"And they knew we weren't going to get involved because there was no way we could take on that many monsters at once," Iker continued.

"Maybe a secondary objective is to try to draw us out," I suggested again. "Testing our boundaries to see what it will take to force us to respond."

"We've closed down the portals," Iker said. "The only thing that will force us to respond is attacking our compound. I'm not sure they're going to do that."

"Why though?" I asked.

"Because we have the last known living apex predators of several supernatural species here—nightmare, banshee, wraith… Practically your entire family. We also have a high concentration of divine monsters. Not only could we cause a lot more destruction than even their beasts could handle, but we could heal whoever does take a hit and be back to full strength, whereas they don't have that luxury."

"That's what you get when you kill off the angels," Shiloh said, shrugging.

"How do you know they haven't found a way to heal themselves?" I asked.

"No, you're right," Iker agreed. "They held Cobalt for years , experimented on him for years. They tested his limits by bringing him monsters on the brink of death. It's entirely plausible they figured out a way to do that."

My stomach rolled. "They did what?"

"No, wait," Shiloh said, waving his hand at me to put off my question. "I'd always thought they'd used that time to find their weaknesses. Acquiring all the information they could so they could best exterminate them. You think that they?— "

"Used that knowledge to make superweapons? Yes," Iker admitted.

Shiloh sighed. "I mean, at least ORKA's gone."

"Did your parents have anything to say about that incident?" Iker asked curiously.

I frowned as I thought about it. "No. I think my father chuckled, but I'm not sure anyone made a comment."

"Why would they?" Iker mused. "The pesky humans got what they deserved for killing monsters."

I could tell by his voice that this was a defense that he'd heard repeated many times. Not that I didn't agree. I did.

"There's a lot to unpack here," Shiloh said. "But I think we should bring this idea up at the next meeting. If we follow the assumption that their goal is annihilating all species that don't fit in their new golden age, humans are the easiest pickings to go with first. Which means we have an idea what their next move is going to be."

"Not that it matters because we aren't going to act," Iker said.

"No. But maybe we can warn them," I suggest. It was the least we could do.

But with my luck, we were looking at the wrong message, taking from this something entirely different. Maybe there was no agenda. Maybe it was just cold-blooded mass murder.