Me

I ran.

I didn’t know where I was going, just away, somewhere I couldn’t hurt anyone. The Federation streets were a juxtaposition of eras: construction mechs, flying cars, and holographic billboards on one hand; torii gates, shoji doors, and, well, karaoke bars on the other. I tried to keep to the older parts of the city because they tended to be darker. I didn’t want to be seen by anyone.

Crawling up the side of a tall apartment building, I climbed through a window into my bedroom, slithered into my bed, and pulled the covers over me.

My mother’s voice came from the hallway. “Sprout.” She opened the door, and I peeked out from under the blankets. “Aiko called me. I heard what happened.”

“They were right to try to kill me,” I muttered. “I’m too dangerous.”

Mom sat on the bed and stroked me behind the ears. “Perhaps I was too hasty to allow you to integrate with society unsupervised. Although you showed telltale signs of PTSD, you did not appear violent, and I calculated that the longer it took to return you to normal life, the more difficult it would become.”

“It’s not your fault, but I can’t stay here.”

Her neck servos whined as she tilted her head. “Why not?”

“Why not?! Because I almost killed someone!”

“But you did not, and I do not believe you will. Your self-control is adequate. With enough practice, you—”

“I don’t want to stay. City life is too stifling. Spend all day in school so you can spend even longer days at a soul-crushing job. Everyone’s caught in the same trap. You can see the years and years of built-up stress and defeat in their eyes. Sure, people are more accepting of differences, but everything is complicated, and I don’t know all the unwritten rules like I did in the village.”

She removed her hand from my head and rested it on her lap. “Would you prefer to return to the village? The reconstruction is nearly complete, and they will need all the workers they can get. There were very few survivors.”

My ears perked up. “There were survivors? How?”

“No idea. They came out from the wastelands after the repair crews arrived, but they won’t talk to anyone. Maybe they’ll confide in you.”

Curling back under my blanket, I thought about it. If I had to choose between the village and the city, at least I wasn’t ostracized in the city. But was that still true after what I had just done?

While I was thinking, she put her hand back on my head. “You don’t have to decide right away. We could always pay a visit to see.”

⁂

Large, open fields, small huts, and even a guard tower that played Dvořák. I don’t know what I expected when I strolled into the village wearing brand-new guard uniform, a Federation rifle on my back, and a gynoid mom at my side, but I certainly didn’t expect it to be exactly the same as how I had left it.

Only it wasn’t really the same: the people were gone. Oliver and Lea weren’t there to greet me at the gate; Apollo wasn’t napping next to whatever stretch of road dirt he had claimed as his territory that morning. Although I recognized the handful of villagers who remained, none were unchanged by the attack. Some bore scars, others burn marks, and one farmer limped even as he plowed the soil.

None were old, but none were too young either. The oldest was six years my senior; the youngest, two years my junior.

Said youngest was one of Lea and Apollo’s kittens, Luna, the only of her family to survive. She looked so much like her mother, with long, wild gray hair, but she had her father’s green eyes. The large scar across her cheek was a tad red and bloated, but once it fully healed, I was confident it would make her look tough.

The villagers were none too happy to see me return, and they really weren’t happy to see a gynoid again, but while the others all avoided looking at me, Luna kept stealing curious glances in my direction. I tried approaching her to talk, but the group she was with moved to keep their distance.

“Doesn’t look like they’ll talk to me either,” I told my mother.

“I wouldn’t be so hasty.” She pointed at Luna. “Look, here comes one now.”

Luna was marching toward us with a determined look on her face. She must have been working up her courage to talk to me the entire time.

“Sprout, you’re back.” Completely ignoring Mom, she puffed herself up and stood on tiptoes in an attempt to appear taller than me. “What about my parents? Will they come back too?” There was a glimmer of hope in her otherwise lifeless eyes.

I couldn’t bring myself to watch as I extinguished that hope, so I looked at my feet. “They didn’t make it, but they both gave their lives protecting the world.”

“Protecting you, more like it.” I saw her take a step back then lean forward, and I realized she was about to take a swipe at me. Her claws met only air as I leaned back to avoid her. She tried a few more times, but my reflexes were too sharp to allow her to land a single blow. Finally, with a yowl of frustration, she sank to her knees and started crying.

Her tears were infectious, and before I realized it, tears were falling from my eyes as well. Despite what I had promised Oliver, I had never made time to grieve Apollo properly. I hadn’t mourned him or Lea either. Adjusting to city life had kept me too busy to think of anything but myself, but here in the village, I would have lots of free time with nothing to do but grieve.

Desperate for something to distract me from my pain, I searched around for a way to keep busy. Rubbing my eyes with the back of my arm, I ran up to the crippled farmer. “Give me that.” I tried to grab the hoe from him, but he pulled it away from my grasp.

“Paws off. Get your own job.”

“But I just want to help. You’ll never finish at the rate you’re going.”

“Ha! Help, is it? You always acted like you was too good for everyone and everythin’, and now you wanna help? Maybe I can’t plow this field by myself, but I’m where I belong, doin’ what I do best. You, on the other hand, don’t belong here. Shoo! Git!”

He was right—I didn’t belong in the village. It was a mistake to come back. Maybe I couldn’t stay in the city, but I sure as hell couldn’t stay here. Nothing had changed. The village was still boring, remote, and filled with small-minded people I didn’t get along with.

I dragged my feet back to where my mother was standing and buried my head in her shoulder. “Oliver was right. I’m like one of those villagers who couldn’t make it in the city and returns only to isolate themselves from everyone. I don’t fit in anywhere.”

“That doesn’t sound like something a human would say. Humans are adaptable.”

“I’m a human, but…” The words I didn’t want to say caught in my throat. They felt so wrong, even if I knew they were irrefutable.

Luna interrupted our moment by tugging on my arm. “Hey, Sprout, give me your gun.”

I brushed her away. “You’ll get your own when you come of age.” After what happened to the village, the Federation decided we needed to be armed with more than powerspears.

“Can’t wait that long. The folks who killed Ma and Pa are still out there.”

I turned to address Mom. “They haven’t been caught yet?”

“We lost track of the two dozen or so who did not enter the Futarchy, but we have some promising leads. Because of the bribes you forced them to make, we were able to track down where they were getting their money from, but the wastelands are vast. If you are thinking of going after them yourself, don’t. You’ve already done enough.”

“But there’s no one better suited to the task than me. I’m a human, and humans take responsibility, remember?”

An epiphany struck as those words left my mouth. They felt right: human and, not human, but. 

I’m a human, and I’m a nekomimi, and I’m a girl, and I’m a hunter, and I’m a killer. Labels like that are useful, but they don’t define us.

Nor are we completely unique individuals. Even snowflakes, renowned for their uniqueness, are all composed of ice. I share genetics, instincts, culture, and more with both humans and cats. We are more alike than we are different.

Past a certain point, it’s useless to worry about it. I exist in this broken world, as Lea called it. So do those bastards, but not for long. I will hunt them down, one by one if I have to, and make sure they can never hurt anyone again. If I’m lucky, maybe I’ll find somewhere I belong, but if not, I’ll create one. If I'm strong enough to save the world, I should be strong enough to change it.

From now on, that's who I'll be: human or cat, I will carve out my destiny with my own claws.

The End