Mina
Marian
Kelly died in a one-car accident near her home in Turtle Lake, Montana, on
August twentieth, at the age of forty-two.
Marian
is predeceased by her parents, Rand and Millicent “Millie” Kelly, and her
brother, Christopher.
Marian
was born in Prospero, California, and studied Psychology at the University of
California,–San Francisco. She held black belts in multiple martial arts and
was an accomplished member of the Turtle Lake Hunting Club.
I
skipped the details of Marian’s perfunctory funeral service, put the newspaper
clipping back in the plain, unstamped envelope it had arrived in, and filed it
out of sight; not that this did anything to clear the smudged print from my
vision. Alone, it was unsettling. In a stack of six other recent obituaries of
other Splinter hunters, in six other anonymous envelopes with my name stamped
on the front, it sent a very clear message.
I’m
no stranger to death threats. And at the time of Marian’s death, it had been
less than a month since the Splinter who poses as my father told me to my face
that if Ben or I fought back again, if we even tried to run, the humans would
be wiped out of my infested little town of Prospero completely.
I’d
fact-checked each obituary as it came in.
Every
one of the hunters had died under circumstances that looked very much like
suicide. Most of the obituaries didn’t say so, exactly, but after the few that
did, omissions of the cause of death and euphemisms like “one-car accident” and
“chemical overdose” were easy enough to decipher. Sometimes, when the deaths
had been a little more bizarre or had occurred on slow news days, there were more
details to be found when I looked up the rest of the news sources in the area.
These
weren’t suicidal people. They weren’t quitters. Wondering how someone could
possibly have made it appear as if Drake Tymon had slit his wrists and throat alone
in an industrial freezer that was later found barricaded from the inside was
filling my head quite effectively with distractingly disturbing scenarios.
But
the thing bothering me most about the obituaries was the fact that all seven of
their subjects were currently loitering around my bedroom.
Sometimes,
if I stared directly at them for long enough, they seemed to remember that they
were supposed to be dead and vanish accordingly, temporarily. Otherwise I could
see them, silently and blankly watching me work, as clearly as I could see my
bookshelves, my bed, and the stark beige walls and end tables that, until
recently, had held my very large and very useless anti-Splinter amulet collection.
Nightmares
are no more new to me than death threats. That’s not what these were. A hunter
would die and join the rest of the hallucinations in my room the day after the obituary
arrived, and then another one would die and join him without fail. If things
carried on this way, my room was going to become unmanageably crowded quite
soon.
It
wasn’t even as if I were going to miss the hunters. A few of them, like
Drake, I’d known pretty well years ago, but I’d stopped assuming they were
still alive—never mind still human—long before they’d turned up dead. Others, like
Marian, I only knew by reputation in the first place.
Not
knowing them well only made it stranger that they were here, after everything
I’d lived through and lost without having suffered from any sensory distortions
before.
Ready?
The
text scrolled across my phone’s screen after Ben’s name.
Almost. I texted back.
I
wasn’t looking forward to conducting the upcoming meeting for my entire Network,
a roomful of people who had nothing in common other than their knowledge of Splinters
and their confidence in my judgment and clarity of perception. Ben had
insisted, though. A lot had changed, and people needed to be brought up to
speed.
Billy
was gone, lost to the Splinters, if we had ever even had him. Whatever had been
passing for my absentminded ally had been using us to breach the peace, such as
it was, for no one knew how long.
Ben
hadn’t even met some of the others yet. Our discovery of portals to other parts
of the world in the Splinter Warehouse had put an end to the Effectively
Certain Non-Splinters list, or at least had reduced it to a uselessly small number
of people. The only people in town I could really be effectively certain of
anymore were myself and Haley, since we’d both recently been ripped directly
out of replication pods. That wasn’t enough to work with, so I’d had to
downgrade my entire Network to Extremely Probable Non-Splinters and start
training myself to live with that because the alternative was not getting
anything done at all.
Ben
was still stubbornly under the impression that Haley’s presence on the list
alone qualified her as a Network member. I disagreed.
Most
important, we now knew more terms of the Splinter-Human treaty and exactly how
precarious our position was. Two human-on-humanoid Splinter kills by the same
human would mean all-out war, and Ben and I each had one strike already. And no
matter how careful we were, Billy and any like-minded Splinters would find a
way to incite that war sooner or later. We were counting on an unforeseen
miracle to make the human side a significant power before then.
As
someone who doesn’t believe in miracles, this wasn’t news I would enjoy
delivering, even on my best day.
I
finished up some new touches on the map over my desk—the new world map I’d
posted under the map of Prospero to track probable Splinter activity at the
other portals—and blinked hard, hoping the illusion of the hunters would fade
out at the usual time. Their faces were already getting blurry around the
edges, right on schedule.
That
was something, at least. I was going to be able to function for another day. If
my Network, the few humans still invested in finding or building that miracle,
found out what was happening to me, it would probably be the end of what hope
we had. They would give up on the one thing they all agreed on, my reliability,
and maybe they’d be right to do it. I’d probably do the same in their position.
But
even if I couldn’t see a difference between the walls and furniture that
constituted my room and the dead people that my brain had decided to
superimpose in front of them, at least I still knew the difference. I
still knew what was rational and what wasn’t. Before the first hunter had appeared,
the evidence of my senses had been the basis for almost everything I thought
and did. It was going to be difficult to get used their new fallibility, just
like the fallibility of the ECNS list. As long as the inner workings of my mind
were still in order, it was worth at least trying to do my job.
At
least, that’s what I told myself for the thirty-seventh time when I recognized
Ben’s knock on the front door above.
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