Seriph went home and sat in her room for a long time, contemplating what she thought she had seen last night. It could have been heat tendrils caused by a steam pipe, but since when do they put steam pipes on the outside of a building? That had to have been the extraterrestrial. If it wasn't, then who carried her home? Who closed up her wound? Who had injected her in the stomach? She was convinced that it was a homicidal alien that had aided her. Why would it do that instead of just leave her to die or take her head as a trophy?
"There would be no honor in that."
A shadow passed behind her eyes and she frowned. She didn't know where that phrase had come from or why she had chose the word 'honor'. It had always discouraged her that she felt her mind was not her own. Something else seemed to access it and make her say or think strange things.
She leaned against the wall and lifted up her shirt again to inspect her stomach. The film was peeling off, but the wound was not opening up again. It was indeed cauterized. The needle hole was beginning to fade and there was a scab over it. For a brief moment she wondered, as she often did, would her stomach begin oozing out more than just blood if she peeled off the scab.
She left the scab in place and laid on her stomach. The pain that had been troubling her since the incident that caused her injury was still absent. She sighed and felt she needed to stop referring to it as an incident. It wasn't any sort of incident. It was just her own instability and access to a long boning knife. Her organs should have been completely destroyed, but the doctor said that the angle in which she thrust the knife and where she had done it saved her life. The blade had missed every organ and had left her with only a hole in her stomach that hurt like nothing she had felt before.
A shining example of her ability to screw things up. She stared at her floor for a while, but that lost it's intrigue and she was soon asleep.
The next morning her alarm woke her once again and she staggered across the room to put it out of her misery. Arwen burst in the door and glared at Seriph. Not having any clue as to what she had done this time, she just stood there with a blank look on her face and focused on a spot just to the left of Arwen's head.
"What are you doing?"
Serpih never had much faith in her sister's mental capacity, but she at least thought that Arwen remembered things.
"I have to go to school."
"What was that weird noise you were making last night?"
Seriph raised an eyebrow and blinked a few times.
"I fell asleep before you got home."
"It was like a clicking noise, really fucking annoying."
"Right. Like there is something in the world that doesn't annoy you."
"Fuck you."
Seriph didn't know where her anger came from, but she picked up her alarm clock and threw in her sister's direction. She was amazed to realize that after her hand let go of it, she was yelling an advancing towards her sister.
"Look you dirty whore! I don't complain about when you bring home a new guy every week and bang him on the couch. I don't complain about you coming home at four in the morning and slam doors, scream and carry on like a lunatic because you couldn't sleep with some random guy. I don't complain when strange men follow me around because they have some beef with you. So you need to lay off me before I decide to pick up my old habit of stabbing things with knives. Ok?"
She had been watching Arwen's eyes this entire time and she saw a look of panic in them that she knew rabbits got before their hearts exploded. She wouldn't have been surprised if Arwen had urinated on herself. It pleased her to watch Arwen slowly step backwards, into the hall and out of sight, never taking her eyes off of Seriph. This was a type of power that Seriph had never felt before and she was almost drunk on it.
After the shock had passed and Seriph could actually function properly again, she realized that she had fallen asleep before injecting herself. That must be the cause of her sudden outburst and uncontrollable rage. She decided to inject herself with one and a half doses this morning because her hands were still shaking and she didn't feel in complete control yet.
School went by in a blur and she felt she might have missed something in all of her classes. She wasn't worried about it. Academic achievement wasn't her biggest concern and she could learn in a week the same thing that took the others a whole trimester to absorb.
She was walking past a news stand when she glimpsed at a headline and it sucked all her attention to it. She picked up the magazine and read it again to make sure she wasn't hallucinating. It did say what she thought it had said. She didn't give much credit to who came up with the headline, but the article was more important anyway.
Meteor: A space rock or a space ship?
She quickly flipped to the page the article was on and read through it. It was about the latest meteor here and the murders. The article said that aliens were harvesting human skulls for some sort of new technology that required them. Seriph snorted and shook her head. That isn't what they are doing, but at least she isn't the only one that thinks it's and alien killing people.
She bought the magazine and read it on her way to the library. That was her favorite source of information.
The internet was full of extraterrestrial lore. Some of it seemed lucid, but most of it was complete rubbish. Seriph could never believe that pigs from space were on a covert suicide mission and that's why people shouldn't eat pork. If Seriph knew anything, it was that organisms everywhere differed and there couldn't be any sort of creature in space that resembled a pig enough to be convincing. Maybe mostly, but there would have to be some sort of variation. Maybe it would be green.
She read more and more and began to see the way that these hunters thought. Her theory broadened and began to fit together. There was an honor system of some sort. Weapons provoked them, they seemed to stay away from women. She remembered the article she had read about the detectives in L.A. The female detective had told a reporter that she had been pregnant when the 'monster' attacked her, but let her go for no reason. Seriph frowned. So even if a woman is holding a gun, these beings wont kill them if they are pregnant.
Her head was beginning to fill with too much nonsense so she closed out the browsers and turned the computer off. She moved to a semi secluded booth near the window and pulled out a notebook. She began to write down words and short phrases having to do with what she had read. Her right brain started to kick in and she drew a few circles, underlined things here and there, then drew lines indicating that things were connected. After she was done she frowned.
She had just given herself the answer. She even felt she knew the name of these creatures. She slowly wrote a word across the top right corner of her notebook. 'Yautja'. Seriph's brain started to pulsate within her head and she closed her eyes for a moment and saw flashes. A bright room that smelled of disinfectant, a scaly hand wrapped around her own, a strange clicking noise in her left ear.
Her eyes opened and she saw that she had knocked her notebook on the ground and she was standing up. A few patrons were staring at her with worry in their eyes. She knelt down to collect her notebook and saw that it was open to a page where she had quoted Isaac Asimov. She read it and her brows furrowed even more. "Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what's right."
In her head, she could hear someone speaking now. A man with a gravelly voice was talking to someone, Seriph closed her eyes, but still couldn't see who they were.
"I'm not going to let a sense of morals get in the way of what I'm doing, because I'm doing the right thing here. I know I am."
Seriph slammed her notebook closed and shoved it into her bag. She hated that voice, but she didn't know who's it was, let alone why she hated it. After collecting herself she left the library to get home and lay in bed for a few hours. Would Arwen be there? Seriph had a strong feeling that Arwen would be avoiding her at all costs until regaining her hostility. That wouldn't take long.