Most of the heads shook sideways, eager to get on with it.
"I have a second-cousin who drowned when she was ten," someone said, and then, "Ow!"
"Pillock. That's not the kind of thing we're talking about, we're writing this essay on the real disappearances - the 'Gobblers' stories all the kids are going on about, so it's the untraceable kids we have to look at."
"You think the Professor will really go for this?"
"He has to, it's modern news and that's what his essay will be on."
"But he's publishing in the iBerlin Chronicle/i and the Gobblers stuff is mostly rumor -"
"Then we make it news, stop being so narrow minded and see what the people are talking about!" Clearly the group leader was agitated by the teammates he'd wound up with. "If you lot can't handle finding and reporting on things before other papers print them then you should drop out now. You know how they used to get the best news and sell more papers than the other bloke?"
"They'd send some kid out to the cargo ships before they made it to port to report on the prices of fruit and tea and such."
An accurate response. Mental cursing followed.
"Exactly that." The group leader went on as if he'd asked the question to create such an opportunity for one of the other lowly members to shine.
"And now we're going to do the same - go out and get the full report on what people want to hear, ibefore/i the ships have anchored and the cargo's already unloaded." He beamed to keep the metaphor intact throughout his small talk. As group leader he'd be the one whose name was published as assistant alongside the other Scholars. Empty cargo hold or not, he'd make sure his ship would not be sinking.
--
It was very clear to the other kids straight off that she was foreign. Becki pronounced her 'i's' too long and mostly stumbled when trying to emphasize more than two syllables properly.
"I would like to play with everyone? Yes?" She asked again and smiled her wide trollish smile as far and, she hoped, appealing as it could go. "Ee would leek to play weeth evORyone? Yes?" Her mouth seemed to form the wrong way around the words, as if she'd been using it the wrong way for English since she was born. Which was true enough.
"We en't up to nothin' so you en't welcome here." One of the older boys spit a peach pit from his mouth at the zeppelin docking tower.
And Becki was received much the same way everywhere else in the new city.
Her parents worked - father for a bakery, mother dying fabrics and pressing them. Their hours were long and Becki was lonely. So she'd occupy herself in the ways she'd copy off the local urchins - spitting fruit pits at the docking tower as the older boy had, putting grass strands between her hands and blowing on them and reshifting and blowing again and pulling them tighter until the perfect puff from her mouth resonated just right over the blade and brought a shrill ifweeeep/i noise into the meadow. She didn't have any toys, but rocks were plentiful enough things when you were a young girl with an imagination. She didn't have any friends or company but she had sticks and the ground and could draw people in the dirt to talk to her.
So when the beautiful woman with the golden furred d?on first passed her, walking hand-in-hand with a grubby little boy who looked her own age, if smaller, she hardly noticed. Being so huddled into imagination for company will keep a person from noticing a lot of things.
She did notice the second time though, because she had some impression that the child - a girl this time, dirty and bleeding from one knee - couldn't belong to the beautiful woman in her elegant dress. Yet hand-in-hand they walked. The woman smiled lovingly at the little girl and spoke quietly, and Becki suspected something pleasant was happening.
It was dusk, her parents would be gone until the very last moment of dusk ran into the very first moment of pitch black. Becki wanted to follow them, to see if the woman really was fond of the urchins. Perhaps she had toys for them or treated them to meals. Or maybe by some chance breeding they really were hers. But they were people. And one thing Becki had learned in the new city was that people didn't like her. She was slow, and foreign, and poor.
And she was next.
The beautiful woman approached her just as Becki was shaking the dirt and flaking splinters from her skirt. Becki's little d?on changed into an unnaturally small collie and yipped before Becki realised who had approached.
"Hello." The woman said.
Becki was amazed. Something pleasant was happening, and it was happening to her. The woman smelled softly like lilac - a facial cream or hair perfume in some dainty pale pink tincture one would inevitable be drawn into calling 'lovely' with perfect honesty. Her glamour was enormous, and Becki instantly found herself both overwhelmed and enamoured of the woman in front of her.
"what's your name?" The woman asked softly. Her golden d?on placed a hand on the furry muzzle of the little collie. He yipped again and changed smoothly into a ladybug.
"Sorry," said Becki, "We're not supposed to talk to strangers."
"That's good to know that." The woman smiled. "What a smart child you are!"
Becki smiled tentatively, "But you are nice and you are not a stranger. I have seen you here before, and you are a good person to the other children." The word 'cheelderEN' seemed to put off the woman for a moment as she digested it. "My name is Becki."
"Becki is a lovely name," the golden furred d?on had her ladybug d?on in his hand, climbing around and around in circles while he flipped his arms one way then the other to follow the moment with an impish cuteness to his exaggerated limb-y movements.
The woman laughed softly while she watched her d?on's progress. She leaned closer to Becki, and the scent of the soft glamour Becki had smelled when she first approached wove over her now like lights dancing in her eyes. She inhaled. The woman reached out a hand to her, and Becki didn't hesitate to take it.
The last anyone saw Becki, she was walking to the docks with the woman.
--
"That's the most of the first hand reports we got." The sole female member of the group spoke. She never said much, but what she had said hit the leader hard - despite their weeks of interviews and efforts, they had only the vaguest rumours to go on after the point where the woman takes the children to the dock. Or the van drives them away. Or the black masked trio stuffs them into a sack. Or they simply disappear right before the watcher's eyes. Even the witness reports varied.
From there on, all they had was rumor. The group would need to put a twist on it yet - modern news was the paper, they'd already dedicated too much work to abandon the project now.
--
When the ships arrive, the children are unloaded to a private area in the basement of the warehouse waiting open and cold for them. They're led in two groups - one for girls, one for boys. The adults who lead them look like young teachers in that over tired way of dealing with too many young children at once. They don't pay any attention no matter what the children say to them. But they are strong enough to discipline any of the children daring to step out of line.
The boys and girls are shown their separate toilets. And some of the boys will run off to have a piss after their long time on the ship with only a bucket. The girls usually hold back, because the toilets here aren't much nicer than the buckets, even if the toilets don't rock from side to side or spill gunk and leave traces on their fingers.
And then they're shown to their dormitories. No one tells them much, but they know the people here don't know much either. They tell the children to be quiet, and to get some sleep, because they'll be traveling again tomorrow.
And they split up the group before the children leave again. Even to their young confused eyes the separating is easy to spy. The bigger boys go into one group, the prettiest softest looking girls in another, and everyone left becomes a muddle of concern.
The boys are bargained to the Tartars.
Deep, they travel into the sulfur mines where chains are bound around their ankles so they can't run. And if they try to run, the Tartars will bind a plank of wood along one leg, and lay the boy down on the ground, and bash his leg with a hammer against the plank so that it's broken through and through. And the boy will be in great pain, and his leg may be broken and sore and bleeding for some time. And some have died of the infection from that because the hammers are covered in soot and their bones might break the skin and penetrate the plank lashed around the leg and the healing bone might try to grow into the plank, forcing the foreman to re-crush the wounded leg, or sever it entirely. And then the boy has no hope left at all, and they remove his chains because he cannot run at all.
And the other boys in this group, who are good and obedient will be chained just the same, locked into prison cells in the mines at night just the same. Nightmares will catch them always and anxiety may overtake everything as nightly sounds of falling timbers and crashing walls arrive to them in their cells deep within the mine shafts.
And the fires that light the caverns and the rich deposits will become too bright as their hope fades. And eventually they will die and fade just as the last group of boys brought in did. And a new group will be sold to replace them. Because here they are only tools of labor.
The girls, the pretty ones and the gentle ones, go separate ways.
Some are sold to rich men who pay deeply for their perversions. And the girls pay even more deeply in their hearts. They may be beaten, they may be raped, they may be forced into unspeakable ways. But many of them will have opportunity and many of them will take it - and their life - into their own hands.
And some are sold off like cattle from the herd. They may find themselves locked in a closet, kept well fed and neglected of sunlight for many weeks. Without company, or certainty, only fear as a constant they live. Well nourished, neglected, the girl grows fat and pale. And then her buyer sees her again as he brings her food to her, and he grows hungry himself. Because here they are the objects of lustful sins.
The others arrive in a group to a hidden laboratory.
They'll tell you, the children who are still left when the new group arrives, that the worst part is hearing the others screaming - one by one as they're taken away.
And the new children will ask: "Screaming?"
And the others will nod their heads with far-too-wide eyes and deep circles and creases on their faces like they've not slept in years and they'll whisper: "Like pain. Like pain is all they have."
And they'll agree then and there that they'd rather die than be taken away one-by-one like the others before them. But like the others before them, they're still kids, and they're still shortsighted, and even though they'll hear one more of them each night screaming in terror and in agony, they'll still think they can escape. But they can't. Because here is the worst thing: here is the Experimental Station.
One-by-one the experiments will happen. Things you wouldn't dream of even in the worst nightmare ever after the worst day ever because normal people couldn't think to do them - only monsters could.
The monsters will burn them alive sometimes: sometimes slowly, sometimes separate from their d?ons, sometimes together, sometimes just their d?on. And if their d?on tries to take flight and get away they might light his wings on fire first.
The monsters will poison them, and bury them, and drown them, and tear them from their d?ons, and tear them limb-from-limb, and cover them in thick oil-silk material. And they'll meticulously plot out how the children die. Each death will become its own separate chart, its own little file, and it's own point on the greater scatter graph. The bodies are incinerated.
But the most haunting thing of all is outside the Experimental Station: a tall rectangular building like a police box or an upturned coffin made in a pale blue with a push-bar door locked for restricted access. And inside they hang crisp white charts on white tack boards. It's where they store their measurements. And the monsters write on them in perfectly bland script, things like:
Subject 43 died of asphyxiation four minutes twenty six seconds after administration of Strain VX2-2 directly into femoral artery of her person.
Note Subject 42 for comparison of injection site.
Note Subject 41 for comparison of injection site.
Note Subject 40 for comparison of injection site.
Note Subject 39 for comparison of child weight.
Note Subject 38 for comparison of child weight.
Note Subject 37 for comparison of gender.
And Subject 43 would then become a note on the bottom of Subject 44 to note for comparison of human v. d?on injection. And the storage unit would fill up very quickly.
Because the Gobblers exist.
--
"Now we'll just end it as what it is - rumour. We needn't say it's fact, just that it's fact these are the types of things parents are telling their children to keep them to behave. It's a study of the human mind, really."
The group nodded. Ill-content or happy with their reporting skills and their nearly-finished paper, it was later than they'd like and they'd already been forced to raid the late-night campus cafe in search of coffee and meat pasties to keep them going for the night.
"You really think the Professor will buy this?" The nay-sayer was at it again, but far too late into the night to start with his tiring teammates.
The leader yawned loudly before responding. "Fact or Fiction it doesn't really matter, you just have to say it the right way and no one will know the difference unless it bites them in the shit-end of next week."
