Litte Hunter
From the ground, the dot looked like nothing more than a passing plane. A dim light in the sky barely visible through the gloomy haze of city lights. The ship lingered for just a moment, slowing as it arced away from Earth. Away from her.
It was colder than she expected.
Nanku breathed it in to grow more accustomed. She'd proceeded quicky from the landing zone in the mountains to reach the city. A sea breeze met her on arrival. Bracing, especially after all the years she'd spent in far more tropical and humid environments.
Dawn crawled alongside her, pressing her side into Nanku's and vibrating her whole body for warmth. Red and black striped chitin shining from a fresh molt. The plates were layered like armor, protecting Dawn's fleshier joints. Long scything claws swooped back as the giant hornet moved on her knuckles. On her back, two large plates flexed back and forth, frilly spines helping her to sense the wind and air.
Nanku reached up, scratching at the softer shell under the alien hornet's jaw.
Dawn's chest rumbled, a satisfied sound rumbling out of her throat. Dusk chittered on Nanku's other side, mandibles clapping and flexing their finger-like joints as he tasted the air.
Which tasted like garbage, a smell Nanku realized she was grateful not to remember.
Dawn growled.
"Shush," Nanku replied. "I know." They didn't like the smell either. "At least you only smell it once."
Fortunately, she was accustomed to smells in all their varieties. She could filter it out. Mostly.
Dusk grumbled.
"Baby," Nanku jested quietly. A big baby. The twins were both larger than most of the dogs she found in the city. She'd need to take care to be sure they weren't seen.
She was glad to have them. The twins had been her companions for nearly seven years. Some of the clan gave her trouble for keeping 'hunting hounds.' Nanku ignored them. The twins were hunt prizes, and she'd use them as any other tool in her arsenal.
Never give up a tool, Pe'dte always said.
Nanku knew how to use them.
The twins leaned forward, compound eyes reflecting the light of the street below. The city was familiar but alien. Her mind turned over the word. Alien. Ironic.
She was born in Brockton Bay. Lived in the city for the first ten years of her life. Yet, after the last ten years, it felt like another world. A jungle of concrete and glass with asphalt rivers, giant mechanical beasts, and droves of bugs.
Small, unimpressive bugs. Only a few she could use as weapons aside from the twins. At least they were many. Eyes and ears too numerous to count, but numbers had never been a problem. She tracked them all. A horde of small silence skittering back and forth as she used every sense at her disposal.
The senses were a bit off, nothing as sophisticated as Dusk or Dawn's senses, let alone her own. They were sufficient.
Every floor. Each hall, room, and corner was mapped. She heard voices. Saw the rooms. Tasted the air fresheners, and some might be worse than the smell of garbage.
And she saw all from her quiet rooftop corner. Still. Never rely too much on any one tool was another line Pe'dte enjoyed repeating.
With a thought, Nanku cycled the vision modes of her bio-mask. Heat. Electromagnetic. Radiation. Luminescent. The electromagnetic mode would be helpful. Power coursed through the city along cables like one big circuit board. A net of flowing electrons worked almost as well as her bugs for mapping the interiors of the buildings.
There were people.
Not as many as bugs, but many.
Men and women. Children. Some watched TV—Nanku remembered watching it with her own family long ago. Others were on computers or talking on phones. They ate. Walked. Laughed. Played.
A window into her past before Pe'dte rescued her from the woods and took her into the stars.
She resented that, for a time. She got over it. Her skills were well-earned. Her abilities proven. It was a more fulfilling life than anything her mother had been prepared to let her live. She adapted, and she survived.
Part of her worried returning to Earth would bring up old feelings.
There was some small relief that it didn't bring up the feelings she'd feared.
Nanku watched a woman and a girl in a room under her feet. They were mother and daughter. The same hair marked their heads. Similar voices. The spider in the corner of the room could see that. They were arguing, shouting at one another. The older woman pleaded. The younger stomped her foot and pointed. The words were hard to make out, but Nanku's fists balled as she watched.
She remembered her similar argument and didn't care to dwell on it.
She'd deal with her mother when she found the woman.
A message pinged, sent directly to the miniature computer mounted on her left forearm. The Yautja script scrolled over her visor, more natural to her than any other after so many years.
one year, little hunter
one year and we'll return
whatever you decide
With that, the light above winked out.
And she was without Pe'dte, Uncle Rhark, or anyone else she'd lived with the past ten years.
With a slow, steadying breath, Nanku rose to her feet.
She was tall.
Nearly six feet of long muscled limbs and faint scars. Netting covered her body from neck to ankle, cloth wrapped around her breasts and groin. Armored plates protected her vitals, chest, forearms, and hips. Her boots and gloves were solid metal with leather and fur linings, pointed at their tips for gripping. Various pieces of equipment stuck wherever they could rest securely.
A string of carved bones hung from the six-eyed mask over her face, and long black hair bound into tightly woven braids behind her head.
Nanku stepped up to the edge and looked down at the city. The street below was distant. Forty stories down. Busied with people walking about and vehicles driving back and forth.
There was nothing to be afraid of.
She'd faced worse than Brockton Bay.
Trapping the computer's controls with two fingers. A shroud enveloped her. The air wrapped and bent, and with it Nanku vanished from sight. Nothing but a faint ripple marked her departure from the roof of the building. Imperceptible in the dark.
Behind her, Dusk and Dawn shook, and their wings burst out. The thick veining membranes fluttered slowly at first, then rapidly as Nanku directed them. Walking toward another edge, she stepped off the roof and dropped.
The air whipped past her, throwing her braids up and over her head as Dusk and Dawn launched themselves into the sky.
Falling two stories, Nanku braced and let her legs collapse as she struck the next roof over.
The cloak flickered on contact and Nanku rolled with her shoulder. Lightning coursed over her form, revealing her presence for only the faintest moment. Her skin—tough as many armors since the night ten years ago—absorbed the impact. Only a dull ache echoed. An ache she ignored as her feet threw her up and forward into a run.
Aiming for the next building, a simple mental command was all she needed to send Dusk and Dawn ahead. At the same time, veiled silver claws shot out of her gauntlets, each the length of a large knife and hooked forward to a razor-thin tip. Sprinting full, Nanku jumped the alley and drove the wristblades into the brickwork of the next building. The hooks on her boot tips caught the stone and held her weight, and with practiced balance, she climbed the side of the building to the roof.
From there, she ran again, jumping, leaping, and climbing while her senses and mask began the groundwork for her goal.
Brockton Bay was vast and cavernous, but the rules of a hunt were always the same.
With her mapping system set to record, Nanku ran through the city. East toward the bay. Her cloak shimmer darted across windows. Too quick for anyone to see any more than a flicker of light. Her boot bottoms silenced her steps as she went.
No one saw anything worth concerning herself with.
She needed to know the terrain. She needed to know the prey. Above both, she needed shelter. It would be a year before a ship returned for her. That meant fall and winter, and she knew both could be cold. She'd need shelter—somewhere Dusk and Dawn could stay warm if the temperature got too low—and she needed a reliable supply of food.
She'd spotted signs of game in the woods beyond the city but leaving every day to eat was out of the question.
She needed information first.
Dusk and Dawn flew overhead, their long bodies aloft on beating wings while their dark hides absorbed the light from below. She used their eyes to help her, finding places to mark as waypoints or very busy streets and windows to avoid. For now.
The city bore markers everywhere. Street signs and symbols. Logos on buildings and vehicles. Some she knew, and some she didn't.
The symbol Pe'dte drew for her was still tucked away under her belt. A simple icon that appeared to be a C inside of a Q, blue and green. Nanku saw nothing like it as she went, but she kept the icon on her mind. It was what Pe'dte tracked to chase the R'ka. Nanku kept her eye out but finding any specific symbol in the utter forest of them was hard.
The terrain didn't help. Many corners and shadows. Her mask let her see through both, but knowing what markings were on different signs or vehicles was hard. Especially when most were in motion.
Brockton Bay would not be the most dangerous hunting ground she'd ever traversed—Bendar had mosquitos the size of trucks—but it was limiting. The streets were dense or sparse. Buildings were not uniform but not as easily navigated as treetops. The presence of so many people was limiting.
Yet, the city never felt that dangerous.
And not just because the bugs were small and humans were the largest predators she'd encounter.
Every few blocks, she saw something she recognized. A building. A street. Even a derelict vehicle sitting in a vacant lot overgrown by grass. A playground with a rusted slide and swing set. The sandbox was a small pond.
Places that sparked faint memories. Thoughts of red hair and bright eyes. Laughter. Warmer feelings she'd not expected.
Nanku absently considered she might not stay in Brockton Bay. It had been ten years. Her prey could have left in all that time. Maybe she'd be lucky, and they'd already been found and caught. Not dead, hopefully.
The Yautja had their own ideas of justice. Close and personal. For all their savage brutality—and the Yautja embraced it—there was a code.
Killing the defenseless. Killing children. Those things demanded answers, and a hunter answered with sharpened edges.
She kept her eyes out for the logo.
Stopping at a corner, Nanku leaned over the rooftop and looked at the street below. She watched a woman with a pair of small girls cross a street. They held hands, and the look in the woman's eyes…
Not familiar.
She knew it should be, but after a decade with the clan, Nanku could only imagine Pe'dte when she thought of her 'mother.' No Yautja ever looked soft, even if they had softer spots.
The huntress had saved her. Healed the wounds the R'ka inflicted on her. Took her away. By the time she was no longer afraid, Nanku no longer wanted to correct Pe'dte's assumption she was an orphan.
Nanku never corrected any of the clan until recently.
Looking through the streets around her, Nanku was sure she'd reached the 'Docks.' There were houses—duplexes mostly—and small lawns arranged into blocks through the area. Small corner shops and stores. A few strips. Not as many gang tags as Nanku remembered. The few roads she recalled, she recalled because she'd known to avoid them. They were dangerous.
That seemed to have changed in ten years.
Cleaner streets greeted her return to what appeared to be her old neighborhood. Buildings she expected were gone, replaced with newer, larger structures. Roads at a few points were too wide or expanded.
She was definitely in the Docks, but they weren't so familiar anymore.
Enough had changed she couldn't find the house. Her father's house. Sending Dusk and Dawn out high and on the edges of her range didn't reveal it.
Was it gone? Knocked down? After the camp, maybe…
Nanku pushed the feeling aside.
The house didn't matter. In Dusk's eyes, she could see the Union building.
Nanku moved in that direction. She couldn't find the house, but the union building was a place she knew. She'd spent time there when she was young. Knew people there. People who might have information she could use. Information she needed. Any trail went cold after ten years.
She needed to sniff her quarry out, carefully and methodically.
Nanku stopped. Her head snapped around, looking south two blocks with Dawn's eyes.
The parking garage was gone.
In its place stood a two-story building. Flying Dawn around from above, she could see the sign over the doors. Brockton Bay Humanitarian Society.
Nanku's hand tightened as she looked across the street. She knew there was a gravestone, but that wasn't the place she'd snuck off to whenever she could slip out of the house.
He didn't die in a graveyard.
He died there. Murdered.
And they knocked the building down and—
Dusk and Dawn landed on the building's roof, carefully positioned to avoid being seen by the cameras. Carefully, Nanku dropped to ground level and maneuvered through the alleys still shrouded in her cloak.
The Society building was busy.
A long narrow parking lot was busy with trucks and cars. People came and went. Some families. Some groups of men in uniforms. The building was clean but still infested with enough bugs to see inside. Many people and what looked like a large store. Little different from others.
Behind the building, an alley led to a loading dock.
Behind that, an enclosed area set apart with tall walls. From above, Nanku immediately noticed it through the twins. Too thin to be defensible. Likely easily overlooked from the ground.
Moving around the side of the building into the space, Nanku came before the plaque.
The letters took her a few moments. She hadn't read English in years, while the Yautja script in her mask came easily.
Danny Hebert
1973-2003
Husband. Father. Union Man.
The corner of the plaque identified it as donated by the Brockton Bay Dockworkers Association.
Nanku turned. A door leading into the building was directly behind her. As if it existed solely to provide access to the small, memorialized space. An awning hanging off the roof covered four large pallets filled with dog food in packaged and sealed boxes. Nanku recognized the symbols of medicine on the stickers.
A camera was conspicuously placed to observe the dog food and medicine rather than the door.
Strange, but Nanku dismissed the mystery.
She turned to her father's grave and dropped her cloak. For a brief moment, she knelt and bowed her head.
Her lungs filled with a deep breath, and she didn't know what to say. Reading took a moment to come back to her. So did speaking full and proper English. She'd used a mutilated form of Yautja to speak for a decade. Many of the sounds of proper speech her human throat and mouth couldn't make.
"Ah—Eh—" Humiliating, but Nanku endured until she got the sounds right. "I'm back, Dad."
The Yautja were not an overly sentimental species. The dead were dead. The living were living. Sometimes the living killed the living and made them dead. Such was life.
But the old ache came back.
The crushing weight and guilt.
Dusk and Dawn fluttered their wings and whined from the rooftop. Nanku obscured the camera with bugs and loosened her hold on the twins.
Acting on their own will, they dropped to her sides and nestled alongside her. Dusk came around her front, leaning into Nanku's stomach and chest while he vibrated to warm her. Dawn covered her from behind, head on a swivel as her eyes scanned their surroundings.
Nanku breathed again and stilled her quaking.
Taylor—She wanted fresh milk for her cereal.
The police found the carton near the corpse. No one had ever blamed her for his death as much as she did. Admittedly, her mother had been far too drunk in the days that followed to blame anyone for anything. After the ambulance, she slowed her drinking. She replaced being drunk with being controlling and stifling. Shutting Taylor up in the house and refusing to let her leave.
Nanku still carried the bitterness of that. The betrayal.
She didn't miss the irony. The first time in years her mother let her out of sight, and a bunch of black-hided monsters killed everyone.
Even Pe'dte's sons didn't survive.
Only Pe'dte, and Nanku.
Annette Hebert probably thought she was dead. And there was a bit of guilt there too. However bitter her memories, Nanku didn't wish further suffering on the woman who bore her. Her angers and disappointments didn't extend to hate for the woman.
Unfinished business. So much unfinished business.
And Nanku intended to finish it.
Finish her business and settle Taylor Hebert's soul once and for all.
Nanku rose and turned away. The twins jumped and scurried alongside her, wings fluttering to take them back into the sky.
She didn't belong on Earth anymore. It wasn't her home. She belonged with Pe'dte and her clan. Her new family.
They lived in the stars. They went to places people on Earth didn't even know existed. Nanku loved them. However hard those first years were, they were in the past. Like Taylor. She wanted to go back to them. She returned to Earth solely to close the door once and for all.
To quiet the dead. To put the girl she'd once been to rest alongside them. To give them peace.
She'd find who killed Danny Hebert and who unleashed R'ka on a summer camp.
She'd find them. Hunt them. Catch them.
She'd run the answers to those wrongs to the ground, and she'd skin them alive.
"Be back soon, Daddy."