FUNERARY TRADITIONS

Deep down, if I was being honest, the observance was beginning to wear on me. It was a freezing, slate-gray day and we would have to stand here until Tobias appeared. We did this every year on the anniversary of my cousin Rachel's murder. I caught hold of my boredom and tried to smother it with thoughts of Tobias. He was growing so old. One day Ax and I would wait for him at the memorial, and he would simply not appear.

For the first couple of years Marco and Cassie came along to pay their respects to Rachel. Marco had stopped first, and then seven years ago Cassie followed. They had both learned how to loosen the grip that the past had over them. Something I wasn't ready to do, even after twenty years.

Rachel's memorial was a sort of amphitheater with a black gravestone embossed with her story at the center. In spring the flowerbeds diminished the severity of the cold thumbprint in the landscape, but it was the dead of winter and the wind created a vortex that was slowly numbing my arms and feet. I pulled a hip flask from my coat pocket and took a long pull. I saw Ax eyeing it.

"You want?" I offered it to Ax.

"Thank you p—thank you Jake," he said, taking the flask.

This was not the first time he'd tried whiskey, that was ten years ago. I smiled, remembering his expression as the liquor hit the back of his throat wrong. He'd still been using the teenage composite morph he'd taken from me and the other Animorphs.

Now his body was unfamiliar to me, an aesthetic blend of a couple of marines that had volunteered their DNA to be an adult morph for my old comrade - my old subordinate really. He never felt like my subordinate, but he sure did call me "Prince" a lot. He was handsome, a striking combination of fair skin and coal black hair and lashes. No matter what form Ax took he always turned out handsome, I wondered if I could ever get him to admit it was intentional.

"I have come prepared this year, Jake," Ax said, revealing a flask of his own with a leaping pikachu embossed on the front.

"Thanks bro," I said. I sipped and tasted sugar and melons. "What is this?"

"It is called "Midori". It goes very well with pineapple juice, but is still enjoyable on its own."

"Not a fan of the Jamiesons?"

"I am glad to share a drink with you but the fumes remind me of the fuel required for an internal combustion engine."

"Okay then," I say, contemplating sitting down on the cold concrete step. Not yet.

We made small talk about the presidential election. How the result would mean suffering for so many people. I found that I was almost speaking on autopilot. I'd talked with so many people about the rise of fascism in the USA I needed a break. I asked Ax to tell me about his life instead.

"My job has not changed since the last time we met, Prin— Jake. I am still the Andelite ambassador to earth."

"Sure, but what's it like? Surely you have colleagues that piss you off? Funny work stories? Paint a picture for me."

I half listened to Ax's anecdotes about annoying young arisths as I scanned the sky. An hour ago there was a promising speck on the horizon, but it stayed at the furthest reach of my view and then disappeared. I couldn't even tell if it was a bird or a drone.

Just before sunset a cab pulled up on the other side of the memorial to us, and a bright blond woman in a trenchcoat emerged. She held a single red rose.

"Prince Jake?"

"What's up?"

"The woman. She looks a lot like—" he trailed off, having mastered the human speech habit of leaving the most important words unsaid.

I looked across the memorial at her again. She looked familiar, in the way that all young pretty women look familiar. A little influencer face, a little girl next door, and yes a little like my cousin Rachel. How I remember her.

"Sure but it's not her. Do all humans look the same to you?"

"I can tell the difference between my friends," he said, missing or perhaps ignoring my joke.

"She's probably one of those Rachel effect girls. Although she's a little young."

There had been a wave of middle-class white women entering law enforcement and the military in the years immediately following Rachel's death, a significant spike that could be tied back to a single role model as it was with the Dana Scully and Temperance Brennan effects in STEM. I wondered how my guerilla fighter cousin would feel about her story being used to seduce women into the military industrial complex. If she'd lived long enough to see the things that were done in her name she might have turned guerilla fighter again. The Rachel effect girls were all in their mid-thirties now, like me. This woman looked around ten years younger.

We watched as she walked down to the black memorial and knelt on the concrete, placing the rose across the gold writing, and then pressed both hands into the polished stone. She murmured something I could not hear and then turned quickly to leave. I glimpsed the holes that tore in the knees of her stockings as she got back in the cab and drove off.

"Should I bring flowers? I never bring flowers," I say, more to myself than Ax.

"It is a human funerary tradition," says Ax.

A streak of orange develops on the horizon. I glance at my watch.

"It's past five. He's never this late," I said, "do you think this is the year he doesn't come?"

Ax's face was expressionless, but I knew this weird wrestling act. Grief for Tobias even while he still lives, or half lives. Distress at not knowing when the hawk's body would fail. And the shameful allure of relief that it might be over. The year that Tobias doesn't come back is the year we can put the anxiety over his safety to bed. It must be worse for Ax too. Tobias was Ax's closest human friend. His Shorm.

"Do you want to leave?" he asked.

"Let's wait 'til dark," I said.

Occasionally a ribbon of gold shimmered on the horizon, but the sunset was mostly a gradual transition from gray day to darkness, and then the lights blinked on along the street all at once.

"He didn't come," Ax said softly. "It would appear that today is a funeral asw—" Ax's words glitched into a strange squeak. It took me a second to accept that my stoic Andelite friend was crying. No, sobbing.

I watched him for a moment, taken aback at his ability to access this human emotional reflex. I shouldn't have been surprised. I had succumbed to the instincts of countless animals. The hivemind of an ant, the bloodlust of a shark, why shouldn't the human instincts for grief kick in at a time like this?

For a second I turned my attention inward to my own emotional state. I couldn't feel anything. Not right now. I knew the grief would come to me unexpectedly. Perhaps if I saw a red-tailed hawk riding a thermal, or if I walked past an arcade of retro games from the 90s I'd hear a jingle that would make me access the little cache of emotion I had in my heart for Tobias.

"I'm— I'm sorry Prince—" Ax hiccuped.

This snapped me back to the present and grabbed Ax, squeezing him to my chest. I had seen enough eruptions of grief for this to be a reflex, hold someone when they cry. His body tensed in my arms, but then he rested his eyes on my collar. His breathing was already returning to a regular rhythm.

"He was your Shorm," I said.

Ax pulled away. "I'm sorry Pr—"

"I don't think you should be alone tonight Ax-man."

"I won't be alone. I have several arisths on the ship."

"Can they look after themselves for the night?"

"If I order them to."

He sounded like an automaton. I didn't think he should go back to a bunch of kids tonight. He should be with someone who understood.

"Have you ever been to a wake Ax?" I asked.