What we eat is not all that we are.

  It shapes us, and sometimes defines just who be our friends, but as the universe is diverse so are our lives. All of us.

  If you read this, you are no different.

  Light from a floor mp that was currently plugged into a tree glinted in the rims a of a pair of wine gsses that were sitting on the polished cedar table. An opened white pstic package of saltines sat o them, with pre-cut slices of cheddar piled up nearby. And I paused before p the wine.

  “Does your vessel get drunk when you’re fronting?” I asked.

  “Maybe, but I don’t notice it,” Felicity said.

  “Iing,” I poured the wine.

  She shrugged, “Differeabolisms, I think.”

  “I’m not sure I’d call what I have a metabolism,” I said, and then poured wio my gss, too.

  “Fair.”

  Putting the bottle back down, I looked at her and asked, “So, you e epialivores?”

  Felicity coughed a startled ugh and said, hand to her chest, “Oh, dear no. All five of my hosts are safe and sound in here. We’re kind of a family now. No, that would be terproductive from my point of view.”

  “Oh?”

  “They’re my bait,” she said, pig up her wine. “And I proudly protect them. It’s a tidy agreement. Kind of like the tarantu and the tiny frog.”

  I leaned bad studied her.

  She’d told me to use “she/her” for her pronouns, to practice for the public. Which made sense. I retty sure she didn’t give any more of a shit than I did, except for the purposes of hiding. But siting to know Cassy and Ayden, I’ve started to be thoughtful about these things.

  She and her host seemed to express themselves a bit more femme than I did. I didn’t really think of my disguise as falling anywhere on that spectrum, actually. I just didn’t wear any makeup. I had sort of a young mom look. Too tired to care, but too in the routine of skin care and brushing my hair to pletely stop grooming. And Hayward’s was the kind of a workpce where that was fine.

  I did “dress up” for Halloween, because that was fun. I had presented myself as wearing a replie from The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra. I’ll let you guess whie. A single er had reized it.

  I didn’t actually own any clothes or anything at all. Everything about me roje, a fabrication of photons and magic fields or something like that. Real enough for physical tact, but all a part of me like a voice is a part of a human. Whereas Felicity’s host probably had a closet full of clothes and was actually really damn good at applying eyeliner.

  “I’ve never really explored your side of things,” I told her. “I ’t really imagine what you’d eat, or how they might prey on epialivores.” I sipped my wi didn’t mean anything to me, but it’s good to practice appearances. “What’s your i in me?”

  “Oh, Synthia,” Felicity said. “You’re cute.”

  “In all the time that that word has existed, I’ve never figured out exactly what it means,” I said, reag for some cheese.

  “Well, OK,” she replied. “I have a proposition for you. I’m finding that I o branch out. Word has gotten around that this vessel is bad news, and nobody es around anymore. Which is great for my little family. But, that leaves me starving, and I don’t want to ge my diet so much that I eat my friends, you know?”

  “I suppose that makes some kind of sense,” I ented, chewing on my cheese and then washing it away with some wine. “But I’m feeling really uneasy about having your attention. And even more so at the sound of the word ‘proposition’. All of my experieells me to get as far away from you as possible.”

  “Yeah,” she said, swirling the wine in her gss. “You probably guess that what I’m going to ask you is to be bait for my argets.”

  I sighed. Yes. Exactly. I had seen that ing since just before p her wi had been my own kind of hunch, slowly firmed with every word. Her expnation had beeirely predictable.

  “You’re very good at hiding,” she said. “And you smell a. So, I imagine you’re very good at running, too. Both are traits that would be very good for this arra. And, if you always ran toward me, I could make sure you were very safe. And, of course, we’d only do this when you were off the cloo o jeopardize your family and livestock.”

  “They’re not livestock,” I protested.

  “Sure.”

  “Felicity,” I said, putting my wine gss ba the table. “That word alone makes me want to say, ‘no’. If you ’t see people as people and a symbiotic retionship with them as mutually beneficial, I ’t bring myself to trust that you’ll see me as priceless as I see myself, regardless of how benevolent you are to your host and her epialivores.”

  “You really like those terms, don’t you?”

  “Do you wao work with you or not?” I asked.

  “So, you’re actually sidering it?” she asked back.

  “Really, I’m not. But I’m giving you a ce,” I responded. “If we are going to work together for ah of time, we really o have a better rapport than this. For something this deadly, we have to get along so well that there’s no room for misuandings. Ever. And I trust myself to be able to adapt to a’s what I do. But I find myself really curious about you. More so with every word.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “ you adapt to me, Felicity?”

  “I… think so?”

  “Not remotely good enough,” I cluded, ppping my hand down oable.

  “Well, shit, I guess,” she said, reag for the crackers.

  “Keep trying,” I prodded her. “I want to see if a teratovore adapt to me well enough that I fool myself into trusting her. you see me as not just your equal, or your beor or ward, or however you think of your panions in that crowded little psyche, but as a person?”

  She popped a cracker without cheese into her mouth and chewed on it for a while, studyih eyes that sparkled in the mp light.

  If she tried to lunge across the table just then, I could have stretched aehe table forcefully into her vessel’s gut, pushing her away from me. If she leapt out of that mind to sink deep into mio eat me from within, which I suspected was more her style, I could turn my domain into a nightmare specifically for her before she made the distarapping her in a loop of metaphor. Because this was my pce. She’d have to fight my home aroy it before she could get to me.

  Of course, she could also just go outside and then wait for me to leave. Which I’d have to do in order to feed.

  But, at the moment, I didn’t really feel threatened by her gaze, and I couldn’t quite tell if that was because she wasn’t being threatening or if I was just that fident.

  Which bugged me.

  But I let her take her time with that.

  After swallowing that dry cracker without even a sip of wine, she csped her fingers and pced both hands oable in front of her, and looked down at them, to say, “I’ve probably bitten off more than I chew here. I’m fairly sure of that. I’m sorry. Now that I’m talking to you, I’m realizing I have no idea how to build trust with someone who I don’t have ered. Not with words alo least.” She sighed, “Especially after screwing up a couple of times, using a different nguage than you.”

  “Hm,” I said.

  “The truth is, her you nor I are people. Not by human standards, anyway,” she said. “And I don’t see myself ging my view on that. But the ideal of being a person, a being that’s worthy of ‘human rights’, as humanity has framed it, is something that humans do a pretty damn bad job of aff themselves, or each other. And you have to know that. It’s an illusion that they sell themselves, while they iraumatize, and kill each other for lesser reasons than nourishment. At least we emanants are ho with each other about what we do, and why we do it.”

  “Sure.”

  “I think it’s funny that you call us monsters, holy,” she said.

  “Why’s that?”

  “A monster is a horrific creature that does terrible things to i people for no particurly good reason at all,” she said. “It’s aion and an affront to life that endangers every living being around it. A monster has purpose for its existence. And don’t you think that describes humanity just a little better than it describes emanants? Like, sure, it doesn’t do humans justice, but I don’t think it fits us at all.”

  “Mm, see,” I said, leaning forward and pointing at the table. “I’ve always liked the broken myth description of a monster. A monster is the thing that’s there to teach the hero an important lesson about how the world works, or about themself, or both. And I think that describes both humans and emanants pretty well equally, actually. It all depends on who the hero is, after all. But humans think of us as monsters, so I go with it.”

  “OK, I do like that definition,” Felicity said, pushigy cracker goop around in her mouth with her tongue, and then swallowing it.

  “I really like your word, too, though,” I said. “emanant seems more descriptive of how we e to exist. It’s pleasing.”

  “Thank you. I am rather proud of it, even if it’s not my idea.”

  “Well thank you for introdug me to it.”

  “You’re wele.”

  I cocked my head, “You don’t happen to know if a human or an emanant ed the term, would you?”

  “I’m not really sure. I’d like to think it was an emanant. The vast majority of humans have no idea we exist as we do, anyway. So, the meaning we’re applying to it es from us, I’m sure.”

  “How long have you been around?” I asked. “Do you predate humanity in any way?”

  She pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes to the point where they both looked like little shiny bck marbles. She seemed very relut to say.

  “One good way to build trust with words, Felicity,” I said, “is to tell the other emanant important things about yourself. And I’m curious how much you uand the value of words themselves.”

  She frowned so deeply I wondered if her host would feel a muscle cramp ter, but said, “The most ret word for the era is the Chibanian. I am pretty good with keeping up with words. Inhabiting a human brain is good for that, of course. Middle Pleistoe, it used to be called. My first host was taken in by another species of humans, made part of their family. Forcefully. Gave her nightmares, and suddenly I had my own first family of emanants to protect.”

  “Precambrian,” I said, and tapped the cork of the wine oable. I had been pying with it.

  She looked up at me, “What?”

  “Yep.”

  Her incredulity could have fed me for a decade if it came from a human. “But you feed oions. Did life even have emotions before the Cambrian?”

  “I didn’t always. Emotions were an adaptation, both for life and myself, which I witnessed,” I said.

  I could tell that she really didn’t believe me at all, but she chewed on her words as she spoke them, “Did you predate life itself? Were you an… ahalpiphage?”

  I held up my hand, fingers spyed and tilted it to the side and back, “Not quite that old. I don’t predate synaptic proteins. I hose. I’m a product of synaptic proteins. I fed on pain.”

  “Oh.”

  “And, because I know you’re w, I survived the extins by feeding on the emotions and pain of emanants.”

  “What? How?”

  “It takes a lot of work to adapt to it, that’s for sure. I do either emanants or life at any given time. Not both.”

  “Why didn’t you stianants?”

  “I love the excuse to i with life. It’s iing. Especially humans. And the emotions of humans are rich.”

  “Nobody feeds off the emotions of emanants.”

  “Not nobody, Felicia. I’m not the only one.”

  “I didn’t even think we had emotions.”

  “Oh, you so definitely do.”

  “How you be that old?” she asked, finally.

  “By never ever trusting anybody,” I replied. At the time, I didn't realize how much I was now lying. I wish I'd stuck to this statement. It had been the way I'd always worked, but I think I lost sight of what it meant and didn't realize it.

  “But you let me into your home,” she pointed out.

  “Yep,” I smiled.

  Maybe I was ready for something new, or something.

  theInmara