Fledgling by Octavia E. Butler

to turn them into vampires. Since we don’t do either of those things, we don’t need cities. Fortunately.” Iosif turned and jumped out of his side of the helicopter, while Wright slid out the other side, then reached in and lifted me out. Then Wright quickly caught up with Iosif and stood in his path like a human wall.
    “I want to know what’s going to happen to me,” he said. “I need to know that.”
    Iosif nodded. “Of course you do.” He glanced at me. “How long have you two been together?”
    “Eleven days,” I said.
    “My God,” Wright said. “Eleven days? Is that all? I feel as though I’ve had her with me for so much longer than that.”
    “And yet you’re healthy and strong,” Iosif said. “And you obviously to want to keep her with you.”
    “I do. I’m not entirely sure that it’s my idea, but I do. What will I become, though? What have I become? You said she’ll … find a mate. What happens to me then?”
    “You are her first symbiont, the first member of her new family. Her mating can’t change that. She’ll visit her mates and they’ll visit her, but you’ll live with her. No one could separate the two of you now without killing you, and no one would try.”
    “Killing me …? Why would I die? What would I die of?”
    “Of the lack of what she provides.”
    “But what—?”
    “Come into the house, Wright. I’ll see that you get all the answers you need. You might not like them all, but you have a right to hear them.”
    We walked from the side to the front of the large house. Iosif’s community was clearly nocturnal. The Ina were naturally nocturnal, and their symbionts had apparently adjusted to being awake at night. There were lights on in all the houses, and people—human symbionts and their children, I guessed—moved around, living their lives. A red-haired woman was backing a car out of a garage. She had a small, red-blond baby strapped into a special seat in the back. Two little boys were raking leaves, and pausing now and then to throw them at one another. They were my size, and I wondered how old they were. A little girl was sweeping leaves from a porch with a broom that was almost too big for her to manage. A man was on a ladder, doing something to the rain gutter of one of the houses. Several adults stood talking together in one of the broad yards.
    Wright and I followed Iosif into the biggest house and found ourselves in a room that stretched from the front to the back of the house. Wright’s whole cabin might have filled a third of it. There were several couches, several chairs large and small, and several little tables scattered around the room.
    Iosif said, “We meet here on Sunday evenings or when there’s something that needs community-wide discussion.”
    There was a broad picture window on the backyard side of the great room; it ran across the top half the wall from one end of the room to the other. At one of the end walls, there was a huge fireplace where a log burned with much snapping and sparking. Books filled built-in bookcases on the two remaining walls.
    In a corner near the fireplace, two men and a woman—all human—sat at a small table, their heads together, talking quietly. There were steaming cups of coffee on the table. There was no light in the room except the fire. Iosif walked us over to the three people.
    “Brook, Yale, Nicholas.”
    They looked up, saw me, and were on their feet at once, staring. “Shori!” the woman said. She came around her chair and hugged me. She was a stranger as far as I was concerned, and I would have drawn away from any possibility of a hug, but she smelled of Iosif. Something in me seemed to accept her. She smelled of someone I had decided was all right. “My God, girl,” she said, “where have you been? Iosif, where did you find her?”
    Both men looked at me, then at Wright. One of them smiled. “Welcome,” he said to Wright. “Looks like Shori was able to take care of herself.”
    Iosif put his