I perched in a treetop, tapping away at my crippled phone and wishing I'd invested in a stylus while I was out shopping. Thankfully, I had lots of batteries with me, because I had a lot to read, but even so I was going to need to find a plug socket eventually.

The data I'd nabbed was all unfortunately historical, from the experiments that had taken place prior to Grant's involvement, but it still made for informative reading. Three hundred years ago, the dead monsters had decomposed with unnatural rapidity, their bodies melting away to nothing within hours, but nevertheless some samples had been frozen quickly enough to preserve them in good condition.

Thirty years ago, Maximilian had got his grubby hands on some, and had begun dedicating his resources to their research. His first finding was that the initial wave of monsters had starved to death, and none of the corpses examined had anything that could be identified as a digestive system. That came as a surprise to me, munching as I was on a captured squirrel, because I sure as hell did.

His initial hypothesis was that they had been artificially designed and built as weapons, and that since they weren't supposed to survive more than a few days, such complex biological systems had been neglected to make space for something more useful. And there things might have ended, if not for the lingering mystery over who had designed them, and why. From the way they had appeared worldwide, it was abundantly clear that there were no good suspects. Given their limited lifespans, it would have required an immense quantity of manufacturing facilities, and the logistics were simply infeasible. It would have needed a global level of organisation, and the countries were hardly going to work together to wipe themselves out.

Logistics aside, there was also the problem that they were physically impossible. No material could be completely bullet-proof, as they seemed to be. Examination of the corpses revealed further inexplicable designs. A salamander-like creature with highly temperature resistant scales lining its throat, but the throat not going anywhere or being connected to anything. Bird-like creatures that weighed far too much for their small wings to get them off the ground. Hulking behemoths that by all rights shouldn't even have been able to move.

While eyewitness accounts from the time were rare, and suppressed for whatever reason by the current authorities, that didn't mean they didn't exist. What tales there were told of fantastical magic and impossible abilities. Of minds far beyond those of humans, or of instinctual beasts that nevertheless possessed great animalistic cunning. Maximilian came up with a new hypothesis; these were creatures from another world and lived off a completely alien energy source. A source that was completely absent from our own world.

When and why he had developed his fanaticism towards them I didn't know, but the data that followed was a full decade of DNA and protein analysis that I couldn't even begin to understand. It seemed they'd been trying to work out exactly how these monsters had functioned, and apparently they'd found some answers, because twenty years ago they'd started splicing sequences into people. The aim was to create a new breed of monsters, able to subsist off physical food. He sought to replace humanity with what he considered to be something better. It had gone poorly; mostly he'd only succeeded in killing all his test subjects. But there had been some hints, some controlled mutations that had got close to a success, but without fail even these 'successes' would go insane, starve and then die before their transformation was complete.

It was several years and some effort in watering down the amount of 'monster' in their mix before they reached a point where the creations could still eat, discovering that raw flesh could stave off the hunger. Whatever energy source the monsters had wherever they came from, some small amount could be syphoned from recently dead corpses here. The fresher the corpse and the more complex the life form, the better, explaining my preference for fresh human. The insanity remained however, and the transformed creatures would either end up comatose and unresponsive, or else violent and raging to the point of self-destruction. They neither kept their human intellect nor obtained the minds of the original monsters.

And that was where the information cut off. Nothing about control chips, Grant's involvement, or what was happening in Kholakel. Not even anything about where Maximilian's pet mantises had come from. More good information, for sure, but it didn't contain anything about me.

Powering off the phone, I slumped back against my tree. Just what exactly was I doing? I didn't need to do anything; I could make any city my home, preferably a safe distance from here, feed only as much as needed, and probably remain undetected forever. That should be enough, but then Lily had to go and gift me with her intelligence and suddenly make everything complicated. Now I found myself plagued by pointless questions like 'who am I' and 'why am I here', never mind a hard to resist desire to see some sort of justice. Although, to be fair, without Lily I could never remain undetected for two days, never mind forever, so I couldn't complain too loudly.

I'd made the decision to stay away from Kholakel until I was certain I wasn't heading into a trap, and now I knew I wasn't. Should Maximilian's death be linked back to me, that might change once more, so if I was to go back, now was my best opportunity.

For better or for worse, I was going to have to head back to Kholakel.