Arcen spent a few minutes collecting himself after coming back home. He was worried about Kysa’s sleepiness, but it seemed to be just her making herself sleepy with excuses by blaming it all on the dance rehearsal. He made her drink a full espresso before leaving New Manning, just to be safe.

  Once home, she retreated into her room, falling onto her bed like a fallen tree. She had convinced herself she needed a lot of rest. That was fine with him.

  He had something else that he needed to take care of.

  He knocked on his brother’s door six times to no avail before he started kicking it. The door swung wide open on the third kick.

  “What is it?” Kylan yelled in his face, taking off his headphones with glowing cat ears.

  Arcen gave his brother the first warning frown. He didn’t like being yelled at.

  “Oh, sorry! Arcie, I’m streaming!” Kylan said in a considerably soft voice.

  His brother was an inch taller than him and a third of his weight.

  Being the idiot he usually was, he’d fallen asleep with his window open on Mayday. Some amount of Mayday light had hit him on the lower legs, and he had faint, bumpy orange scales to show for it.

  Fur grew faster on his lower legs too, but he always shaved them every morning to the point he was scared of his own beard. Kylan hated his slight hybrid mutation more than Arcen hated his full one. He was paranoid and always thought his mutation was spreading to other parts of his body whenever he got sick, even if it was a common cold.

  Arcen pushed him back and walked into his room. His brother was playing a game on his computer with rainbow lights. There were three large monitors, and all three had half-naked Asian maids with guns on them.

  Impressive. Just what we need right now.

  “Man, what is this? Why-” Kylan started nagging immediately.

  Arcen took a peek at the numbers on his third monitor. He hadn’t played a game since he began working at Helviter.

  “You’re streaming? To four viewers? Just make a group chat at this point,” Arcen said, making sure to start this on the wrong foot.

  “That’s what you kicked my door for?! What’s wrong with you, man!”

  “Come with me for a bit.”

  He grabbed his brother by the shirt.

  “Why?”

  “Did you hear what I fucking said, Kye?!” Arcen slammed his fist on the computer.

  The last time he did this, the tempered glass cracked, and his brother cried for days. Threatening his computer was a very effective tool when it came to punishing him.

  Five thousand dollars just to look at fucking maids. At least play a real goddamn game.

  “Alright, fine! Fine! Jeez...” Kylan threw the headset at his bed and followed. The way he tossed it so carelessly didn’t go unnoticed by Arcen. It was a limited edition one—a birthday gift he bought for Kylan a few months ago when he couldn’t stop whining about it. Arcen zipped his lips, swallowing the words that he wanted to yell. He had to save them.

  Arcen dragged him to the rooftop of their apartment building, way out of Kysa’s range of hearing.

  Although it was a bit aggressive, he wasn’t really angry with Kylan at all. Talking to a street hooker was quite impressive. He’d not expected his wimpy little brother to get that far this soon.

  Unfortunately for all involved, Kysa was too soft with her teenage baby. One of the adults had to do the parenting, and it was never going to be her.

  “Arcie! Why are we here?” Kylan asked, rubbing the back of his head. He kept a considerable gap between them.

  “I just want to talk to you. Come here,” Arcen said, placing the phone on a nearby table, grabbing his brother’s shoulder with one hand, and keeping his other hand free.

  Kylan dragged his feet reluctantly and stood next to him.

  “Can you tell me what that is?” Arcen asked, pointing at the phone.

  Kylan took thirty seconds more than necessary to look at the screen with his head tilted to the side.

  “Hm?” Arcen grunted.

  “Ah—erm! Wait! Arcie! This is a misunderstanding! I wasn’t—”’

  “Now we can skip all that bullshit. Don’t waste my time.”

  Arcen glared at his brother, and he stared back at him with wide eyes. Suddenly, Kylan broke free from his grip and pushed off like a flailing monkey.

  “Get off me, man!” He screeched, raising his forearms.

  Arcen watched patiently as his brother fully transitioned into a boxing pose as if real life was a martial arts game.

  Oh, now it’s getting interesting.

  Arcen hadn’t brawled with his brother in years. In his eyes, the kid never grew up. Eight years ago, if his snot-nosed brother did anything like this, Arcen would’ve bent him into a pretzel in ten seconds flat.

  The funny thing is, he could still do it just fine. He weighed nearly three times as much and had a much higher pain tolerance due to his mutation. He could easily put his twig of a brother in the ER.

  He calmed himself.

  Kylan already had tears in his eyes. He cried whenever he got upset, no matter how little or how big. This was another thing he hated about his brother.

  “Let’s just talk,” Arcen said with a sigh, trying to be patient.

  “Why do you care who I talk to! I can do whatever the fuck I want! I have my needs!” His brother howled. Arcen felt about half of his patience evaporate into thin air.

  Did he just say needs?

  “What needs?! Say that again, motherfucker. Say that again, but slowly this time,” Arcen hissed, taking a step toward him.

  Kylan had mentioned ‘needs’ when his every need was being taken care of. This felt like high treason—punishable by death.

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  Kylan flinched. He knew he just screwed up. It was all over his white face. “D-don’t come closer, Arcie—I’ll—” He lifted his leg with a grunt, but his foot hung limp due to indecision.

  Now, this would be a huge mistake. Arcen hoped his brother could hold off. A foot in his face was far more disrespectful than a fist. It would simply trigger the beating of a lifetime. He wasn’t going to dodge it either. If his brother was going to kick him, he wanted to feel the full force of it before he beat the living shit out of him.

  “You got more needs now? Really? We have to work our asses off even harder so you can get your dick sucked, is that it?” Arcen walked closer, deliberately ignoring Kylan’s raised leg.

  “N-No! Arcie-”

  “No? Can you pay your part of the fucking rent then? Who the fuck told you your needs matter before you can pay for them, huh? Was it Kysa? Or did you find some other dumb bitch to listen to your whining?”

  Kylan swung his leg in a half-assed kick to push Arcen away, trembling like a tree in an earthquake. His shin sank into the soft flesh of Arcen’s shoulder like a broom hitting a pillow. It was unfair to call it a kick. Arcen slapped his leg off with very little effort.

  Grabbing his brother, he pushed onwards and brought his face inches away from his nose. Kylan hid behind his forearms as if it was supposed to protect him.

  “I’ll give you one chance to calm the fuck down. Hell, I’ll even forget you just tried to kick me,” he spoke through the gaps in Kylan’s forearms as he parted them. It wasn’t hard at all because, in true Kylan fashion, he had given up already.

  “Alright, stop! Please stop!” He yelled helplessly. “I wasn’t there for that girl, dude!”

  “Oh yeah? That’s what you’re going with?” Arcen asked, relaxing his posture. Kylan’s excuse was disappointingly weak.

  At least I scared him enough.

  “I was just buying pills from her!” Kylan covered his head with his hands.

  You motherf-

  Arcen’s face twisted into a mad frown. Kylan took one glance at him and tried to run away. Arcen grabbed his shirt like a rat by the tail.

  His precious little brother had just dug a deeper hole for himself. He would’ve been way better off having sex with that hooker.

  Arcen barely managed to stop his fist from flying into his brother’s face just thinking about it. Kylan was already crying his eyes out even harder.

  “Where are they?!” he asked, pulling his brother up by the collar.

  “In my pocket! Take them! I don’t want it! I didn’t take any! I swear!”

  Arcen grabbed a small packet from Kylan’s trousers. There were four heart-shaped pills inside it. Each pill had a bright red core, like a tiny drop of blood surrounded by a translucent casing.

  His mood had blackened when Kylan said ‘pills’. He knew what pills could do. Looking at these, he felt something he’d never felt about pills. He couldn’t take his eyes off them.

  “.∴?∵??∴∷∴??..”

  He heard a faint murmur in his ear.

  Now what kinda fucking pills do that?!

  He knew the answer. The kind his idiot brother shouldn’t have bought from a street hooker.

  “The fuck is this? They make you hard or something? What do they do?” Arcen asked, shaking the packet. Of all the pills that he could swallow, the clumsy fool had gone with red hearts. This pissed him off even further.

  “Love! she said they make you feel loved or some shit,” Kylan screamed, crawling away from him like a woman in a slasher movie.

  “Fucking pathetic. How much did you pay for it?”

  “Two fifty! I’m sorry! I-it was my money! Not Kysa’s or yours!”

  Did I hear that number right?

  The very last drop of his patience disappeared. “Two fifty! You fuck! Every penny you have is someone else’s fucking money!” Arcen kicked his butt, making him howl like a wounded dog. “I’m gonna break your fucking legs if I catch you trying this shit again, you hear me?!”

  “Y-yeah! I’m sorry!”

  “Louder!”

  “I’m sorry, Arcie! I’m so sorry!”

  He lifted his little brother off the ground and pinned him against the railing.

  “I’m sorry too,” he said, tapping his cheek lightly. “But if you tell Kysa about any of this, that computer of yours is going out the fucking window, you understand?”

  Kylan nodded, wiping his face.

  “Wash your face before coming back. You’re dead if I catch you crying in the house.”

  Arcen pocketed the pills. Kysa didn’t need to know about them. He could find a use for them next weekend.

  They better be worth every cent of that two fifty.

  On Friday, Arcen came home from work two hours earlier than usual. Karnic had let him off again because he wanted to give Arcen time to prepare for his Saturday overtime, which was more important than sorting embryos.

  It was just as well, because Arcen just about had it by the end of Friday after living through a blur of futures passing him by like windows of a moving train. He never thought of his work so poetically, of course. He was a grunt sorting designer babies. He had sent thousands of potential lives to an incinerator for $675 a day.

  There had to be at least one Einstein that he threw into the incinerator in the last three years—no glory in anything he did at Helviter.

  Friday had been especially rough. He had died eight times in three hours. It was a new quarterly record. Some of them were so bad that he could still see blood whenever he closed his eyes. He could hear their screams.

  The worst death by far was getting stabbed in the chest with a kitchen knife as a child. He hadn’t felt so scared in a long time.

  Regretting his life choices, Arcen sat down for dinner after trying to wash it all away in the bathtub.

  They ate dinner in silence. Kylan had been quiet since their little pill altercation. Arcen hadn’t felt like yelling at his brother to stop being a bitch, because he was sure his work stress would make him snap way harder than was appropriate.

  As much as he thought of his brother as a loser, he loved him a lot in his own way. Kysa was the better parent for patching things up. He had all the sticks; she had all the carrots.

  This was the first time since Tuesday that they sat together for dinner.

  “I was thinking we could all go out for dinner tomorrow,” Kysa said, looking at them both.

  She always smoothed family tensions with her money. He would’ve agreed if it was any other weekend. A free dinner is a free dinner, and she always knew the best places, always got the best service from waiters.

  “Sorry, I’m busy. You two can go. I have work tomorrow,” he said, making sure his tone stayed even.

  His brother didn’t deserve to be rewarded for buying pills, but his sister couldn’t ever be told that’s what he did. Now, the idiot was going to get a good dinner for it.

  Lucky son of a bitch. I should’ve beaten him after all.

  “We can just wait until you get back?” Kysa set her green headlight eyes on his face, trying to read his expression. Despite his best efforts, she had seen something off about him. She looked slightly worried.

  “No, I’ll be away. It’s a full weekend overtime in Wensik.”

  “What? In Wensik? That’s weird? It’s not anything dangerous, is it?”

  “I don’t think so. It’s a lot of money.”

  “I’ll get you something delicious when you’re back, then.”

  Later that night, he saw his sister cuddling with his red-nosed idiot brother on the couch.

  There’s the whole goddamn problem.

  The stick never worked because the carrot was too kind.

  He retreated to his room after dinner, jumped into bed, and closed his eyes. He was dreading the upcoming tower overtime.

  He was sick of these unhappened bad memories that still plagued his tired mind. He had a wild guess that this R&D station gig wasn’t going to be any better.

  As he lay there with regrets and fears, he felt something fall on his back. It quickly walked up to his head.

  “Gollum?”

  He reached around and grabbed the kitten like a potato. Gollum put up a valiant fight against the purple giant’s evil hand, but he was way too young to win. Arcen dragged the little thing next to his face and gazed into its blue eyes that shone like gems. There was nothing behind those eyes. Gollum only had one brain cell, and he dedicated it to violence and mayhem.

  Gollum was Kysa’s ragdoll kitten that cost four thousand and seven hundred dollars. She had always wanted one, and she impulsively bought it a month ago. Arcen had a lot to say about throwing that amount of money on a cat, but he felt a little better when the name he suggested won the three-way coin toss.

  Since then, he and Gollum got along just fine. This wasn’t the first time Gollum ambushed him in his room. He was obsessed with Arcen’s tentacles.

  Gollum looked a bit disheveled and unhinged, more so than usual.

  His fur felt sticky to the touch. He had clumps on him as if he licked himself too hard. Arcen rubbed his fingers together, feeling the strange texture. Gollum had definitely poked his head where he shouldn’t have and spilled some sort of ointment on himself.

  “What did you break this time?” Arcen asked, looking at his bedside cabinet. Nothing seemed out of order. This was bad news.

  Great. Guess I’ll find the one he broke in a few months then.

  He poked the feisty kitten a couple more times and scooped him off the sheets, squishing his small head with a kiss.

  Gollum hadn’t been trained properly yet. Arcen didn’t want to wake up next to a turd Saturday morning and then have to go to work.

  “Let’s go back to mama,” he groaned, lifting himself off the bed. He dragged his feet to his door, opened it, and placed the kitten outside. Too lazy to yell, he turned to find his phone to text Kysa to wash the cat.

  “So, starting from where we left off,” a squeaky voice came from somewhere behind him.

  Arcen jolted upright like an electric eel went up his backside.

  You gotta be fucking kidding me.

  The oily girl was sitting in the middle of his room.

  She smiled at him. “Your cat’s really cute, sir. I shouldn’t have touched it. I’m sorry.”