Willow pulled a face as he started to pull away from the curb, “Claude had to check into a clinic. I’m going to sit with him after I drop you off…” He sucked in a breath, holding it, “He doesn’t want to come home with me and disrupt my family,” He said with an exhale, “So there are just going to be more and more stays at the clinic until this plays out.”
“Until he finds a mate?”
“Best case scenario, yeah.” He blinked hard, “Worst case scenario, he dies...his state is only going to further deteriorate until one or the other happens. That’s the life cycle of a Novus, unfortunately.”
I frowned at that as I looked out the window at all the people walking by in the very early morning, few alone, and the ones that were I thought seemed to be unhappy-looking Novus youths. “Why are they like that?” I asked quietly as we stopped at a stoplight, a Novus female sitting on the railing outside a store staring up at the sky with a listless look, her face covered in stitches as she blew a bubble from her gum.
“Well,” Willow said just as quietly, “To simplify a very complicated subject, the brain and body require a balance of hormones. Sapiens produce their own hormones to regulate themselves, for the most part. For Novus, they need to leech off of others to regulate.”
“And it’s their mate?”
“Well, not just that – the way they explained it when we were kids was that the body needs one hundred points to be happy. For healthy Sapiens, they can fluctuate between seventy and one hundred depending on stress and abnormal emotional disorders, with medication able to help the body regulate so those numbers go back to one hundred or close to it. With Novus in general, they are born at one hundred, and then they start losing points naturally. From one to five they lose five points a year, from five to ten they lose ten points a year. From ten to fifteen they lose twenty points a year. From twenty to thirty they lose thirty. So a Novus alone is going to deteriorate fast, and once they are below thirty, they begin to scratch themselves or hit themselves, and the lower they get, the stronger those urges are. When they hit zero, it’s-” Willow shook his head, “It’s the end and their minds tell them it’s the end, so they implode and..try to end it.”
I looked out at the street, watching as a young man scratched at his face and it suddenly hit me – I looked to Willow. “Those scars on their faces are all self-inflicted?”
Willow nodded a little, frowning. “Some are from others, but the face is always avoided during combat unless the intent is to kill, so if you see someone with scars on their face...it’s usually from scratching themselves.” He said quietly. I thought about Claude, and Willow seemed to pick up at that. “A Novus will scratch everywhere else besides their face for as long as they can, usually starting on the back and arms. When a Novus starts scratching their face, it’s the end-stage. Claude has been scratching at his face for about a year now, so…” His frown deepened. “So we’re getting close now...”
I didn’t know what to say to that besides “I’m so sorry, Willow, that’s so awful.”
“It is -” He sat up a little straighter, “Now, there are ways to add points back.” He said, perking up a little. “So, Novus get, say, five points from being around their kin – that’s parents, siblings, and others that they consider to be very close, including friends. So let’s say a Novus has two parents, two siblings, and an aunt they are very close to. That twenty-five points they get, so when they are younger than fifteen, they are going to be just fine because they get all the points they need from their five family members. It’s not until they hit an age where they start losing more than that and require points from a mate. A mate will give them sixty points once they’ve fully mated and are in their company, so when they start losing thirty points yearly, and then more than that as they get older, you can see why mates are important.”
I nodded. “But until a certain age, they get all they need from family.”
“If they have a family. Birth parents are important at first, but adopted family fulfills the same role after a few months and the Novus accepts that they are their kin – but infant Novus don’t require as much point input as older children.” He licked his lips, “Now where it gets tricky is the difference in classes. So Novus come in three classes – A, B, and C, which is entirely based on the degenerative speed of their hormones. Strength and speed are just another symptom, but someone is sorted based on how quickly they lose those points. Most Novus are class C, like Claude, and roughly follow the cycle I explained – if they have kin, they don’t require a mate until they are in their mid-twenties, but after that, they start to lose points a lot faster. Class B are similar, but once they are about twenty-three, they deteriorate a lot faster. Class A are very different beasts.”
“And Joy is a Class A,” I said slowly, staring at him.
He nodded with a grim look. “And I’m sure whoever they send you to mate with will also be Class A, like all the candidates they sent over. They deteriorate far faster – instead of losing five points a year from age one to five, they lose about ten, from five to ten they lose twenty-five points a year. From ten to fifteen they lose twenty-eight points a year. From twenty to twenty-five they lose forty. I’ve never known of a Class A male that lived to thirty without having a mate.”
“So with Joy…?”
“With Joy, as with all Novus, she gets points from both Sapien and Novus parents. It really doesn’t matter until they are about ten years old. Females have it easier than males – female Novus actually get one or two points from other female Novus, which is why females work together and form very tightly knit groups with girls they call cousins, or other female Novus they consider to be kin. So it will be essential you get Joy socialized young so she is able to form close friendships with other Novus females, since it will absolutely make a world's difference. Class A females can be without a mate into their thirties if they have a large enough social network and regularly interact with them...given Joy’s class, she will likely be recruited as a Peace Keeper early and will be forming that close kinship with the other females in her unit. You see a lot of Peace Keepers that have younger female Novus as cadets because they are building bonds and easing them into their role as a peace keeper – the officer a cadet bonds with will be the strongest and if done right, they will get full sister points, which is close to five per year.”
“So having her around other Novus females is – is going to be necessary,” I said to myself as I looked out at the city, and sure enough, almost all Novus females seemed to be in pairs or more. The ones that weren’t looked far worse off.
“Absolutely. All cultures are centered around encouraging female kinship because it’s the foundation of stability. My daughter is a Novus, and we send her to summer camp every year with her cousins, girls she will go through school together and keep those bonds for the rest of her life. Other girls join something called a troop, where they do after-school activities together. But you will want to get on that very early – there are lots of resources, and once you get Joy, you will be assigned a social advocate who will help you arrange groups for her and choose the right schools.”
“And for males, they don’t get those - those points with other Novus?”
“No. A Novus will go through three different steps of maturity, one a roughly five to six, when they get their first burst of strength and speed growth as well as lose their first set of teeth, one at roughly thirteen when they lose their second set of teeth and get another burst of strength and speed as well as heightened senses, and then finally at twenty to twenty-one, when their senses sharpen further and they begin to develop ‘slow growth’ strength and endurance, which will continue to slowly grow until they are in their fifties if they live that long. Each time they hit one of those three steps, they become less receptive to other Novus and by the third step, being around other unmated male Novus takes away points, sometimes up to ten if both males are completely unfamiliar with each other. Mated Novus males don’t have that effect on unmated males, though, so they are often free to pass through territories because they don’t set off the local unmated males.”
I rubbed my face and held my hands over my eyes. “That’s so awful. I’m sorry, but that’s just...awful. All of it. Having to-” I inhaled sharply, “Live like that. I can’t even imagine.”
Willow was quiet for a long while before he said in a light, conversational tone “It’s not natural, you know.”
I frowned, lowering my gaze to see we were at my apartments. “What do you mean?”
Willow parked and glanced at his phone briefly before he looked at me. “There were only Sapiens for a very long time, and then someone used science and technology to change our genetics, and that was how Novus came into creation. A group of men got together and did this to the human race and made it so the population would suffer as Claude has.”
“Can’t they reverse it then?”
“Lord knows some countries are trying, but so far, no. They’re trying to add onto whatever it was that was added to at least lessen the symptoms – the allergy to sunlight, the inability – but results have so far been, ah, horrendous. About two hundred years ago, most countries got together and signed an agreement to never alter genetics again, but, like I said...some countries still try, and the ones that are are...not doing it for the best reasons.”
I frowned at that as we got out of the car to gather the bags of my groceries, bringing them up to my apartment in silence before Willow helped me update some of the nonfood items he had me buy, including a little bottle of melatonin, which he told me to take before I was ready for bed and only after I set my alarm clock.
Before he left, he told me that if for any reason he was no longer able to be my advocate, he’d make sure his replacement was aware of what was most important to me and of the most vital aspect of my case.
When I asked what might cause him to no longer be my advocate, he simply said ‘Claude’, telling me then that he’d be back to pick me up at two pm for my appointment.
I intended to have an actual meal then, but instead, I sat in my living room in silence and ate the rest of my strawberries while I tried to figure out where to store all the goods I had gotten, and when I was done, I figured out how to turn on the television and listen to then talk about the weather.
The hurricane was coming, they assured, and it would be one of catastrophic proportions.
Catastrophic, to my knowledge meant the absolute worst, so I was very confused when the weatherman, a Sapien, said so with such obvious glee. I would have to remember to ask Willow about that when I saw him tomorrow.
Comments (4)
See all