PSYCHIC HARVEST

Chapter 11: What Meat Remembers

Dallin had the answer Ethan was looking for which didn't surprise him nearly as much as how long it took Dallin to actually say it out loud.

"Rendcross Yards," Dallin said finally, over breakfast, two days after Ethan had asked around enough that word had clearly gotten back to him. "That's what you're circling. I figured you'd land on it eventually."

"You knew."

"Most know. People find out eventually. Nobody talks about it cause we obviously aren't eating cows." Dallin didn't quite meet his eyes, turning his mug slowly in his hands. "It's where the meat comes from, Ethan. Every settlement's meat, one way or another, routes back through there eventually."

"So we're eating Verith?... That's not like eating an animal back on earth... "

"I know." Dallin exhaled, something tired settling into his shoulders that Ethan hadn't seen from him before — "It's low-sentience stock. Bred for it, mostly. Barely more aware than a chicken back home, from what I understand. It's not — Ethan, it's not the same as what you're picturing."

"What am I picturing?"

Dallin didn't answer that either, which told Ethan more than any answer could have.

He took the job without telling anyone why he wanted it — a routine supply escort, Rendcross-bound, nothing dangerous enough to warrant a second linker, exactly the kind of low-profile contract Ethan wanted Mura rode quiet on his shoulder the whole way, tenser with every mile, and Ethan didn't need his notebook to know why.

The Yards themselves looked, from the outside, almost disappointingly ordinary — long low buildings, pens, the mundane machinery of any working farm, nothing that announced itself as anything other than agricultural infrastructure. Workers moved between structures with the unhurried efficiency of people doing a job they'd done a thousand times, unremarkable, unbothered, entirely at ease.

They can't hear it, Ethan realized, the thought arriving whole and cold. The Wardmark that people had implanted if they decided not to link with Vareth was the norm. Most people wanted something as close to normal as they could obtain, and not hearing the psychic waves of Vareth was the typical choice of newcommers They were fully shielded. Whatever this place actually sounds like, they've never once had to listen to it.

He felt it before he understood what he was feeling — a low, constant pressure building at the edge of his awareness the closer the cart rolled toward the central processing structure, something he'd only ever felt in fragments before: the ambient hum of ordinary wildlife, filtered and distant, the harmless background noise of a world full of psychic creatures going about their business.

This wasn't that.

This was close, and it wasn't background, and it wasn't harmless.

Mura made a sound against his neck that Ethan felt more than heard — the same wordless, mourning note from two nights ago, except sharper now, more present, no longer a memory of something but a direct, unbearable now.

Please. Not that. Please, not that, not that, not—

Ethan's hands went white-knuckled on the cart's edge.

It wasn't words. It was never words, not from Mura, not from anything in this world — but the shape of it was unmistakable all the same, layered and overlapping, dozens of small distant impressions bleeding through a wall that had never fully closed for him the way it closed for everyone else in this cart. Fear. Confusion. Despair... These creatures felt it all and by the structured psychic wave patterns he picked up, these were not dumb chickens.. He felt the raw, distress, over and over, the same plea repeating itself with a patience that had nothing hopeful left in it.

Mercy. They were begging for mercy.

Ethan pressed the heel of his hand against his temple, breathing hard, and understood, with total finality, exactly what Mura had recoiled from two nights ago at dinner.

He's been hearing this the whole time. Every meal. Every single time. And I never even wondered why.

The foreman who signed off on the delivery was a broad, sun-weathered woman named Coretta, entirely unbothered by anything Ethan couldn't quite hide on his face.

"First time out this way?" she asked, not unkindly, noting his pallor with the mild concern of someone who'd seen new arrivals go pale at plenty of ordinary things.

"Something like that."

"Yeah, it hits some people funny, seeing the whole operation laid out plain." She said it easily, no weight behind it at all — the tone of someone discussing weather. "Cudlings don't feel much, if that's what's got you. Barely smarter than dirt, most of them."

"Cudlings," Ethan repeated, testing the word.

"That's the stock line, yeah. Bred for it generations back — docile, low output, easy keeping." Coretta gestured absently toward the fields beyond the pens, wide, cultivated rows Ethan hadn't paid attention to on the way in. "Same reason we grow Thornroot out there instead of anything wild. Whole plant's edible, and it doesn't fight back anymore neither — used to have barbs on it, believe it or not, some old bitter defense before it got farmed and devolved soft. Root, stalk, leaf, all savory now. Damn near feeds half the settlement between the two."

Ethan felt something cold and total drop through his stomach.

"It devolved," he said slowly.

"So they say. You linkers typically push your Vareth to adapt, even get stronger or smarter, but enough stress can do the opposite" Coretta shrugged, entirely unconcerned, already turning back to her ledger. "Everything out here used to be something else, before somebody figured out how to make it easier to harvest for food." 

Ethan looked past her, out at the wide cultivated fields — root vegetables he'd eaten dozens of times without a second thought, the onion-sharp flavor, the savory staple that showed up in nearly every meal the kitchen hall served — and felt the full shape of it land at once, compounding on top of everything Mura had already shown him.

It wasn't just the meat.

It was almost everything.

His stomach turned, hard and sudden, and for one humiliating moment he thought he might actually be sick right there in front of a woman who clearly saw nothing here worth being sick over.

He didn't say anything else. He signed the delivery log with a hand that wasn't quite steady, and got back on the cart, and didn't speak again until Rendcross was well behind them and the ordinary hum of wild, distant, unbothered wildlife had replaced the thing he couldn't unhear.

Mura didn't relax the whole ride home either, but sat upright next to him still tense, and Ethan understood, finally, fully, exactly what he'd been trying to say two nights ago at a dinner table neither of them would ever look at the same way again.

You knew this whole time, Ethan thought toward him. Every meal. You never said anything.

Mura looked at him with an understanding that spoke volumes about its Sentience *Everything eats* he felt Mura say *If you don't eat, you die.. if you die, I die.* 

"I'm sorry," Ethan said out loud, to the empty road, to Mura "I'm sorry I didn't ask sooner." 

Mura curled up in Ethan's lap and let out a a soft chirp and Ethan could feel the acceptance from his Vareth, acceptance of his nature, that he didn't blame him for the brutal methods used on the vareth at the farm they just left. Ethan, however, could still feel the sadness faintly.

He thought about Sato's settlement — timber walls, terraced fields, a place that had looked, on his very first day, like proof that humans could build something clean and good in a world this hostile. But that was just as impossible here as it was on earth. 

And he thought, unwillingly, inevitably, of Vera's voice on the Kettholme road, warm and terrible and telling him exactly what he hadn't wanted to hear.

"Sato only cares about cohabitation with beasts that would eat you if given the chance."

He'd dismissed it then as manipulation, a lie wrapped around a kernel of truth just close enough to land. He still believed that, mostly. Haven wasn't Undertow. The people of Haven had been eating sentient creatures, things that could  think and communicate clearly but were now called dumb and unable to feel pain to dismiss what they were doing. They hadn't done this for the sake of raw power, but survival.. still it made him feel sick. 

Everything felt less simple and now he felt he needed to know more... He held his pack tightly feeling the outer pocket that had a red pill still sitting inside of it and wondered if it was time to hear the other sides story since Neither were completely honest... And since only one group may be actively looking for a way back home.

End of Chapter 11