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Unnatural, perhaps… but real.

He could never explain that to the child. The child was inconsolable. It had found one of its own with the life ripped out of it, and now it mewled like a kitten left in the rain.

In that aloneness, the Stranger did feel some pity.

He could not leave it.

He could not leave it alone in the world, like he was.

He walk-glided to the garage door leading into the two-story building. He walked past another of them, the remnants of a meal he’d left on the steps.

He scarcely glanced at its face.

He’d caught half of them here.

He’d caught the other half back from some night out.

He’d been waiting for them.

He’d been waiting for hours.

He re-entered the house.

A long, informal foyer lived just inside the door.

A mud room. They used to call it that. Laundry machines and cabinets lined the walls, beginning just past a number of low racks for boots and shoes. Back when the stranger was still alive, his human mother had a room like this. Unlike this one, which connected the kitchen to the garage, his mother’s mud room led from their backyard into a separate laundry room.

He walked past the hooks for coats and umbrellas.

The kitchen opened up into a large living space with monitors on two of the three walls, an old-fashioned dining room, a sitting area filled with transparent couches and loungers that conformed to a person’s body.

He did not find the mewling kitten there.

He ascended the stairs.

The building must be old to have stairs at all, but they had been modified with new technology, new ways of connecting with the world as it existed now. Once he took his first step, the stairs moved with him, speeding his rise smoothly up to the second floor. They also gripped his booted foot at each step he took, keeping him from falling. They released those same soles as soon as he raised the foot to the next platform.

He reached the second floor in seconds.

The mewling stopped.

The Stranger cocked his head.

He was close enough now.

He could hear it breathing.

He could hear it breathing so loudly.

It must have heard the mechanism of the stairs. An instinctual desire for self-preservation caused it to fall silent. That might have worked once before, in an all-human world.

In this world, with the Stranger hunting her, it didn’t even slow him down.

Then again, it had been too late for her before he came up these stairs.

It had been too late for her before he opened the mud room door.

The instant he heard her first snuffling, gasping scream…