text: THE MAN WAS tired, and alone. He was the last of his group, and as far as he knew, his species. He was realistic about his life expectancy, but had the habit of survival. He foraged through ruined buildings, moving slowly, frequently stopping to listen. The naked girl was too clean, too attractive, too unlikely to exist in this post-invasion world. She could only be bait. Her leg appeared to be pinned under collapsed ceiling rubble. She was wide-eyed and terrified. "Oh, thank God! Can you get me out?" He stopped moving and sniffed the air, expecting human spoor. Cephalopods didn't really have a detectable scent. He smelled dust and mold, and himself, but nothing else. Not even the girl. No sign of a trap, because he'd be able to smell any sufficiently large group of people to man a trap, and the Invader-modified mutants never worked with humans. Confusing. Unless the girl was really stuck as she appeared to be. The man remained still and considered circumstances. He looked at the girl again, and it seemed that she shook her head very slightly. There was something wrong here. The hair stood up on the back of his neck. He retreated a slow, measured step and quietly drew his katana shaped sword. A collectible he had looted from an abandoned house in the suburbs, it was a cheap knockoff made from crap steel that wouldn't hold an edge. With frequent sharpening it was just barely sufficient for slicing mollusks. The guns he carried were for dealing with humans. Half a dozen chunks of concrete rubble flickered and it was suddenly obvious they had been cuttlefish the whole time. The girl screamed and they leapt, flashing colors in ripples that were intended to dazzle his senses and confuse his mind. He sliced and diced, carving pieces from his attackers. Several were able to get their arms on his limbs and torso, but the man was wearing paper armor made from old magazines. The suckers could attach to the outer sheets, but unless they wrapped all the way around he could jerk them off at the expense of a few pages. One cuttlefish grabbed his forearm and took a divot from the fleshy part of his palm with its beak before he shook it off. Dismembered arms, still fighting, managed to attach to his face and scalp and draw blood, but they were more annoyance than dire threat. A couple of piles of dirt turned into octopuses and scurried towards his feet. He sliced one open but the other was able to wrap arms around his left knee and began to squeeze and twist. The man felt a ligament tear as his knee torqued, and began desperately hacking at his assailant until he finally cut its mantle in two. An octopus is hard to kill with its three hearts and nine brains, but cut into pieces it fights with less coordination. The man staggered but kept moving and swinging his sword. The girl screamed, "Behind you!" and he spun on his good leg. A colossal squid was hanging from the ceiling with 8 arms and reaching for him with eight meter feeding tentacles. He chopped one of the tentacles off but the other wrapped around his waist and planted hooks that extended through paper and pierced his skin. The man howled in pain and drew a handgun, firing shot after shot into where he perceived its giant eye to be. The hooks loosened a bit and, gasping and panting, he chopped at the tentacle, finally pulling it free along with chunks of his own flesh. The squid pulled itself through a hole in the ceiling, trailing severed limbs that spilled gouts of blue blood. He took a couple of clumsy steps, blood dripping from his scalp and face, and pouring down his legs. He looked for more threats, but apart from writhing arm sections, there weren't any enemies left. Suddenly dizzy, he sat down hard. He wanted to reach the girl before losing conciousness, in case they came back while he was out, and crawled toward her while he could. HE WOKE UP an indeterminate time later, lying against a dusty wall. He wasn't wearing his paper or pants, though he still had his underwear and shirt on. The rags he used to secure the armor were tied around his knee, and someone had made an attempt to clean off some of the blood he had been covered in. The girl was wearing his other shirt like a poncho and sitting cross-legged with her back to him, cooking pieces of octopus and cuttlefish on sticks over a small fire. He could see her leg that had been pinned was bruised and scraped bloody, presumably from pulling it out in desperation once the attack had begun. She had two of his handguns in shirt pockets. The man quietly drew a dagger from the sheath between his shoulders, and lunged forward, putting an arm around her and the blade to her neck. She froze and said, "Calm down, mister. I borrowed your guns so we'd be safe while you were out. You take them back now, ok?" He didn't say anything. "Look, mister. If I wanted to hurt you I could have done it before you woke up." Keeping his arm around her chest and the knife in his hands he retrieved his firearms and felt down her body until he was sure she didn't have any other weapons in her possession. Then he released her and leaned back against the wall. "Can I turn around now?" The man grunted and pushed her with a foot. She turned around slowly and met his gaze. "Want your shirt back?" He stared at her until she became uncomfortable. "What, you don't talk?" When he did speak, his voice was a rough growl. He had to clear his throat and swallow to be understood. "Used to. Been a long time since I had anyone to talk to." His throat was dry and his lips stuck together in the corners. He looked around for his water bottle. Moving slowly she reached to her side and picked it up, and handed it to him. It was a one liter soda bottle and it was full of a murky liquid, which he drank carefully. Water. He capped it and set it down, then continued staring at her in silence. "I wish you would say something. You're making me nervous. Why are you staring like that?" Eventually he decided to answer. "You don't make sense. I'm trying to figure out what you are." She smiled slightly. "If I give you your shirt back, you'll see what I am." He shook his head in irritation. "Where did you come from? How can you be so healthy and well fed? Where are your scars?" He held out an arm covered with sucker marks, hook lines, and healed bites. "Why aren't you dead?" He repeated himself. "You don't make sense." She sighed and took a deep breath. "I'll try to explain." "Go ahead then." She appeared to take some time to figure out where to start. "Ok, you know what these things that attacked you are, right?" "Mutated cephalopods. Uplifted by the Invaders. Given a new way of breathing so they can live on land and intelligence so they can work together to hunt us." She nodded. "That's pretty much true. But how do you know this?" "I don't. It's what people say." "For once, people are mostly right." She started to turn back to the fire but stopped and asked permission. "I think the food is ready. Can I check it?" Now that she mentioned it he could smell the cooking meat and his mouth flooded with saliva. He jerked his head in assent. She turned her back to him and did something over the fire. After a minute she turned back with skewers of meat set on a relatively clean sheet of plywood, which she placed between them. He greedily grabbed one and started ripping octopus off the skewer with his teeth. He hadn't eaten in days. "Can I?" She pointed at the trencher. He grunted assent and took another stick for himself. She took one as well, and began eating, almost dainty compared to the way he wolfed his down. They ate in relative silence for a while. He had finished five sticks of meat and she two before she spoke again. "What do people say about why they did it?" He swallowed and wondered if he should save the last few skewers for later. With his knee he wouldn't be able to hunt for a while. If she tried to hunt she'd never make it back. "A bunch of crap. Guesses. Maybe they didn't like us eating calamari." She made a soft noise that he didn't recognize as laughter right away. He hadn't heard anyone laugh in so long that he couldn't remember it ever happening. "What's your guess?" "That they're evil bastards who want us dead. What fucking difference does it make? We're almost all dead anyway." She shook her head. "What you need to understand is, it's not about you. They didn't really even think about humans. You were just in the way." She spoke quietly. He stared at her for a long moment and placed his hand on the pistol in his lap. "You're going to have to explain how you know that." She nodded. "I'll explain everything." Again she thought for a while. "The Invaders are very intelligent, in a way that you, with your single brain, can't really understand. I'm not talking about their technology, the genetic engineering and faster than light drive. Humans could develop as much in time. They can control multiple limbs more precisely than you can control your hand. They can be any color or shape they choose. An Invader, any cephalopod, has abilities that humans can't even conceive. Even pre-Invasion cuttlefish and octopuses can do things you can't imagine." He thought about what she was saying. "We always suspected the Invaders were cephalopods. No one has ever seen them, though." "Some have." She paused. "I have." She waited for him to say something but he remained quiet. "They're not just cephalopods. They're directly related to the terrestrial species genetically." "You mean Panspermia." She looked surprised. He smiled bitterly. "I've neglected my academic studies somewhat since the Invasion, but I remember things. There was even a theory that cephalopods had extraterrestrial origin." His voice sounded more cultured and less brutish than it had previously. "I ... I didn't expect that you'd be educated." "Lot of fucking good that's done." When he didn't go on, she said, "So, you have to understand that, to the Invaders, humans didn't even seem sentient, at least not as they knew it. All intelligent life in the galaxy is like them. Of course it is. They seeded it." Again she waited for him to respond. When he didn't she went on. "Humans seem more like automa that can perform clever tricks. Like you would think of a virus. By the time they realised their error it was almost too late." "Almost." "Once they realised that humans were more than they thought, they decided to study us. To learn about us. Before we were all gone." He looked at her, suddenly intense. "Now we're getting to what you are." "I was an experiment. Raised by Invaders and exposed to captured humans, in the hope that I could form a bridge between the two. Able to understand both species." "Do I want to know what happened to those captured humans?" She looked away. "No." After a while, he asked her, "What are your plans for me?" "Why do you think I have plans for you? I could have escaped them." "Could you have? You would seem to be a valuable tool for them to lose track of. And our meeting sure seems to be a perfect set-up. You in distress, me your rescuer? You sympathetic and warning me of danger, then after, you my nurse and caretaker? Maybe I'll tell you about the Resistance?" When she didn't speak, he went on. "That attack should have killed me. They gave up pretty easily, didn't they? Leaving me crippled and unable to get away, stuck here with you. So I'd have to listen to your story, and then what? What do you want from me?" She reached out a hand and placed it on his good knee. "There aren't many of us left. We may be the last ones." He laughed bitterly. "I'm supposed to ask if you mean we'd be like Adam and Eve, right? Except we can't be, can we?" She stared at him, saying nothing. Then, "Why not?" "Because you're not human, are you? You're an Invader. You put on a good show, though." She looked at him, choosing her next move, and then just gave up. "What tipped you off?" "Your skin flickered a bit when you were trying to sell me. Your scraped leg is still wet." She looked at her leg and it scabbed over. "You've been watching my reactions and adjusting your appearance to suit me. You've been getting more and more beautiful the longer we've talked." "Eventually I'd be your perfect woman. I could make you happy." "Your happy slave, you mean." "Is that so bad? You'd still be happy." "I think I'll pass on the role of 'Slave to Alien Conquerors,' thank you." She leaned into him and he drew back. "It's not like you really have a choice, you know." Her limbs began to separate and become tentacles. He raised his pistol and she said, "You must know that won't do anything to me." He said, "It's not for you." He put the pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger. He had the habit of survival, but he had secrets.