Excerpt: Dark Sun Rising

"Was it weird? Being around one of them?" Will asks, and Eris pauses, considering her answer.

"It's weird being around any of them." She answers carefully, pushing aside the urge to shudder.

"I've never seen one before," Lynette breathes out, her tone overly curious.

"You should be glad for that." Will says sharply, and Lynette sits back, chagrined.

"It's different, but at the same time...not different." Eris explains, frowning as she realizes how unhelpful her answer is. "They look like us. Same facial structure, same body, but it's their skin that does it. It's all see-through and...unsettling. Disgusting."

"You can see through it? How? Why?" Lynette asks in rapt fascination.

"There used to be these fish that lived really deep in the ocean." Will explains quickly, and Eris recognizes the distaste on his face as he speaks. "They lived so far down that no sunlight ever reached them. Because there wasn't any sunlight, their skin was often white, or translucent. I guess that's why the subs have skin like that...living underground, they never had to defend themselves against natural light. Their skin probably just...changed."

"Evolution," Eris nods. "The same reason their eyes are always completely white, and their ears and nose are shaped differently. It's all just evolution."

"So they're still humans, then. Just...not." Lynette says, and Will's face pales. Eris feels herself shaking her head, her fingers trembling from some emotion she can't quite place. Anger?

"They're not like us." Will says, his tone closed off. "We may have been brutal and cruel at times, but we at least had the decency to acknowledge the way we were, to sometimes accept it and try to be better. We didn't tell others that we were good-natured at heart and walk around professing to be peaceful while essentially committing genocide."

"But they weren't the ones that killed most of us in the beginning. That was our doing." Lynette argues. Eris remains silent, her eyes moving back to her mother, wondering what life would have been like for them if the subhumans had never arrived, if they had never even existed in the first place. Perhaps they would be alive and healthy, with her father, a bit worse for wear but still managing to thrive. Their lives now were certainly not thriving. The opposite, perhaps. They were struggling to stay alive, and fighting back the ever-present threat of complete extinction.

"But they finished the job." Will says flatly, and Eris can see no trace of his usual good humor now. "We could have come back from it. Hell, we humans have made history coming back from the worst possible hardship imaginable at the time. Look at the Holocaust during the second World War. That was genocide. If someone had come in after Hitler, taken his power, and finished the job he'd started while saying they were just doing it for the general good the entire time..." He trails off, his lips thin and white.

"That's what it is now." Eris speaks finally, closing her eyes. "They're killing us off slowly, without remorse, because they think it's the right thing to do. They think it's what we deserve, and that left alive we would just bring further destruction."

"Killing people is never the right thing to do." Lynette murmurs, shaking her head. "No matter what the reasoning is."

"I don't know," Will replies, catching Eris's eyes, knowing they're thinking the same thing. "I can think of a whole lot of reasons to kill them. High up on that list is to do it before they get me first."