Cor is game, willing to tell us about the person on whose behalf she shot me with fungicide. “Saba was in charge of caring for our wolf beetles when we still had money. We ran out, but I still kept in touch with him,” she begins. Eventually, though, she found out Saba was trafficking in wolf beetles. She tells us all about how they were raised for extreme cuteness in pens under horrible conditions and farmed out to people. This boggles my mind. To what end? Unscrupulous people did that with puppies on Earth, but with wolf beetles? Can the indebted population here really support that kind of business?
“He did not care for the animals, he only viewed them from a profit perspective,” Cor rails. “It was just like Morgan! And he sold my family wolf beetle, Mr. Fuzzy, okay? And I know it sounds dumb, ‘oh, he sold the family wolf beetle.’ But I didn’t have a lot of friends, okay?” Her voice cracks. I wipe all trace of incredulity from my face. She’s opening herself up to us, and that deserves respect. “And I wasn’t really motivated by wealth. And when a lot of my family didn’t make it or terrible things happened to them…” Cor pauses, then rallies herself. “I can’t prove it, but I’m pretty sure Saba has connections to Morgan. They’re both driven by profit. I confronted Saba about this and tried to bust up his operation. It didn’t go well.”
“What happened?” Cleve asks.
“What happened is… I got exiled,” Cor says. So this all was quite recent, then. “I managed to get the job to spray fungicide to at least get outside—”
“Did you kill Saba?” I ask, trying to put all the pieces together. When we first met, she claimed she was self-imposing an exile before she could be exiled proper. She implied that she landed in her current predicament because she had killed someone. If her parents had died much earlier, Mr. Fuzzy could’ve been the only family she had left, essentially.
At my question, Cor grinds her teeth. “Yes, I killed Saba.” She pulls out her switchblade and gives it a flick. “I don’t feel bad about it,” she adds grimly. Okay… maybe Cleve should be a little more careful about threatening to eat wolf beetles. Cor sees my eyebrows shoot up at her admission, and she continues, “Look, he tortured them, okay? And when I became an adult, I realized what a terrible person he was. And he paid no penalty for this. ‘Cause he’s just like Morgan. Morgan enabled this.” Cor begins to seethe. “And he sold Mr. Fuzzy to Morgan!”
Ah, now we get to the meat of it. There are so many threads woven into Corazon’s hatred of Morgan. She blames him for the death of her parents, and he even has her beloved pet. But still… puppy mills of wolf beetles? That can’t be right. “There’s no, like, cock-fighting type thing with wolf beetles, is there?” I ask. “They’re really just highly desirable pets?”
Wolf beetle fights seem reasonable to Cleve. His take on the cuteness component is that it might make the alien creatures—and the alien world by extension—a little less terrifying. It could be a way for people to cope with the environment that seems to want to kill them. Not that he approves of this, mind you, but he sees how it could be a kind of consolation to planetfallers.
Cor, however, is having trouble wrapping her head around my suggestion. She struck me as a street tough when we first met, but I think she was actually quite a bit more sheltered than that. This idea, that people might derive satisfaction from watching these creatures maim and kill each other, has never occurred to her. Maybe because she’s never been attacked by one like Cleve and I have. I’m sure this wolf beetle breeding was never about cuteness. That was Cor’s own interpretation of what she saw. This is about brutality.
Cor presses her lips together, and I can hear a growl building at the back of her throat. “Now that you mention it,” she forces out, “that would explain why Saba and others were also so interested in how strong they are, how fast they are.” She sits there a moment and then shouts at the robot, “Just… just drive in circles!” The reminder of Morgan backs away and begins doing laps around the encampment. Cor snatches up her shades and leaps to her feet. She storms off, needing some space. We let her go.
“I guess the robot has a good print of her voice now,” I mutter.
It has a good print of ours, too, as it responds to our orders for it to stop when it’s time to attach the litter. Cleve and I assemble it while Cor is off cooling down. It’s made mainly from thicker mushroom stems, but the real clever bit is the vines dangling behind it to further obfuscate our party’s tracks. The weight of the defunct robot—which, yeah, Cleve and I lug into place—on the litter will help smooth out the prints from boots and treads, while the slithering marks left by the vines will simulate the tracks of a briar beast.