Fledgling

“I touched my face and the short fuzz of black hair on my head, and I tried to see someone I recognized. I was a lean, sharp-faced, large-eyed, brown-skinned person—a complete stranger. Did I look like a child of about ten or eleven? Was I? How could I know?...‘I don’t know this person,’ I said. ‘It’s as though I’ve never seen her before.’”

Shori’s reflection is a stranger to her because she has no memory of her life before waking in the cave. She is essentially a new person, which she gradually comes to accept throughout the novel. This is the first moment in which Shori is confronted with her fragmented identity. She sees herself as Wright and other strangers do: a mysterious young girl finding her place in the world.

“He bent over me. I could feel him there, warm—a large, edible-smelling patch of warmth—so tempting to my starving, damaged body and to my damaged mind. Close enough to touch. And I grabbed him and I tore out his throat and I ate him. I was capable of that. I had done that. I sat for a long time, stunned, not knowing what to think…The man had known me. He had cared about me. Perhaps I had had a relationship with him like the one I was developing with Wright. I must have had such relationships with someone—several someones. How could I have killed such a person?”

The juxtaposition of an animalistic, instinctive act—killing a human stranger and eating him—with Shori’s developing sense of Morality is key. Although she remembers nothing of her previous life, she knows killing the man in the cave was wrong. She is constantly confronting her dual nature as an amoral creature beyond human judgment and a half-human girl learning right and wrong.

“I didn’t know what I was starting when I bit you the first couple of times. I didn’t remember. I still don’t remember much, but I know the bites connect you to me. That comforted me—that you were with me. But now, maybe you don’t want to be with me. If that’s what you’ve decided, tell me. Tell me now, and I’ll try to help you go.”

Part of Shori’s growing sense of morality is her feeling responsible for Wright. She desires his company but is wary of taking away his freedom—despite the possibility of him having already lost his free will. Instead of allowing the bite bond to take more of a hold, she promises to help him leave should he desire to.

“And I left feeling better, feeling as though he’d forgiven me. Whoever I was before, it seemed I had had some strong beliefs about what was right and what wasn’t. It wasn’t right to bite someone who had already been claimed by another of my kind. Certainly it hadn’t been all right to drain Raleigh to the point of sickness when he wasn’t truly responsible for shooting me. Why on earth would one of my own people take the chance of being responsible for a pointless shooting, perhaps even a death?”

As opposed to learning the fictional rules of vampire folklore, Shori’s instincts gradually reveal the Ina’s “real” rules. This innate knowledge gives her a moral code and reminds her that she wants to abide by it. It gives her a glimpse of the kind of person she was before her amnesia.

“‘Renee?’ Wright said to me, and I stopped. It eased something in me to hear him call me by the name he had given me. ‘You okay?’ he asked. I nodded. ‘Yell if you need me. I’ll hear.’ He nodded. He looked as though my words eased something in him.”

Shori and Wright have a special connection because he is her first symbiont. This connection is accentuated by him giving her a name when she was nameless. Although “Renee” is not Shori’s real name, it is real for Wright. She is “Renee” to him, and Shori finds comfort in being referred to as such, if only briefly.

“I gave him a moment to remember the dead and to deal with his obvious pain. I found that I almost envied his pain. He hurt because he remembered.”

When Shori meets her father, Iosif Petrescu, she finds him grieving the deaths of her mothers and sisters. She knows she should feel a similar grief at their loss but is frustrated because her amnesia prevents and protects her from it. In this moment, she would almost prefer pain if it meant remembering who she was. This scene ironically foreshadows Theodora’s death later in the novel and Shori’s overwhelming grief; she then understands her father’s pain at a severe cost.

“This was a bit of vampire theater. I knew it, and I was fairly sure she knew it, too. She had probably been brushing up on vampires recently. Of course, I didn’t need permission to enter her home or anyone else’s. I did find it interesting, though, that human beings made up these fantasy safe-guards, little magics, like garlic and crucifixes, that would somehow keep them safe from my kind—or from what they imagined my kind to be.”

Here, Shori feeds into vampire folklore by asking Theodora for permission to enter her home. She is playing with fiction and reality to make Theodora feel more at ease and in control. This also highlights how myths can sometimes become reality if given power through belief and ritualization.

“She hugged me against her. ‘I am lonely,’ she said. ‘Or I was until you came to me that first time. You’ve made me feel more than I have since I was a girl. I hoped you would go on wanting me—or at least that’s what I hoped when I wasn’t worrying that I was losing my mind, imagining things.’ She hesitated. ‘You need me,’ she said. ‘No one else does, but you do.’”

Theodora is perhaps the most sensitive of Shori’s symbionts. Theodora’s age makes Shori hesitant to take her on, but she feels an undeniable attraction to her—which is made stronger by the older’s human desire to be needed. Shori sympathizes with her loneliness: She has lost her entire family, knows almost nothing about her own species, and must build new connections with virtual strangers. This scene clearly illustrates the emotional symbiosis between human and Ina.

“I stared at the spot for a long time and caught myself wondering what the Ina did with their dead. What were their ceremonies? I knew something about human funeral services from my vampire research. I had read through a great deal of material about death, burial, and what could go wrong to cause the dead to become undead. It was all nonsense as far as I was concerned, but it had taught me that proper respect for the dead was important to humans. Was it important to Ina as well?”

As Shori learns more about humans and vampires, about Ina, she sees similarities and makes connections to help her understand her own kind. She knows that life and death are significant enough to warrant burial ceremonies, and given her repeated experiences with death, she wishes to know about Ina death rituals. Again, fiction influences her grasp on her own identity and morality.

“As he spoke, I realized that I was willing to go further than that. If we found the people who had murdered both my male and female families, I wanted to kill them, had to kill them. How else could I keep my new family safe?”

Shori was initially certain that murder was wrong, demonstrating her instinctual morality, but now she believes it may be a necessary evil to defend her new family of symbionts from those who are targeting her. Instead of signaling devolving morality, this shift speaks to her growing understanding of Ina values. The Ina value family, and Shori is willing to sacrifice her sense of moral superiority to protect her own.

“He was like the deer I had killed—just prey. He was my first deer that day. Before he realized I was there, I was on his back, one hand over his nose and mouth, my legs around him, riding him, my other arm around his head under his chin. I broke his neck, and an instant later, as he collapsed, I tore out his throat. I wanted no noise from him.”

This is one of the few moments in which Shori exercises her full strength. When her family is threatened, she becomes a fearsome predator and the human assailants become prey—like the Deer who sustained her in the cave.

“He said that, physically, he and most Ina fit in badly wherever they go—tall, ultrapale, lean, wiry people. They usually looked like foreigners, and when times got bad, they were treated like foreigners—suspected, disliked, driven out, or killed.”

Just as Shori has been targeted by the Silk family because of her dark skin, the Ina have historically been persecuted because they look different. This is interesting considering the Silks consider their species superior to humans and Shori’s mixed DNA. Ina are outsiders in the human world, but instead of embracing Shori because of their shared differences and common alienation, the Silks choose to antagonize her. This shows the prevalence of prejudice due to difference, no matter how small.

“Jessica Margaret Grant. I shut my eyes and tried to find something of the woman in my memory—something. But there was nothing. All of my life had been erased, and I could not bring it back. Each time I was confronted with the reality of this, it was like turning to go into what should have been a familiar, welcoming place and finding absolutely nothing, emptiness, space.”

When Shori tries to remember her human mother after being told her name, she uses a simile to express how her shifting reality is fracturing her sense of identity. In addition to feeling guilt for her lack of memory, she is helpless to change it. Without connections, which are essential to Ina survival, she feels lost and alone. This is Shori’s primary motivation for building respectful, permanent relationships with her symbionts.

“‘They take over our lives,’ Brook said. ‘They don’t even think about it, they just do it as though it were their right. And we let them because they give us so much satisfaction and…just pure pleasure.’ Wright grunted. ‘We let them because we have no choice. By the time we realize what’s happened to us, it’s too late.’”

Brook and Wright, two of Shori’s symbionts, question their behavior and choices in relation to the Ina. They acknowledge that the Ina-symbiont relationship is symbiotic but also sometimes imbalanced in favor of the Ina. This highlights the significance of free will and morality—and calls into question the degree to which Ina should use their symbionts.

“No, I mean…having Wright and Joel as well as Brook, Celia, and Theodora. It scares me. I need them. I care about them more than I thought I could care about anyone. But having them scares me.”

Shori feels the weight of responsibility for her growing group of symbionts—which reiterates the novel’s discussion of free will and morality. She loves her symbionts and wants them to be happy with her. However, the idea of connection scares her because losing her symbionts would be laden with memories—a greater pain that that of her biological family’s deaths. Like Important Quote #7, this fear foreshadows Theodora’s death.

“‘You read Ina? Excellent! I hope you’ll teach your children that skill. Some of our people don’t bother to teach their children to read Ina any longer. Some day our native language will be forgotten.’ I frowned. ‘Why should it be forgotten? It’s part of our history.’”

This scene highlights the importance of passing down family histories and traditions both orally and textually. Shori is able to learn more about her species via the Gordons’ history books and from simply speaking to other Ina. Culture is preserved through myths, stories, and language. As we see from Shori’s folklore research, even fictional stories can influence real understanding of culture. Shori is able to preserve pieces of Ina history by reading and speaking their language.

“We can see that our Councils aren’t games like the trials humans have. The work of a Council of Judgement is to learn that truth and then decide what to do about it within our laws. It isn’t about following laws so strictly that the guilty go unpunished or the innocent are made to suffer. It isn’t about protecting everyone’s rights. It’s about finding the truth, period, and then deciding what to do about it.”

This quote is perhaps a critique on the way society sometimes worships the law to the point of hindering true justice or equity. People of color have historically been unfairly cast as criminals and punished more severely for crimes, suggesting the law is not always impartial. Ina law focuses on truth instead of carrying out a limited view of justice. In the end, the Silk family is disbanded and Katharine Dahlman is killed—which Shori believes to be true justice.

“‘I’ve moved to Mars,’ she told me. ‘Now I’ve got to go learn how to be a good Martian. Who better to teach me than the other immigrants?’”

Theodora’s metaphor is significant for several reasons. It expresses the alien nature of the Gordon family compound, which Shori understands as she is experiencing Ina life for the first time as well. Theodora also wants to be “good” to earn her place in Shori’s family. She refers to the symbionts as “immigrants,” implying that they, like she, had a choice in their relocation. Because Theodora is murdered by a symbiont shortly after, this moment is darkly ironic.

“I was not in full control of myself as I approached Theodora. I had demanded that Martin take me to her, but I was not truly seeing or understanding what was happening around me. I could not believe my Theodora was dead. It made no sense that she would be dead. None. Then I touched her cold flesh.”

When Shori sees Theodora’s body, her lack of self-awareness and self-control mirror her waking in the cave in Chapter 1. She has suffered another trauma that has shattered her reality and ended in death. She finally understands the grief she should have felt at the loss of her mothers and their families.

“And yet, I understood on some murky emotional level and from slivers of recovered memory that it would be a serious offense against the Gordons to kill one of their guests. I couldn’t remember anyone ever doing such a thing, but I felt enough horror and disgust at the thought of doing it to know that I must not.”

Shori is able to exercise some restraint in avenging Theodora’s death. Her instinctual urge to kill the murderer is strong, but her sense of right and wrong proves stronger; in searching her memories, her emotions, she unravels more of who she used to be.

“‘But as I’ve told you, you were not what the Silks expected you to be. You should have been, by all reckoning, only a husk of a person, mad with grief and rage or simply mad.’ He paused. ‘I wonder if that’s part of why your memory is gone, not just because you suffered blows to the head, but because of the emotional blow of the death of all your symbionts, your sisters, and your mothers—everyone. You must have seen it happen. Maybe that’s what destroyed the person you were.’”

Until this moment, Shori has seen her amnesia as a mental betrayal for which she should feel guilty, but the Gordons help her understand that her mind is protecting her from further trauma. This highlights how loss and grief can change people both physically and emotionally. In Shori’s case, trauma literally shattered her past self so she could start anew with a new family.

“Russell launched himself toward me. I stood up and away from the table, ready for him, eager for him. It was like being eager for sex or for feeding. But before he could reach me, before I could taste his blood, two of his sons and one of his brothers leaped up from the front row, grabbed him, and dragged him down. They held him while he struggled beneath them, screaming. At first, it seemed that he wasn’t making words. He was only looking at me and screaming. Then I began to recognize words: ‘Murdering black mongrel bitch…’ and ‘What will she give us all? Fur? Tails?’”

When Russell Silk tries to attack Shori after he is sentenced, her biological instincts take over and she wishes to fight him. It is ironic that Russell is a racist who sees Shori as a “mongrel” because of her human DNA, but he is the one driven animalistic with rage. This illustrates how bigots are the true monsters of the novel.

“She screamed. Either she was terrified of my getting control of her or her pain overwhelmed her. I had not bitten her for nourishment or out of affection. I meant to destroy her throat, tear it to pieces. She let go of my shoulders to grab my head and push my face away, and in the instant of opportunity that gave me, I went for a better grip on her with my teeth. I bit through her larynx. She would do no more screaming for a while. And I broke her neck—or tried to. I wasn’t sure whether I managed it or not because I lost consciousness before the worst of my own pain could catch up with me. And then it was over.”

This moment is significant not only because it details Katharine Dahlman’s death, but because it is the first time Shori bites another Ina. This gives new meaning to biting in the novel. Previously, we have seen that bites feed Ina, are pleasurable to symbionts, can kill murderous humans, and establish bonds between mated Ina. Here, however, Shori’s bite is vengeance. By crushing Katharine’s throat, Shori effectively silences her forever.