Ingenious #1

Chapter 8

Chapter Eight

T hree days later, after Beau had consumed six roasted goats, dozens of buttered loaves, wheels of cheese, and anything edible passed through the food chute, the putrid growth spurts triggering the ravenous hunger stopped. The lacerations healed without scarring, leaving behind smooth golden skin. He topped out at six foot ten with wide shoulders and a leanly muscled frame designed for speed. The paddle-sized hands and feet laughed at by cadets suited his new body. He had inherited the claws and the double-jointed flexibility of a feral, but his human appearance dominated. He had the slanted green eyes of a feral, but the round pupils were human, and the expression was pure Beau. His shoulder-length hair was the same white-blond, but the thick tawny hairs around his hairline were new.

Quiggs considered him handsome and showed him off like a proud new father to the stream of paying visitors. The new Beau, like the younger Beau, enjoyed attention. He bounced around the cell, swinging off the bars as agile as a sucker-toe. He was massive but friendly, a point Quiggs stressed to visitors as he urged them to protest a vote being debated for benevolent extermination. Men traveled from the other ports to view him, and the fees collected went into the treasury. The substantial amount mollified the Ruling Mothers into postponing the vote while doctors and professors evaluated Beau.

Which nature dominated, human or feral? Quiggs argued his friend was human with enhancements, able to serve the Triangle like Commander Bronn.

Quiggs received an exemption from curfew to set up a bunk bed, chair, and desk outside the cell, with jailors acting as his chaperones. In return, he promised not to cross the yellow line before the prisoner’s status was ascertained.

There were flaws that questioned whether Beau’s human side dominated.

At first Quiggs thought Beau required schooling in speech like a toddler. He soon realized Beau grasped language but was mute, communicating only with gestures.

When Quiggs asked if he had a voice, Beau shook his head. He gazed at Quiggs, then pointed at the ceiling.

“Beau, I know you want out, but you must prove you’re human.” Quiggs took a step toward the line when Beau squatted and rocked. A jailor thrust a baton at Quiggs’s stomach to block him. “How can Beau prove he’s human if we keep treating him like an animal?”

Beau gripped the bars glaring at the jailor.

Oh, fuck. “Beau, be good. The guard’s only following orders.”

Beau pointed to the ceiling.

“Be good and we’ll let you out.”

Beau gave a very human sigh.

If the Ruling Mothers observed Beau, Quiggs believed they’d vote to save him. Unfortunately, the jail was off-limits to women because Beau couldn’t be trusted to keep his clothes on. Even a loincloth irritated his new skin.

What impressed the visitors was not Beau’s friendly disposition. It was his penis. Long and thick, it had a pronounced spongy ring around the middle. Unconcerned with his nudity, Beau sat cross- legged on his pallet and fondled himself as if wondering what the fuss was about. He never showed wood. Instead of drawing tightly to his body with pent need, his new ball sac swung loosely.

Dr. Keith called Beau’s impotence a blessing. The Assembly viewed a sexually active but untrained male as aberrant and would have exterminated him.

The next obstacle to freeing Beau was proving he was employable. Idleness created deviant thoughts, so the law required every able-bodied male to work.

The Herders Guild offered to hire Beau if he could be trusted to handle a herd without eating them. While doctors and professors argued over who, besides Quiggs, was brave enough to step over the yellow line and test Beau’s control, Master Herder Brooke answered the question. He simply opened the food chute and shoved a weakened two-day-old baby goat with a crooked foreleg into the cell.

Beau immediately pounced on the crippled infant. Everyone clapped their hands to their mouths, horrified, as he whisked the baby to his pallet at the back of the cell. He sniffed, examined, and petted the trembling animal until it quieted. His worried gaze on Quiggs, Beau pointed from his mouth to the baby repeatedly.

“He wants permission to eat it!” Dean Cagney was the first to speak, his crisp diction reduced to a girlish soprano.

“I can’t watch this.” A professor of language knelt with his head between his legs.

“For fuck’s sake. Beau wants a bottle to feed it,” Quiggs informed them, watching the baby goat suck Beau’s fingers. Yeah, Beau still had the magic.

Brooke passed bottles of milk through the chute. The baby goat sucked its fill for Beau, then slept in his arms while he gently massaged the crooked leg. The next day the baby was hopping around the cell.

Convinced Beau was useful again, Brooke secured the guild’s promise to employ him once he was released and trusted to wear clothes. “Can’t have him wagging his new cock in the street,” Brooke told Quiggs. “Officers of the Herders Guild will speak to the Assembly. I reckon herders carry more clout than a bunch of doctors submitting papers on how much pee he produces and professors teaching him to match circles and squares.”

With employment settled and Beau’s sex drive undeveloped, communication remained an obstacle.

Though Beau couldn’t speak, his human perception clicked into place, expanding as rapidly as his body had. He read first-year primers as if he grasped the words, but he struggled with writing. The professors pointed out if he couldn’t write legibly, he failed his communication skills.

Quiggs told the professors to give him a fatter marker. Beau’s thick fingertips hampered his writing.

Problem solved.

Once he mastered a fat writing marker, Beau demonstrated the skills of a second year… third year… fourth year… fifth year and rising.

Beau wrote on a slate and held it up, gesturing it was for Quiggs to read.

I want to go outside and hug my Quiggs.

“When the Ruling Mothers vote yes.”

Beau paced, staring up at the ceiling before writing, I need to feel sunlight.

“Archers will shoot you on sight. People are afraid of you. You must show them how good you are. Be patient.”

I am good. I am patient. I want to hug my friend Quiggs. He stretched his arms through the bars, silently pleading for a hug.

Quiggs blinked back tears. “I can’t step over the line yet. The guards will spear you. We must wait until the Ruling Mothers vote yes.”

Beau dropped to the floor and rocked back and forth in a silent yowl, his head butting the bars. He was caged without privacy to wash or use the toilet. He slept on a pallet. His cell was hosed down daily. Guards fed him by sliding food through the chute. He studied his lessons and performed on command. He masturbated when asked and seemed amused by the visual stimuli the sex clinic arranged. He agreed to wear a loincloth. Yet if he approached the bars and held out a hand to touch, visitors yelped and scampered further back behind the yellow line. Their fear wounded him.

The increased rocking was a sign Beau was reaching his breaking point. If Quiggs continued treating his friend like a savage animal, Beau would snap and behave like one.

At midnight, believing Quiggs asleep, the guard left for a hook-up in the cell down the hall. Quiggs threw off his blanket, ready to prove his friend was human. The blue veins in the stone walls glowed as the motion triggered the sensors. He pushed his cot and footlocker packed with what he needed to the cell door and pulled out a key.

Beau gripped the bars, his body trembling in anticipation.

“If I unlock the door, you must promise not to escape. The guards will kill you. Understand?”

Beau nodded.

“I can’t let you out. But I can move in with you. We’ll be roommates again.”

Beau stood back, hopping from one foot to another while Quiggs pushed his cot, desk, chair, and footlocker inside. The guard would have a seizure when he discovered Quiggs had locked himself inside the cell with all the keys. Quiggs had picked the lockbox in the jail’s office and stolen them so no one could unlock the door and drag him out. The gray metal bars resisted hacksaws and acid. The governor could starve Quiggs out, but she wouldn’t, fearful Beau would eat Quiggs and cost Rosamunde the income from her husband’s inventions.

Once the Assembly of Ruling Mothers learned Quiggs lived with Beau unharmed, they would declare Beau human and release him to live out a productive life with the Herders Guild.

Beau pounced after Quiggs locked the door. Their size difference was awkward with Beau handling him like a mound of dough while he licked and hugged, snuffled and patted .

“Aaack! Enough licking! Help me move in before the guard returns.”

Quiggs used the extra sheets and rope hidden in his footlocker to rig a privacy curtain around the toilet and sink. He’d also brought a wash bucket, brushes, and a better grade of soap and towels.

Beau scowled at the soap.

“If we’re roommates, you will bathe daily. And you must wear real clothes.” Quiggs pulled out a pair of brown military boxers and an extra-sized brown tee from his backpack. “Commander Bronn’s manservant, Cutty, sent them. He said your friend Max is somewhere tracking ferals, or he’d visit.” He held the clothes against Beau. “Damn, you’re taller than the Commander.”

Beau sniffed the clothes. Bouncing on his toes, he slid the tee over his head. The seams strained at the shoulders. Beau flexed, and the seams ripped, giving him room. The boxers hugged indecently. He strutted, showing off his friend Max’s gift. Quiggs suspected he’d never get them off Beau.

Quiggs stared at the ripped armholes and the outline of muscular buttocks. An awkward zing twitched his cock. It had to be the military clothes. He’d never reacted to the skimpy loincloth.

Beau pushed the cot against the back wall and dragged his pallet beside it. He sat on the cot and spread his legs, motioning for Quiggs to kneel between them.

Quiggs experienced one of the few blank mind pages of his life.

Beau chuffed and pulled Quiggs over to kneel facing the bars so he could groom the messy braid. He made happy throaty rumbles as Quiggs sat unmoving with arms resting awkwardly on a pair of muscled thighs surpassing his best fantasies of Miller from the shower.

So… damn… mortifying.

Beau sniffed the air, his hands stilling on the braid. He understood the smell of pre-cum meant a visit behind the closed door of the bathroom. He tied off the braid, then pointed at the curtain. Beau never questioned Quiggs about his releases. He treated those times matter-of-factly. Like being hungry and eating a slice of bread.

Quiggs grunted “No” and crawled on the cot to sleep. He flipped the blanket over his head and faced the wall, listening to Beau stretching before curling up on the pallet.

The blue light in the cell block dimmed as movement ceased.

There were five minutes of quiet before the guard returned and the whole place lit up like a lightning storm.