28. Bertram
Bertram
Days passed and Bertram never heard the rumbling from inside the egg.
Helena was going on and on about her latest conversation with Jennie about whether or not the Arctic penguins could possibly be investigated as a new subspecies.
It wasn’t a conversation Bertram cared about at all, but he still found himself vaguely annoyed that his mom was having it with Helena instead of with him.
“It’s happening!” Helena shrieked, interrupting her own report on Jennie’s activities. “Look, look, look! It’s happening!”
Bertram’s attention snapped to the egg.
The top had broken open, and a tiny glimpse of a beak was visible.
There was more tapping, and then the cracks spiraled out like a spiderweb.
Bertram’s stomach did a backflip. V-2 was about to enter this world and, if owl-bears did imprint, Bertram was about to become the first humanoid being imprinted on by an owl-bear.
The magnitude of this scientific accomplishment felt surreal.
He heard a muffled squeal and looked over to see Helena biting her fist to keep quiet.
“Should I . . . should I get on all fours, maybe?” Bertram asked.
“That would give you a more owl-bear-like shape,” Helena said. Her pencil hovered over her notebook, poised and at the ready.
Bertram got on all fours and rounded his back, doing his best to look as owl-bear-like as possible. Just in time, too, as the top of the egg fell completely away, clattering to the floor in a rain of eggshells.
Bertram was face-to-face with the infant owl-bear cub-chick.
She was about the size of a house cat, and almost as naked as a baby parrot.
Her skin was covered in a layer of very fine fur, so thin that it was white.
She had no feathers yet, only slightly raised bumps where the feathers would presumably grow.
The nakedness of her skin made her giant silver-ringed amber eyes look bulging and too big for her face.
Her naked ears seemed almost like horns, fleshy and pink.
Her yellow beak had a metallic golden tip.
“She’s a girl,” Bertram announced to Helena. “And she’s beautiful.”
“You have a daughter!” Helena said.
Beneath the owl-bear mask, Bertram smiled at his daughter.
His daughter blinked her awkwardly large eyes up at Bertram. Then his daughter let out a shriek and burst straight through the incubator, sending shards of glass flying. With a furious cry, the baby owl-bear leapt into the world, razor-sharp talons fully extended and aiming for Bertram’s throat.