Chapter 227: Gaslighting A Seven-Year-Old For Sport

Worth it. So worth it.

They wheel me through a set of double doors into a massive enclosure. I drift inside, hovering over the concrete floor as the door seals behind me. There are fake rocks, a heat lamp the size of a dinner plate, and glass on one side facing a viewing gallery dotted with tourists.

Someone presses an intercom button, and a chipper recorded voice informs the crowd they’re looking at a rare, recently acquired specimen pending species identification.

I float toward the fake rocks and arrange my coils in the air above them, letting my smoke tail drift down to brush the stone like I’ve lived here my whole life.

A little girl presses both hands to the glass and gasps.

"Mummy, look, it’s so big!"

Her mum glances up from her phone, unimpressed. "Very nice, sweetie."

I flick my tongue at the glass, slow and deliberate, and the girl squeals with delight.

[System: You are an attraction now, mate. A tourist attraction. A budget Kuji with a feeding schedule. How does it feel?]

Honestly? Kind of nice. Nobody’s trying to stab me. Nobody’s screaming in terror. There’s a heat lamp with my name on it, metaphorically, since apparently my actual name is a species classification code nobody’s bothered to fill in yet, which, rude, I’ve had the same name for two lives now, and it still doesn’t fit on a plaque.

[System: Don’t get used to this. You are not a zoo exhibit, you are a top of the food chain nightmare wearing a snake costume, and also I would like to remind you that somewhere out there Lyra is probably still waiting on you and getting increasingly murder-eyed about it.]

...Right, yeah. Okay, fine, I probably shouldn’t just live here.

But it’s gonna be really funny to see how long it takes before someone notices the mystery snake isn’t actually eating any of the frozen rats they toss in on Thursday.

The little girl’s mum wanders off toward the gift shop sign, phone still glued to her face, and that’s my cue.

I lean my head down real slow and let out a hiss so quiet only the kid could hear it. She jumps back from the glass like she’s been electrocuted.

"MUMMY, it HISSED at me!"

By the time Mum turns around, I’m already back to looking like a decorative rock with a tail, not a muscle twitching, tongue tucked in, completely and utterly innocent. A snake statue. A six-foot piece of dangerous art that has never hissed at anyone in its life.

"Sweetie, it hasn’t moved at all. Snakes don’t just hiss for no reason."

"It DID, I swear!"

"We don’t lie about the animals; that’s not nice to the other visitors."

The kid bursts into actual tears, and I am having the time of my life. I would high-five myself if I had hands, or literally any appendage that wasn’t just more snake.

[System: You’re a bloody menace, you know that? A grown man tormenting a toddler for sport.]

Grown snake, thank you very much, and also she started it by existing near the glass.

A group of college-aged girls rolls up next, giggling about something on one of their phones, and one of them points at me and goes, "Oh my god, it’s actually kind of hot, " which is fair, correct, but also I’ve got a reputation to maintain here. I flare my smoke out wide, inflating my entire body so the scales spread and I look about forty per cent bigger, infinitely more dangerous. I hold perfectly still like I’m posing for a calendar shoot. Snake of the Month. Mr. October.

"Whoa, look how big it gets!"

Yeah. Yeah, I know I’m a budget Godzilla. Still got it.

[System: Mate, you are so thirsty right now it’s actually kind of sad to watch.]

I am not thirsty, I am an alpha predator displaying dominance, there’s a difference, look it up.

Then someone in a lanyard and a polo shirt with the zoo logo steps into the gallery holding a clipboard, eyes scanning the enclosure like she’s about to start counting rats or checking my feeding log, and every instinct in my body screams nope.

I go smoke instantly. Just poof, gone, nothing but a curl of dark red haze drifting between the fake rocks like the world’s laziest ghost.

The intern squints at the empty enclosure, frowns, taps something on her clipboard.

"Huh. Weird, I swear I thought it was right there a second ago."

She moves on. I reform behind the rock pile, solid again, smug as hell, tail already draping back over the edge as if nothing happened.

[System: You do realise that’s going to end up in a report somewhere. "Specimen occasionally vanishes." That’s not suspicious at all, mate, that’s totally normal reptile behaviour.]

Listen, I never said I was playing this smart; I said I was playing this for fun. There’s a difference, and also nobody’s paying me to be smart today.

The little girl is still sniffling by the glass, mum now fully checked out and back on her phone, and I feel a small pang of something that might be guilt if I let it sit for more than half a second, which I don’t, because I flick my tongue out one more time, slow, deliberate, right at her.

She gasps through the tears. "It did it again!"

"Uh huh," says Mum, not looking up.

Worth it. Still so worth it.

Thursday rolls around, and a hydraulic hatch hisses open somewhere behind the fake rocks, that industrial disinfectant smell mixing with something meaty and cold. A keeper tosses in a frozen rat with the kind of casual underhand throw you’d use for a frisbee at a barbecue.

It lands near my coils and just sort of sits there. Thawing.

I do not eat the rat. I look at it, then at the glass, then back at it, and I push it with my snout until it rolls off the rock ledge and disappears into the little drainage channel by the pool.