Read Unnaturals for Free Online Page A

Because if they are, I must go and get them out!"
    "Sit down, child," the old man sighed. "Eat your chocolate." She did, but her eyes kept on shaking him.
    "You're not going there, do you hear me? You're not going there yet. And, gods be willing, my grandson is not there, either, and, gods be willing, neither is your dad."
    "Gods?"
    "Yes. I believe in the gods. I pray to them. The gods must exist. They must. Someone must stand above those who do this to us."
    Mel
    The creature—no, the man—started crying. He looked weak, Meliora suddenly knew, in addition to being so extremely ugly. His skin was as washed-out and shrunken as a leather purse put by a silly five-year-old girl into the wash. His eyes were almost invisible down there in their deep, misshapen holes—small, pale, watery eyes, surrounded by wrinkled, hanging skin and bushy eyebrows of a dull white color.
    Some people had white hair, of course. People had all kinds of hair, whatever was fashionable. Mel had changed her own hair more times than she could count. But his white wasn't shiny, healthy, and living, it wasn't...natural. She hated herself for thinking of the word.
    The man's shoulders were unnaturally hunched, his cheeks sunken, skin both wrinkled and taut over the sharp cheekbones. His limbs were unnaturally thin. Thinness, just like fatness, came and went in fashions, and it was as easy to flip from one to the other as it was to change the color of your hair—but somehow Mel felt that it wouldn't be easy for this man to become fat. He looked brittle, like a piece of the finest glass, one that you bought and must throw away almost immediately and buy a new one, because it shattered so fast.
    She looked at the man with a new worry. You could not just buy a new man.
    "Please don't cry, Nicolas." She decided it was now proper to get closer and pat his shoulder reassuringly. "Would you like your pills? Shall I call your medstat for you?"
    "No!" the strange man shouted, then laughed through tears. "There is no such abomination in my home, Meliora."
    "I'll call one from the shared homes..." But no, he wouldn't want that. So, something else must be done.
    "I'll fix you up then, Granddad Nicolas." Somehow I will figure it out. "I'll be a doctor one day. Did you know that, many, many decades ago doctors used to cure disease? I understand now. I understand why my doc asked me to become a doc myself. Granddad Nicolas, before today I never understood what disease was, but I think that you must have one." The man was calm again, smiling vaguely.
    "And so, it repeats. The young, eager, and ignorant would cure old age. But where does it lead from there? In whose hands does the power fall? For what purpose?"
    He handed her a new chocolate. He also broke a piece off another chocolate bar and put it into his mouth. He had no teeth, so he sucked on it, the sound echoing in his big, empty home.
    "Listen to me, Meliora-girl," he said. He sucked again. Mel felt it polite to bite off a piece of her own chocolate. It was the same as before, very delicious. Yet, in a way, she could not feel the taste. The man's brittle limbs were trembling and Mel noticed that, though hers looked very different from his, they were trembling, too.
    "You asked for the truth, girl. The truth is I won't live much longer. I am a goner, as they say. Or used to say. You can't cure me. At this point, no one can. I chose it like this. And, my girl, there is no need to tell me how it was fifty years ago. I was there."
    She took a deep breath. She let it out.
    "And, my girl, I am not really Nicolas' granddad. I am his great-granddad. I saw them all go—my son, my daughter, her son, his daughter, even the little ' unnatural ' boy—all of them young, all of them beautiful. But the boy is alive. The boy must be alive still. The gods would have told me if he weren't. I am sure of it."
    "You had a son and a daughter?"
    "Does this sound to you like stuff from the fairytales?"
    She nodded.
    "Even fairytales,