Tommy Masterson’s mother looked him over. She grabbed him by the chin and twisted his face this way and that, making little noises of dissaproval as she ticked off items on some hidden checklist.

She ran her thumb across his lips, stopping at the corner where a dab of blood had dried. She pulled his eyes level with hers and, putting her forefinger beneath the left one, pressed firmly at its puffed outer edges. He winced in pain. “It’ll probably be black,” she said gruffly.

But these weren’t the wounds that worried her. Boys will be boys, after all. She’d had three brothers growing up who could always be counted on to remind her of that. No, a little roughhousing was to be expected.

It was the two small ovular bruises at the base of Tommy’s neck that had her hairs standing on end. She tried to hide her disquiet, but Tommy, in addition to being rowdy and generally untamed, was also fairly astute.

“Stop worrying,” he protested. “Everybody knows they’re harmless now.”

“Harmless?”

“He had a pretty good left hook I guess, but you know what I mean. They can’t _really_ hurt us anymore.”

“What if he’d broken the skin, Tommy? His teeth have been filed down but if he’d bitten you hard enough he could’ve punctured the skin and…”

“And nothing. Mom, it’s not just their teeth. They’ve all been sterilized. Come on, you know this.”

“Do I? Should I just trust everything the government and media tell me? Look, I just don’t think it’s smart to take chances. I mean, there are two hundred other boys in your class. Can’t you fight one that isn’t a couple of generations removed from seeing us as livestock?”

“Mom, I love you. But you have to relax. The Vs are domesticated now. They get to live life on the grid with Netflix and Amazon Prime, and we have a bunch of mooks to work all the graveyard shifts no human wants. It’s a win-win all around.”

“Just be careful,” his mother entreated. But Tommy didn’t hear, as he’d already bounded into the next room determined to test his theory that he could do a backflip off of the sofa.