64. Coon. Dink. Eyetie. Kraut. Nip. Raghead.

Coon. Dink. Eyetie. Kraut. Nip. Raghead. The shape shifter had been called all of these in his lifetime but not the word that now escaped from the small boy’s mouth. It shook him to the core that a 5-year-old would even know the slang let alone that he’d slap him in the face with it.

It took the shape shifter a while to get over it. He was used to being hurt – whenever he transformed into a new being he did not just take its appearance but also its feelings and anxieties – but this one, it really stung.

He’d never harmed a person in his twelve centuries of existence. He’d gone out of his way not to offend or irk. All he wanted was, from time to time, to view history through another being’s eyes. He’d been one of the first of his kind and though their numbers had increased vastly over the past millennium, it was estimated now that shape shifters still only made up .42 percent of the world’s population.

“Another double,” he ordered the bartender, who shook his head disapprovingly as he put down a full tumbler on the counter next to a dozen empty ones.

It happened more often these days. Shape shifters were no longer allowed by the government to operate under the clouded veil of anonymity which made it easier for people to see through the disguise, many often not bothering to hide their contempt.

Like the young boy who’d just called him a spook-face.

Life as a shape shifter in 2089 suddenly didn’t seem all that different from his days as a black sugar slave in the scorching Louisiana summer of 1811.

An uprising was inevitable.