Chapter 23
Szhe’ka
I know I’m close to the hunters’ camp when their stench thickens in the air.
It isn’t as sharp as I expect. That’s what unsettles me. Where there is a camp, the smell should be overwhelming—rot and oil and that sickly sweet decay that clings to their kind. Instead, it hangs thin and wrong.
Fear tightens in my chest.
My hands ache from dragging along the ground, small stones biting into my palms as I move carefully, wary of making too much noise. I force myself forward until I can finally see the camp through a veil of leaves.
I slow and press myself behind a tree, peering into the settlement. It’s smaller than I imagined. Contained. That means fewer hunters. It also looks too empty.
Ani’s scent lingers in the air, warm and unmistakable. There’s another scent too. Not a hunter. Not like her.
I’m edging closer when I hear her voice speaking in a different language. She’s with someone. I don’t pause to decide whether the creature is predator or prey. I launch myself into the clearing and head straight for her.
She stands with her back to me. In front of her stands a two-legged creature holding a weapon trained on the body of a dead hunter. So he is not the enemy. Not right now.
Where are Ree and Thivoll? They should have reached her before I did.
My gaze drifts to the corpse.
I have only seen hunters alive—moving, hurting, hunting. Seeing one sprawled and powerless is deeply unsettling. Its jelly-like body lies punctured with smoking holes. Gray, putrid blood stains the ground. Even in death, its beady eyes seem to glare with the same malice.
The smell rolling off it is nearly overpowering. But I have more pressing concerns.
“Ani,” I call.
She freezes, gasps, and turns. My throat tightens at the sight of her.
Gray, pink, and yellow smudges are scattered across her face. One eye is swollen.
“Szhe’ka!” she cries, racing toward me and leaping onto my body.
I catch her easily, lifting her against my neck as her arms wrap around me. She squeezes tight, song muffled against my skin. I can’t make out the melody, but I know it’s joy.
“You alive,” she warbles, resonance revealing her disbelief, somehow still mixed in with that edge of defiance always underlying her melody.
I laugh.
Still defiant, and also happy to see me. What she doesn’t know is that I am happier.
I want to sink into her warmth, but the presence of the stranger nearby keeps me alert. He watches us with a solemn expression. There are no hunters left standing. Only him. Ani doesn’t seem concerned, so I force myself to stay still.
I wrap all my arms around her and pull her closer, savoring her warmth. She is far more fragile than she pretends to be.
Abruptly, she pulls back, climbing down from me, a stain of yellow spreading across her pale face. I let out a hum of confusion, remembering a similar effect happening on her skin, but it was pink before. My eyes dart to her mouth, which also used to be rimmed in pink, but is now a dark yellow.
I open my mouth to ask her about it, but she is already singing.
Her tones shift rapidly between relief, guilt, excitement. She’s chirping quick, frantic songs, hands waving wildly. It would be comical if her voice weren’t shaking.
“Slow down,” I murmur before she exhausts herself.
“I worried, Szhe’ka. Thought died. Scared.” Her newly yellow mouth trembles.
A small, selfish part of me glows at the knowledge she was worried. It’s quickly smothered by the weight of her fear.
“Does not matter,” I say softly. “I here now.”
She shakes her head.
“It matters. Was my fault.”
Conviction burns in her red eyes.
I open my mouth to argue—to tell her that she is the reason I kept going, that the thought of her pulled me forward—but she presses her hand over my mouth.
“Please. Let me speak.”
I nod.
“My regrets,” she says haltingly. “I made journey longer. Should not have been.”
I bend down to press my forehead to hers.
“No regrets, Ani. No fault.”
Water spills from her eyes and I wipe it away gently.
She takes my hand and leads me toward the stranger.
“He save me,” she says, glancing up at me. “Forgot ask name.”
Ani touches her throat and speaks in his tongue, asking him.
The male speaks. His language is unfamiliar, sharp and rhythmless.
“They call me Azoeul,” he says in a toneless language, no hint of his emotions and no resonance to carry it.
My feathers raise at the wrongness of it, but I don’t comment.
He continues speaking, but I am distracted by scanning the camp.
“Azoeul,” Ani translates into song after a wince of pain. “He run from hunters. I save him. He save me.”
“Speak this,” I tell her, shifting into Azoeul’s lifeless language. “Ree gave nanites with languages.”
Her eyes widen. Azoeul’s head snaps toward me.
I crouch with my fingers circled in greeting. He mirrors the gesture.
“We should not stay here,” he says evenly. “They will return.”
Ani’s grip tightens around mine. “There’s a stream,” she says softly, tracing a finger over the wounds on my hands. “We should follow it and clean ourselves.”
I reach toward a bruise on her face. She flinches and steps back.
“You clean first,” she insists.
Azoeul suggests gathering supplies. I agree. We collect what we can. He moves quickly—faster than I expect. Not much larger than Ani, lean, toned, with small horns and sharp teeth. A blade hangs at his waist.
When my box is full, we make our way into the forest and follow the sound of water. In silent agreement, we follow it until we are a safe distance from the camp. We set our supplies down along the bank, each warily scanning the trees.
“You see Ree? Thivoll?” I ask them.
“Thivoll?” Ani asks, brow furrowed.
“Big, orange, deadly,” I reply succinctly, longing for the richness of my own language, while also pleased to communicate so quickly.
“No, it’s just us,” Ani replies, looking at Azoeul with a raised brow.
“I have only seen you and the enemy,” he confirms.
“They healed me, then followed your trail. Should be here. We need to find,” I share.
“We will look, but wash off those scents first,” Azoeul tells us. “I will look for the enemy.”
Ani stands before me with her head lowered, bright threads falling forward to shield her expression. “I wanted you to see,” she says, her voice steady, deliberate.
When she lifts her face, the changes are unmistakable.
Her skin, once a clear stretch of cloud color, now carries faint yellow threads beneath it, visible as lightning-thin veins along her forearms. Blue undertones shift across her collarbones when she moves.
Against her white skin, the alterations are stark and impossible to ignore.
“They were angry,” she says evenly. “About the changes. Said I was encouraging it.”
I ask who, though I already know. “The hunters,” she answers. The word pushes like a strong wind against my chest.
“They beat you,” I say.
She lifts her shoulders and lets them fall. “Just my body, not my mind.”
The distinction does not ease the pressure building behind my ribs. I picture her surrounded, restrained, struck for daring to change her feathers. My failure. The thought is immediate and poisonous.
“I should have been here,” I say quietly.
She lets out a hum of frustration, the sound a rich break from the toneless language of the male who saved her. “They were angry. I wasn’t.”
She flexes her hands, showing me her new claws, clean, curved, precise against her pale fingers.
“They didn’t expect me to fight back.” When she lets out a hum, there is pride in it, controlled but undeniable.
I look at the bruises blooming dark against her neck, dark yellow staining white skin. “You were injured.”
She meets my gaze without wavering. “I injured them more.”
I still feel the guilt spreading, cold and relentless. “You should not have needed to fight.”
Her hum turns angry. “Szhe’ka. It’s my body. My fight. You don’t get to decide how I feel about it.”
The rebuke is precise. Clean. Correct.
I tilt my head. “You are correct.”
She crouches to wash off the blood coating her arms and the blue and yellow remain, each becoming clearer and richer with each stroke. Integrated. Natural. Like my own coloring. Feathers woven through her long red threads echo the tones along her skin.
She runs her hand over a healing wound and winces, then stiffens. Her shoulders lock. Her hand flies to her head.
“Szhe’ka—” she gasps before doubling over. I am beside her instantly. “What is happening?” Her breath fractures. “I don’t—”
She covers her mouth, dampening the sound of her scream as she falls to her knees, splashing water onto my feathers as I catch her, then arches her head back, eyes open wide in her panic.
As I watch, unsure how to help, her right eye darkens. Not the pupil — the entire eye. Black. Absolute. Her left eye shifts next, red giving way to blue, deepening, inner green igniting until it mirrors my own.
One void. One mine. The transformation is fast and brutal. She screams, losing control of her volume, the sound tearing through the quiet valley. Blood spills from her nose, vivid yellow against pale skin. Then from her mouth. She coughs, yellow staining the water beneath her.
Her body convulses as claws gouge the more delicate skin along my shoulders. Then she clutches her stomach, shaking. “It burns,” she manages.
“Breathe,” I command, though my own voice is unsteady.
She coughs again, then gradually stills. The black eye blinks once. The other narrows with startling clarity. Her breathing slows, though tremors continue to ripple through her frame. I realize my own hands are shaking, the larger set violently trembling.
“Why is this happening?” she croaks out, between ragged breaths.
“Know not. But not only you,” I tell her. “Ree has traits of Thivoll.” Ani’s mismatched gaze lifts to mine, one eye abyssal, the other unmistakably kin to my own.
“Probably all of us are changing,” she says.
The stream carries the last traces of blood away. She reaches for one of my upper hands, steady despite everything.
“I’m not afraid,” she says.
I wish I could say the same. Instead, I tighten my grip around her fingers and stare at the water as it flows past, knowing with cold certainty that we are no longer merely adapting.
The pattern of our song is changing.
Azoeul interrupts us with a pouch of supplies, and emotion surges again at the sight of him.
I resent him for saving her, even while grateful he did. But it should have been faster. Both of us were too slow. Why wasn’t he there sooner? Could he not have stopped whatever they did to her?
“Ready,” Ani calls, pulling me from my thoughts.
“Azoeul gathered food,” she says tonelessly. “You found rope. We can leave.”
Is she really this unmoved or is it just the language? My head spins with too many emotions, and the thought of her feeling unaffected makes me feel…
Alone. Cut off.
We follow Azoeul into the trees.
Ani walks beside me in strained silence. I glance at her and find her already watching me, small neck tilted back so she can see my face. She bares her teeth and tucks her threads behind her ear, both of them some mysterious gestures of her species that reveal nothing about her true emotions.
“They hurt you,” I sing, switching to my language, unable to keep speaking such lifeless tones for something so important.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” comes her reply in Azoeul’s dead language, her body stiff.
She is using the language as a shield, I realize. She is hiding her emotions. My feathers lie sleek, but inside the air churns with my frustration. I want to carry her pain. She won’t let me.
She hears the hum of my frustration and runs her fingers over my healing wounds, the gesture closing some of the emotional distance that lies between us, though our movements are still strained.
I offer her a hand and she wraps her fingers around two of mine.
“I’m happy you came,” she says softly. “Really worried.”
“Should have been there,” I murmur. “To protect you.”
“It’s alright,” she says quietly. “Like you said before. No regrets.”
I squeeze her hand. No regrets? I have nothing but regrets. I will never stop wishing I had reached her sooner.