Chapter Nineteen #2
With a palm on her dagger, she slunk away from the wall, swaying unsteadily as the ground shifted beneath her feet, eyes darting from one side to the other, aware of every noise, every shape, every crevice of dark.
Her dagger stayed cool for long enough that Solana thought she might not run into a single muki.
How lush the lives were here, that nobody died unexpectedly or violently, that most of their dead felt no need to return and wreak havoc.
She was about to turn back the way she had come when she saw a bright flash of color race by from the corner of her eye. She spun and held out her dagger, the sharp edge of the blade glinting in the moonlight. There was nothing there.
Another flash, this time followed by a child’s giggle. Solana saw sunlight and brown hair and her favorite blue dress. She took off down the street after her, desperate to see who she was running from.
“Careful,” a voice called out. “You don’t want to get blood on that pretty dress.”
Solana whirled in a circle, flashes of gentle hands and scraped knees and soothing words. “It’s important that this stays in your body at all times.” Fingers tickled her sides. She laughed, but his eyes were so serious. “You are very special, ususi.”
Ususiiiii, the dark whispered.
The walls of the homes surrounding her blurred and swayed. Solana stuck out a hand to steady herself, but the wall she fell against was cold and severe, sucking her down into memories and nightmares, swirling the two until she couldn’t tell what was real or imagined.
A knife pressed against her body. Fingers curled into the earth. Blood-soaked stone and forgotten pasts and gut-wrenching betrayal.
On her knees, Solana gasped for air, dying to live, to be free, to—
She didn’t feel the heat of her dagger until it was too late.
The muki was upon her within the next breath, a collision that sent her careening into the wall with enough force to make her vision go black.
It knocked her dagger out of her hand, and her solidly back into the present, into a reality where she had gone to hunt muki all on her own in a ridiculous dress because she was reckless and selfish and sad.
Pathetic. Distractions were for the weak, and Solana was the weakest of them all.
Daggerless and waiting for her vision to fully return, Solana watched through a fog as the muki got to all fours and shook its head like a dog, and then its beady eyes landed on her.
Saliva dripped from its teeth. Scraggly bits of hair fell onto its forehead.
It watched her, waiting to see what she would do.
Solana chose to stay very still. To carefully calculate the distance between her and her dagger and her and the muki and the muki and her dagger, trying to ascertain who would get to what first.
It was more consideration than she usually gave any single problem, but there was no Sami to watch her back, no Reyes to hunt beside her.
It was only one muki. And despite the several piscos and the negligible vision problem, Solana was determined to put it down.
Decision made, she lunged into a slide, her hand just closing around the hilt of her dagger when the muki’s body hit her again.
She was able to turn so that she was facing it and swing the blade into its side.
Not an ideal spot—she preferred the base of the neck—but this would slow it down and give her the time to make a killing blow.
Except it didn’t react the way she had expected it to. Its head hovered above hers, tilted like a dog hearing a strange sound. If it had ears, she imagined they’d be perked.
Instead, it watched her, its beady eyes unmoving and unblinking, and then it moved its lipless mouth.
At first, she thought it was another nightmare.
A figment of her imagination paired with a foolish amount of pisco.
There was no world in which muki spoke, and yet, Solana watched its mouth move and attempt to form words.
She saw its purple tongue touching the roof of its mouth.
She heard the gurgle and gasp of language, even if she didn’t understand the words.
Solana tried to scramble free. She yanked her dagger out of its side and plunged it back in, higher, this time, where she knew its unbeating heart would be.
But its mouth didn’t stop moving, and its grip tightened on her arms, talons digging into her flesh and pinning her like a cat playing with its food. She wanted to scream, but she didn’t dare wake it from whatever trance it seemed to be stuck in.
And if she had screamed, she wouldn’t have heard the word it whispered.
?akapana.
A hiss, a whisper squeezing through decayed muscle and deconstructed flesh.
Solana pulled her dagger out and sunk it back in, this time into its chest. Brackish blood poured onto her hands and stomach, and still the thing spoke.
?akapana.
?akapana.
?akapana.
“Stop, stop, stop,” Solana chanted, plunging the dagger in again and again with each word. Bits of gore splashed onto her face. Talons dug deeper into the fleshy parts of her arms. It wouldn’t stop talking. It wouldn’t die. She bucked with her hips, desperate to dislodge it, to make it stop.
Finally, she gained enough leverage that she was able to swing up and around and sink the dagger directly into its spinal cord. Its mouth stopped moving mid-word, and still she heard the end of it like a plea.
?akapanaaaaa.
The muki slumped over her with all its weight, and it was there, covered in blood and alone in the middle of the street, that she weathered all of its relief and grief and turmoil.
Absorbed it into herself as if, in death, it had finally been granted eternal peace.
It hurt to experience it while pinned to Supay, while knowing that future for herself was so far away.
It filled her with envy, with rage, with the need to pummel and tear and destroy anyone and everything.
But eventually it faded, sapping her strength along with it, and she was left stuck beneath the weight of her choices. That was when they found her. Reyes appeared above her, his silver hair matching the stars haloing his head, face set into a careful expression of clinical concern.
“Can you move?” he asked distantly.
“Well, no, but that’s because there’s a giant man-eating creature on top of me.”
Reyes rolled his eyes and pulled a pair of gloves out of his pocket. Oskar popped up next and gave her a small wave. He glanced at the muki and then shook his head, but there was a half smile revealing the beginnings of dimples in each cheek.
“It’s so funny, right?” Solana asked, but she was smiling despite the leftover ache in her chest and the incessant throb of her head.
They counted to three, and then the muki was rolled off her and Solana took a deep breath, wincing slightly as a twinge of pain shot through her side.
Broken rib, most likely, and not her first. The ground tilted when she pushed herself to her feet, and she reached out for the wall to steady herself.
She found Reyes’s chest instead. None too gently, he twisted her arm to the side and inspected the gouges from the muki’s talons. Then he grabbed her face.
“Look at me,” he demanded. When she did, his fingers gently slid into her hair and felt along her scalp.