Chapter 17 #4
“You’re scaring her,” Nezha said in a low voice, gesturing again for Rin to stand back. He turned back to Khudali. “Can you show me what direction it ran in?” he asked softly. “Where did it go?”
“I . . . I can’t tell you how to get there. But I can take you,” she said. “I remember what I saw.”
She led them a few steps toward a corner of the alley, then paused.
“That’s where it ate my brother,” she said. “But then it disappeared.”
“Hold on,” said Nezha. “You said you came here with your sister.”
Khudali looked up at Nezha, again with those wide, imploring eyes.
“I suppose I did,” she said.
Then she smiled.
In one instant she was a tiny girl; the next, a long-limbed beast. Except for its face, it was entirely covered in coarse pitch-black fur.
Its loping arms could have reached the ground, like Suni’s, a monkey’s arms. Its head was very small, still the head of Khudali, which made it all the more grotesque.
It reached for Nezha with thick fingers and lifted him into the air by his collar.
Rin drew her sword and hacked at its legs, its arms, its torso. But the chimei’s bristly fur was like a coat of iron needles, repelling her sword better than any shield could.
“Its face,” she yelled. “Aim for the face!”
But Nezha wasn’t moving. His hands dangled uselessly at his sides. He gazed into the chimei’s tiny face, Khudali’s face, entranced.
“What are you doing?” Rin screamed.
Slowly, the chimei turned its head to look down at her. It found her eyes.
Rin reeled and stumbled backward, choking.
When she gazed into those eyes, its entrancing eyes, the chimei’s monstrous body melted away in her vision. She couldn’t see the black hair, the beast’s body, the rough torso matted with blood. Only the face.
It wasn’t the face of a beast. It was the face of something beautiful. It was blurry for a moment, like it couldn’t decide what it wanted to be, and then it turned into a face she hadn’t seen in years.
Soft, mud-colored cheeks. Rumpled black hair. One baby tooth slightly larger than the rest, one baby tooth missing.
“Kesegi?” Rin uttered.
She dropped her torch. Kesegi smiled uncertainly.
“Do you recognize me?” he asked in his sweet little voice. “After all this time?”
Her heart broke. “Of course I recognize you.”
Kesegi looked at her hopefully. Then he opened his mouth and screeched, and the screech wasn’t anything human. The chimei rushed at her—Rin flung her hands up before her face—but something stopped it.
Nezha had broken free of its grasp; now he held on to its back, where he couldn’t see its face. Nezha stabbed inward, but his knife clattered uselessly against the chimei’s collarbone. He tried again, aiming for its face. Kesegi’s face.
“No!” Rin screamed. “Kesegi, no—”
Nezha missed—his blade ricocheted off iron fur. He raised his weapon for a second blow, but Rin dashed forward and shoved her sword between Nezha’s blade and the chimei.
She had to protect Kesegi, couldn’t let Nezha kill him, not Kesegi . . . he was just a kid, so helpless, so little . . .
It had been three years since she’d left him. She had abandoned him with a pair of opium smugglers, while she left for Sinegard without sending so much as a letter for three years, three impossibly long years.
It seemed like so long ago. An entire lifetime.
So why was Kesegi still so small?
She reeled, mind fuzzy. Answering the question was like trying to see through a dense mist. She knew there was some reason why this didn’t make sense, but she couldn’t quite piece together what it was . . . only that there was something wrong with this Kesegi in front of her.
It wasn’t her Kesegi.
It wasn’t Kesegi at all.
She struggled to come to her senses, blinking rapidly like she was trying to clear away a fog. It’s the chimei, you idiot, she told herself. It’s playing off your emotions. This is what it does. This is how it kills.
And now that she remembered, she saw there was something wrong with Kesegi’s face . . . his eyes were not soft and brown, but bright red, two glaring lanterns that demanded her gaze . . .
Howling, the chimei finally succeeded in flinging Nezha off its back. Nezha jerked through the air and crashed against the alley wall. His head thudded against the stone. He slid to the ground and did not stir.
The chimei bolted into the shadows and disappeared.
Rin ran toward Nezha’s prone form.
“Shit, shit . . .” She pressed her hand to the back of his head. It came away sticky. She probed around, feeling for the contours of the cut, and was relieved to find it was fairly shallow—even light head wounds bled heavily. Nezha might be fine.
But where had the chimei gone . . . ?
She heard a rustling noise above her. She turned, too slowly.
The chimei jumped straight down to land on her back, seizing her shoulders with a horrifically strong grip. She wriggled ferociously, stabbing backward with her sword. But she attacked in vain; the chimei’s fur was still an impenetrable shield, against which her blade could only scrape uselessly.
With one massive hand the chimei seized the blade and broke it.
It made a disdainful noise and flung the pieces into the darkness.
Then it encircled Rin’s neck with its arms, clinging to her back like a child—a giant, monstrous child.
Its arms pressed against her windpipe. Rin’s eyes bulged.
She couldn’t breathe. She fell to her knees and clambered desperately over the dirt toward the dropped torch.
She felt the chimei’s breath hot on her neck. It scratched at her face, pulled at her lips and nostrils the way a child might.
“Play with me,” it insisted in Kesegi’s voice. “Why won’t you play with me?”
Can’t breathe . . .
Rin’s fingers found the torch. She seized it and jabbed it blindly upward.
The burning end smashed into the chimei’s exposed face with a loud sizzle. The beast screeched and flung itself off Rin. It writhed in the dirt, limbs twitching at bizarre angles as it keened loudly in pain.
Rin screamed, too—her hair had caught fire. She pulled up her hood and rubbed the cloth over her head to smother the flames.
“Sister, please,” the chimei gasped. In its agony it somehow managed to sound even more like Kesegi.
She crawled doggedly toward it, pointedly looking away from its eyes. She clutched the torch tightly in her right hand. She had to burn it again. Burning it seemed to be the only way to hurt it.
“Rin.”
This time it spoke in Altan’s voice.
This time she couldn’t stop herself from looking.
At first it only had Altan’s face, and then it was Altan, lying sprawled on the ground, blood dripping from his temple. It had Altan’s eyes. It had Altan’s scar.
Raw, smoking, he snarled at her.
Staving off the chimei’s attempts to claw off her face, she pinned it against the ground, jamming down its arms with her knees.
She had to burn its face off. The faces were the source of its power. The chimei had collected a mass of likenesses from every person it had killed, every face it had torn off. It sustained itself on human likenesses, and now it tried to obtain hers.
She forced the torch into its face.
The chimei screamed again. Altan screamed again.
She had never heard Altan scream, not in reality, but she was certain that it would have sounded like this.
“Please,” sobbed Altan, his voice raw. “Please, don’t.”
Rin clenched her teeth and tightened her grip on the torch, pressed it harder against the chimei’s head.
The smell of burning flesh filled her nostrils.
She choked; the smoke made her tear up but she did not stop.
She tried to rip her gaze away, but the chimei’s eyes were arresting.
It held her eyes. It forced her to look.
“You can’t kill me,” Altan hissed. “You love me.”
“I don’t love you,” Rin said. “And I can kill anything.”
It was a terrifying power of the chimei’s that the more it burned, the more it looked like Altan. Rin’s heart slammed against her rib cage. Close your mind. Block out your thoughts. Don’t think. Don’t think. Don’t think. Don’t . . .
But she couldn’t detach Altan’s likeness from the chimei. They were one and the same. She loved it, she loved him, and he was going to kill her. Unless she killed him first.
But no, that didn’t make sense . . .
She tried to focus again, to still her terror and regain her rationality, but this time what she concentrated on was not detaching Altan from the chimei but resolving to kill it no matter who she thought it was.
She was killing the chimei. She was killing Altan. Both were true. Both were necessary.
She didn’t have the poppy seed, but she didn’t need to call the Phoenix in this moment. She had the torch and she had the pain, and that was enough.
She smashed the blunt end of the torch into Altan’s face. She smashed again, with a greater force than she knew she was capable of. Bone gave way to wood. His cheek caved in, creating a cavernous hole where flesh and bone should be.
“You’re hurting me.” Altan sounded shocked.
No, I’m killing you. She smashed it again and again and again.
Once her arm started going, she couldn’t stop.
Altan’s face became a mottled mess of fragmented bone and flesh.
Brown skin turned bright red. His face lost shape altogether.
She beat out those eyes, beat them bloody so she wouldn’t have to look into them anymore.
When he struggled, she turned the torch around and burned him in the wounds. Then he screamed.
Finally the chimei ceased its struggles beneath her. Its muscles stopped tensing, its legs stopped kicking. Rin lurched forward over its head, breathing heavily. She had burned through its face to the bone. Underneath the charred, smoking skin lay a tiny, pristine white skull.
Rin climbed off the corpse and sucked in a great, heaving breath. Then she vomited.
“I’m sorry,” said Nezha when he awoke.
“Don’t be,” Rin said. She lay slumped against the wall beside him. The entire contents of her stomach were splattered on the sidewalk. “It’s not your fault.”
“It is my fault. You didn’t freeze when you saw it.”
“I did freeze. An entire squadron froze.” Rin jerked her thumb back toward the Federation carcasses in the market square. “And you helped me snap out of it. Don’t blame yourself.”
“I was stupid. I should have known that little girl—”
“Neither of us knew,” Rin said curtly.
Nezha said nothing.
“Do you have a sister?” she asked after a while.
“I used to have a brother,” Nezha said. “A little brother. He died when we were young.”
“Oh.” Rin didn’t know what to say to that. “Sorry.”
Nezha pulled himself to a sitting position. “When the chimei was screaming at me it felt like—like it was my fault again.”
Rin swallowed hard. “When I killed it, it felt like murder.”
Nezha gave her a long look. “Who was it for you?”
Rin didn’t answer that.
They limped back to the base together in silence, occasionally ducking around a dark corner to make sure they weren’t being followed. They did so more out of habit than necessity. Rin guessed there wouldn’t be any Federation soldiers in that part of the city for a while.
When they reached the junction that split the Cike headquarters and the Seventh Division’s base, Nezha stopped and turned to face her.
Her heart skipped a beat.
He was so beautiful then, standing right in the space of the road where a beam of moonlight fell across his face, illuminating one side and casting long shadows on the other.
He looked like glazed porcelain, preserved glass. He was a sculptor’s approximation of a person, not human himself. He can’t be real, she thought. A boy made of flesh and bone could not be so painfully lovely, so free of any blemish or flaw.
“So. About earlier,” he said.
Rin folded her arms tightly across her chest. “Not a good time.”
Nezha laughed humorlessly. “We’re fighting a war. There’s never going to be a good time.”
“Nezha . . .”
He put his hand on her arm. “I just wanted to say I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to—”
“Yes, I do. I’ve been a real dick to you. And I had no right to talk about your commander like that. I’m sorry.”
“I forgive you,” she said cautiously, and found that she meant it.
Altan was waiting in his office when she returned to base. He opened the door even before she knocked.
“It’s gone?”
“It’s gone,” Rin confirmed. She swallowed; her heart was still racing. “Sir.”
He nodded curtly. “Good.”
They regarded each other in silence for a moment.
He was hidden in the shadow of the door.
Rin couldn’t see the expression on his face.
She was glad of that. She couldn’t face him right now.
She couldn’t look at him without seeing his face burning, breaking under her hands, dissolving into a pulpy mess of flesh and gore and sinew.
All thoughts of Nezha had been pushed out of her mind. How could that possibly matter right now?
She had just killed Altan.
What was that supposed to mean? What did it say that the chimei had thought she wouldn’t be able to kill Altan, and that she had killed him anyway?
If she could do this, what couldn’t she do?
Who couldn’t she kill?
Maybe that was the kind of anger it took to call the Phoenix easily and regularly the way Altan did. Not just rage, not just fear, but a deep, burning resentment, fanned by a particularly cruel kind of abuse.
Maybe she’d learned something after all.
“Anything else?” Altan asked.
He took a step toward her. She flinched. He must have noticed it, and still he moved closer. “Something you want to tell me?”
“No, sir,” she whispered. “There’s nothing.”