2

Before I was Eion’ahisural Apama I was a nameless son of the Auye, just one of many peoples who have lived below the great gulf coast since the Long Before. My earliest memories were set against the adobe walls of a sun-baked city, always ringing with chatter and birdsong. In one unbroken sequence, my father’s gentle hand on my back guided my toddling steps through a high gate lined with red and green and white streamers, little Merah chattering and playing all the while. Wide plains gave way to forested hills, thin streams crawling over exposed limestone slabs, game trails haunted by peccary and deer. At the end of the trail was Pama.

The Auye who lived there hadn’t built the forty or so ramshackle structures scattered across the clearing in the oak woods, only moved in as the dry years slowly ran on. The creek bubbling along just south hadn’t failed in years. My mother’s mother, Ahi, had seen this as particularly auspicious in her youth, and it was she who greeted us as we arrived from the city, perpetually bent over a phantom garden plot and grinning toothlessly.

Merah and I were spoiled. The other children were wary of us at first, then outright dismissive. They seemed sure we would disappear just as suddenly as we had arrived. Being exiles suited us; we splashed laughing in the creek together, scaring the fish away; we dug holes in the black soil where the adults tried to grow sorghum, corn, and medicine; we ran through the forest like wild animals, scaring off the actual animals we often depended on for food. Ahi handed down her first and most severe scolding to us a year after we arrived. Merah and I had argued too fiercely and broken down the fence to the goat pen.

Our punishment–spending a long two days and a night tracking down each escaped goat, variously cursing our wise grandmother and sobbing over the thought of a coyote or jaguar eating one of the poor things–seemed to warm the other children up to us, the failed outlaw siblings. I began spending time with some of Engo’s grandkids, while Merah found a confidante in Sudha, who was a year younger than him but taller than all of us.

Where Merah had been my first friend, Sudha introduced me to cruelty. At the time I didn’t understand why he went out of his way to belittle me as we were learning, to shove me during dances, to take my food during meals. I must have done something wrong, I thought. The adults must have thought so, too; Sudha’s bullying seemed invisible to them.

I came of age at eight. In the dancing light of a bonfire the children of the Auye stood before their elders and proclaimed themselves their own masters, one with themselves and each other, a unique thread binding together the blanket of ourselves. I remembered Merah’s bold face, the pride in our family’s eyes, more distant in my father than in Ahi, as he came of age three years prior, stating his intention to become a hunter, an herbalist, and a caretaker of people. In typical Auye fashion all the adults laughed at him, this scrawny boy pretending to be grown. It was all very good-natured, a light ribbing to keep the kids humble, and they showered him with praise at the feast afterwards, especially for his strong new name, Merah, horse. It still took him a while to stop sulking.

Then my own shadow replaced the memory of Merah’s before the fire, and I felt a small bird take wing deep in my chest, and in front of everyone I had ever known I said: “I want to be a mother.”

No one laughed. Only the fire spoke. Maybe they didn’t hear me, I thought. I said it again, louder. Some in the crowd began to murmur to one another, their eyes darting between one another and me, one or two giggling. My head began to spin, the bonfire and the people of Pama stretching away, leaving me alone. I spotted Merah through the flames. He caught my gaze and smiled.

Ahi stepped out of the circle arrayed around me and the fire, which were one and the same now, and she crossed the empty space towards me. A pale light shone mischievously in her beady eyes. She knelt down in front of me.

“Kid,” she said, sighing. “I thought you might say something like that.”

Easy laughter, relieved, rippled through the gathering. My cheeks and ears were flushed.

“It’s not easy being a mother, you know,” she said, smiling now.

“It’s hell, kid!” said a woman from the crowd. They laughed again. Tears welled up in my eyes. Ahi, my sweet grandmother, cupped my face with a wrinkled hand.

“I knew a woman like you once, a long time ago. She wasn’t a mother, but she was brave, and strong, and she had a good laugh, like you. Her light went out early. Yours won’t, so stop crying, okay?”

“I’m not scared,” I sniffled.

“Right, I know. You’re doing really good. Hey, how about a name?”

The gathered adults whooped and cheered, Merah the loudest, somewhere behind Ahi’s big old head. I started bawling. Ahi moved with her surprising grandmother speed and put her hands on my shoulders, turning to stand behind me and push me further into the light.

“So this kid lives a long life,” she proclaimed. “And so she can be a strong woman and a brave mother, here in Pama or anywhere else, her name will be Eio. The mayfly!”

“Eio,” the crowd echoed, laughing. “The mayfly!”

Then the ceremony was over, which was never very somber to begin with in Pama, and the celebration kicked off in earnest. Music rang out, drums and horns and flutes taking over the hearts assembled and commanding them to dance. Food was produced from one storehouse or another: roasted savory and sweet corn, charred fish, stewed venison and peccary and alligator, warm flatbread with goat butter and cheese and mustang grape jam, several whole succulent turkeys, pawpaws, persimmons, mayhaw, prickly pear, and five ancient casks of mulberry wine.

As a child I had always played on the outskirts of these festivals, never paying any mind to when it would be my turn. Now the light and laughter were dizzying, the promises of sisterhood from the older women becoming less clear, the congratulatory embraces and jokes growing louder and less focused. Too much hot wine, not enough water earlier that day. I slipped backwards between Ahi and my father. The Auye loved to throw a good party and forget why they were dancing and feasting halfway through. They thrummed and sang like one heart. I grinned at them, a woven basket of a hundred of my kin all lit furiously from within, and I went into the night, barefoot on the wild earth, untouchable, everything that ever was, nothing at all.

Sudha found me in a canebrake by the creek. I heard his footsteps and turned, wary. The icy light of the moon, half-peeled, slipped behind a cloud, taking the boy’s features with it. He was standing silhouetted by darkness in the tall grass beside and a little behind me. My confidence fled. I waited for him to push me, or mock me, but he stood still.

“Only girls can be mothers,” he said. He sounded hurt, like he was being punished for something. Crickets sang nearby.

“That’s right,” I said.

Sudha started towards me. The weak breeze parted the grass easily for him. They led him right to me.

“You don’t know how to be a mother. You don’t even know how to make a baby.”

I shrugged. I couldn’t meet his eyes. I didn’t know what he wanted.

“I know how,” he said. He was looking away, too. “I can show you. But you can’t tell anyone. You have to promise.”

I’d never heard him so scared before. I must have scared him, I thought, coming into the fire and saying something so crazy it shut the adults up. Something wet and cold began to undulate deep in my stomach, heavy and clammy. I nodded, yes, agreeing, although I wasn’t sure to what exactly, even as he closed the distance between us and placed his small hands on me. Later I understood. I walked under the sun and the rain and the moon; I laughed along with Merah, who everyone loved, and our love for each other never faltered, even after our father quietly slipped away from Pama, leaving no trace of himself but us; when hunting was bad and the crops failed Sudha organized us, and his leadership brought us from the brink of starvation. As long as I kept my eyes away from his, and as long as I spoonfed Ahi her warm broth in the cold months, and as long as I kept taking the special herbs meant for women who began as boys to keep them hard and beautiful and swift like the rest of Pama’s mothers and sisters, I could go on. I went on for a long time. The sickness only found me the autumn before my thirtieth year.

The Auye, unnoticed and unlooked for except in dire times, held true the stories of the Long Before, when our planet was blanketed in darkness. Mother Gar and Sister Peccary dozed in the twilight, oblivious to the hardships echoing from desert to sea. Hour after hour, the animals and plants cried out for succor, but the shadows were too deep. Eventually, after many sightless generations, it fell to Grandmother Owl to poke holes in the sky with her talons, creating the stars and moon. Seeing the beauty and terror of her wings under the nascent light, Woman and her children grew jealous, throwing stones at Owl, and she became tangled in the net of the sky. Her panicked thrashing tore open a great rift in the firmament, through which the sun cascaded. Grandmother Owl was blinded, but her sacrifice saved our world.

To honor her spirit, and to atone for our primal sin, we hunted at night.

I crept through the understory silently. Cicadas sang around me. I parted their noise as snakes parted grass. Light from the half moon danced and wavered above me, suspended in the oak canopy, and I was grateful. Gratitude filled me with elation. I suppressed a giggle.

A twig tensed beneath my bare foot. I paused. Shifting my weight, opening myself wider to my surroundings, I sensed movement to my right. Merah was creeping alongside me some twelve paces away. He held his stealth in high esteem, would brag about it around the fire to his friends, but I could always find him.

We stopped as one. My mind lagged a step behind my body, its responses automatic. My eyes unfocused and I inhaled. As if in answer, the wind murmured towards me, rustling the young leaves of a sumac bush in my path. I registered an earthy scent, darker than the soil, like uprooted secrets, stale piss, crushed walnuts, nasal whispers. It was probably a tapir, maybe thirty paces away. Merah and I waited in silence for what seemed like hours before we heard it: leaf litter gently rustling, punctuated by a nearly porcine snort.

I didn’t have to hear Merah to know he had advanced, was circling around the animal, carefully planting his feet where the forest couldn’t betray him. He was always better at getting the jump on prey. I held more patience. We were a good team. I thought those exact words then, the wind blowing tapir sign through my black hair, past my crooked nose, through me totally. We are a good team, I thought.

The taut muscles in my thighs began to protest. I had been squatting for too long. I could feel my toes going numb. Somewhere far away a nightjar trilled. The tapir hadn’t moved, engrossed in browsing, eyes and heart open to the hostile curtains of night. I could feel its hooves pawing through the forest floor.

Slowly, with the caution of a climber repositioning herself on a desperately fragile scree, I pulled the spear off the braided cord on my back. My right hand found its home three fingers from the base, my left wrapped delicately around the middle, right at the edge of its balance. My burning squat grew grain by grain into an explosive crouch, poised to lunge.

Once more the wind breathed in and out. The upper canopy parted. A lone tear of moonlight glanced off the black obsidian blade at the end of my spear. It gleamed hungrily.

From the darkness beyond my quarry I heard a screech owl’s whinny, only lower. Merah’s signal. Then the forest exploded.

Something louder, farther off, haunting, trembling; a lowing of pain from a deep place. Nocturnal animals jettisoned themselves into the sky; the understory shook with falling hooves and paws. I fell backwards. A riotous pain erupted in my neck. I had landed on a stone jutting from the soil like a rogue wave. I had the sense of feathers falling above me.

The great roar continued–and the tapir sprang out of the bushes before me.

A quiet second passed as we locked eyes. I charged forward; the tapir juked right. My right foot landed in solid dirt and pivoted, nearly twisting, and I thrust the spear with my right arm, guiding with my left. I twisted my core towards the animal. We seemed to hang in midair as the obsidian blade gouged through its flank. I whooped with joy despite myself.

It didn’t take long for the tapir to succumb, and I quickly finished it with my knife, thanking it for its meat, hide, and bones. Ahi would be pleased. Merah found me panting over the corpse, a ways back from where we had parted. His eyes were shifty and cold; his brow furrowed under his dark wet hair, pulled back loosely into his classic ponytail. Thin lines crept wearily across his face and crinkled beside his eyes.

“We’ll butcher it back home,” he said.

We waited for the long, sonorous roar again. The forest answered as it usually did, with the percussion of leaves in the breeze and an accompaniment of cicadas. I whistled.

“You outdid yourself with your call this time,” I said, forcing a smile. “Who taught you how to do that?”

Merah ignored me and sucked in through his teeth.

“I’m getting too old to be running around with a spear,” he said. “I should get a gun.”

“What? Why? They take all the fun away.”

“Come on,” he insisted. “I said we’d butcher it back home.”

“Thank her, first.”

I couldn’t say I wasn’t spooked. Still, I liked the way Merah rolled his eyes; I rolled my eyes that way too. Like a little girl, our father would say.

“Thank you, tapir, for your hide, and for your meat, and for your bones. We will surely feed our grandmother for a long while because of you. You can come to our hearth any time.”

“Alright,” I said, scrambling to my feet. “Now let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!”

We laughed all the way home, the hoarse, easy laughter that finds those who think they’re finally in the best years of their lives, and no more howling troubled us that night; but I will concede it was hard to sleep without the fire burning low, weakly flickering to keep the darkness out.

I woke late the next day, near noon, to commotion outside. I sat up in my bedroll and found Ahi at the fire, shakily dicing mushrooms on her low table. She had changed little since I first met her over twenty years ago, just bent lower, less steady in her hands and her steps, more prone to wandering both afield and in her mind. A few wiry white hairs spiraled down over her eyes as she worked. I wondered what those gray eyes had seen the first time she set foot in Pama, sixty or seventy years ago, fleeing famine or worse. She didn’t look up as I approached.

“You took a hit to the head last night,” she crowed.

I knelt next to her and planted a kiss in her hair.

“Your brother’s outside.”

“Where’s that tapir?” I asked.

“Merah decided to let Kavit and her girls have it.”

“Oh, Ahi–”

“No, no. I can’t eat that much. And she was a big tapir, you both did a good job, but I don’t need it, and the meat’s too tough for me anyway. If you want some you can go ask Kavit, I’m sure she’d let you pick a nice cut.”

I stood up, sighing. A loud crash came from outside, like one of the little storage huts collapsing, and there was shouting. I leaned my head out of the tanned hides covering the front door. A crowd of Auye was pushing through the broad mud street towards the center of Pama, carrying what looked like long crates, many of them spilled and shattered now. Peering closer I saw a few limp figures being carried. I turned back inside.

“What’s going on?”

Ahi snorted. “Go ask your brother,” she said, returning to her mushrooms. “Or Sudha, the big baby, go ask our brave work captain what all the fuss is.”

When I found Merah, still tightening my kit around my waist and pulling my hair back into a loose knot, he was trying to talk down a sizable crowd by the unlit bonfire, sweat running across the deep creases in his forehead. I spotted Sudha behind him near the big house he had commandeered some years ago, deliberating or arguing with a man I had never seen before. I slipped through the crowd, nearly stepping on some kids playing underfoot, oblivious to the chaos and fear around them, and had to push past old Engo just as Merah turned away, shaking his head. A pang of panic fluttered in my chest as I reached out for his shoulder only to grasp empty air. He hadn’t seen or heard me.

“Merah!”

He turned, his clenched jaw relaxing as he saw me.

“Slept well, huh?”

“I’m sorry.” I clasped him on the shoulder. There he was. “Ahi said to find you.”

“It’s okay,” he said, lying. “Some people came in early this morning, from Talash, I think.”

“That’s far.”

“It’s really far, and they were scared, Eio. Something was after them, hunting them, they said something about being rounded up, and no, I don’t know by who, don’t ask. Sudha’s putting them in the big house for now. Everyone’s just worked up.”

Over Merah’s shoulder I saw one of Engo’s kids hauling another of the long crates, dragging the end in the dust. One of the Talashi women, old and brown, stepped out of the big house and wailed, her trembling arms reaching after the box. Sudha held her back. I couldn’t register anything in his eyes; I couldn’t tell whether they could see anything at all.

“They’re coffins,” said Merah. My heart dropped. Our dead were buried bare.

“So there are people in those.”

My brother shook his head again, turning to leave. “Just bodies. Let’s go see Sudha.”

A wave of rancid incense assailed us as we pushed through Sudha’s door. The big house was claustrophobic despite its size, makeshift shelves lining the walls, baskets and dried herbs hanging from the ceiling, big ochre jars and adzes and bundles of parchment scattered around the floor. Sudha glared up at us, his jaw writhing like a cliff before a mudslide. The visitors paid us no mind. There were four of them, dressed in the high-waisted breeches, alligator boots, and heavy overcoats of the deep swamp. All were bald and bearded except for the old woman, now quietly sobbing. Each of them stared ahead, eyes unseeing, clouded by some storm. They were in front of us in the big house, yet none of them were really there.

“You can’t be in here,” Sudha hissed between his teeth. His eyes flashed to me, momentarily locking me in the pain of his presence. There had been a lot of pain. My own eyes found the far wall.

“We heard,” said Merah. He kept his voice low. “What’s going on? You can’t keep us in the dark forever. Who are they?”

“You need to leave, Merah.”

“We have a right to know.”

A white flash scurried behind Sudha’s eyes, and for a second my heart stopped. If he and Merah came to blows there’d be real trouble. They could both be such hotheads. Slowly, as the taller man began to tremble, my hot fear grew cold and leaden in my guts. Sudha had the animal fear in him; if he was pressed he’d run, or bite.

“Used to be twelve of us,” one stranger finally spoke in a toad’s growl. He scratched his mossy beard with filthy fingernails, eyes vacant. “Rest sick, or caught.”

“What do you mean, sick?” asked Merah, exasperated now. “Caught by who?”

It was then I noticed the fifth stranger.

She was huddled on Sudha’s meager cot, not so much shivering as convulsing, spasming almost constantly. Someone had stripped her down, which seemed a little odd given her distance from the fire, until a wild flame lit the sweat drenching her pale, withered form like stars. I had never seen someone so wretched. I suddenly found myself taking quiet steps towards her, circling around the fire as Merah and Sudha argued. She just kept lying there, curled around herself, nothing but an empty seashell spiraling into itself; a woman turned cavernous, a calcified chamber, once a home but now so hollow. I wanted to see her face.

“Eio, get back–”

I jumped, startled, and stumbled into one of Sudha’s little shelves. A clay dish full of coyote teeth fell and shattered. In a moment longer than my entire life up to that point, the woman on the cot craned her neck up and met my gaze.

Yellow irises, streaked with mesmerizing crimson rivulets; bloodshot sclera, the vessels burst into a cloud in the left eye; sightless black pupils.

“Dog eyes,” I muttered, right before my brother hooked his arms around my chest and wrenched me out of the hut.

He threw me into the dirt at the small crowd’s feet. I could hear their gasps and murmurs. My head was suddenly leaking. My hands fumbled in the dust for my brains.

“Get back,” Merah growled. “All of you, get out of here, go home! Don’t come out until Sudha or I say so. Go home!”

That sent them packing. Somebody was laughing somewhere. Probably at me and my spinning leaking head.

“Shut up, Eio. Stand up, come on.”

I felt my brother trying to haul me to my feet but I just collapsed again. Something was weighing me down. Something was wrong.

“Merah,” I choked as he turned me over to face him. “Merah, what’s happening?”

“You shouldn’t have gotten that close, Sudha should’ve just said, what was he thinking, what were you thinking?”

“Merah, her eyes–”

“I know. She’s sick, Eio, I mean, really fucking sick. We need to go home.”

Oh, Mother Gar: please keep me hale and hearty in all seasons. Keep my lungs clear and fresh, and cleanse me of my stains. Let me swim after you in the wide, clean river.

I must have been praying all the way to Merah’s hut; when he dumped me onto his bedroll he sighed, “Mother Gar’s busy. From now on you listen to me. Don’t move.” Then he stormed out.

Even if I could have left the bed I wouldn’t have tried. My head was swimming and my heart was biting its way out of my chest. Something inside me was gnawing. A cold well opened up in my stomach, and I dug my nails into my abdomen. I couldn’t feel anything but my intestines as they roiled.

Moonlight cautiously crept into the hut, first as a sliver on the dark hearth, growing longer and brighter as she climbed into the deep night. I recall a saucer of water held up to my parched lips, a firm hand on my chin, and concerned voices flitting about my pond body on damselfly wings. I sank into the marsh of my sickness and sweat and stayed there, preserved in peat, as eons passed above me. Days had gone by, I suspected.

Through all of my muddled, useless senses, for nearly my entire stay in that bedroll, I could smell something burning. Half asleep and trembling, just like Dog Eyes, I would catch portions of shouting outside the hut and hushed whispers inside, though just as frantic. I thought I recognized Merah’s low grumble, even deeper when he was stressed, and little scraps of Ahi’s voice shaking with fear. Others joined the chorus, wholly unfamiliar, sticking to the walls in a thick patina. They were all screaming. From where my corpse lay shivering on the bedroll I saw myself running, the hut turning effortlessly into a spiraling world, a grassland inside of a great tube that stretched into the sun. Then, from right behind me, as if he were still pressing his hot weight down onto my shoulders, right in my ear, Sudha’s voice. “Eio,” he drawled. “You’re sick.” I understood him perfectly.

The middle of the day broke without warning. My eyes focused on a stranger standing over me, clad in a thick blue coat and a leather harness. Their face was masked, and thick, dark goggles hid their eyes. Another stranger joined them, dressed the same, and they exchanged a few words I didn’t understand. I tried to speak but my mouth felt like it had never known words. All I could do was wheeze. The burning smell was overwhelming.

Wordlessly the two interlopers grabbed me, one holding my arms, the other my legs, and hoisted me out of my bed. I groaned as a slimy pain raced up my back, pooling at the base of my skull. Drool congealed around my mouth, slack from fatigue. I might as well have been a cloth sack. I was sure I was going to spill out everywhere.

The sunlight was blinding. It took another eternity for my eyes to adjust, hanging there between the two soldiers. They had to be soldiers, I thought deliriously, no one else around here dressed so stupid.

A wave of sick heat washed over me. I blinked away the singed air and a pyre materialized before me, piled atop the old bonfire in the center of Pama. This fire was angry, raging; the flames were climbing up and up. I choked on the smoke billowing off the dead meat. Gradually the pyre came into focus. Curled beneath the flames were arms, feet, twisted torsos, eyes mercifully shut, all folded up like desiccated spiders. I knew what was happening, who they were logically, but my brain insisted on swimming in the milky sea of disbelief. Ahi, grandmother, I needed to find her, maybe Merah was with her right now…

I wrenched my eyes from the fire. All our old huts were gone, now only smoldering ruins. Stalking among the embers were more soldiers, poking at the burnt timbers and ashes with the butt ends of long rifles and wicked polearms.

“What’ve you boys got there?”

The two soldiers stiffened to attention and dropped me into the ash. Pain kept my face down and my eyes closed as the fire roared and roared: but still I listened. They weren’t speaking Auyecha. I realized the last time I had ever heard this language was from my father.

“This one was hiding, sergente,” said one of the soldiers.

“It’s afflicted,” said the other.

Ash began filling up my lungs. A weak wheeze escaped me. The tip of a hard boot turned me over. Good meat needed to be roasted on all sides, I guessed.

“Is it dead?”

“It just looks dead,” said their leader, the sergente. “These are the ones you really need to watch for. In another three days it’ll be just like that swamp woman, give us a whole load of trouble. We’ll take this one to the coffin camp up north.”

Days passed; my life unraveled into a long mauve dream. Only a few sensations would orient me: the shock of being loaded onto some sort of cart, my hands and feet bound in cold iron, something else restraining my mouth, bars around my jaw and a leather bit lodged between my teeth; the sudden realization that I could no longer smell the burnt corpses of the Auye, the smoke of the conflagration, and instead noticed only fragrant juniper and the hot dust of the road; a seething white pain in the back of my head where my spine began, radiating out into my mouth, down my legs, between my ribs. Moments of lucidity would unearth an itch deep inside of me, one I couldn’t reach even if my hands had been unbound. The pain would wrench a sob out of me, a pitiful, growling, mewling whine that always triggered the nearest guard or soldier or whoever to hit me until I passed out again.

Three days, they had said. Until I turned out like Dog Eyes. A shell of a thing, hollow, frozen. When Merah and I were kids our father had shown us a treasure from the city, a big orange jewel with the back half of a gecko trapped inside. The blood of a tree, he had explained, eliciting much excitement out of us. It didn’t take long for our father to find his children zealously stabbing at an old pine with our little fishing knives in the hopes the sap would catch some incredible beast.

A bump in the road. We lumbered to an uneasy stop. Dim sensations in my body, still pulsing with fever, slowly returned as the hazy outlines of soldiers carried my limp carcass from the cart and dropped me. Shallow walls surrounded me and a clear azure sky, hauntingly empty, black towards its zenith, loomed above. It was a beautiful day, now eclipsed by the shadow of a man carrying a long wooden board. Other voices, further away, hummed mindlessly like gnats. The air was crisp and vibrant. My head swam, dizzy, but approaching clarity, stumbling blindly towards the truth.

Merah, I thought. Merah, I think I hear you, but you’re far away. You’re so old, can you even hear me? Do I have to speak up? Which one of us is talking?

The whinny of a screech owl, too deep to really be a screech owl, rang like funerary bells in my empty head. The world snapped terribly into focus.

One of the soldiers, the one holding the coffin lid, turned, alert, but too late. The air cracked. A sound like a hornet buzzed through us and the back of the soldier’s head burst open. The rest of us were showered in blood. It burned where it fell on me, searing my face, my neck, my shoulders. I felt myself growing inside of myself. Another me grew. I ripped free of myself. I stood. I snapped the chains around my arms. My muzzle fell away. My shadow fell across my captors. Their fear as they beheld me surged through my veins. I could have drunk the entire world then.

Someone had replaced my hands with thick paws. Wicked scythes gleamed where my fingers had been. The soldiers stumbled backwards, fumbling with the weapons on their belts, but I was too quick, too happy. Butchering was a skill; one had to know right where to cut, which bones could be pulled away from which tendons the easiest, the weakest vertebrae to sever. I could see these people in front of me now, and in that instant I knew they were just meat like me.

I reached my claws towards the nearest soldier, faster than I believed I could move, and ripped through his belly quietly. His entrails steamed where they hit the ground. A small, surprised gurgle crawled out of his whole body as he collapsed. The others drew daggers and pistols. There was shouting all around, screaming and gunfire; the blood pounded in my gut. Butterflies swarmed in my stomach.

Another shot, another hornet sting right in front of me, and a third man collapsed over a red blossom just above his hip. The fourth tried to flee. That got me excited.

People were running all around me, and I chased them. When I caught one I would tear them apart. For all their force and fire they went to pieces easily. I felt like I was floating. I thought I was glowing. Someone was calling my name. I turned. They looked familiar. I bounded towards them. I wanted to play.

I took their leg in my jaws and wrenched them into the air. They screamed. I laughed and it sounded like screaming, too. Whoever I was playing with flew out of my grasp, landing far off. The leg squirmed happily in my mouth. I dropped it and leapt onto my playmate again and sank my claws deep. I laughed and laughed. It made so much sense to be sick. The world receded. My knowledge, my place in time, my worries about the future; they all slid away like waves after their affair with the shore was done.

Then I was back, and Merah was crawling away from me. I had never seen him so small before. What remained of his leg was pumping out blood slower and slower. He turned his gaze on me, shuddering and convulsing, and in his eyes swam animal fear. I barely noticed his rosy entrails splayed like streamers around him.

“Eio,” he murmured. “Shit.”

Merah sank into the grass. The stench of blood rose around me like smoke. I looked down and beheld myself.

I was naked. I was taller. An animal’s hands had taken over my own. They were slick with gore. I stood hunched; my legs were strong and muscled. My throat refused any speech, and my hair hung down to my knees. The blood slithered blindly across my new skin, soft now where it wasn’t bristling with fur, my chest heaving with each snarling breath. With my clawed hands I began to feel the curve of my hips as they rose into my waist. My claws found my breasts, fuller now, and squeezed. I found I had stained them when I lifted my claws away.

Turning from my brother’s fresh corpse I found a sea of bodies and limbs scattered around a camp, littered with empty coffins and ruined workbenches, poised on the edge of a cliff. Vast forest loomed beyond. This was the great, winding escarpment that divided our land, north from south, many days' journey from Pama. I had been asleep for so long. Turkey buzzards wheeled lazily above me.

My head turned at the snap of a twig to my right. Sudha froze in his tracks, a long rifle trained on me. I could have sworn he had aged decades. A trembling hand betrayed him.

“We looked for you,” he sobbed. “We found you.”

Tears burned behind my eyes but never came. A painful howl crawled out of my throat. Sudha recoiled, his face twisted between grief and madness. I probably looked the same.

“There always was something wrong with you. I knew it. Your father did, too. Merah was too stupid to do anything about you. Now look at him.” Sudha took his left hand off the rifle to wipe the snot from his nose. He lowered his weapon. I started towards him. He jerked the gun back up.

Suddenly, for the very first time, and to my complete bewilderment, I realized the depth of my hatred for Sudha. My heart froze over.

I sprang back and away too late. Hot sharp teeth ripped across my calf, accompanied by a sick crack and the stink of gunpowder. The cliff wasn’t far. By the time Sudha could have prepared another shot I had leapt into the empty air below, and Merah was sprawled cold where I had last stood.

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