To Carve Home in Your Bones
The 2023 Ignyte Award Finalist for best novelette. A swim team shipwrecked on a strange island must fight to survive in a dark twisted world.
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This novelette was originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction Nov/Dec 2022. If you’d like to buy a physical copy, you can do so through Amazon or grab an e-book of it from Weightless Books!
Monica
A red sun burns me awake, sprawled out on an unknown beach soft with sand. One of the other passenger’s scream wakes me fully. Pain tears through me like an ax when I try to move.
“If this isn’t the afterlife—” It’s Nance! “I’m going to die!”
She’s alive. And the others?
“Nance, shut up,” yells our captain, Kim. “I hate to ask, but who is not dead?”
Voices ring out around me, but mine cracks in my throat. My hand—my hand is … or, to be more accurate, isn’t. Where a delicate black structure of fingers, flesh and bone, should be, there is nothing but already hardened blood and severed cartilage. I cry like a seagull catching sight of the sea, my lips splitting and swollen. It continues in staccato hollers of horror until my teammates Nance, Kim, and Sherril converge around me, forming a halo of brown girls, all bloody and bruised.
Where are the others? Are they fleeing from fear too late?
Nance’s girlfriend Christina gasps somewhere out of sight.
Along with her soft sobs, the familiar acid of Wanda’s vomit rolls with the wind. Nance’s face drains of color. I’ve been here before—on the other side of pity and disgust.
Kim puts her hands on my shoulders, her head blotting out the sun above me. “Mo, don’t move.”
“I …” My throat burns. “I can’t move.” Something inside me squirrels, eats my terror, and grows.
If we hadn’t gotten on the boat, none of this would have happened. I almost laugh at the thought, but there’s nothing left. This was bound to happen. I was always meant for this beach, this death, this fear. This has always been our home.
Others around us, the rest of the passengers and other crew members, wake to the unimaginable carnage of their bodies. Screams, cries of mercy fill the air and drown out the sea. I am not the only one with a faerild gestating inside of them.
This is what we get. When Coach Amani’s headless body began to sink beneath the waves and into the black, I should have gone with her, but some damned dark thing in me wanted to live.
“Check on the others,” Kim says to the others, her eyes searching mine for any sign of hope. “You know what to do.”
They obey and run off to examine who is left alive and afraid. Kim’s stare burns me more than the sun. I shut my eyes. Here is your love, swirling in a boiling body of terror. Tears roll down the corners of my eyes to pool in my clogged ears. If I don’t get the water out, an infection will no doubt set in, and then I’d have to hear your coddling because it’d be the third this summer. The pain inside me hatches from a crack to a canyon.
“Kim,” Christina chokes, coming back. More blood clings to her varsity jacket and rolls down her legs, seeping into the tattered and wet jeans. “There’s too many. We need your help.”
Kim looks up. Her hair dangles in front of my face—curtains!
“I gotta get Mo out of the sun.” Her eyes flick up toward the uncaring blazing orb and the birds circling, diving toward the crashing sea. “Away from the tide.”
Before Kim lifts me, our co-captain, Sherril, comes over and places a hand on her arm stopping her.
“Leave her.” Sherril’s eyes dart in my direction.
Kim pushes her away, and they begin fighting over my body. Crying is the only answer, but I am already weeping, so I scream. A few thousand seabirds spotting the toxic pink sky answer me. They are here to take me back to the place I should never have left. Home. The other girls return to pull Kim and Sherril off each other. No one notices my sobs turning to giggles amid the rolling waves.
“Settle your bones.” One of the largest among us, Wanda, tosses Kim over her shoulder, holding her in place.
Bits of Wanda’s dark skin appear to have cracked, wood splitting in a stove.
The new girl, Mary, appears. All dark skin and royal, her dyed curls soaked to their full length. “Anda, put her down,” she says. “We’ve landed in a tight situation with, and I am sorry to break it to you all, no chance of getting back home. Ever.”
Tell them the truth, Mary. Tell them this is it. The end. Curtain call.
“They’ll send a rescue ship,” Christina says. Her dark eyes bulge, watery with a potent combination of hope and the tiniest sliver of fear. “They won’t leave us out here.”
No more laps in the pool. No more pool. We’re all just a bunch of dead girls. Tell them, Mary.
“And where the fuck are they gonna send the rescue party?” Wanda snaps at Christina. “In what vessel? No country would risk an outbreak on our sorry asses.”
“Keep your rot to yourself,” Nance barks.
Salt stings my nostrils, and my words die somewhere between I’m sorry and goodbye. After being let down, Kim crawls back to me in the sand. Tears stream down her face. She’s not afraid—thank the seas—just angry, sad.
“We don’t have time for this,” I say. No one hears me at first. No one but Kim, and all she does is stare. “Enough!”
Sherril’s departure is silent, but her presence leaves an unmistakable hole around us. The others’ soft steps leave Kim and me alone at the water’s edge. Out of the corner of my eye, Sherril strikes down with a rock. Suddenly, the beach is one scream quieter.
But we still are not alone.
“Go with them.” My throat is a hearse carrying the last of my remains. “You’re our captain. They need you.”
Kim rests her body over me, blocking everything out but the growing tranquility of birth. Together, Kim and my faerild create a dense black cloud around me.
“No.” Kim’s voice is a hot, rancid whisper across my lips.
Eventually, all that remains is the call of the birds. What is it they gather for? The fresh kills? Or are they cheering for us and our brutal ways of surviving in a world gone dark?
“You’re burning up,” Kim says, moving her cracked lips away from mine. “Shit, Monica, you’re on fire.”
“If I’m on fire,” I joke, but it comes out an intimate whisper. “Put me out.”
Sherril comes back, catching Kim’s attention. Bloody and panting, she stands above us, her eyes scanning my body. “You’re carrying. Aren’t you?”
I try to speak again. A contraction of pain dives from my chest to my pubic mound. I shake my head, pinching my eyes to the agony rippling through me.
Kim’s arms brace over me. “Leave her,” she growls.
Nance, Mary, and Wanda join us. They carry bloodied gray stones in their hands. When fear and pain combine to form trauma, death must be absolute. We carry that knowledge with us in our bones to keep us safe.
But I am no longer safe.
They stand around me now, except for Christina. She’s sobbing somewhere out of sight. Wanda and Mary wrestle Kim’s arms behind her back while Nance stares at me, her eyes still dark pools.
“You know what I am going to do, right?” Sherril whispers.
I glance at Kim and the sky and nod.
“She doesn’t need to be here for this,” Sherril says to Nance and Wanda.
As they drag Kim away, Sherril grips her bloody rock in her hands. There’s no time to tell her thanks for getting us out, for giving us a chance. She brings death quick, makes it sorta like an eclipse that never ends.
Nance
After Sherril beats the life out of Monica and washes herself clean in the ocean (like the reckless heroine she is), we each take a turn at butchering her to find her faerild. Because we weren’t okay, we used our hands, nails—Kim might have even bit her. Either way, we found what we were looking for, and we all had blood on our hands. Kim points it out behind Monica’s ribcage, red clinging to her chin. It struggles to free itself. There is no hope; we bash it worse than Monica. In its dying moments, its tentacles and sucker-mouth writhe, imitating the scream Monica would make after losing a tournament. Then we tentatively wash ourselves of blood in the small tide pools by the rocks jutting out into the sea. If Monica were still here, she’d do everything she could to keep us from staring at the butchered bodies littering the beach and attracting gulls. And I’d be right alongside her.
Remains of the ship and what look like other crashes from years, maybe even centuries, ago form a barrier around a section of the beach. Burnt flesh hangs heavy in the air, but together we make a rough camp and a fair home with the feverish Christina nuzzled shakily beside me and my teammates limping and sore around me. Home is where you keep your love, after all. Sherril volunteers Mary, Wanda, and herself as the first, second, and third watch. Even though all the predators were killed by faerild’s decades ago, there are still intelligent rustlings in the forest and shadows moving beneath the ocean’s surface.
My dreams quickly become one long snaking nightmare. Christina’s rising temperature grows unbearable, and I, to help, rip the skin off her bones. We kiss, touch, find each other’s small hard desires and eat until there’s nothing left. Her moans of fevered relief echo even after I awake. For a moment, we’re back home in Christina’s bed, waking up from a rough meet and an even rougher night. Reality washes over me with the screams of blood-sick seabirds and Christina’s agonizing groans beside me. If we were still home, I’d call my dads, ask them to tell me a joke, make me laugh. But I’m the only funny man, now.
More rope and rubber than muscle and bone, I stand. Only pain lives here, and for that, I am blessed. Christina, on the other hand, has an ankle that swells by the hour and a certain tell-tale tremble.
“Wonder what they have to eat around here?” I start my morning stretches and eye Christina for any sign. “Egg sandwiches with pickles? Maybe something damp and green to lay on top? Ma used to love chopping up a bit of K. Slap it on, right quick.”
“Nance, the fuck,” Wanda says from her position in the tree beside Mary above our camp.
Sherril spits up blood and pulls a tooth out with a grunt as she stands just outside our circle. “Not sure how good any of the food here is,” she says, tossing her canine into the smoldering fire.
Mary jumps down. “I did some reading while on the boat—”
“Always the studious dictator’s daughter,” I say, twisting my kinks out in the sand.
Christina avoids my eyes when I try and wink at her. Not even wiggling my ass in her face gets her attention.
Mary rolls her eyes but continues. “From what I read, everything that comes from the sea is contaminated, and the vegetation out here is mostly toxic, but if we find a fresh water source, then any immature lifeform we come across is edible.”
Sitting up to rest on the fallen tree behind us, Christina rakes her head up and down like a spring-jack. “Right. Yes, of course. The deckhands, they said the sea is where it first started—the reckoning, they called it. The cracks in the ocean are a direct connection to something. I don’t know, but it sounded bad. That’s what they told me.”
Mary purses her lips. “Yes, for some reason, the ocean was the first place to experience the carryings.”
“It’s because all them fishies knew,” I joke, “fear is the enemy. Right, Chris?”
Still, her eyes drift away.
“Is it safe to go in-land?” Sherril asks, sharpening up a piece of metal from the boat into a makeshift machete. “There’s what? At least three different types of cruisers, yachts, and skiffs among the wreckage from our liner. Safe to say, we might not be the only ones here. We shouldn’t go empty-handed, is all.” With Mary in tow, Sherril stands with her new weapon and stalks off through the gritty tan sand.
Wanda walks off toward a pile of driftwood while Christina massages her pulsing ankle turning a sickening array of techno colors. In the distance, Kim digs a massive grave where the sand turns to dirt with a makeshift shovel made from dinner trays and a broom handle. She started it last night after Monica and the faerild she was carrying were both deader than dead. Sun-baked bodies lie scattered around the graveyard, rotting and perfuming the beach. Birds scream for her to stop or for some faerild in the waves and swoop down toward the bodies. One by one, Kim yanks them out of the claws and beaks of the birds with a grunt and a dull thud followed by a chorus of caws.
Deep bright blues, purples, and reds stain Christina’s skin. Her blood is reaching the boiling stage. If I tell a joke, will she laugh? Ma would know what to do, what to say to make her okay again.
There once was a simmer who forgot her suit every time her team went to an away game, forcing them to have to put their worst swimmer into the pool. So, during the next away meet, the girl’s teammates have finally had enough. They tell her either remember to bring her suit or find another way home. And the girl, of course, is outraged, damn right, thunderstruck by her teammates’ ultimatum. The whole bus ride to the other school, girl is totally quiet, and so are her teammates. It isn’t until they get to the pool does the girl say some shit. Know what she says right before ripping off her clothes and jumping into the pool fully naked?
“It’s nothing,” Christina says, noticing my glare.
“Shucks, that don’t look like nothing. If you ask me—”
“And I am not.”
“—That looks like a whole hell of a lot of something brewing beneath your skin.”
She sighs in the way that drives me crazy.
“Tell me what you want me to do?”
When Christina tries to get up and storm off, her leg gives out. She tumbles, a sack of wet rocks. And that dull thud. Sherril and Mary turn their attention in our direction.
Smoothly, Sherril removes the blade from Mary’s hand and walks over. “I bet your ankle got worse in the night, huh?”
Behind her and away from all of us, Wanda joins Kim in her burial procedures. More grunts, more dry, hard thuds, and bodies finding their homes in the dirt.
“It’s nothing. Go look for some more weapons,” I say.
“No,” Sherril says, looking between the two of us. “The last thing we need is the two of you alone.”
I yank Sherril’s silly weapon from her hands.
“Just because you come from the dark side of shit doesn’t make you more prepared for this. We’ve all sat through the films, been through the daily preps, and watched what happens if a faerild is carried to full term. But guess what? Christina is not going to let you anywhere near her. So, back off.” I plant myself beside Christina. “We’re not your baby sisters. You left them back home, remember.”
Mary comes over. “I’m gonna go help the others with … the others.”
She runs to Kim and Wanda. With a low groan, Sherril glances between us, the girls digging, and the forest, cool and fresh—silently watching.
“Fine,” Sherril says before retreating. She doesn’t join the girls but sits on a shattered-looking stump in the shade of the woods, her back to us all.
Christina hisses, a teapot calling for mercy. “She’s become a real juggernaut since the crash.”
“Stop being afraid,” I say, spinning to a crouch. “Just stop.” My voice is harsh as I lean into her. “Whatever techniques or skills you use to keep yourself together, use them. Now!”
“Stop being afraid?” She doesn’t laugh, but her mouth splits open into some sick grin, all teeth, and absurdity.
I sit down, Sherril’s makeshift machete in my hand. “Let’s cut it off then.”
The look on Christina’s face grows from crazed, agonizing pain to absolute horror. I want to kiss her citrus lips and find that place again, that home.
“You want to be better, right, Christina? For everything to go back to being cool pools and warm beds?”
Gritting her teeth, Christina says, “This is bullshit.”
Something in me snaps, grows, claws its way out into a shriek. “Then tell me what to do!”
Tears crash. Sobs roll. Her leg moves in ways that make me seasick. I want my family, my real family, not this Christina with faerild and dying of fear.
When she slaps me, her words fly away at first. All that remains is a ringing hate. “You’ll have your body taken by fear.” Christina freezes, lets a shiver take her, drain her. “I … I didn’t ask for this—for any of it. I’m just scared.”
Like hitting mute, her voice fades out again.
The knife slices the sand as Christina pulls it to her lap. Her voice fades in from her flapping mouth. “Can you do that, Nance? Can you take me back home, undo the shipwreck, convince us not to listen to fucking Sherril’s stupid-ass plan, and just make this go away?”
My father’s words come out. “Maybe a little laughter will. It’ll make it like everything’s okay again.”
Christina shuts her eyes.
The joke falls out, a ramble of a story of lousy team camaraderie and poor communication. It’s an apology, really—just like all good jokes. Sorry, I can’t be right there beside you, holding your fear and your pain.
“So, they never gave her a swimsuit?” Christina’s voice has changed. It’s like Monica’s was, crowning into something new. “That’s the worst joke. And you had to make it my last?” She brings the knife to her neck.
It’s a gesture, right? A joke?
She stretches it across her flesh without a goodbye. Her blood flows, releasing the life from her eyes. She is red hot, but I manage to rest her head in the sand so that the blood just goes into the earth.
I reassure her. “You’re not alone.”
Kissing her forehead, I realize I am the one who’s been trembling, shaking uncontrollably. Motionless and pale, Christina lays before me, her eyes wide and lifeless. Is this fear?
Some kind of an alarm breaks free from me. It’s a call for help, a beckon. My beautiful and damned teammates, the flightless others, holler in response to my cries. We’ve lost again.
Christina’s leg begins to shake. It builds into a jolt as something fights to get out. Plum pin-needle talons breakthrough skin, shredding her ankle. The faerild inside splinters bone as it rips free. Its infantile face is absent of any features other than a rose-like mouth that blooms for air.
I reach a finger toward its delicate oral opening. Those lips. I know those lips.
“No!” Mary yells. “Get away from it.”
My finger freezes heated centimeters away.
Blindly, it closes its mouth and wrenches the rest of itself from Christina’s flesh. It whips the blood from its slender body, exposing two spiked forearms supporting a scaled torso and muscular tail with wispy spindles the same color plum as the six talons sticking from its feet. And is that citrus? Its skin glistens in the sun—ice cream if ice cream’s main components were blood and gasoline.
Caught mesmerized by the sinuous abomination, it takes me over in seconds. Up my thighs and stomach to my neck, just the way Christina would, latching on. Iron floods my throat.
The books and videos have it all wrong.
A faerild attack isn’t painful; it is bliss like love, sweet and connecting. I give myself to it and shut my eyes to the pink-gone purple sky. I’m coming home, and Christina’s coming with me.
Sherril
No. No, no. Noooooo!
The sand is absolute fire beneath me. My weapon’s near Christina and Nance. It still holds its quick sharpness. I slice the faerild down its slick spine, splitting it in two on Nance’s neck. She moans. She fucking moans. Moans like this is some twisted water sport. But no. She is dying, not living.
Blood and a thick black acidic muck pour from her open wound. Nance slumps forward onto Christina just above her shoulder. They cuddle in death among the gore with the faerild, slew and separated, beside them. Wanda stands staring, her mouth agape, while Kim’s steely brown eyes refuse to look at me.
This is the thanks I get.
Mary’s the only one who says anything. “Let’s add them to the grave.”
Mary and I, the two strongest girls, carry our dead teammates across the beach to the newly dug hole. Blood drips from their various wounds, leaving a dark trail in the sand. The sun’s started baking the bodies into a soup of rot and decay. Like me, Mary pushes the stiff corpses around like they’re just meat. Brown and white and tanned meat. Back home, they—I guess, some would call them my parents—used to say that shit all the time.
All you and your lot are is meat waiting to be packaged, eaten, beaten, and spit out. Get used to it.
I’m used to it.
Nothing I haven’t smelled before. Fingers stick up, worms reaching for a way back home. We focus on finding Christina and Nance a place among the others. Once found, we quickly bury them, but not before Mary shuts their eyes for good. With Nance’s final words hanging in the sticky air between us, repeating themselves in the dark brown, I couldn’t bring myself to go near her face.
We’re not your sisters.
“You given any thought to what got us here?” Mary asks, glancing back at Kim consoling Wanda by the smoldering fire. “I keep thinking of alternate realities where things are different, you know? Where things turned out different. We choose to stay instead of leaving.”
It all weighs me down, their deaths and their doom—the words that never fall from their lips. “Any of those other worlds,” I say, standing, “see us proud?”
Her eyes drift off toward the dark sea and home where poor girls like me and Monica are nothing. Especially not to blood royalty like her.
Get used to it.
I say what she will never understand. “I entered us so we could have somethin’ to take back. Somethin’ to show everyone just ’cause we sit at the world’s ass don’t mean we shit.”
Mary considers me from her position in the sand.
“Aren’t you sick of it?” I continue. “Of the bullshit they broadcast about us, about our home? In all those thought experiments runnin’ through your head, did it ever occur to you we could change this reality—our reality by doing what we do best? Swimming our asses off on the global stage.”
Mary’s eyes never leave me.
I kneel beside her. “Even if we didn’t win the contest, we would of still been out there, showing everyone there’s more to our country than bloody war and politics and shit.”
She stands. “You can’t fix something if you’re not there.” Moving away from me and toward the others by the fire, she says, “What about your sisters? You know what happens to them since you lef—”
I stomp back to the fire. Of course. It is different for Mary. Pretty little rich girl. Dictator’s daughter. More brain and brawn than full-grown faerild and more gold than the devil. She will never understand.
Once we get back to the others, I lay it out simple before anyone says anything else. “If I gotta kill every one of you carryin’ to keep who is alive, still alive, then I’m gonna do it.”
Kim steps to me. Always the captain. “I’ve already buried my best friends, and … It’s time for the killing to stop.”
I expect her to claim Monica in some way, but she just stares at me. Her eyes held the cold of the ocean and something else just out of reach. There’s a bitter taste in the air of death and rot. It reminds me of home, of what I finally left behind.
They preached from an early age: you’re stuck here ’cause you can’t leave a place that don’t want you.
Well, I did.
“Yeah.” I grip my machete’s handle sticking up from the ground. “All right.”
Kim scans the beach, the ocean, the darkness of the woods behind us, and the purpling of the early afternoon sun. “Come on; we need to arm ourselves for the forest before it gets dark.”
We set off together along the beach, collecting what scrap we can fashion into weapons or use to keep us alive until …
Our conversations always end there. No one wants to admit this is it for us—our new home. We survived a world gone mad with a dangerous sickness. Years of disease, riots, and all-out warfare couldn’t knock us down, but this unknown island will be our tomb. The others can’t face it, but I accepted it the moment I woke up on the beach to screams.
After strapping up with gear, Wanda sets flame to the torches that we dipped in the puddles of grotesque gasoline found pooling along the beach. We set off into the thickness of the rest of the island. The forest welcomes us with a cool sweet vapor. Strange fruits leaking strong-smelling syrup from spindles hang down around us. They resemble horned melons turned inside out and ugly. Mary presses us on into the darkest parts of the jungle. The ground beneath our feet sometimes feels nonexistent. We balance on thick vines running between the trunks. Above our heads, birds sing to each other. Kim is an amateur ornithologist and tries to communicate with them but gets no response. Deeper and deeper, we press into the forest. The ocean a pounding refrain along the sand behind, beside, and all around us.
Get used to it.
“Can’t we just hack at this shit?” Wanda asks, raising her chiseled propeller. “We’d be through in a flash.” She imitates a swift and deadly strike at the vine tangled around her ankle.
“No!” Mary yells, reaching her dark brown arms out to Wanda. “Don’t you dare.”
I probe the thick vine with my metallic armrest—my machete strapped to my back. I have to blink to stop the vines from turning into arms and legs and torsos, chopped and bludgeoned, piled on top of each other.
All you and your lot are is meat.
“What’s the big idea?” Wanda asks, wrestling herself free.
Mary kneels. Back at the beach, she found the only pair of gloves with all the fingers still attached. She now peels the red silk from her hand and places it on the bulging vine. “I’m not quite sure what they are, so I am cautious about unleashing you on them.”
Kim gets down on Mary’s level and examines the vines in Mary’s hands. “Where are they going? They aren’t connected to any of this.”
Mary gazes ahead at where she is leading us. “That’s what I plan to find out.”
I stop her before she continues taking us down to an end with possibly no return. “This better not be another one of your expeditions, Mary. Food and water are what we are here for. That’s it. Then, we head back to camp before nightfall. Chasin’ things into nothin’ is only goin’ to get us lost, maybe worse.”
Beneath our feet, I see the vines begin to writhe. I can’t blink away the images.
Meat waiting to be packaged, eaten, beaten, and spit out.
Their words run through my head while I try to unsee all the bodies I’ve mangled and mutilated. Are you my sisters?
“About that,” Kim says, dragging me out of my dark thoughts. “The ocean and camp aren’t that close.”
Wanda trips her way through the thick growth. “No, it’s right there. I’m pretty sure.” She squints at nothing, screwing her face up.
Kim continues, “I’ve been listening to the birds, and I’ve identified at least three distinct types of calls. All of them mimickers.”
“What does that shit have to do with us being lost in the woods?” Wanda continues to stare through the trees.
Kim’s eyes look up at the canopy. “A lot of times, in small areas, a bunch of birds tends to sing together. An orchestra of noise, they play off each other to balance their songs. The birds on this island have developed a way to mimic their environment. One set is providing that ocean rhythm that changes too frequently to be the natural flow of the waves, and another is doing its best to imitate gulls.”
Wanda steps closer to our small group, turning away from the long-gone sea.
“All right,” I say. “What’s the third part?”
Kim motions for us to huddle up. We do what we did all the other times we needed to lock the world out so we could speak freely.
“Us. The third part has been mimicking us. But in the wrong way,” Kim says. “They are putting the words in odd orders, but the cadences are near identical. Listen.”
Get used to it.
Holding my breath, I close my eyes to try and pick out the sounds Kim is talking about. But all I hear is them.
You’re connected to us. Home and faerilds, it’s what’s in your blood. No matter how much I spill on the floor.
I’ve always been the protector of my sisters back home and my teammates. I was the one who took the blame, who took the beatings, who made sure we snagged win. It was all up to me, and I couldn’t take it anymore. Beneath the rush of leaves and chirp of animals and the endless churn of my parent’s voices and the kneading of waves is a tiny whisper.
I hear my voice say, “Kill, kill. War.”
You’re connected to us.
“So, they’re mimicking us,” Wanda says. “Big deal. They’re not doing it right, right?”
“But what if it’s not that.” Kim pulls us in closer. “What if they are doing it wrong to learn it? Tossing the words around in their mouths or beaks or whatever, experimenting. What’s that saying about lions? ‘Put enough into a room with a typewriter, and you’ll have a horror on your hands.’ That’s what we could have here: a species of highly intelligent birds that are spending their time practicing our voices, following us. Tracking us. Becoming us.”
Faerilds inside and faerilds outside is what girls like us always get. No peace. No home. Only death, hardship, and the worst things any of us could ever imagine.
You’re connected to us.
Wanda speaks up, breaking the silence. “These aren’t lions, though. They are just birds. We handled worse. We’ll take care of these, no problem.”
“Until we get eyes on ’em,” I say, checking above our heads. “Might as well think of ’em as lions.” I tap us out of the huddle. “What’s the chances of getting back to the beach before nightfall?”
Wanda and Kim look back the way we came, but Mary’s eyes are on the prize at the end of the vines somewhere out of sight.
“Hard to say,” Kim says. “If we turn around now, though, we could be sure.”
Mary pulls her eyes toward Kim. “We came out here for a reason. To go now would be a waste.”
I turn to Mary with hair sticking to her face. “What are you thinkin’?”
She rubs her chin and tucks the sweaty offenders behind her ear. “These lead to freshwater. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“No,” Wanda says, “it’s the only thing that makes sense to you. To me, that shit is just going to lead to trouble. Heading back to the beach sounds way better than wandering deeper into that.”
She points toward where Mary wants to go. The trees grow thicker into a cave of hanging fruits and darkness.
“It could help us,” Mary says. “That should be reason enough.”
In-between Mary and the other girls, I let my eyes drift toward the dark trees ahead, bodies sway from their branches. Turning away as soon as my sisters’ faces begin to form in the brown bark, both of blood and water. “Mary’s right.”
“That’s bullshit,” Wanda says. “You don’t know what’s out there—neither of you do. Fuck! I am sick of following you lot into situations that nearly get me killed.”
“So, what are you gonna do?” I ask. “Stay here? Go back?”
“Yeah.” Wanda lets out a hollow chuckle. “I’m going to go back to the beach.”
I grab her arm as she tries to push past me. “We need to stick together even if one of us gets a bad idea in her head. We don’t go with Mary now, and she’ll end up sneakin’ off without us. We are all we got, now.”
You’re connected to us.
We lean into the deepening shade, taking a sigh in unison. Nance’s death moans ring out in my mind. Behind them, Monica’s chubby peaceful face covered in blood stares at me before I turn her face into fine-grained sand. This is our place, my place, together wherever any of us go. An apology carried on our backs. The forest and its disturbing noises accompany our every step. We say little and press against each other often just to know we're still here, still together. We will never be all together again, though. Kim keeps her eyes on the forest above us while Wanda tramples in Mary’s wake, a shark in a jade shop. In the hunch of her shoulders, tension builds like mounds beside a grave. Strike, sister. Tell this world you are not afraid. You are fear. And we are your shadows.
Our combined sweat and heat take me back to running through the streets of our home, betting no one would or even dared stop us. Finally, the trees thin until all that remains are the vines, overlapping and twisting around each other. Thick large canopies shield us from the sun. Somewhere up there, creatures track our slow progress through their forest. Let’s go, sisters. There’s life to find and terror to leave behind. No words will ever be enough to my kin back home, and they will never reach you. But I’ll hold you like voices, medals of regret and joy that I got out and left you behind.
“We are close,” Mary says.
“You’re just saying that to make me feel better,” Wanda pants, her clothes clinging to her sweat.
“Listen,” Mary says, stopping.
“There ain’t shit,” Wanda says.
Mary hushes her. “That’s because you’re talking and not listening.”
“A babble.” Kim gasps. “A stream!”
Her excitement spreads through us. Our captain ducks under a large branch caught on two trees. I follow behind Mary. Wanda is the only one among us who is hesitant and drags behind me as we crawl through the muddy underbrush.
“Everyone,” I whisper, “be on your guard.”
There is a thick growth of moss and ferns on top of a dead tree in front of us that I motion the others to take cover behind while I sneak up to look at the creek’s surroundings from a better vantage.
Memories flash of hot days at the pool, besting the others in laps and swimming our nightmares away. On the other side of the fence surrounding our practice pool, my little sisters’ eyes followed me, their wishing star. Their way out.
My heart pounds until I lay eyes on the creature crouched by the water. It basks in the shade, a beautiful monstrosity. Fur covers its long bird-like neck, shoulders, and face while the rest is bare of everything but sagging skin. Its naked epidermis flashes from a deep rotten green to an iridescent pink. The tree I hide behind trembles, and I tremble with it.
“Come out. Come out,” my voice sings from above me.
The bird by the stream burns red.
You’re connected to us.
It gathers its skins and scurries up the bank and into the brush on the other side. Leaves fall from the tree above me as something large begins to climb down.
I manage to yell. “Run! It’s a trap.”
Get used to it.
I struggle back toward the others and end up tangled in vines and moss.
All I have is my voice—my real voice. “Get out of here!”
Lions.
Birds.
Monstrous beauties.
Whatever they are—
“They are coming!” I scream as claws grip my shoulders, piercing my flesh and ripping me free. I’m hoisted up, up into the trees.
It’s what’s in your blood.
“I’m sorry!” I scream before a beak clamps around my neck.
This brute is different from the creature by the stream. Bigger. Covered in bright iridescent feathers that make the impassive white of its eyes dazzle. I am fouled, DQ’d, caught walking where I shouldn’t.
You can’t leave a place that don’t want you.
Kim
As the winged horror drags Sherril up into the canopy, I ruminate on the terrible events that led me to feel such joy in her demise. It was because of you. All her shiny words about pride, glory, and fame blinded us. We should have been wise. We should have said, ‘No, this is a bad idea. This will end with all of us dead.’ Instead, we looked past the obvious horrors of the situation and agreed to take the risk of a lifetime. And me with my family’s name on the line. You escaping that cesspool of a life you were cursed with. Though her betrayal shook my love for her, it was once we shipwrecked on this wretched island that my hate truly blossomed. If it were Sherril’s fate to die back on the beach with all the other scared, injured survivors, the ones like you, Monica, then I would have shed more tears than imaginable. I would have wallowed in her blood.
But her direct hand in your death put an iron nail through my heart. I am not the girl I once was. Sherril cursed us to this island with all her want and greed. If that is the case, then like my home, I will captain our efforts and lead us forward into whatever small light of hope I can sketch out for us.
“Sherril,” Mary, the sweetest and youngest, whispers beside me. Her eyes narrowed on the spot where Sherril’s body vanished.
“Holy shit,” Wanda, a coward till her last dying day, gasps before taking several stumbling steps back. “Fuck this!”
Before anyone grabs and pulls her back, Wanda takes off.
Mary says, “Kim, we have to go after her.”
“Which one?’ I ask, shrugging her off.
“Wanda,” Mary says. “She’s going to get herself killed.”
“That was bound to happen sooner or later.”
She takes hold of my arm. “Don’t forget what Sherril said; we need to stick together.”
“Then stick with me, and let’s go get what we came for.”
I push the brush apart, breathing in the dirt of my new home. I make my way down to the stream. The beasts had left, and the stream is nothing but fresh and inviting. You should see it.
“Kim!” Mary hisses.
She is the only one left from the team. It is her role, now and always, to follow, not question, not make demands, but fall in line. But, of course, the dictator’s daughter could never just follow. I continue negotiating the slope, one dark leg after the other down to the water. Within the light mists of the stream, a sharp pain strikes me in the back. Blackness descends quickly over me, and the beginning of a dream tickles my consciousness.
Monica, are you there? Are we going to meet again?
Meat sizzles beside my face. The fatty salt of beef bacon comes over me.
“Kimmy, get away from there; you’ll burn your hair,” your voice chastises me.
“Monica?” I sit up from my grounded position.
You are aged and rugged. At least twenty years hang on your skin, but your smile and eyes are the same.
The older, heavier you comes close to me in the backyard of my childhood. “No, Kim,” she says, still smiling. “Monica’s dead. I borrowed her form to make you … comfortable.”
Pushing myself up, I feel the familiar sharpness of my yard’s fake grass against my fingers. That sensation stabilizes me. I am home. An odd and ever-shifting home, but it is home.
Even though my head swims with all the images of home and you, I ask, “How are you her?”
“In dreams, we are anything we wish,” you more chirp than say, standing beside the inflated pool my mom bought for a much younger me. “Victors. Winners. One of the saved. All the untrue things.”
Beside you, the pool wilts and deflates into a molded heap now forgotten in the backyard. I blink up at your large form. The skin around your bones slips off at a slow rate, sand down a dune.
Your smile turns. “I am her because I consumed her.”
In the home I grew up in, there is an electric fence to keep the faerilds and the poor like you at bay. Here, that wire mesh is a white picket fence like the ones in movies of people living lily lives in some country that does not and will never exist.
“You and your friends are here during a tumultuous time for us,” you say.
War rings in my head. The world around me isn’t real, but your voice is what it used to be: soft, hot, and disastrously welcoming. “Us?”
“The ones who live on this floating nest. We are in the middle of a great battle to decide how we continue our cycle.”
The dream woman, you, take me by the arm. Your skin is a soft cloud, and my eyes swim as I stand.
“What are you on about?” I try to place my hand on my head but never connect with anything more than hot air.
“We are the Monseau. There are many of us, but not all are as gentle as we. A group among us has taken you to their section of the forest. They believe you to be our champion and plan on ending your cycle.”
“Wait,” I say, putting you into focus. “What?”
She takes a deep breath. “We, my sisters who live in the trees, have decided not to choose a champion. This battle is for claim of the nest, and most of us are near the end of our cycle; such claims mean nothing.”
I groan. “I’m going to be sick.”
“We’ve sent an advocate to bargain for your release.”
“This isn’t real. What do my team or I have to do with you?”
You make a purring chirp. “You showed up on the day of selection. Whether by choice or fate, you are involved in the outcome of what happens here. Not you exactly, but the others among you.”
“Not me?”
“You are not a champion,” she says before kissing me awake.
Blackness. Then the sun. Back to blackness. Your lips, and finally blackness again. This time no matter how many times I blink, the sun and you do not return. The darkness around me is muggy. Beneath my body, a spongey ground caresses my exposed skin. I rise and stumble to find my bearing. Really, I’m searching for you.
“Kim,” Mary’s voice echoes to me in the absolute pitch. “Where are you? I’m scared!”
Though even more lavish than my own, Mary's home is war-torn and divided by tone down the middle. She’s witnessed her brother hack her uncle to bits and helped him hide the pieces. She is not one for minor frights.
“Kim!”
My name becomes a prayer on her lips. Mary’s whimpers are endless, making it hard to pin down which direction she is in. Like back home, she is mine, my responsibility. Like you were. I failed you, but I won’t fail Mary.
“Mary.” I keep my voice from running away from me.
I stumble and fall in an attempt to save the last of my swim team. My senses keep telling me to expect a wall or cliff, something to stop me from reaching the screaming Mary, but there is nothing but endless black and a need to possess something, anything.
The echoes stop. Mary’s voice calls out, “You’re so close.”
It has lost its cadence of terror.
“Mary, can you move?” Inching along the spongy ground of the cave, I feel for her, for you. “I’m almost there, Mary,” I say, crawling faster, reaching a hand into the darkness.
What I caress is raw, dry trembling flesh. Recoiling to a tumble, I roll away from whatever it is. It barks at me in the manner of a bird with a broken beak. I kick myself away harder and faster. At some point, I lose control and become pure speed, tumbling down a hill with a steep, harsh decline. Water knocks the wind out of me. I’m in the curl of a wave that throws me against the mossy floor, knocking the air out of me. It cradles me back again as I choke for help. The water is sweet and fresh. It fills my empty stomach ease as you. Beneath the waves, a rough tentacle wraps itself around my ankle and begins to tug me down gently. Paralysis grips me as its sharp suckers break through my skin. There is nothing I can do to stop being torn asunder but shut my eyes and dream of you, the girl I loved who died.
Mary
Kim takes steps to reach the stream below us without first surveying the situation and her surroundings. The creatures of this island work like every animal anywhere. It separates and conquers. As soon as Kim breaks free of the bush cover, a marriage between a tall prehistoric person and crow descends upon her. Two short, strong wings are sticking from its abdomen scratch the back of Kim’s neck. She falls into its muscular, long arms. It flies her up into the canopy where they’ve taken Sherril.
There are only a few moments before, I am sure, they find and take me. Falling limp into the mud of the brush, I let my eyes drift close and slow my breathing until it is as though I am asleep like my brother taught me. It’s not about fear and calm; it’s about life and death, strength and weakness. Leaves fall around my body as something climbs down from the treetops. At once, its hands are cold and rough against my bare burning skin. It tosses me about, examining me for life or fight. As always, I show I have neither. I am a hidden whisper in the rain, the thing you wish you never heard. My strength is best saved until I have a handle on the situation. It sings in a croaked fashion, a broken necked frog, before pulling me to its chest and securing me there by wrapping its wings around me. After a chorus of honking and cracked barks, silence comes and stays. Hidden beneath its feathers, I stay motionless while it climbs back up to join its comrades in the trees.
A rush of wind ruffles my hair.
We are flying. The creature must have a second set of wings stashed on its back that comes out for aerial flight. What cooks in the world's wilds with monstrous creations running rampant is both great and terrible. I deem it safe after a time to open my eyes and try to figure out an escape from the clutches of this birdman. From my position, all I can make out in front of me is the creature’s feathered chest. Wind rushes in on me, so I gently maneuver myself to peer out of the opening above me. We fly through the clear skies in a pack. In front of me, several winged beings are soaring on wings protruding from their backs while their chest feathers rest against their muscular abdomens. Two are carrying something within their front wings, I assume, Sherril and Kim. My captor begins to rise until the light from the sun comes in direct contact with my eyes, blinding me.
Once they turn away, I take another look. The island we found ourselves on is much larger than any of us could have guessed. The ocean is a distant playful mirage on all sides. Further we fly toward the island's heart, where the trees grow tall and fertile. One of the bird creatures carrying either Sherril or Kim splits from the group and dives into the trees below. My head dribbles against my captor’s chest.
It begins whistling erratically. We’re going down.
We spin. I slip slightly in its grasp and bite my tongue not to scream. It builds in me. Clear skies shine into my feathered hole. And we continue to fall and spin and crash until it releases me.
I lose sight of everything as I twirl in the clear blue air. There’s no use hiding it. I am awake, and I am falling to the earth alone. My scream breaks free, choking the consciousness out.
My older brother Hakeem ran a rebellion training camp in the woods of the Thist Jungle. Citizens learned how to protect their community from the government’s enforcers. Pictures of my aunts and cousins and one of my mother were nailed to trees as signposts. He even stole a bottle of her perfume, a strong venom penetrating above all else. This is where you go if you want to be free. This is who you must fight if you're ever going to be free. These are your enemies.
Whose pictures hang along the trunks of the island? Is it us and our blood-stench? Are we the ones who bring fear and devastation with our monstrous bodies and cold blood? Have I turned into my mother after all? Someone who lives in opposition—almost hand in hand with the things that should terrify us?
Those were the enemies he taught people to fight. And whoever taught these creatures led them to rue our coming.
I never made it to Hakeem’s camp. Father sent me far away to boarding school when mom seized the office using blood and fear. These girls, the ones dead, alive, scattered along the ocean floor, were my new family. And the only thing they taught me was to use my sickness as a weapon, as a thought for a better world. Sherril always said that. Just cause we bring the darkness doesn’t mean we are the dark.
I am not afraid, but I will never become fear.
“Pour it down her throat,” Sherril’s voice barks.
Jolting upright, I smash into the chubby beaked face of a feathered, yellow-skinned baby. It scuttles back on small human feet. When it sneezes, its wings flash out, revealing large feathered webbed hands. It burbs up a laugh before running back to me, bringing with it a rainbow of identical small creatures all celebrating around me and singing in a drumming array of voices. Who are you cheering for?
“Hold her,” the bird I rammed heads with shrieks in Sherril’s voice.
A purple and green chick seizes me with their feathered hands. More take hold of me. Gentle, though firm, they hold me in place. Maybe if I had gone to Hakeem’s camp, I’d know how to fight back, how to be stronger.
“No,” I grunt, attempting to fight back, but without anything in me but exhaustion, my reserves are tapped. “Let me go.”
“You must drink,” one of the flapping chicks says in my calm voice. “It’s the only way you’ll survive.”
Moaning, I continue to struggle.
“Now!” barks a chick in Sherril’s voice before it lunges at me.
Caught unaware, a set of wings clamps down on my jaw and forces my mouth open. I try to fight, but more chicks come to grab me, hold me down, and vomit a chunky acidic green substance down my throat. It burns and warms my insides with violation and bile. When they were done, they let me go. I manage to get to my knees and then to my feet. Someone or something has put fresh clothes on my body. And in moments, they have ruined the soft cotton. Shaky though I am, I take several steps in different directions, wavering with every movement of my body. The chicks surround me in a full circle, pressing their fuzzy bellies into my calves and ankles.
I collapse into the dirt and try to force their sick out of me. It’s the least I can try and do.
“You must keep it down,” my voice says as a fuzzy arm rubs my face.
Turning away from the baby beast, I say, “Don’t touch me.” And shove another finger down my throat.
Together, the baby chicks open and close their beaks rapidly. In a way, it’s laughter.
“Aye.” In the accent of a colonist, a chick says, “best stuff around, our sick, but also the worst shitte you ever tasted.”
“It’s fast-acting too,” Monica’s voice breaks through the laughter.
I look in the direction of where the voice came from. But it’s not Monica. It’s a toddler-sized chubby red chick-like creature with big round black eyes. My stomach clenches, but all that comes out is a bellow and saliva.
“You’ll be good to go in no time,” another unfamiliar voice says.
“And off into battle!” my voice yells.
This time the slapping beaks are accompanied by the hard batting of fatty underdeveloped wings in a joyous cheer.
Continuing to cradle myself and assess the situation, I ask a straightforward question, “What battle?”
The birds calm down and move around me. One pushes forward and kneels beside me in the dirt.
“Your battle between the other one,” the chick says in Sherril’s voice. “The one this speech belongs to.”
There are a total of thirteen little chicks around me and hanging in the trees above. Whenever I try to stumble away, they force me back.
“I’m not fighting Sherril,” I say.
A fluttering of wings. “But you must,” says my voice. “The ones who fly found out you were our champion and attempted to end your life. They already have the one you call Sherril. They are preparing her for battle as their champion.”
Some more excited barking erupts among the small chicks.
“Champions for what?”
“Champions for us,” gasps the tiny green chick with Sherril’s voice. “We have selected you to fight and protect us from what is to come.”
“And what is to come?”
“War.” A sob comes from the chick in front of me. “We are close to becoming them, and they are close to losing what they were, but if our champion wins, you choose for us. You can make it, so we don’t have to change—ever!”
We were the faces that hung on their trees, and now we were going to rot in their earth.
“You’d be helpin’ us put an end to this,” a chick says.
“We’ve been following you,” the fake me says. “The moment you stepped foot in the forest, we could tell you were our champion. None of the others had it in them.”
They begin to encircle me in the excitement that borders on a craze. Is there a way for me to be anything other than what someone wants from me? A teammate? A daughter worthy of being the dictator’s own kin? And now, a champion?
“You have to fight,” Sherril’s voice says. “It’s the only way to survive.”
My stomach releases the cramp that it held. A calming relaxation rolls over me. I rise to my knees and look around at the chicks. If I’m quick, maybe outrunning them is my way out. But what then? This isn’t my home. My home is a moving bridge connecting me to what I want. Could this war-battered island be something I want?
“You’re much cleverer than her,” my voice says from behind me. “So clever, you’ll find a way of beating her.”
The small birds herd me back into their fold. My mother drugged me once to make me into an agreeable daughter—a soft hand on my lower back and a familiar voice beckoning me onward. I’ve been here before.
They begin strapping tree bark and leaf sewn undergarments onto my body as armor. They chit around me. Water breaks are given to me, but I am never left alone. To keep me holding on, I make believe I’m at Hakeem’s secret rebel camp. If I try hard enough, I can smell my mother’s perfume. Are you proud of the monster you raised?
A handful of the colorful chicks go out into the forest in separate directions to search for Sherril. In less than an hour, the party returns to say she is down at the beach digging a new grave. My breath catches in my throat. Of course, where else would she go but back to our new home? She knew before any of us. This island was it, our real contest.
“What happened to Kim?” I ask. “The other one who was with me?”
My voice answers, “She was taken by the ones who fly. A barter was sent to release her, but she was found dead.”
“You killed her.”
The chicks screech in unison, a chorus of hell bitches.
“No,” Sherril’s voice pleads. “We don’t kill.”
“She turned into food,” chirps up the chick with a colonist’s voice. “Caught, cut, catered for us.”
Rolling up from my stomach, Kim tries to fight back against her circumstances. I fall to my knees and swallow the double sick. This is nothing like Hakeem’s camp. Once they finish dressing me, they move back away from me. At least I wouldn’t be going up against Sherril alone.
“Is Sherril armed?” I ask. “Does she have a weapon?”
“She has a shovel,” my voice answers me from among the birds.
“Last I saw her she had a machete.”
A few chicks chirp in offense.
“Those types of weapons aren’t allowed,” Monica’s voice says. “You must only use what the island provides. Not tools of the outsiders.”
“I’m a tool of an outsider. What about me?”
The light purple chick with the colonist’s voice says, “If you win, you get all of it. Rule of the nest.”
I struggle to my feet. “What way is the beach?”
Pointing with their puffy and fuzzy wings toward my destination, they slap their beaks together in excitement.
“Are you going to come?”
“We can’t,” my mimic says, “it’s feeding time.”
And with that, the little overzealous fuzz balls run off into the cave to leave me on my journey. From the caves to the beach, it takes me all the shining, hot hours of the day. There are no fake waves to misguide me this time. The ocean’s unending blue stretches out away from me in my mind’s eye. No matter which way I go, I’ll reach the beach and Sherril.
Before long, the ocean’s breathing becomes my anthem, and soon, I am upon it. As I step out onto the fresh cool sand, I greet Wanda’s shredded head with a nod and kiss blown on the wind. Her beheaded body gently rocks from its twisted position in the trees above me. Her lingering sweat greets me like a hug.
“I was going to take her down,” Sherril’s voice, her authentic voice, says. “Figured I’d wait for you.”
She glances at me. Whatever had taken her had left her broken—in the eyes and body. She wears less of a battle garment and more of a tattering of clothing thrown on her to cover the parts she finds the most embarrassing. Bruises and fresh scars cover a great deal of her face and arms. The gulls were still here, screaming a warning we never listened to.
Smiling with a wince, she says. “I’m glad you came.”
“Of course, I came.”
Sherril glances at me as though there are no faerilds in the world, only us—me, her, Wanda’s mutilated corpse, and the rest of our team scattered among the flora and resting in the belly of hungry chicks and me.
“Those things told me about some war and how we’re involved,” I say.
Her laugh is high and dark. “Come on, let’s get her down.”
Whatever strung Wanda up had used strands of torn bark to tie her to the trees’ branches. But they are easy for Sherril to undo once she climbs up. I catch Wanda’s body before it hits the dirt. Her skin changed, becoming brittle and tight around her bones. Together we buried her with her head resting atop her chest in a fresh hole beside the others.
The sky begins to fade black. We sit in the last bits of bright yellow that burn the beach.
“I am sorry I got us all mixed up in this. They wanted me to hurt you,” Sherril says, smiling. More teeth than I remember are missing from her dark gums. “When I said no, they attacked me. Left me alive enough to make it down here. I hoped we’d find each other. That way, we didn’t have to be alone.”
The ocean licks at the beach. No faerilds rise from the sand to torment us, and the ones in the sea keep their distance and only emerge occasionally with a tail or tentacle to grab a screeching gull from the sky. Time worms away from us and into the black of the evening.
Sherril finally says, “This way of theirs is more than law; it’s fact. Damn near science to them. We are supposed to fight, and whoever wins gets to call this place her kingdom, decides the new rules of life.”
I wrap my arms around my body to protect myself from the cold mist rising off the sea.
“I did try,” Sherril says, “to help us—to make things better. I thought the world outside of ours would be different. Once we left home, I was sure everything would just open up. It’d all be fresh air, pink skies, and no more fighting.”
“Sherril—”
“Don’t,” she spits, standing in the sand on shaky legs. “Don’t try and reason with this, Mary. Don’t try and reason with me. I’m beat to shit, but from where I’m standin’, you’re the poster child for the ringer’s asshole. Whatever you are gonna say is bullshit.”
I start again, this time standing to meet her eye, “You’re right. We’re fucked.”
That makes her laugh. With tears rising in her eyes, she laughs in the way she used to when she’d best one of us in a match.
“You could do it,” she says after her laugh dies. “Be the champion to those crazy birds.”
I scoff. “Sherril, you’re the only champion I’ve ever met. You may have led us to this death trap, but you at least led us.”
Collapsing into the sand with the weight of her tears, Sherril sputters, “It’s too late for any of that champion shit now. I let those bastards get to me.”
Sherril releases a hysterical sob that turns into a small silent scream. It should have been obvious to me as soon as I laid eyes on her. Not just in her injuries but in the way she holds herself. Everything about her is rearranged, a stack of heavy books after a fall.
“You’re carrying, aren’t you?”
She nods.
There isn’t much else to say after that. I look away, only for a second, but Sherril grabs me by my wrists.
“You know what you have to do,” she says, squeezing my skin. “Mary, my blade is over there.” Her head flicks slightly to the side.
“No.” I am not afraid, but I will not be fear. “Let’s go for one more swim. I’ll race you home. Winner gets to be free.”
The ocean slaps the sand, calls us by our blood names, calls us home.
I will eat fear, swallow it whole.
I help Sherril to her feet, and hand and hand, we walk to the water’s opening. It's freezing, but Sherril runs into it, threatening to leave me behind in the shallow waves. Before she gives herself to the ocean, I take what little remains of my co-captain, the girl who risked us all for something better, the girl who dared talk to the dictator’s daughter after hearing a rumor I’d swam in Olympic-sized pools since I could take a breath and grab her by the throat. I was your way out, but you’ll be my ticket to staying. I squeeze, press, twist, and yank, like my brother once taught me.
Sometimes, he said, the enemy comes from within your blood.
“I get why you tried. I’m going to try, too,” I say to Sherril’s twitching body. Is it her faerild who listens, or the ghost trapped in her bones?
Again, I squeeze, press, twist, and yank until her bones pop and grind her life to a halt.
Once she’s dead, I pull us out of the ocean’s crash and drop her body near her blade. Her faerild’s death is seasoned with salt from the sea and my tears. No sort of mercy will save it. With Sherril and her faerild both dead, I am alone on the beach that welcomed us, that held us until we were all gone. All but one. Me. The young one, the one that needed rearing, shielding, guiding. Behind me, the jungle trembles and shrieks. As night comes for us all, I rest my head in the sand, letting it drink my tears, my regret, my fear.