The pain that wracked her was echoed in his stare. In a single, squinted eye rimmed with blood that wept from the gashes upon his face. A single eye. Dark. Glistening. Alive.
Barely.
“I can’t move, Denaos,” Asper whispered.
His voice escaped on a red groan. “I know.”
“It’ll see me. It knows me. It hurts. I can’t.”
He pressed his good hand against the floor, began to push himself up. “I know.”
“You can’t, either. She’ll kill you.”
He coughed. Blood wept from his mouth. “I know.”
“Denaos, don’t.”
He rose to his feet, staggering. “I have to.”
“Why?”
“Because I can’t.”
A dead man who didn’t know it. He got up, tucking his broken wrist beneath his good arm. He turned to face Xhai, who wore a disappointed frown, as though she had hoped he would do something else.
“Stop,” Xhai said.
“I can’t,” he replied, limping toward her.
“It isn’t supposed to end this way. You can’t die for her.”
“Well, I can’t die for myself.”
“You’re supposed to die for me,” Xhai said. “You’re supposed to die trying to kill me. That’s what we do. We kill until we are killed.”
“Not for me. I always should have died for her.”
“For her.”
“Yeah.”
Her ruined face twitched for a moment, trying to remember what it was supposed to look like. But it could find no snarls. Despite her torn mouth and her broken teeth, despite the blood painting her purple skin and her ruined arm, Semnein Xhai, Carnassial and killer, looked hurt.
He staggered toward her. She struck him to the earth and he did not rise. There was no enthusiasm in her boot as she pressed it between his shoulder blades.
He didn’t even bother to scream. He didn’t fight. His mask lay somewhere else, between a pool of his own blood and the dead sikkhun. What stared at Asper as he lay on the ground was him.
A man. Broken. Whose mouth could only twitch with a word he desperately wished he had breath to speak.
Sorry.
Asper found herself rising to her feet. Only the barest part of it was her. Only a faint desire felt through the agony to rise up and go to him. The rest, that which forced her to her feet, that which propelled her forward, came from elsewhere. Came from the paper creature on the rubble. Came from the thing inside her that it recognized. That thing remembered Xhai.
That thing wanted to see her again.
Her left arm rose up. Xhai didn’t look up. Not until Asper felt her fingers against the Carnassial’s throat. Not to strangle, not to harm, just to touch. The thing inside her remembered that skin, that strength beneath it. Xhai felt it, too. Xhai remembered. Xhai looked up.
“No,” she whispered as she looked at Asper. “No.”
Sorry.
Asper pretended to say that. Her voice was on fire. Her limb was alive. The hellish light erupted from her palm, swept over her flesh and painted her bones black. It raced up her arm, onto her shoulder, splitting cloth and flesh and baring the black skeleton beneath.
Her grip was death. Xhai swept her arm up to shove her off. Her fist bent, arm snapped and folded in half, fingers curled over so that their tips brushed the hairs on the back of her hand. She clenched her jaw so hard that the jagged shards of teeth punctured her gums.
“No. NOT AGAIN.”
Sorry.
She could only pretend. The thing inside her reached out, leapt into Xhai’s own flesh. She could feel it keener than she ever had. It was searching. It was digging holes in the Carnassial. It was looking for something else.
It had a voice.
Where is it, where are they, where are the rest of them, what are these bones, oh, they break so easily, what is this skin, why does it split apart, what is an arm, a leg, a rib, they all snap and break, and there is nothing in her anymore but bone and blood and I need more and I never find it and I can’t find anyone else like me and where is he, I heard him emerge, I heard him scream, I thought he was there in those people, in that creature, in that girl, in Taire, I remember Taire, I keep hearing Taire, but he wasn’t there, I need them, I need to talk to them, I need to see them, let me out, let me out, let me-
“SAVE ME-”
Xhai was still alive. Xhai was bending. Xhai was breaking. And she was screaming.
Screaming his name.
“No, no, no, no, NO!”
It was Asper screaming now. Asper hurling herself to the ground. The fire retreated, dissipating back into her flesh, leaving bare and steaming skin. The muscle beneath was ablaze. The blood boiled. The voice inside her was a jumble of wordless babble. It was still there. It wanted out. It wanted the paper creature.
It wanted something like it.
And now that it was so close, so close to the familiar, it was talking. It was within her. Alive.
She heard footsteps. Heard breathing. Above all of it, after all of it, Xhai was still standing, still walking. The Carnassial came to a halt over the priestess. Asper didn’t look up. She knew what she looked like.
“It talked to me.” Asper whispered softly. “It was in me. It was awake. I could feel it, all this time, feel it screaming. But. .” She shook her head. “It’s like. . that thing in the statue. That’s in me. That’s. .” She inhaled, felt the tears forcing their way out the corners of her eyes. “I stopped it. I couldn’t let it. I couldn’t give it anything.”
“Why.”
Xhai’s voice was a croaking thing, a voice that belonged to something without a throat. Not a question. Not one that she thought had an answer.
“Because you cried out his name,” she said. “Like you. . I don’t know. But you’re down here because of him, we’re fighting because of him, he acts like he knows you better than anyone, you kill, you’re dying, I hurt you. . and you still called out to him like. .” It ached to say it. “Like he was going to save you.”
“Why.”
“I guess. . I didn’t want that. For you.”
“Why.”
“I don’t know. I can’t-”
“Why.”
A fist against the back of Asper’s head. She fell to the ground.
“Why.”
A boot to her side. She reeled.
“Why.”
Again. Again. Striking with what were once limbs, twisted beyond recognition. Again. Again. Snarling in a voice that wasn’t hers.
“Why. Why. Why. Why. Why. Why.” Xhai, snarling and striking and flailing as Asper quivered on the floor, trying to protect herself. “Why do you do that? Why do you not act like you’re supposed to? Why aren’t you dead?”
She looked up and saw Xhai. Saw one eye wide, the other a thick crunch of flesh and shards of bones where the eye socket had folded upon itself. She saw her mouth flapping, the jaw separated at the chin. She saw blood seeping out between jagged teeth.
She saw a woman who shouldn’t be alive.
She felt the broken woman’s twisted arm and bent legs hammering her into the ground.
She left Asper there as she collected her sword, dragging it behind her on a withered arm. She hauled it, hefted it over the woman who had not died, who tried to kill her, who hurt her worse than even he had.
“Wait.”
No urgency. No desperation. Denaos pulled himself wearily to his feet, pausing to spit out a glob of blood on the dusty ground. He didn’t hurry.
“Don’t kill her,” he said.
“I have to.”
“No, you don’t.”
“This is the way it has to be.”
“Why,” he asked. Not a question.
“Because there’s no other way. There is killing and there is dying and the more you do it, the more it makes sense.”
“And then the more you do it, the more you keep waiting for it to make sense,” he said. “You want to kill her because she hurt you, because you think that doesn’t happen, because people like us. . we aren’t supposed to get hurt. But people like us,” he gestured between them, “it’s not a necessity. We just don’t know anything else.”