“No, I do Mina, and I need you to listen to me.” He pulled the knife slowly out of my hand, making sure that I wasn’t cut as he did so. He spoke to me as if I were a horse that needed calming. I clenched my fingers around where the knife had once been, missing the solid certainty of action.
“Ettore and Jin Woo are mostly immune to poisons; they are going to be fine, if they are not keeling over by now, they are not in any danger,” his eyes flicked between mine as if searching for some inkling of understanding in me.
“Oskar,” I said calmly, as calmly as I possibly could, “what the ever-living fuck are you talking about?”
The hand that was not holding mine ran through his hair, tightening into a fist at the back of his head and pulling harder than would be comfortable. Yet the agony on his face didn’t seem merited even with the firm tug.
“Maybe you should sit down,” he said, once again in that oh-so-gentle voice.
“Oskar, spit it the fuck out.”
All four of the men glanced between themselves, as if they had already talked about this, and maybe they had, maybe this was what those half-whispered conversations had been about. Oskar released his hair and looked me dead in the eyes.
“We’re not entirely human.”
I snatched the pocketknife out of his hand and went back to attacking the wall of the cabin, speaking as I worked.
“Oskar, I want you to sit down and drink some water. There probably was a hallucinogenic mushroom in the ones that Jin Woo picked. I’m getting us out of here; you just need to relax.”
Once again, he grabbed my hands, prying my grip open with a deft move and causing the knife to drop to the floor with a quietclank. Smoothly, he swept his leg under mine, causing me to plummet for a millisecond before he caught me and lowered me the rest of the way to the floor with him. I was too surprised to struggle. By the time the thought of fighting against Oskar had come back to me, Bartosz had my legs, and Ettore and Jin Woo each had one of my arms as Oskar took one step away but directly in front of me. All three of my captors were freakishly strong. I wriggled and kicked and tried to yank my hands out of their holds for a long while before I realized I was stuck and stopped moving.
“Ginne,I’m not delusional. I need you to listen to me,” Oskar began in Norwegian before he was cut off.
“Italian, German, English, or Korean, please,” said Ettore with a little threat in his voice, the goblin in the back of my mind who, in this exact moment, was entirely useless, noted that he seemed on edge, that there was an almost aggressive tone in his voice like he had fought with Oskar before this or something. The little gremlin liked the way aggressive looked on him.
Oskar glared at Ettore for a moment before he focused back on me, but continued in English nonetheless.
“Do you remember when I was a kid, and I was able to hold my breath for fifteen minutes?” he asked me.
I didn’t have time for this, but it didn’t look like they were going to let me free until they had said all that they wanted to, so I humored him.
“Yes, that’s what you claimed, but I always figured you swam behind a rock and took some breaths when I wasn’t looking,” I replied.
“I didn’t. I didn’t fake accidentally memorizing every line ofTitanicand reciting it back to you perfectly when your godmother said that you couldn’t watch. I didn’t fake being able to lift two hundred pounds at nine or shoot better than most Olympic riflery competitors.”
I remembered everything he was saying. Oskar used to ‘look at fish’ for more than ten minutes at a time while I paddled away on the surface or read a book on a warm rock. He had carried all of the heavy rocks for our massive rock fort by himself. He had shot a moose perfectly through its eyes at a hundred meters away and had dedicated the hunt to me. I had come up with excuses, had explained away the more far-fetched of the strange occurrences by blaming my overactive imagination when I was younger or my undiagnosed illness, but it made sense.
Oskar looked like he saw the realization come into my eyes.
“You knew it wasn’t normal, but you convinced yourself that it was fine, that you were just making things up, didn’t you?” he said softly.
Looking up through my eyelashes, I glared at him. I didn’t want him calmly telling me how things were. An immature type of fury boiled up in me, but there wasn't much I could do, so all I did was glare.
“So what are you all, elves? Vampires? Aliens?” I scoffed.
When they all looked at each other as if they were trying to figure out the best way to move forward, I scoffed again.
“Aliens?”
Ettore started then.
“It’s all pretty unclear, as all history is when you go back far enough. Some of our historians believe that we were separate from mainstream humans for at least 200,000 years, some think that we were on an island, others say we developed advanced technology and lived on a habitable Mars, no one really knows, as no myths or legends were passed down. All we know is that something happened to where we lived before, and we moved to western Asia, where we spread through the Silk Road and beyond. Eventually, we sparked the Renaissance, and everything else is history. We are called The Renai.”
He said Renai, like the first half of Renaissance, like the woman’s name Reneé,and I couldn’t help but mouth the word, letting it roll around in my mouth.
It was now Bartosz's turn to scoff, his dark grey eyes squinting with derision.
“We could just as easily call ourselves ‘The Plag’ cause we sparked the bubonic plague as well.”
