Her brow’s a little tacky and cold.
Her heart’s beating strongly, however, and her temperature’s about what it should be. It’s really not my specialty to figure out why humans are alive and how to improve their health. In the past, my generals have all been strong and robust. As they learned to use my magic, they grew stronger still.
I consider killing her again.
But being stuck out here, slumbering near this depressing lake, would be worse than being buried under that mountain. No, I need to revive her and at least get to a better place first. I can’t seem to entirely give up on the idea of reforming her. I reach toward her to pat her face or jolt her awake with a small shot of pain.
But when my hand touches her face, something distracts me.
I couldn’t read her thoughts when she was awake, but now there’s a memory floating near the front of her mind. I wonder whether it’s a dream she’s having, if she’s asleep rather than passed out.
She’s walking in the darkness on a fairly busy street. I can’t tell where she is, but they’re speaking Spanish. She has, so far, only spoken English to me. She turns on a side street, and I realize she’s headed home. She’s tired. She’s cranky, and her feet hurt. Being human seems a miserable endeavor. I wonder why they fight so ferociously to keep their lives.
Then she’s bending over to tie her shoelace, and when she stands back up, there’s a man in front of her. His soul’s dark.
Very dark.
He pulls something out of his pocket, and I realize it’s a knife. I try to reach through her memory and hurt him. He’s clearly diseased of mind and soul, and he deserves to die. But I can’t do a thing.
Because it’s just a memory.
The girl’s body begins to tremble, her nervous system doing its job as it pumps adrenaline through her system, and she begins to prepare for the possibility of her impending doom.
The man shouts. “Dame tu bolso.”
She frowns, and then she shakes her head. “No. No quiero problema, pero no puedo.”
“Dame tu bolso ahora.”
“Mi padre se murió,” she says. “Él me dio este bolso. Puedes tener mi dinero.” She fumbles with her small purse, where it’s strung across her body. “Espero un momento.”
But the man isn’t waiting. He grabs her wrist, slices the purse strap, and yanks it away. Then he looks around, his eyes cutting right and left. He shouts a profane word, and then he kicks her right in the stomach.
She doubles over, clearly presenting no threat.
He spits on her, and then he kicks her again, and again, and again. He’s smiling as he does it, relishing his power over another person. Then he pulls the contents from her purse, throwing them all over the ground. He slices the purse into pieces, and he takes the money. He’s smiling when he leaves. “Te liberaré de ese recuerdo.”
And then he’s gone, leaving her to curl up in her misery.
When she finally moves again, her body wet from the cold puddle she was lying in, her face scraped, her arm and face bruised, she’s stiff and slow. Surprisingly, even in her terrible state, she gathers up the pieces of her destroyed purse and cradles them next to her body, sobbing as she does. She rocks back and forth there, weak and broken, but instead of staying down, she rises.
And when she does, I see the darkness in her that I saw before.
She doesn’t look haunted by the memory. She looks enraged by it. That man’s lucky he’s nowhere near us in that moment, because she might have embraced what I offer just to end him. She clenches her hand into a fist, and then she hurls the fragments and strips of gutted fabric out of her hand, where they scatter and flutter across the dirty, wet ground.
I’m barely processing what I saw when the small woman below me gasps and her eyes open. She glares at me, and then she forces herself up. “Where are we?” She looks around. “The middle of nowhere?” She smiles.
And I see the same darkness.
I may be closer to my goal than I realized. This woman’s somehow a bizarre mixture of light and dark entwined, but the darkness hides just below the surface. If I can free it, if I can free her from the memories of light she’s clinging to, I may yet forge her into something I can use. Her anger’s the key.
But she has to survive for that to happen.
“I pushed you too far and too hard,” I say softly. “You need to rest and recover.”
She looks down at her feet and grimaces. “I need some new shoes.”
“And a little medical treatment, perhaps,” I say.
