Opposition Shift

by Sarah Stone

  Neither Hayden or Nibiru batted an eye at anything the Akiaten did, whether it was feeding or the gruesomely unrestrained hand to hand training that sometimes went on in the deeper part of the jungle that often required the Akiaten to heal themselves afterward.

  One of his rather brief conversations with Cabal consisted of the man bemoaning the lack of urban landscape in which to train the jungle Akiaten in city warfare. The urban Akiaten, by coming to the island, were successfully learning how to navigate such an environment, but in a fight on the mainland, the jungle Akiaten might struggle.

  Hayden saw Una in glimpses and a handful of meetings wherein her thoughts seemed to be somewhere else altogether. The distance between them felt, to him, as if it grew deeper still. She dropped her gaze when he looked at her too long, but was different with the other Akiaten, her eyes issuing a challenge when any of them stared after her as she headed off into the jungle while the rest of them fed, daring anyone to judge her or follow. He’d wondered if she simply didn’t like feeding in front of the others, if she was uncomfortable with her true nature, but that didn’t explain the distance the other Akiaten seemed to hold her at.

  Cabal was the only one that didn’t seem at least mildly put off by her presence, and try as he might, Hayden couldn’t grasp why. He’d thought about asking one of the others, but that seemed uncharitable. The least he owed the woman who had saved his life not once, but twice now, was to hear whatever explanation she could give him herself. Or at least, that was his thought process as he followed her into the jungle at long last.

  He was, admittedly, not so great at navigating a landscape rather than a cityscape; he was pretty good at bus routes, but the jungle held only a few winding paths, and Una had taken none of them.

  It would have been easier to cut through the thick brush and restricting vines with a machete, but he wasn’t sure if that was done outside of old movies and he was too far in now to head back just to find a knife to borrow. Really, he should acquire a knife of his own. Even in this day and age, guns could still jam, and he figured a blade would take less skill to aim. It certainly seemed to work for the Akiaten, who used blades as much as they did guns, and come to think of it, so did Laine and Hirohito.

  Sometimes being 'just a slinger' really ate at him, and without a mission into the datascape to occupy his time, Hayden was getting stir crazy. So why not follow Una into the forest? He cursed at himself, knowing he was being ridiculous, but the slinger's mind was hungry for input, and this seemed as good a data run as any.

  Sweat stuck his shirt to his skin by the time he found her, despite the late hour, the sun close to fading from sight below the trees.

  She was waiting for him, her back against a tree, her head tipped toward one side, listening. He ducked his head, rubbed the back of his neck a bit awkwardly as he wondered just how much noise he’d been making crashing through the trees.

  “An elephant might have been quieter,” she said, the words were joking, but her voice was troubled.

  “I'm a work in progress,” he answered, stepping closer, hoping to study her face, but she stood in the deepest shadow of the tree, and his eyes were only human.

  She saw him squinting and stepped onto a bit of ground that was better lit. “What are you doing out here, Cole?”

  Well, his plan to keep beating around the bush with bad jokes was officially shot. “You’ve seemed…tense, since we got here. I know I might be over the line here, especially how things have been between us, I noticed you never eat with the others.”

  “Eat?”

  “Feed, indulge, barbecue, whatever,” he corrected. “I’ve never seen you do it, and you seem uncomfortable around the others when they do. Not that I’m, you know, offering. I’d just like to understand and help. If I can help. So yeah, I guess I am offering.”

  Nice job, Cole, he thought. Very eloquent.

  She didn’t seem to lock onto the disjointed manner of his words, but rather the sentiment behind them, for which he was grateful. Her eyes lost some of their tightness. “The Akiaten and I, we aren’t the same.”

  Confusion twisted his features. “What do you mean? You are Akiaten. You’ve said so.” He was sure she had, and he’d seen himself the way she moved and fought. He called the image of her stomach speared by glass to mind, remembered the thin, pink scar that had replaced the wound just scant days later, perhaps hours, though he hadn’t seen it then.

  “I’m a different sort,” she said. “I have different ways of surviving. It is harder. The others do not understand, and perhaps they can’t, but it is my way."

  The look on his face must have made his lingering confusion plain.

  “You have it in you to be a good man Hayden Cole, and you are genuine, for that, I am willing to show you,” she said. An unspoken, if that’s alright, hung in the air, and Hayden felt himself nod in response, trying to look encouraging and not as nervous as he felt.

  At the nod, Una stepped back into shadow, closed her eyes as if to summon some hidden strength, and began to change.

  Her face was the first thing he noticed, the inhuman mask falling over her usually pleasant features, teeth lengthening, eyes going bright and pupils widening until it was all of her eyes he could see, just two large, black discs. She stripped off her clothing as she went, her spine lengthening grotesquely as she hung her shirt on a low hanging branch, and then stepped out of her pants. Her shoes popped off on their own, when her feet arched in the middle, nails growing on her both her hands and feet.

  All the while, she kept her gaze locked with his wherever she could, and Hayden, in return, tried to keep himself from flinching, from letting any fear show on his face. The skin of her stomach looked stretched taut, painful, and then it broke apart. Her middle unraveling like a split seam, intestines spilling out in place of stuffing, dangling from her upper half as it hovered in place, the leathery wings that sprouted from her back keeping it there. Her lower body hit the ground, legs askew as they waited for her to rejoin them whenever she chose.

  It was unmistakable as the same image he remembered from his so-called dream so many days ago, down to the strange way Una moved.

  There was a scuttling in the bushes behind them, and Una moved, quickly, a jolt forward that his eyes had trouble tracking, and sprang into the leaves.

  An awful, drawn-out squeal echoed from the woods, cut off in the middle, the silence heavy and sickening in its wake. Hayden forced himself to move closer, until he saw one of the islands numerous wild pigs caught in her claws, muscles spasming as she drained the blood from its throat.

  It was small, with bits of dark brown in the short, wiry fur that covered it, blood staining the ground beneath it. None escaped from where her mouth was fastened to the fountain, but her claws had speared it elsewhere and she didn’t bother stemming the flow.

  This is what she was telling him, her shameful secret. She was both more of a monster and less so. A different breed than the rest of them, something even further from human, and this was how she compensated, how she ensured she wouldn’t lose herself.

  He watched until the pig was still, a husk, and she let the body thump to the ground. She could not simply feed.

  She had to kill.

  She came closer to him, the same odd hovering movement, her wings brushing his arms as she closed in. Even now, he could find bits of familiarity in her face, bits of beauty. The beauty was something dangerous though, like a storm, lightning streaking over the ocean.

  When she pressed her bloodied lips to his cheek, he did not flinch, and though he hoped for more, even now, he was strangely satisfied with the mangled smile she gave him in return for his own.

  War was on the horizon, the kind that came with no regard for love or nature, and there were things far more horrifying than monsters to devote his fear too.

  The End