I track her every movement through the eyes that don’t feel like mine. Yanami is a feline mimic through and through. Determined, headstrong, and bold when she leads. My own feline genes dictate I should be similar, yet I’ve never worn power as comfortably as she does. No matter how much she protests, Yanami was born to be Inka. I have to believe I was born to be by her side, too. After everything, there’s no other choice.
“Turn back,” Yanami says, and Koa slashes a heavy paw through the air. It misses her by inches. My heart is in my throat,but I stay still. “Turn back,” she repeats, and Koa snarls in her face and lunges. She moves divinely fast, so agile I think she must have regained her samay.
No. This is just Yanami. Her body reinforces what she told me before. Her life of training and battles and expectations. She surpasses them all.
“Turn back,” she says again. How fitting that the only time Yanami repeats herself is in the face of a god. She zips around the beast and hits its paws, physically forcing it to shift and move. “There is no reason for you to stop us,” Yanami screams.
When I think I should help her, when I make the first move to lift Mare off my back, she slams her fist into the god’s leg, and the beast rears back.
“You will not succeed,” the thunder screams at us.
The hypnosis I was under cracks, and my body moves of its own accord. I lay Mare on the ground and run to Yanami’s side. If the god’s words are true, then this is not a fair match.
Except, by the time I’m at her side, the god is long gone. I see the trail of stars left in its wake as it jumps back to the heavens it calls home. I stare for less than a second, more concerned with Yanami’s body crumbling at my feet. She’s curled around her right hand, holding it to her chest.
“I should have come sooner,” I whisper, but she shakes her head. The movement allows me to see the true state of her hand. My stomach rolls, and I hold back the bile that builds up in my mouth. My mind protests at the sensation. It’s too much. It wants to go back to the sunlit haze. Yanami’s skin is an angry red, shredded and ripped. Her fingers are bent, like twisted dry roots forced out of the dirt. “Yanami, I’m sorry, I should’ve–”
“Thank you,” she whispers through grinding teeth. “Sinchinrei, all I can say is thank you.”
It strikes me that Yanami may be out of her own body, too. As I see her stretch out her hand and hiss, in lurching pain from aself-inflicted wound, I recognize her actions. While I want to stay in the illusions of my own mind today, she is doing everything possible to force herself back into reality.
Can I bear this reality? Maybe with her by my side, maybe once she has her samay back and I have the sun staff in my hands, maybe then reality will be worth living in. It has to be. I pull Yanami up and kiss her senseless, her injured hand between us. I help Yanami splint her fingers with cloth and sticks. The sound of bones grinding against each other barely registers in my mind. I get Mare on my back, and we begin to walk. The further we get from the bridge, the less my mind replays Koa’s only words.You will not succeed.
But we did.
It’s as if I blink and the first lake is before us.
There are four of them, but it’s the last and largest one that is our target. Yanami still takes the time to leave offerings and pray at the first three, dried blood falling in with the coca leaves she sets down. As I watch her become more and more of a heavenly thing, I drift.
“Pomakanchi,” she whispers, then turns to me for the first time in hours. “Dedicated to the Feline. There’s an eye of water hidden somewhere among the trees here. That’s where I need to bathe.”
An eye of water, a fountain of sacred water coming out from the earth to feed the lake. I nod and begin to search. I find it first and wish I hadn’t.
The eye is off the side of a large cave right next to the lake so that the water feeds directly into it.Feeds. Gushes. The water comes out of the rock wall with the force of a tsunami. I reach up to touch it, and my hand is shoved down.
Yanami will be pushed into the lake. I’m sure of it.
But we’ve come this far. I have no choice but to call her over anyway. I think somewhere in the reality I refuse to enter, I hate myself.
We’re between mountains, and the ground couldn’t be sturdier beneath us. It’s serene. The water sounds beautiful, peaceful even. The war inside Yanami isn’t.
“It’ll push you in,” I say. She stays still and doesn’t respond. “You don’t know how to swim.”
Still no response from her, but it doesn’t frustrate me, not when I’m stuck in the same purgatory. I’ve seen her go nonverbal enough times now. All I can do is try to guide her back.
“I’ll go with you,” I say and grab her hand. I don’t pull her in any direction.
That seems to snap her out of her head.
“It has to be just me,” she says.
My tongue feels heavy in my mouth when I speak. “Does it or do you just feel like you deserve it?”
Her eyes widen at my pushback. “I do deserve it.”
That’s enough of an answer for me. “I’m going with you,” I say. Before she can argue, I’ve already let go of her and begin to gently set Mare on the ground. “Some sacred water will probably do wonders on my shoulder anyway.”
“Sinchinrei,” Yanami interrupts me. “You don’t have to.”
