Child of Sacrifice

by Sevi Rais

"It was then that they knew I was different; not human like them. I was an elf — a black mark on my father's legacy."

A/N: Chi-Min and the world of Yileria are made by keiiii. Any other person is made by me. This fanfic takes place just before the events of the comic. R+R. Thank you!

Child of Sacrifice

Chi-Min blinked out the painful rays of the sun pouring through the vein of the blinds. The outside air hummed of vibrant springtime heat, so the hospital was chilled to near freezing. Chi-Min drew his scarf in thick mounds over his mouth and flexed his fingers, feeling the cold press around him in the empty, spare hospital room. He sat at the table furthest from the door, admiring the silence, the time alone, to read his newspaper and sip scalding coffee. Chi-Min shook out the paper and folded it to the second front, catching the headline that jumped out at him in tall, bolded font:

Zedong Overthrown from The Mao Empire!

The Usurpation of an Emperor

The tyrannical dictator

of The Mao Empire —

infamous for his capture and

execution of elves — was

usurped in a revolution

from embattled Maoists,

largely supporters for elfish

rights. Maoist have lived

largely in abject poverty

brought on by Emperor Zedong's

draconian measures of rooting

out elves. Emperor Zedong has

come under fire from inter-

national communities for his

continued abuse of elves,

including the slaying of an

elfish coven in the outskirts

of a rural community (resulting

in the entire village, human and

elf, to be decimated). With the

deaths of the Royal Family ...

Chi-Min yawned and turned the page, not even trying to feign interest. There were patients within his own community that needed help, the downtrodden and the sickly. Why care about people halfway across the world? Why would his countrymen care, especially when they had their own problems, their own issues? Besides, what was the difference: Elves were tools in Yileria where as in Mao, they were slaves? There was an underlining hypocrisy there to which Chi-Min didn't dwell on; he didn't care either way.

Chi-Min stretched his body out in the plastic seat, staring up at the ceiling and letting the stillness invade his mind. It wasn't as if he didn't care about people, but he only cared about the things he could control. He put faith in anything he put his mind to for he always overcame it. There were accolades he had, certificates and awards he deserved: his PhD from Kendry, a certificate for performing a triple bypass, an honorably mention for his part in helping identify and cure prima facie dauphinois — a disease leaving the face pockmarked like a potato.

Mao was a country that could be molded, even emboldened, by elves like him. Why not when he could be an inspiration for others, of what elves can achieve? He would be a person admired, someone respected; remembered. Someone to name an award after for his pure and utter greatness: Mao Empire's Highest Honoree Citizenship, in Dedication to Doctor Chi-Min Huang, would like to award this first dedication of Pure Greatness recipient to —

Chi-Min's ears pricked up at the loud speaker that funneled down the hallway: Doctor Allcome, Ward Three ... Doctor Allcome ... — a warning for all doctors to convene on floor three. Chi-Min left the room and turned the corner toward the elevator, watching as it closed with a crowd of doctors and security personnel inside.

Chi-Min paused, exhaled, and took the stairs down to the next level.

"Would they do this to a world renowned elf genius from an oppressive regime?" he mused. He pushed the door to the third floor open and went into the lobby area where visiting families huddled on couches, eyes wide and watchful as they heard the shouts coming down the hallway. Chi-Min moved past them and down the hall, stopping by the first room as a jagged edge of lightning bolt cut the door frame.

Chi-Min paused, crouching as he heard the shouts and frightened screams coming out of the room. He edged his head around the corner, catching nurses huddled with patients underneath beds, and doctors scattered about, lost or confused on what to do. Doctor Tiberius was near them holding up a bedpan as a shield and shouting useless commands.

"Doctor Young! Over there! The lightning is situated there! Move! Near the —"

Chi-Min saw a strike of white lightning in his vision, but couldn't stop it from hitting him. It radiated through his body, traveling until he grasped it and redirected the force, moving it out through his shoes and into the floor.

Chi-Min panted, but refocused his attention, quietly judging the electric pulses by the second and swept into the room, moving around the mid section of doctors and dove by the bathroom door. The lightning flicked past and zapped a doorknob.

"What's causing all this?!" a nurse said to his left, with frazzled hair sticking to her sweaty forehead. Chi-Min shook his head.

"I do not know, I just got —"

He was cut off by another lightning strike — the biggest one. It lit up the room in black and white sparks, breaking light bulbs. Chi-Min felt the familiar vibration pulse through his fingers and reverberate through his body, but he was able to resist the attack by countering it with his own power.

The attack desisted, leaving no trace of the lightning, besides its black, jagged imprints in broken lighting fixtures. There was a collective pause, a peaceful silence of breathing, until the nurses began goading patients out of their hiding places. Chi-Min panted, then sighed, cleaning up with the rest of them as he took an upturned metal tray from the ground and banged it on the table. The nurse next to him screamed and the room grew silent again. Chi-Min glanced around to see every watchful eye on him. He scratched his head with a shrug.

"It wasn't me who caused this." He chuckled at the looks on their faces. "I heal, remember?"

"But you do have lightning style ... attacks! Right?"

"Dr. Young, is it? Though I am not sure how many comic books you have read, I do not expend my 'lightning style attacks' into an area two floors down from where I currently am."

Dr. Young blinked and thought about his response as the nurses made their way out of the room with patients in arms. Dr. Young took off her glasses and cleaned them on the lappet of her white coat, clearing her throat.

"So ... so you were ... somewhere else?"

"Since I was the last one here, yes, that is correct."

The doctors were at a loss for words for they were all concluding the same idea: that the elf did it. Chi-Min wasn't mistaking their silence for doubt nor did he want colorful excuses to gloss over this fact. It was natural for humans to blame an elf in most circumstances, and they weren't totally false here: An elf did create the destruction here, but whom? And where was he now?

"Dr. Huang, I presume?

Chi-Min felt a tap on his shoulder and saw a brightly colored fan out of the corner of his eye. He turned, finding the eagle eyed stare of a woman, with brown and silver hair coiled in a bun. Her black dress was long and narrow, printed in patterns of blooming red dahlias. She looked through her square glasses at Chi-Min.

"Yes," Chi-Min replied, half curious, half irritated. "Who are you?"

"Good." The woman strolled past him, crushing plastic and glass underneath her high heels then ripped the curtains off a patient's corner room. Chi-Min's red eyes drew back into a stare. The nurses and doctors held up their hands.

"Excuse me, ma'am, what are you doing?" A nurse stood by her side, stooping over her. She jumped back when the woman pushed a table tray out of the way. Doctor Tiberius stood nearby.

"Please, ma'am, all of the patients have been moved out and transferred to —"

"You have a patient here," she said, tearing another curtain open to find a beeping a heart monitor. She moved to pull the plug. "You are not authorized to have her and, therefore, —"

"Of course," Chi-Min said, seizing the woman's elbow. "Especially when this is a matter for the ECA to deal with, though I doubt you are a part of that organization. It sounds more like this person is someone you are not authorized to have."

The woman shoved him off with the claws of her fingers. "I didn't come here to be lectured by an elf of all things! I came here looking for … for someone."

Chi-Min and the other doctors waited for her answer, but the woman crossed her arms and flipped the fan over her mouth, gazing out of a cracked window. The background picture of the fan revealed mounds of grassy lands, a great arching cityscape, and a menacing Bengal tiger in the foreground.

"This is pure and utter nonsense," the woman answered, moving from the window and toward the door. "She's not even on this floor. The nerve of completely, incompetent doctors..."

"— Or things," Chi-Min added with her exit.

"What a virago," Dr. Tiberius muttered, coughing. "But what of this incident? Perhaps that woman will —"

"Excuse me, Dr. Tiberius, but I will leave the investigating to you," Chi-Min answered stiffly. "Please inform the staff about this and be on alert: Any persons you might suspect of being a high level elf? Stop him. I must run a small errand."

"Oh, yes, well," Dr. Tiberius replied, giving the elf an ironic bow as he passed him, "if Dr. Huang feels the need to take a personal day in such a time when he is absolutely necessary!"

The doctors' eyes all stared at him like they were chiseled out of ice. Chi-Min avoided them, exiting and pacing himself down the hallway. It wasn't a coincidence the woman was there, but he knew she was not the cause of the lightning strikes. His main reason for leaving, however, was to get out of there, not just to pursue the woman but to avoid the stares and whispers. He couldn't stand the awkwardness and displeasure toward his race. It was better they talk behind his back, to get out that festering hate, than to endure it and pretend they treated him as an equal, which was worse.

But he never limited himself based on others' bigotry. If anything, he was emboldened by it, wanting to best them any way possible. Of course, he had to remind himself from time to time that human perceptions were restricted based on their superficial beliefs and judgments. It was a part of human nature; far more limited than his kind.

"Am I insane?" he mused to himself. "I must be, since I have pointy ears."

He gave a wry smile, thinking of when he heard these words last, back when he left the Order a year ago. If anything, he hoped he wouldn't have the same situation here. It was hard enough growing new roots.

"Get her through, quickly!"

"Right."

"Watch her head!"

"Ouch! Sorry, doctor!"

Two male doctors sideswiped Chi-Min, wheeling a patient through the room. Chi-Min spared his verbal attack when he sensed a powerful energy coursing through the veins of the girl on the stretcher. Her face was hidden in hair of disheveled silver — hair that was knotted and untidy around her torso, reaching down past her hips. Her face was that of a child.

The doctors poked a needle in the crook of her elbow and attached it to an IV drip line of saline solution. The doctors were busy putting white circular pads over her body and hooking her up to a heart monitor while Chi-Min felt an aura surging through her body. Though the girl looked eight or nine, he knew it could not be her real age.

"Heartbeat stable."

"She was in the hall?"

"Near the bathroom, not in her room."

"But why? Isn't there a —"

"Who are you?"

Chi-Min quietly summoned a small lightning bolt that sparked near the feet of the girl. As his colleagues were busy consulting her chart and gathering supplies, the space shrunk away and darkness veiled the room. A white aura floated over them and grew into the bodies of a twenty-six year old Chi-Min next to a girl half his age. The child had grown substantially into a young woman, dressed in a vivid red kimono with black spider lilies twisting around the base and arms. When she opened her eyes, they were doused in a deep claret.

"Who are you?" Chi-Min asked again, his face inscrutable with his scarf covering the bottom half of it. The girl's eyes faltered, gazing at him.

"Mo ... mother?"

"No, I am not your mother."

The girl did not seem altogether there for Chi-Min, but what interested him was her attire; not everyone dressed like her in Demas. Not only that, but her skin was too pale to be a native and her hair too long to not be noticed. Who was she and where did she come from?

"Who are you?" he asked, looking loftily down at her. Her eyes fell to the floor.

"What?"

"Where do you come from?" he said, feeling like his time was purposely being wasted. She was confused by his question, as if the question were rhetorical. But before she could answer him, the shadow around them dissipated and Chi-Min found himself back inside hospital walls.

"Dr. Huang!"

Chi-Min felt his emotions pull at him and stepped from the girl's feet to the right side of her; his hands glowed with an iridescent light and healed her wounds.

"Dr. Huang, her chart."

"Hmmm?" Chi-Min glanced at the chart, not taking it from her bedside.

"She's just been admitted," the doctor went on. "Dehydrated. Some type of rioting."

"Rioting? Where?"

"Not sure." He scratched his head. "She was brought in alone in the ambulance. More details are in her chart, but not much has been —"

"Thank you," Chi-Min inclined his head toward his colleagues. "There is a woman crying for this girl on another floor. I'm sure you will have no trouble in finding her. See to it that you notify her that her ... daughter is fine."

The two doctors exchanged glances, shrugged, and left the room. Chi-Min listened by the door, hearing their footsteps die down the hallway.

"You can quit the pretenses now. We're alone."

He could feel her eyes on him. He turned, but instead of the deep crimson color he saw in the telepathy, her eyes were a bright blue.

"Don't invite her in here," she said automatically, tearing the covers off her child-sized legs. "I don't want to go back. Not with her."

"Back where exactly?"

The girl didn't say anything but kept staring at the wall to her left, blinking at the dripping faucet near her bedside. The girl's kimono was replaced by standard hospital robes and lounge pants of light blue. Chi-Min crossed the room to read her chart, but it, like everything else, was full of more questions.

"I can't even read this," he said, peering through his glasses with distaste. "And your parents' names have been crossed out —"

"They're dead," she said with a kind of apathy, eyes now focused on a stethoscope hanging from a metal box on the wall. "It isn't necessary to know them."

The doctor placed her chart on her bed. "If you are in need of a grief counselor or someone to transition you into this difficult period of loss —"

"You sound like someone who's never experienced death before."

Her answer lingered in the air between them, but Chi-Min wasn't bother by it. He scrutinized her features, making her feel vulnerable. She tucked her knees up to her face and rested her forehead against them, sighing. Chi-Min put a palm to his forehead and shook out the loose strands of hair hiding his spotted eye. He didn't want to appear upset or impatient, but that was exactly what he was feeling right now.

"Tell me something," Chi-Min started again, trying to extract some form of answer that was semi-plausible from the girl. "How can I help you if you won't tell me what's wrong with you? How can anyone?"

"You don't," she answered with fervency in her face. "I'll become like a ghost. Everyone already assumes me dead; it's how I keep up with the charade."

"And why are you considered dead? Dead to whom exactly?"

"I don't answer to you."

Chi-Min took another second to stare at the girl, hoping she would let the burden of stress out way her reticence, but she never cracked. If she wasn't staring at the walls she stared at her feet, or combed her fingers through her hair. It was maddening. None of her answers made any sense, and he assumed that insulting her with his own musings would lengthen the divide.

"It says that you're from here ... but your clothes aren't anything I've ever seen." Chi-Min assessed as he flipped through minuscule pages of information. "Plus, you have a strange drawl to your voice, one that cannot easily be identified. This makes me think you are foreign."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

Dr. Huang finished looking at her papers and sighed, flipping back to the first page. He pressed his fingers to the first name and saw the name the girl had put previously was scratched out vigorously with a pen before starting over. He peered at the loopy, printed letters.

"M-A-C-H-I-K-O. Machiko ... is this your real name?"

The girl leaned back from her knees, giving the doctor a cold stare. Chi-Min tried looking for her pointy ears amid her thick hair, but he couldn't see them. Perhaps cosmetically fixed? He couldn't tell. From all angles she was a perfectly normal looking child. He looked at her chart.

"It sounds like you are — were — very fond of your mother," he chuckled, finding the box labeled "mother" heavily scratched out and blackened with impunity. The girl growled.

"Not that passive, insignificant —"

"Excuse me?"

"Never mind!" The girl threw part of her hair over her shoulder. "All you have to know is she's dead — not here anymore."

"How did she die exactly?"

The doctor had been looking at the sheers from the blinds when he asked her this question, and turned around to find her haunting eyes on him. The stare she gave him looked like the blue crystalline lining over her eyes could easily darken to scarlet.

"From her ignorance."

Chi-Min wasn't amused by her petty attempt at dramatic effect, in fact it seemed almost comical. He faced away from her to stare through the window, pondering. To him, the girl didn't seem to have much focus on reality, or perhaps her view on reality had been warped early on. Apathy had overtaken her and consumed her so much to deaden her to consequences. However, Machiko had made the choice easy for him and whatever problem she had was for someone else's profession, not his.

"First, take into consideration that no one can outright die from stupidity," Chi-Min said, strolling past her bed, grabbing the phone and dialing it for security. "Second, I realize there are people like you who will continually prove me wrong on this argument and use their powers to harm others as a means to distract. Thirdly —"

"What are you doing?" Machiko asked, lifting her head, trying to see the numbers he punched, but whoever Chi-Min talked to was brief and he hung up. "Who did you just call?"

"Thirdly," Chi-Min said, ending by her bedside, catching the lining over her irises, the contacts there. "I am no ally to the ECA, but if I am forced ... if you will not willfully supply the information of who you are and where you are from, then you have forced my hand."

The elf doctor looked over Machiko's face, surprised by her countenance, the eyes that leered at him, the neck that buckled with shoulders hunching forward, as if her back crawled with flecks of silver fur; looking like a wild, fierce tiger.

Suddenly, Chi-Min had a vision of the woman's fan in the lightning room; its picture of the tiger in the foreground. Now he realized what it was: the symbol of the Mao empire.

The light faded above him and slowly darkened, growing into a bright white before exploding. Chi-Min shielded and felt that familiar punch to his gut — the shock of black and white clouding his vision, the electricity that filled within him. He gathered the lightning inside him and pressed it out through his feet.

He steadied himself over the sink, breathing hard, waiting until his vision straightened, but his legs felt like jello. There was a long thinning sound from the heart monitor and the heavy swish of the door, and Chi-Min knew Machiko had left. He forced himself out through the door, trying to sense Machiko's energy, but there was no use — she was masking it again.

Now he was growing fearful: how much damage would she do now that she couldn't trust anyone, not even the woman she came with? Machiko regarded human life as an unnecessary burden, an object she had to remove.

Chi-Min turned around, making his way through the elevator doors. He had to report about the incident, but he also needed security personnel for patients' protection, to evacuate the third floor ward if necessary. Did he believe Machiko was just as foolhardy and reckless as anyone with powers would be? As he would have done in the past, trying to fix something, or damage something, thinking no one would die?

Chi-Min leaned against the elevator wall, trying to coax his weary mind. Memories were resurfacing now, echoes he didn't want to feel for fear of pressing his thoughts too hard. There was a time Chi-Min could remember when his magic was pure and unfocused; a memory, strange and elusive, caught only when he probed his mind long enough or the echo of the day wore thin. It was like when dealing with the elf girl, someone just as foolish and arrogant as he used to be.

"Hey ... you killed him."

His father gazed at the haru-sari Chi-Min squashed with a kind of concerned ambivalence. Chi-Min was thinner in his past, with eyes not quite spotted and short boyish hair with strays standing out in the crown. He looked up at his father with a smile too brash and bold for that of a child.

"I didn't kill it," his past self answered. "I ended a meaningless existence."

The elevator dinged. Chi-Min shook out the memory and exited, thinking about going to the lobby when he heard a shout.

"Incompetence!"

Machiko's patron had finally found someone else to yell at, Chi-Min thought. Dr. Huang traveled the length of the hall and followed the shouts that led him to a sparse waiting room. Chi-Min grimaced as he stood on his toes, trying to move past anxious doctors and nurses consoling the woman.

"Calm yourself, Mistress Iva, please," a doctor pleaded with her.

"You're telling me the hospital misplaced her?" Iva said with eyes strict and tempered. The nurse Chi-Min remembered from the lightning room shook her head of frazzled hair.

"Everything is being done for the safety and security of the staff available here. Additional security is being summoned from the Elf Control Agency, which will apprehend the girl and send her to a facility in the county of Demas."

"What?!"

"Ma'am, control the volume of your voice!" Dr. Tiberius was near her, looking like he wanted to arrest Iva himself and send her away. Iva jabbed her finger into his chest.

"If anything, you, this hospital, should be held responsible! You, who employ elves as doctors! Dangerously psychotic —"

"— things that have no control over themselves."

"Exactly!" Iva turned to find Dr. Huang walking blithely through the door to her side. Her rage turned to quiet ire.

"Who is Machiko?" Chi-Min asked her, assessing her reaction. The woman crossed her arms to pull her vest tightly over her bosom.

"I don't know who —"

"Stop playing games. I want to know why she's running away from you — from everyone. She could harm others here along with herself."

"And how does this issue involve me?" she sneered at him, pointing her decorative fan all around the room. "I didn't lose her, I was right here! The doctors came and took her from me then lost her. How am I to blame?"

The silence between them enveloped the room. Chi-Min couldn't help but feel that he was only winning at a staring contest when it came to these two. He pinched the bridge of his nose.

"If you didn't know by now, Machiko is running amok on the third floor —"

"— due to policies enacted by people like your kind who cannot monitor a single person within the walls of your own hospital."

"Your niece is making her own choices."

"I am her guardian," she insisted, drawing herself up to her fullest stature. "And as her guardian you will release her to my custody or face the consequences."

"Believe me, not even I would want to incur your wrath. However, she is not running away from us, she is running away from you."

The woman's eyebrows arched high. Her demeanor shifted from indignance to a quiet shrewdness. Chi-Min studied her features, but it didn't look like she was very sure about Machiko's whereabouts. A doctor spoke up to Chi-Min's right.

"Mistress Iva, if you will have the patience, we will assist you at once."

"After your blundering, I have patience for no one," she answered hotly. "The ECA being involved assuredly eats away what precious time we have left. The bus leaves for the train station midafternoon — less than an hour away." She checked her watch, turning to the teem of doctors and nurses, and waved her fan at them. "If you want to help, then go! Leave! Be useful!"

Before any of them reacted, the woman left, pushing past Chi-Min and moving toward the lobby. The elf doctor paused, then followed, watching the woman's face slide behind the elevator doors. Chi-Min hurried up the stairs, jogging until he pushed through the third floor landing. He was panting as he got there, wondering if he really was getting old. He wiped his brow but Mistress Iva left long ago. His mind was feeling fuzzy now, being filled with the kind of memories only fear brought on:

"You told me the other day, 'It's not how long you live that's important. It's how you live it.'"

Nearly forgotten words his father taught him. Now it frightened him — would Machiko react rationally or live with reckless indifference, to sacrifice and to be sacrificed because there was nothing left to live for?

But charging down every hallway was probably what Machiko wanted, for people to waste time and energy rooting her out. It was obvious that she would try to move toward the elevators and staircase, but knowing her, she would create a diversion to throw the doctors into a different room while she snuck by.

Suddenly there was a yell — a howl — and Chi-Min faltered, tripping over a trash can. He put a hand to the side of his face, massaging a bump, then ran into a room three doors down and stood in the door frame, panting. In it he saw a nurse wrestling a patient into his bed who struggled with one leg on the floor.

"It wouldn't hurt if you didn't move!" the nurse panted, with dark curly hair falling over her shoulder. The patient cried out.

"Not move around, she says! Just cut it off! What's the point?"

The patient gestured to the sling with his leg in it and a cast on. It would look comical to Chi-Min if he weren't so anxious about Machiko. He stayed just in case to peruse the room, making sure the elf girl wasn't there.

"The point, he says!" The nurse threw up her hands, looking around and spotting Chi-Min. "You see what they brought me? An elf doctor! He'll set you straight, just you wait. He only heals so don't go thinking he can kill you!"

Chi-Min was looking in the closet, thinking how glad he was for the nurses in this hospital. It was possible that, apart from his patients, they were the only ones keeping him sane. Chi-Min brushed past medical instruments in the room now, looking behind the bed and finding a newspaper stuffed in the back. The patient continued sputtering off, nodding to the elf.

"My life? Nothing. If I die, I die," he said as Chi-Min scanned the second front of the newspaper with interest. "Die like my king and queen and their daughter. Elf or human alike, we all die the same. But ship me back to my country where I may rest easy."

"The King of Mao never had a daughter. He speaks nonsense." The nurse fluffed his pillow while the patient leaned back in shock.

"How do I remember her then?" He put his hands up to which the nurse pushed them away. "I could never forget her ... a tiny, baby girl..."

Chi-Min looked at the picture on the back of the newspaper, squinting, studying the headline with Machiko's face plastered underneath the article:

$100,000 REWARD

for information leading to

the bodies of the Empress

Mao Fei's daughter

and her attendant

"You're talking about your granddaughter."

"No, he's not." Chi-Min shook his head. "He's not wrong, he's —"

An avalanche of sound began crashing all around them, bending the ceiling tile that swayed in waves. The nurse covered her patient and Chi-Min ducked, feeling a jolt pierce through him, perforating his mind's eye with visions of a terrible fire — a shock of electricity pulsating; ripping through the in-line walls of the circuitry.

Code Red ... Code Red ...

A tiny white light flashed out of the corner of his eye — the fire alarm. Chi-Min ran out of the room and down the hall, turning the corner of the third floor ward crowded with doctors and nurses rushing patients to the exiting staircase. The alarm rang over them as water shot out of the sprinklers. Judging where he was, Chi-Min threw himself into the chaos and down through the hallway, sliding on the floor. He moved to the side and stood, pushing against the stream of people, with the bright light of Machiko's energy firing up like Christmas lights. He twisted his body around a person in a wheelchair, then skirted around a corner —

"Machiko! Do it now!"

"I can't!"

"Do it or we die!"

Dr. Huang was at the end of the hallway trying to decipher the scene — Machiko and her guardian stood at the dead end of a hall. Doctors and security guards made a human shield around them, trapping the duo. But to Chi-Min these lives would only be casualties.

"This can be done the easy way or the hard way." Dr. Tiberus led the pack, cautiously imprecise; steadily moving forward with too small rubber gloves as his only defense. "The ECA will make it hard on you ... trust us."

"Don't back an elf into a corner, Tiberius!" Chi-Min yelled. "This is the worst situation for all of us!"

Dr. Tiberius looked over the ruck to find the elf stationed near the back. But just as he turned, another flash erupted.

"Tiberius!"

Dr. Huang pulled behind a corner quick enough to hear the singeing force of Machiko's electricity burn the wall. Chi-Min peered out to see Tiberius on the floor; his arms and legs sprawled out. Doctors moved toward him, but were quickly shocked back.

"You stupid girl! Concentrate!"

Scanning beyond the corner, Chi-Min spied at least a dozen hospital staffers dressed with rubber gloves on — whatever good they would do. Machiko emitted waves of electricity that coiled around her arms and legs, stringing together; breaking apart.

"Forget about them!" Iva yelled, facing the child. "It's their choice if they want to be killed!"

"I ..." Machiko sounded calm, but her eyes were covered under silver slips of hair. "I — "

"You what?"

"I don't know about ... I don't know about this!"

"You have no choice, do it now!"

"Ahhhhhhhhh!"

Machiko dropped to the floor, pulling her fingers through her hair. The electricity formed all around her, making Iva and the doctors back away, shielding themselves from waves of electricity. Chi-Min stepped out from the corner.

"Everyone back away from her!" he said, slipping through two large security men as they checked their elbows.

"You see who they brought, Machiko?" Iva looked out of the corner of her eye at the crouched girl. "It's an elf, Machiko! An elf! Do you want him to take you away? To be led to the dogs like your father — like your mother?"

"I don't want ..." Machiko shook her head back and forth. "I don't want my head to be ... like father's."

Dr. Huang came closer to the girl and formed a large bubble encasing only Machiko and himself. The child opened her eyes and stared at her body, but it wasn't that of a child anymore. Instead she was a person of sixteen now, kneeling, with her vivid red kimono decorated in patches of dark lilies around its base. She looked up and stared at the dark outline of a man twice her age. Her eyes were dark and forbidding, yet they glistened when they fell on him. Dr. Huang's face was stern, but his voice was calm.

"Let me help you," Chi-Min said, moving toward Machiko. "You will not be handed over for execution if you surrender now."

"No." She leaned away from him. "Elves only destroy ... they never help."

"You are wrong," Chi-Min said, stretching his hand toward hers slumped on the ground. "I will take you and your guardian to the train station myself. No one here will touch you."

"Liar," Machiko said, batting his hand away; her breathing heavy, her stability waning. He could tell she would not be able to hold up for long; he had to convince her otherwise.

"The ECA is on its way," Chi-Min stated. "They will extradite you to the Mao Empire. You can either go with them or come with me."

Machiko was silent, her face shaded in strands of hair. There was a strange crack in the connection, and the telepathic world dissipated, revealing the child-like Machiko still kneeling on the ground with Chi-Min facing her in the bubble. Electricity pulsated around her, sparking in midair, uncoiling from her and breaking out of the bubble. The doctors and security guards shouted as they pushed themselves toward the walls, crouching as the lightning moved overhead. Iva moved out from behind the bubble. Dr. Huang looked behind him, his crimson eyes widened. He felt his body surge with a shock.

"Machiko!" he shouted, shielding his face.

He jumped back with sparks electrifying the air around him. There was no stopping it — she was out of control. There was a place where his black lights could have assuaged her, but it was way past time now. The energy around her multiplied, running rampant.

Machiko's eyes broke into a wide haunting stare. The sound inside the bubble was deafening. Dr. Huang felt his scarf rip at the edges; the sleeve of his coat wet with blood at the cut of the lightning bolt. The bubble was engorged in an explosion of lightning. A brief flash of light surrounded them, encasing the whole room in an iridescent glow. The ray of light contracted — replacing itself with a huge gush of wind, disintegrating the protective bubble. Chi-Min steadied himself, reaching out to Machiko, but all he could see of her was her body fighting against the current, her spirit waning; desperately trying to reach out, reaching out to find his hand.

Machiko's eyes drooped. The doctor felt her energy plummet, pulling her down, slipping her into the thickest blackness. The wind died, throwing her into the wall and smacking her onto floor. Chi-Min waited. He could no longer feel her, the energy that flickered like candlelight. But he could hear it ... a subtle thumping. He didn't move, fearful of interrupting it. It wasn't a spirit, but a still, small voice echoing out, reaching into the recesses of his mind.

"I will tell you ..." he heard her whisper. "I will tell you my story ..."

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

"It was in the spring when my mother found out she was pregnant with me, and that December she conceived me in the cold winter of the New Year. It was then that they knew I was different; not human like them. I was an elf — a black mark on my father's legacy."

Dr. Huang and Machiko sat under the awning of a giant Gingko tree watching the sun darken the rolling mountains into shades of gray. The slope created a backdrop that overlooked the train station and the bus stop where Iva waited for them. Machiko hands were folded in her lap, eyes unfocused on them, tracing the lines of the cuts Chi-Min healed from her lightning strike. Machiko breathed in.

"They had an announcement of my birth in the paper on page eight, I heard. After that, barely a mention was wasted as my father laid siege to the destruction of elves and those who harbored them. My mother acted like the war wasn't happening; like the elves didn't exist, so I didn't exist. I fell deaf to the war, thinking the masses brought sin and suffering onto themselves. I was taught to suppress my energy and act as normal as possible. There was an old wives' tale that containing the magic early helped in suppressing the energy for good. But this only made the power well up inside me and unleash onto others ... onto my attendants... They ..."

Machiko stopped, pacing herself. "After that I thought — no, I knew — that elves were inherently evil: to possess a power that only killed and powerless to stop themselves from killing."

Machiko tilted her head, looking through the peek in the trees swaying in the breeze. "My father did not care about the death of my chambermaids, but it did impress upon him the need for my power to be controlled and willed. He hired a retired but skilled elf hunter: my attendant, Iva. She taught me how to control my power and expend my energy into a single point rather than all around me. We had sessions of this every once in a while and then I went on in a normal way, the way any child would. I ignored the problem like a harmless disease or a defect that was dealt with every so often; at least those were the excuses." Machiko traced the light lines of the cuts crisscrossing her arm. "I had a life uninterrupted, that is until the besiege of my father's palace."

Chi-Min strained to hear her voice. Machiko's eyes looked past the scenery into the tear of her memories.

"When I went to bed that night I had a family, when I woke up I was an orphan. I remember waking to the howls of a celebration — laughter and joy. But the joyous shouts were blanketed by wails of human voices ... human screams. I remember being ushered out of my room, but soon my chambermaids fell by elven sorcery. I ran blindly through the castle, seeing the flames sear up the outside tower walls. I stumbled into mother's room, but she was already dead. The rioters wanted more victims to maim and kill for their insatiable hunger. So I hid in the arms of my dead mother with her back facing the rioters as they burst through the bedroom doors. Her body was still warm."

The sun's warmth seeped out of the air around them as a cold draft blew by, shaking the leaves, winding through Machiko's hair. The valley backdrop felt hollow now, creating an empty space where words were meaningless. Chi-Min turned to see her eyes glazed over; she blinked and shook her head.

"Iva found me later, lying there. She must have hid well or made an exchange with the rioters — I am not sure. We hid in a mangled carriage and rode off into the cold night. I still feel like we're there, running away, trying to cut a path we will never find. Now I am here — a runaway, a common nomad. I have no place to call my own."

There was a pause as Machiko studied the mountainscape and as Chi-Min digested the information, carefully and systematically. Up until this point, he thought Machiko had been running away for unknown, selfish reasons, but now he knew why. There was a vein of sympathy he felt for her, but it didn't prevent him from scrutinizing her story or finding fault in her actions.

If Chi-Min were smart, he would leave her there and let her be convinced completely of her feelings and convictions. But there was a nagging feeling he had with Machiko, something he couldn't quite explain that made him feel as if he were obligated to correct her even if he knew it wouldn't do any good.

"May I ask you a question?"

Machiko stared at him for a while then turned back to the sunlit mountains; silence being her answer. Chi-Min continued in a voice of being analytical.

"Your father, through all of this, where was he?"

Machiko didn't answer which meant she didn't know. Chi-Min pressed on.

"During the event, had he ever expressed concern for you or for your mother, his wife?"

Chi-Min could see Machiko's lips thinning, her eyes narrowing, but again he didn't wait for a reply.

"But he happened to conveniently leave you to those wild, organized dogs — those elves he holds so dearly — as a way to ... give you back to your own kind?"

"What are you trying to say?" Machiko turned to meet his gaze in the air of someone caught for a fool.

"What I am saying," he started, keeping his thoughts completely open and honest, "is in all of this you make it sound as if your father is a saint; he is not. He wanted to have you killed, to be rid of his 'problem.' It was an unwillingness of your people to abide by your father's laws and they, rightly, rebelled. You, however, chose to support him. Why? To cling to your father's position and power; to lead a co-dependent lifestyle. You could have taught yourself, become a self-sufficient person, found a way to escape; anything. If you had, you wouldn't have a problem surviving, but now you can't adjust to a life where no one cares nor listens to you."

"That's a lie! My father — "

"Your father's policies were a latency," Chi-Min continued, his tone rising. "A fundamental policy for the conceptual product of a newer, so-called truer, version of Maoists. But this was always a lie contrived for the benefit of an ideal that doesn't exist."

"It exists in the annals of our history in a library burnt to the ground," she replied, her voice deep, with hands clenched to linen pants. "My father's policies were not what caused his downfall — my usurpation! Elves were the one who took over, massacred innocence, reinstated genocide. Elves are parasites — a disease — something that carries a virus and seeps in, infecting the innocent, tearing families asunder. They are savages who have no physical or mental control of themselves. Thousands of innocent humans die needlessly by factors beyond their control..."

The doctor let her talk, lulling her into a sense of quiet self reflection. This was the root of the problem he saw within her — the ignorance of her beliefs; the belief that only through the killing of elves would one inevitably be relieved of a problem.

"... but they are not beyond our control." Her blue eyes were darkened by the refraction of the light, turning them into the blood-red tinge of the sun. "If we removed the disease, removed them all, then the bloodline need not be polluted. Everything will go back to normal, back to how it use to be. Peaceful and prosperous."

"Machiko, you are so far deluded."

There was a pause as one elf considered the other. Chi-Min realized that further incitement of the child would only help in infuriating her. Machiko was genuinely confused by his allegation.

"What?" She turned to him with her wide, perturbed eyes. "Won't you understand? Don't you have friends, family, who have lost loved ones to a psychotic elf? Have you ever killed anyone? Why suffer for the sins of an elf —"

"No," Chi-Min said firmly, putting a hand to the tree to stand up. "They are not sins. Don't you understand that the power of an elf and the power of a human are relatively the same?"

Machiko's eyebrows pulled together, then turned to face the ground and shook her head.

"You're a complete fool! Elves are the only ones who can physically harm a human with their power!"

"Your father," he started, looking out over the draw of the sunset, "he had power: The power to mobilize his army; the power to decimate a village. To terrorize, to destroy." He stole a glance at Machiko, but her face was covered with silvery hair. "Are these not the same characteristics you have described using your example with elves?"

She sat quietly as if she couldn't hear the conversation; as if a void stood between them. Chi-Min waited a couple of minutes before starting again with another thought.

"Elves are not the disease; ignorance and bigotry, however, are the products a dictator uses to obtain supremacy and ultimately death by the thing he most detests."

"You don't know a thing about this!" There was a shakiness to her voice, with face still obscured. "Not a thing! Stay out of this! You weren't there. You haven't lived — you don't know anything, so stop pretending to explain something to me as if I were a CHILD!"

She stood up to face him and he could tell that if her eyes were not covered in its crystalline blue lining she would look possessed; that same haunting look he witnessed back in the hospital. She moved close to him, up to his face, and he could feel her tension; hate quivering with every word.

"I am not a child. Only children create such chaos, because they don't know any better. Sympathizers are petty objects used to explain a problem as if it were a simple equation. What is death to you as long as you're defending psychotic killers?! What do you know about death or even sacrifice?!"

"More than you think I know." Chi-Min's voice was forceful and calm. He felt his temper reach past a boiling point, but he wasn't going to comply with her dramatizations. People like this needed to be contained, not inflamed.

"It is USELESS speaking to someone like you!" Machiko's face contorted into rage and she raised her hand to slap him. He crouched; waiting to block her, but it never came. He looked at her face and saw her eyes — bright and shining. Her outstretched hand turned into a fist and she threw it forcefully over her face, stumbling back, falling over long strands of swaying grass. Chi-Min stood over her, looking down at her shaken form.

"When I was growing up I was defined by a society who wanted to set my life based upon an established hierarchy of race and culture. When I was your age I worked hard to defy the stereotypes and receive top honors at the most elite school. I didn't burden myself with what other people thought or hide under my father's comfortable wing. I succeeded to prove myself better, more indispensable, than the average worker: human or elf."

Machiko still lay in the dirt, locking her eyes to the side as she curled her hand around clods of grass. Chi-Min held out a hand to her.

"You accept your limitations thinking you can never achieve your defined impossible, but it is only as finite as your ability to overcome them."

Machiko didn't say anything but remained distant. After a time she hoisted herself up and looked straight into Chi-Min's spotted one. There was a terror and a daunting hopelessness there, and there was a point where Chi-Min thought she would change. But she had exposed herself too much and began masking her vulnerability with petty shouts.

"J— Just ... get away from me! Leave!"

Machiko pushed past Chi-Min and ran down the length of the hill before tripping on an outgrowth and falling to the surface. Chi-Min watched as she pulled herself up and ran into the station; her face never looking back. He had no sympathy to chase after her.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Chi-Min checked the silent clock on a great steel beam, sitting at a bench near the trestle of the train station half an hour later. The doctor stole a glance at Iva, sitting next to him, only to find her watchful eyes on him. She raised her eyebrow and inclined her head, her way of saying that speaking terms were allowable now.

He had come to a strange, silent agreement with the attendant. She had to agree that he was not a psychotic elf, and he knew that she had been given the runaround by an unsupportive staff. They found themselves on even par now as they waited patiently for Machiko to emerge from the bathroom stall where she barricaded herself in to change clothes. Iva was considering the streams of people filing in motion to load luggage. She inclined her head forward.

"Pity."

Chi-Min raised his eyebrow. He didn't feel like asking her rhetorical questions and only politely stayed now, making sure he physically saw Machiko off to be sure she had left his county for good.

"There is a pity to that girl," she added under her breath. Chi-Min studied the people with her with an air of indifference.

"Really? I don't feel pity for her at all."

"You should," she answered. "She is similar to you, someone who regards herself very highly, faltering on expressing her feelings openly with another."

"I disagree." He turned to her now, with feet scraping the stone ground. "Tell me something — Machiko lost her sense of reality a long time ago, eons I'd estimate, and even now stubbornly submits to it."

"What are you implying?" she asked, peering through her glasses. Chi-Min continued, closing his eyes.

"That reality for her is ephemeral, that she will not accept her circumstances and thus will create another situation like today."

"She will not. Of that you can rest assure."

"She needs a specialist."

"She has one."

"Someone with just as much hatred toward elves as she does?" Chi-Min opened his eyes at the attendant with an eyebrow raised. Iva answered him with her tone rising, indignant.

"I don't have anything against elves."

"You called me a thing."

"You deserved it. You had lost Machiko."

"That was only after ... never mind. I can tell I will not get anywhere in this conversation."

Iva blinked and stood up with the doctor following. She looked out across the sun now beaming its last dying rays over the mountain. She took a moment's pause before turning the conversation back to the Empress Mao Fei's daughter.

"I am glad you spoke with her."

"I suspect nothing will come of it."

"Possibly, but she will never again be surrounded by bigots." She turned her eyes toward Chi-Min. "She is by all definition a bigot, but she will eventually see that it will get her nowhere. She is young and foolish, but she has the ability to learn from others. You taught her that elves have power other than to kill — the power to heal."

"She won't see it that way."

"But it is enough of a seed to grow, and she has several opportunities for it to take root."

Chi-Min looked toward the long line of the train and its boxcars behind Iva, watching a cloud of smoke rise up from the smokestack like a fog over the station, gently touching the floor and encompassing his lower body. He began coughing and Iva checked the big hand on the clock with an impatient glance toward the bathrooms. Chi-Min cleared his throat.

"Machiko mentioned that she wanted to keep up with the charade; to be like a ghost."

The smoke dissipated from the station where Chi-Min and Iva turned to find Machiko gliding forward through the now thin mist. The smoke wrapped itself around her so tightly that her face was the only thing that showed, looking like a bodiless head traveling toward them. Iva watched her carefully.

"Not even ghosts can hide what they are, Dr. Huang," she said.

Machiko made it close enough to distinguish her clothing: A vivid red kimono made with black spider lilies covering the base and arms. She unfolded her attendant's fan and covered her mouth. Her hair was bound with small rubber bands forming two loose ponytails. Iva turned toward her just as the conductor made his last call for passengers.

"All aboard!"

"Are we prepared, Iva?"

It was in the near twilit evening when the time came for Chi-Min's ties to be severed indefinitely with them. It was the only safe thing to do; the most responsible thing. Chi-Min's response was muted. He was resigned to the fact that there was nothing he could do for them, and how could he when he could not even change their minds? Iva looked at Machiko for a second before turning toward the railroad car.

"Come along, Machiko."

Chi-Min felt a sense of relief as he watched the pair climb up the boxcar stairs, Iva first and then Machiko. The elf girl lingered half way up the door, hesitating, resting her hand against the boxcar frame. Her voice came out in a hollowed whisper.

"There is a place that I go to, even now, along the coast of my country. It is a private beach where my father's statue is erected along with his accomplishments, his prizes and accolades. It was a place where my family, Iva, and I could go to where we could all enjoy being outside, being together."

She folded her fan then turned to face him.

"Do you know why I go there now?"

Chi-Min's face was passive, but he thought he had a better feel of what her answer would be to know it. "To give yourself a reason for being here, of what it is that you can change."

"No." She whipped her head back around. "I go there to remind myself how utterly alone I am. How ... how I need someone there besides me. There is a part of me that fights against friendship, against companionship. But in the end I relent because if I do not, all of the places and memories I know will be forgotten and lost. I will be an unknown. A nobody.

"Dr. Huang," she addressed him, her fingertips curling the doorframe of the train car. "I don't think of my failures as impossible feats ... but I do if I have no one there to share it with."

Machiko stepped up quickly now, disappearing into the boxcar, hair trailing behind her. The train whistle sounded again with a billow of smoke rising, obscuring the train, the station, the opening at the station's head. Chi-Min covered his face, coughing, barely making out the sunset sky still bidding for twilight. The train went to follow the sun's rest beyond the mountains, with the power of the engine storming out and the wheels rotating, moving past the doctor, past the station, and out into the expanse.

There was a pause from Chi-Min studying the fair lit landscape with a bus idling nearby. He could feel the toll of the day weigh upon him, making him feel fuzzy and drained. He began to dwell on matters he normally wouldn't care about. But there was a persistence within himself, a worry, that wouldn't go away, not until he understood what it meant.

Chi-Min felt that his perceptions of people were as finite and all encompassing as no other. People like Machiko were those who were bound by stubbornness, a martyr to their principles. But there were parts of her he could see within himself; the elfish part that let their power supercede almost everything, believing so completely that they know how to fix things because they are so blessed with powers.

But there were things he couldn't do, issues he couldn't solve just by physical healing alone.

"Why do people have family and friends in the first place?"

He could remember his boyhood self back then, sitting at the edge of his bed, in shoes and shirt he would never outgrow. He sat with his father, believing with a kind of fervency in his powers, that he could do anything, fix anything. But, in basic matters like this, Chi-Min couldn't understand why it didn't have a complex answer.

"Well," his dad answered, in words too kind and patient for questions that needed no answer: "wouldn't you be lonely all by yourself?"

At the time, he realized the fragility of his own circumstance, how his life could change if he had no father to take care of him. It was just for a moment, a brief feeling he nearly forgot. Even now, he realized the waning of his own life, how old he was growing, how he had always been living with the assumption that this was all that he needed.

And he realized then what bothered him, why he felt a certain way around Machiko. It wasn't how difficult she was, how childish, but it was a question deep within himself that he had no answer for. Because what would be the point of all of his accolades, all of his accomplishments, if he had no one there to share it with?

And there was this fear of loneliness that seeped through him; fear that disabled him, if for a moment, under thin clouds sucking in the sun's rays near the horizon line. It pressed within him the kind of permanence that he couldn't shake, a kind of dread that overtook him and made him feel, if for a moment, that it would never let him go.