Here's chapter three. Please note that this has replaced the old chapters 4 and 5, so if you've already read those, the content is the same in this chapter.
Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto.
Disclaimer: Content is rated for mature adult (MA) audiences only. Reader discretion is advised.
As always, feedback is appreciated. Questions? Comments? Concerns? Feel free to contact me.
-Nyroc
We go on for thirty minutes, forty minutes, an hour. Two hours. Three hours. We fight to the point of exhaustion.
We stop abruptly when he hits me hard in the face. I'm too tired to block it, so I drop to the ground like a sack of rocks. I land on my belly and cough blood onto the stonework. My whole body is shaking. There's too much cold, too much fighting, too much starvation, too much exhaustion. We haven't eaten in days. Weeks, maybe. I have no energy. I feel like I can't go on.
Still, I push myself to my feet anyway and turn to look at him. We both take a few moments to breathe. I can see the things he wants to say in the green of his eyes and his words from days or months or years before echo in my mind. I think he meant them at the time, but he's stronger than I am now. He has a better chance. We both know how this is going to end. My knees shake and threaten to send me tumbling down to the stonework again, but I don't let them.
There is no weakness in Hiretsuna.
I don't have time in the next few months to worry about my family. I don't have time to think about them. I don't have time to fear for them. I don't have time to dream about them. I don't even have time to sleep. After a while the days blend together, one after another without much to break up the monotony. It's easy to sink into a routine—practice after practice, training session after training session, flogging after flogging, cut after cut. The scars build up on our bodies like the layers of ice build up on the ground.
Physical training is only part of what we do now. Now, we train our minds as well. I bury myself in the words they say, the things they teach us. I learn to read the runes they write. I learn to mimic the symbols. I learn to take things apart and put them back together. I take apart locks, I do and undo knots, I learn everything I need to know to never be contained. We torture each other over and over and I learn everything I need to know to never crack. We make shogi pieces out of scraps of wood and shale and play through the night in our cells to get better at strategy.
I'm fluent in the language now. I guess over two years of speaking only it means I really had to learn it, and I don't have any trouble now. I speak and think and dream in only Runic. I remember being really upset the first time I didn't dream in my native tongue, but I guess it's fine. It has to be fine. I don't really have another choice. I dream in Runic at night and I speak it during the day. I swear a lot, too. I picked that up from some of the other kids. Mostly from Ataeru.
"Goddamnit Kurai, get on your feet!"
Speak of the devil.
His voice pulls me out of the dreary grey fog that fills my head. I groan a little and push myself up with my hands. I'm vaguely aware that my wrist is sprained. The muscles are bruised from landing in an odd direction underneath my body. I don't pay it any attention, though; pain is something that our minds construct, and if I ignore it, it will stop existing. I have to fight through it.
I force myself to my feet and stagger a little. The movement stirs up the snow I've been laying on and mixes the red of splattered blood with the pure white, making it dirty. Everything we touch becomes dirty. I reach up and run the back of my hand across my mouth to wipe away the blood. My mouth is filled with it and the copper taste makes me feel sick.
The girl I'm fighting comes at me again. She outweighs me by probably 15 kilos, since she's older than me. Her name is Balith, and she's awful. She screeches like a banshee as she attacks me head-on, aiming to punch me in the face a second or third or fourth time—I have honestly lost track at this point.
I spit the blood and two teeth from my mouth directly into her face. It catches her off-guard and gives me enough time to grab the back of her head. I pull it forward and smash her face down onto my knee with enough force to break her nose. She howls in pain as the bones crunch against my leg. I want to back off, to let her compose herself, but I know that I can't.
There is no mercy in Hiretsuna.
I shove her back down into the snow and drop myself onto her skinny little torso. She claws blindly at my face and I pin her arms to the ground, then grind my knees down into her wrists so she can't hit me back. I pull my hand back and curl my fingers into a fist.
I pound her in the face probably 16 times before she passes out. And even then, I keep hitting her.
It isn't until Mouseface calls me off that I stop. I stand up and back off, my spine straightening into a rigid line as I stand at attention. She goes to inspect my work. Balith is a bloody mess of broken bones and bruises. Blood bubbles up at her lips with every breath she takes.
Honestly, I'm a little worried she might die.
But not too worried, because she's just a worthless as I am.
Mouseface looks over at me and backs up a little bit. "Mark her and take her back to her cell," she orders.
I nod and walk back over to Balith. Ataeru tosses me one of his knives, and I catch it and slit open one of Balith's ankles. It isn't deep enough to cause any real damage, but it'll scar over. I toss the knife back and scoop Balith up, carrying her over my shoulders and holding on to one arm and one leg.
The walk back through the snow to the barracks is long and tiresome. Balith is heavy and she drips blood on me as we go, which makes the skin slick where I'm trying to hold onto her. Eventually we get back to the stone buildings and I sit her down in her cell, up against the wall. I check to make sure she isn't going to suffocate. She's regained a little bit of consciousness.
"You hit hard, little shadow," she whispers to me. She shifts a little and leans her head forward to let the blood drip out of her mouth. It adds to the staining on her shift, but honestly, all of our clothes now are more red than anything. Her face is starting to swell up. "Why didn't you just kill me?"
I shake my head at her. "Because then I'd have to dig the hole to drop you in," I say. The permafrost makes digging fairly impossible. But, really, that's not the reason, and both of us know it.
"You're still too soft," she says.
"I can still pound you into the ground," I say. She scoffs a little bit. We're not supposed to laugh, and she knows that, so as punishment I reach up and grab her broken nose. She gasps sharply—a sign of pain, which is also unacceptable.
"Get off me, you little bitch!" she snaps.
I yank on her nose. There's a satisfying crunching noise as the bones snap back into place. She smacks me across the face and reaches up to hold her nose as blood pours out of it.
"Gods damn you," she hisses at me.
"That's for my teeth," I say. I walk to the entrance of her cell and scoop up a few handfuls of snow. I hold it out to her. "Ice your face before you stop breathing."
"Fuck off," she mutters, but she takes the snow anyway and presses it gingerly to her swollen face. It'll probably be disfigured once it heals. "You're too soft, little shadow," she says to me, "And the next time we fight, I'm going to kill you for this."
"You say that every time," I say as I stand up. I'm not particularly worried or scared of her. Being scared is a luxury I don't have.
I leave her there, bleeding and miserable, and walk back to the training area. I scoop up some snow on the way, chewing on some to stop the bleeding in my mouth and holding some on the hand I'm fairly certain I broke on Balith's face. My knuckles are black and cut open. They hurt, of course, but I force myself not to think about it. There is no pain that I can't control with my mind. If I don't let it consume me, it doesn't exist.
Ataeru is fighting a boy named Riku when I get back. Riku is bigger and stronger than Tae, and it doesn't take him too long before he has Tae pinned on the ground. Tae fights hard, of course, but it doesn't really matter. Riku hits him until he passes out, and then stops.
Mouseface smacks him across the back with a thin stick and he resumes punching Tae until Mouseface finally calls him off.
Riku is like me. He's still too soft. He doesn't have the desire to hurt another human being.
Then again, we aren't human beings. Not really. Not to them.
I stand still with the others in our class as Riku hauls Tae off to the side. He's already waking up a little, so there's no need to take him all the way back to the barracks. I crouch next to him and put his nose and jaw back into place so they won't heal the wrong way and cause problems later. I'm pretty much the designated nose-fixer, which is fine.
"You," Mouseface calls. I look over at her and realize that she's talking to me. She never calls us by our names anymore—not that she ever really has. She says it makes us feel too human.
I straighten up and walk over to her, standing at attention. She points to Riku. "Fight with him."
I nod a little and turn to face Riku. We wait until Mouseface tells us to begin before we launch ourselves at each other. There is no waiting to see who will strike first, because there is no hesitation in Hiretsuna.
"It'll probably be a while before the bleeding stops."
I nod a little bit and tip my head forward. Sileny places a handful of snow on the back of my neck. I close my eyes as I wait for my nose to stop dripping red. I don't think it's broken since I didn't feel the bones break, but it still hurts and is already swollen. Riku hits hard.
"Didn't break you, did I, little shadow?"
I look to the side. Riku is standing in the entrance to our cell. The door doesn't really close anymore, since it's rusted open. It's fine, though—we don't really have anywhere we can go.
"You hit like a southerner," I say. From what I've gathered, it's pretty offensive to anyone who comes from the north. I've never understood it, since I'm a southerner and I hit pretty hard, but whatever.
He frowns at me, but he doesn't say anything offensive back. Instead, he just crosses his arms and leans against the iron door of the cell.
"Balith is going to kill you," he informs me. He glances over to the side, down the alley formed by the barracks. "Tonight."
I just hum at him because I honestly couldn't care less. "She can try," I say.
He looks back down at me and his brows wrinkle in the middle. "No, she's actually going to kill you."
"I'm not afraid of death." I wipe some extra blood from my nose. "It'll probably be better than whatever the hell they have planned for us next in this hell hole."
Riku frowns a little deeper at me, but he just shakes his head. "Stupid southerner," he mutters. "I guess we'll see if you're still around come morning." He pushes off the iron bars and walks away.
"Do you really think she'll try to kill you?" Sileny asks a few minutes later.
I lift my shoulders in a shrug. "She can try," I say again. In all honesty, it wouldn't make much of a difference.
I wake suddenly from sleep. It's the dead of night, but I'm still leaning against the wall. Sileny, Kotori, and Ataeru are all in the opposite corner, sleeping in a pile to keep from freezing to death. They probably tried to sleep around me, but judging by the smears of blood on the ground, I must have kicked them away. The air is so cold that it hurts my skin and small crystals of ice have built up anywhere that moisture collects. The blood is frozen to my face. My nostrils, the corners of my mouth, the thick lashes around my eyes—all of them have flecks of ice on them.
It's the ice that gives her away.
It crunches under her bare feet, even though she tries to be quiet. It's not like her to be quiet. Normally she gives off a banshee-like scream before she attacks, but not this time. Still, I hear her coming.
I turn slightly and bring my knife up from my side as she jumps at me, her mouth open in a snarl, and my blade nestles itself across her gaping mouth. The forward energy of her movement doesn't stop and she lands on me hard. Her knife buries itself deep in my side and my knife cuts several centimeters into the corner of her mouth at each side. It surprises her that I'm awake.
She should really know better by now.
She twists her knife deeper into my side and I pull my hand back, then slam the hilt of my knife into the side of her jaw. Her face is still bruised and swollen from where I beat the hell out of it earlier. She rolls back from me, jarred by the impact, and I grab hold of the hand that's holding onto the knife in my side. I twist hard to the side and bend her wrist up so quickly and with so much force that I can actually feel the crack as the bones in her arm break in one, two, three, four, five places. Shards of white erupt through her skin.
She screams in pain.
Which is, of course, a mistake.
There's a reason Hiretsuna worms don't react to pain.
The cuts in the sides of her mouth give as her jaw gapes wide and I watch through the dark as her flesh tears. It rips upward on each side of her face like a sick, wicked grin carved by the gatekeeper of the underworld. Blood pours from the wounds and drips down onto the stone, where it begins to freeze almost immediately.
She thrashes around in crimson slush and shrieks in horror, cursing me over and over. I don't know which set of gods she prays to, but if they're powerful, I'm not going to have a happy afterlife.
It only takes a few minutes for Mouseface, Riktor, and Iggnok the Horrid to arrive. Mouseface hauls off the screaming Balith and Riktor takes me to the warm room while Iggnok stays behind to clean up the mess.
It takes some effort for Riktor to get Balith's knife out of my side. The blade was frigid cold going in, so it froze to my skin and flesh. I barely even felt it once it stopped moving. It was like it was a hot iron, cauterizing the wound as it entered. I never realized cold could do the same thing.
When the knife comes out, the bleeding starts up again, and it only takes a minute for me to get dizzy. The walls and floor pitch around and I feel like I'm on a slaving ship in the middle of a storm. Unable to help it, I turn and vomit over the side of the table. Bile and water are the only things that splatter on the floor because I haven't eaten in far too long. Riktor makes me lean back and lay down and seconds later, the room blurs, and then goes dark.
It takes two weeks for the wound in my side to heal enough for me to go back to normal training. In the meantime, I do exercises that won't make me bleed out, and I work on other things.
They start teaching us ninjutsu.
I have a bit of experience kneading chakra, since my big brother used to try to teach me fire jutsu. But I never got the hang of it, and my parents never wanted me to become a ninja. Hell, I never wanted me to become a ninja. But my brother loved the village and wanted to protect it no matter what, and so I wanted to be able to protect it no matter what. He didn't force it on me, which is probably why I wanted to learn.
Not that any of that really matters now. I don't really have a choice.
I know a fire jutsu, but as it turns out, the litmus paper they gave me crinkled up, which means that my chakra is electric in nature. They hand me over to Mouseface. Sileny comes, too, and she teaches us how to mold lightning. It's hard work, but it doesn't take too long to get the hang of it. All we ever do is train physically and mentally, so we have massive amounts of chakra to work with. We can train for hours before we actually get tired.
Once my body heals, things go back to normal. Physical training, then mental, then chakra, then physical again. They start feeding us more often to keep up with the high energy demands. Two small meals a day are enough to keep us going. Our bodies burn through the protein and build up muscles, but never fat. There are never any extra calories that we don't use. I build muscle, but I haven't grown any taller since I got here—I'll probably be small forever, if I don't die before I get out of here.
They teach us all of the basics—clones, substitutions, illusions, escapes, diversions, shurikenjutsu. All of it. Then we move on to change in form, and then change in nature, and then both.
Turns out, I can't do both.
I can hold electricity in my palm but never shoot it outward. I can move chakra away from my body but never electrify it. I try and try and try, but I can't get it. Mouseface whips me across the back of the legs with a switch every time I get it wrong but that doesn't make it manifest any quicker. Even after my legs are red and my skin is raw and my body is drained, I still can't do it.
At least I'm not the only one.
She doesn't dismiss us until it's well past dark outside. The moon is full and the sky is clear so the bright light reflects on the snow. I walk back to my cell with Sileny next to me, the others around us completely silent. We don't really talk to each other anymore. After enough of our friends died and enough of our hearts got broken, we learned to just stop making friends. Sileny, Tae, and Kotori are the exceptions, since I bunk with them. I wish I could distance myself from them to save myself the heartache. Friendship with them is an involuntary reflex that I wish I could stifle but I can't.
I'm pulled from my thoughts when Sileny stops walking. I turn to look back at her, to ask her why she had stopped, but she isn't looking at me. She's looking out at the snow. I follow her gaze and locate a white winter hare cleverly disguised in the blanket of pure white that surrounds it. There was once a time when I would have jumped for joy at the thought of seeing another living creature, but I don't anymore. Rabbits are just a stepping stone in the hierarchy of things we kill in order to dissolve our feelings and our morality.
She pulls her smaller throwing knife off of her belt and stays still for several minutes. The hare eventually goes back to munching on a small patch of greyish winter grass. Once it relaxes its guard, she strikes. The knife flies through the air and misses by a centimeter. The hare darts to the right and, quick as a whip, I sling my throwing knife a meter in front of it. It hits the hare in the back leg. The animal screeches and flails around on the ground, turning the snow into a bloody mess. I walk over to it and break its neck without a second thought, then clean my knife on its fur and put it away. I hold the rabbit by the ears and offer it to Sileny. She shakes her head as she stoops to pick up her knife.
"You keep what you kill," she says.
From my experience, that's never been the case, since Mouseface and the other seniors always confiscate our kills after we hunt them down. But then again, they supply those targets; this one was out in the open and ours for the taking. I follow her back to the barracks, dripping rabbit blood on the way, and settle down once we reach our cell.
Kotori isn't back yet, which makes sense, since wind nature is the hardest to master. But Ataeru is there, playing shogi by himself with the pieces we made from shale rocks. He looks up at us when we enter and I see his brow quirk up in the dark.
"Got yourself a little snack?" he asks.
I nod a little and settle down in one of the corners near the entrance of the cell, since I don't want gore in the other parts to attract vermin of any kind. Nothing grows here, but scavengers are ruthless, and the last thing we want are rock rats. They're large and savage, with thick hides and sharp teeth. That's how a kid down in the next cell block died—the rock rats could smell one of his open wounds after it putrefied, so they ate the meat off his bones in the night. He was the only one in that cell, so nobody found him for four days, after they'd eaten him from the inside out.
The image of his eaten body sticks in my mind as I skin the rabbit, but for some reason it doesn't bother me as much as it probably should. I roll up the skin with the inside out and pull snow in from the outside to bury it to keep it from rotting. We don't have any way to tan the hide, but the Runic gods prohibit wastefulness in a kill, and just in case they're real I don't want to piss them off. Next I gut the rabbit and slice open its insides to check for belly worms. They aren't usually a problem up north since it's too cold for them to survive. Then I cut off the head and stand up. I give the guts and the head to Tae, since they're his favorite, and cut the rabbit in half at the bottom of its ribs. I divide its rump lengthwise down its spine and give Sileny one of the back legs and the stuff attached to it. I keep the other, and store the front legs and ribs in the snow for Kotori when she gets back.
We should probably cook the meat, but we don't really have a way to do it, and we're all starving anyway. It's slimy and gamy when it's raw. The bites crawl down my throat. The blood squishes from the muscle as I chew it between my teeth. I scrape the meat from the bones with my knife. Sileny doesn't bother—she just rips pieces of meat off with her teeth like an animal.
I guess eating raw meat makes us all animals, in a way. It's hardly a sign of civilization, that's for sure.
I collect the bones once everyone is done and stack them in a small pile by the front of the cell. The dry bones themselves probably won't attract the rock rats, but if they do, I don't want them anywhere near us. With our bellies tighter than usual and squirming a little from the feel ofraw game, we curl up together and try to sleep.
Crystals of ice have formed anywhere moisture collects on my body. My nostrils, my eyelashes, the corners of my mouth. My breath spirals up in a small white plume before it is whisked away by the harsh wind. It howls through the mountains, carrying a mixture of snow and hailstones as it goes.
I crouch down a little lower in the snow, my eyes still fixed on the moving shadow in front of me. The monochromatic landscape is all grey at this time of morning. It's hard to discern light from shadow, black from white, because everything is the same shade like smoke and ash. But still, I can see it moving, lanky and lean, slinking through the landscape toward me. I'm downwind of it. Its amber eyes glow through the flurries of snow, scanning back and forth.
I have to make this kill.
When it's close enough, so close that I could hit it with a stone's throw, I spring forward. The mountain cat yowls in surprise, its amber eyes wide, and its lips curl up into a snarl. It reaches out and grabs me with its sharp claws as I plunge my knife deep in its belly. Its blood stains the white snow as we roll around, ripping open the skin of my arms. It tries to bite down on my neck, and when I turn away at the last second, it sinks its teeth into the cartilage of my ear instead. It rips open.
It doesn't hurt. Pain does not exist except inside my own mind.
I wrestle with the cat for several minutes before I'm able to bury my blade in its jugular vein. It very slowly stops its struggle as the life drains from it. When it can't use it's claws anymore, I press my lips to the hole in its neck and drink deep while the blood is still hot. When I can't drink any more, I wipe my mouth on the back of my hand, clean off my blade, and sling the cat over my back. It outweighs me by several kilos, but I can't let that stop me. I feel the heat slowly draining from its body as I walk it back down the mountain side.
Later, after my technique has been scored and the meat has been eaten, I roll the fresh new pelt up around what's left of the skeleton and bring it back with me to the barracks. Hiretsuna doesn't usually follow the law, but even here, you keep what you kill.
Ataeru is back in the cell when I get there. He's been quiet lately. His bones have been hurting as his body tries to grow, but can't find the nutrients to actually build anything. Three and a half years of malnutrition will do that, I guess. I don't think I've grown any more than maybe ten centimeters since I got here. I'll probably be small forever.
"What'd you get?" he asks curiously.
"Frostbite," I say. He scoffs at me, and I look over at him. "Mountain cat," I supply.
"That'll be a warm pelt," he comments, his head nodding slowly as he thinks aloud.
"If I can actually get it to tan properly this time," I mutter. I stack the bones in a pile near the door and bury the cat's skull in the snow to keep it fresh. Then I hang the pelt meat-side-out on the wall. The metal nails I pounded into the mortar are still holding fast. I'm not technically supposed to have them, but Mouseface left them out in the training yard, and here, it's finders-keepers. I pull out my knife and begin carefully scraping the fat and membrane from the skin.
"You're pretty handy for a southerner," Ataeru comments.
I shrug. "I'm hardly a southerner anymore," I point out.
He hums at me and gets up to help me with the pelt. He takes the side I'm not working on and continues to scrape. Suddenly he chuckles.
"What?" I ask, even though I don't take my eyes off the hide.
"I just forgot you were left-handed, that's all," he says.
I blink, realizing that I'm using my left hand for scraping. I haven't used it in a while since the superstition up here is that left-handed people are witches or cursed or possessed or some other nonsense. But I shrug and continue to use it anyway. Our arms keep knocking into each other as we work, but I ignore it for the most part. He ignores it, too, until I accidentally jab my elbow into his funny bone. He jerks his arm back and scowls at me.
"Sorry," I say, even though we're not really supposed to apologize. He continues to scowl at me, so I lift his elbow and kiss it better. I watch him for a moment before he bursts out laughing at the sheer absurdity of it. Eventually he sits back down against the wall, his bones too sore to stay on his feet for longer than he needs to. We stay quiet for a while, with no sound except the scraping of my knife against the hide and the whistling of the wind outside.
In the following weeks since I killed and skinned the mountain cat, I've been able to tan the hide with the cat's brain and smoke it over a fire of dried dung. The hides of a second cat and two caribou follow it on the wall. The pelts make sleeping far more comfortable as the temperature outside begins to plummet again.
"Kurai, what the devil are you doing?" Sileny asks unhappily. I'm melting fat inside a bowl I made out of the second mountain cat's skull.
"I can't sleep," I say, which is obvious. It's light outside. Not that that's much of a help, because at this time of year, it's never really dark out. The sun stays low behind the mountains and makes midnight look like dusk.
"So, naturally, you're rendering," Sileny says slowly. Clearly she means that there's nothing natural about it, but I don't exactly owe her any kind of explanation. Eventually she gives up and rolls back over, the shadows of her movement playing on the wall by the light of the smoldering coals.
Once the fat is melted, I drip it onto the hinges of the freezing metal door of our cell. It hasn't actually been closed in years, since it's been frozen open. But since I couldn't sleep, I dug it out of the snow. The hinges squeal and groan noisily as I pull the door, but eventually the fat lubricates the hinges enough to allow the door to close. I move it back and forth several times for good measure.
"Kurai, quiet the hell down," Sileny barks at me.
"Piss off."
I know I won't be sleeping tonight anyway, so I open the door again and begin packing snow in between all of the iron bars on the door, using the animal bones I've collected for additional support where it's needed. It takes a few hours, but eventually I've blocked out most of the open spaces in the bars. It matches the two patches along the walls, the barred spots that hold the door.
My mind wanders as I work. I don't know why, but I can't stop thinking about my brother. I know we're not supposed to, but I can't help it. I can't stop worrying.
"Relax your wrist, and throw it like this," he says, throwing the shuriken and letting his wrist go loose with the follow-through. It hits the target dead in the center.
I try to do the same thing, but I'm not strong enough. My shuriken glances off the edge of the target and falls to the ground. I pout a little.
"Hey, you'll get it eventually, Kurai. Just keep practicing," he chuckles. I feel him pat my head, ruffling my hair and messing up the braids Mama put it in. I frown at him a little, but I keep practicing anyway.
The cold eventually gets to me and I have to stop. I pull the door shut, and thankfully, the snow doesn't immediately crumble. My project of several weeks is progressing nicely. The wind continues to whistle outside, but the packed snow blocks most of it. With that and the smoldering fire still burning in the rear of our cell, the room becomes at least ten degrees warmer within a few minutes. I move over to the remains of the fire and defrost my hands. Then I curl up under the pelts with the others.
"Kurai, your feet are freezing," Ataeru hisses at me.
"Well, your legs are warm," I mutter. He shifts away from me anyway, but eventually Kotori crawls over him and me and snuggles up against my back. She's warmer than he is, and I shiver into her arms.
"Big Brother, I'm tired," I say. No amount of practicing has gotten my shuriken any closer to the middle of the target. I look over at him. He's practicing his jutsu, his body flickering in and out of sight as he moves. But he stops when I talk to him and smiles at me.
"Okay, Kurai. Let's get you home," he says. He scoops me up and sets me up on his shoulders as he walks us home. I've never been so tall in my life. I wrap my arms around his forehead and set my chin on top of his head, his curly hair tickling my nose.
The images of him follow my mind into a restless sleep, and I dream about him, and then I dream about me. Some of the images are terrifying. A dark place, surrounded by people trying to take things from me. I don't know what it is they want. A dark night, Little Big Brother, and then I can't see anymore. A long fall, and then water. It fills my lungs.
I wake with a start to find Kotori leaning over me, shaking me to wake me up. It takes a minute for me to remember where I am. I pull myself up into a sitting position and rub my head.
"Kurai, get up," Ataeru barks at me. Kotori helps pull me to my feet. My head is throbbing, and I'm not sure why. "Come on. We've got training."
"Yeah." I shake my head rapidly to try to get the fog to clear out of it, but I can't shake away the feeling of disconnect within my body. It's like I'm functioning from some place far away, telling my body to move around without really having any actual concrete grasp on what it's actually doing. It's incredibly disorienting.
I follow them out into the dark, since it's still very, very early. Sileny brings up the rear, but eventually she passes me. I trail behind them slowly, my mind still occupied by the disturbing images in my dreams. I don't stop until I physically bump into Sileny's back, and I blink slowly as she glowers back at me.
"Get your head out of your ass, Kurai," she hisses at me, and turns forward again.
I move slowly as I come to stand beside her. I rub at my eye reflexively. It only happens for a moment before a line of fire cuts down the back of my hand. I jump a little bit, startled, and my wide eyes shoot up. Mouseface has a thin switch in her hand. I drop my hand down to my side and steel myself.
I can't believe I was stupid enough to show a shred of human nature. Hiretsuna worms don't get tired. They don't get sleepy. They don't have traits like that.
Mouseface moves on and all of us step into a single straight line, shoulder to shoulder, as she passes us.
"From this day, you are rats."
Oh.
It makes sense that every rank we go through is a different kind of pest, a different kind of undesirable. Worms, to fleas, to lice, to rats. I wonder what comes next. Everything is meant to remind us that we have no value, that we are not human. It's effective, really.
"Rats are special," Mouseface continues. She taps Balith—the one with the grin of scars on her cheeks that always shrieks when she's fighting—on the head with her switch. "What do we do with rats?"
Balith hesitates, which earns her a smack on the shoulder. She winces, which earns her a second one. She doesn't flinch this time, but still, Balith is a slow learner.
"We eat them," she replies.
A third switch, a flinch, and then a fourth. Mouseface moves on.
She taps the boy Riku on the head. "You. What do we do with rats?"
"We... test things on them?" he asks. She smacks him in the shoulder and, in a stronger voice, he says, "We test things on them."
Mouseface nods. "Yes," she says. A confirmation, but never praise. They don't praise us in Hiretsuna.
"From this day, you are rats," she says. "You will be assigned a color, and from that color you will be assigned your tests."
I frown in confusion, but I don't say anything. I'm already a hunter. Is there something else they're splitting us into?
We all keep still, standing there in the cold, some of us shivering. I am some of us, because I'm smaller than most. My body struggles to keep itself warm. Mouseface and another teacher walk down the line, dotting the front of our smocks with colors. Sileny gets red. Kotori gets white. Ataeru and I get black.
"Scatter!" Mouseface yells, and we do. There are pillars of smoke in the distance, smoldering and rising like moving towers. Ataeru and I and a bunch of others race toward the black one, because it's never a good idea to keep someone waiting when they could kill us without any effort.
We run for probably five or seven kilometers before we come to an old building. It's low to the ground, half-buried in snow, and most of it looks like it might be falling apart. But we enter it anyway.
Iggnok the Horrid and Riktor are waiting for us. By the smirk on Iggnok's face, I don't think we're going to like what happens next.
We follow them through the building and I find that I'm right. There are at least twenty different tilting tables in the long room we step into, all of them with straps to hold us down. An uneasy feeling settles heavily in my stomach. I don't want to be strapped down—nobody does, really—but it's not like we have any choice. I strip like I'm ordered to and go to a table next to Ataeru so that I can see him, hop up, and lay down. Riktor buckles me in tight. There isn't any part of my body that I can move except for my head, and after a moment, that gets buckled in, too.
I sit in the quiet for a while, hearing different numbers of us rats screaming in what I'm assuming is agony to my left as they work down the line. One by one they scream, a shrieking noise that I know I'll never be able to wash from my brain.
My heart starts to hammer in my ears as panic begins to build. We aren't supposed to feel panic, but I can't help it.
Ataeru is the next one they target. They hook up bags of liquid to bundles of dozens of needles, all spaced far enough apart to enter the skin, and rigged so that the syringes depress at the same time in some scary hydraulic setup. The liquid is dark amber. Riktor says something to Ataeru, but I can't hear what it is. He slips a thick piece of leather between Ataeru's teeth for him to bite down on.
I can't hear anything but the rushing in my ears.
They push the numerous needles into Ataeru's deltoid muscle and pull a trigger on the handle, and the syringes depress a small amount. Ataeru's body stiffens, but he doesn't cry out. They move to his bicep and his tricep, down his arm, across his chest, hitting every major muscle group. His body is stiff as an icicle. I can't see a while lot in my peripheral vision, but I can see the girl across from me, white as a sheet as she stares at the scene unfolding before her.
I watch in my peripherals as my best friend begins thrashing around.
The rushing in my ears dulls as Ataeru cries out in agony, and before long he's screaming. They depress the liquid into every single muscle group in his body. I can see him jerking around against his bonds, trying to get loose. Eventually his body grows still, more or less, as he loses consciousness.
My heart is hammering so hard in my chest I think my ribcage will break as they pick up their things and move over to me.
I fight Riktor for a minute as he tightens the straps, but there isn't anything I can do. Eventually I open my mouth and bite down onto the leather strap he sticks into my mouth.
"It's okay this time if you cry out," he says to me. I wonder if it's what he says to everyone.
I shake and shiver as I try to keep my breathing even, wincing as they push the needles into my skin, the same needles they used on Ataeru. It burns. They click the trigger, depressing the syringes, and it begins to sear. It feels like my muscles are eating themselves, dissolving into mush, melting over a burning hot flame. I don't even last until the second injection before I'm screaming. Everything burns so bad.
Despite the duration of my screaming, I stay conscious for a lot longer than Ataeru did. My heart is hammering so hard and fast I think it might explode. There are a few times that Riktor checks my pulse to make sure I'm not about to die, and they stop halfway through to change the set of needles because they're getting too dull. I sit there while I wait, writhing in agony. My face is burning from the saltwater. They resume their poking and prodding and my muscles keep screaming at me. They move from my arms to my chest to my abdomen to my legs. They get to the lower parts of my thighs before everything starts feeling fuzzy, my eyes roll back in my head, and my body shakes uncontrollably. I can't see anything. I can't hear anything clearly, just muffled voices.
I can barely make it out when Riktor says I'm having a seizure. Iggnok tells him to fuck off—I can tell by the inflection in his voice—and keeps stabbing me with needles anyway. It takes a while for my body to stop shaking, and when it does, everything feels like it's in a fog. I'm in a fog. Everything hurts.
Eventually they finish up, and Riktor pulls the leather strap from my mouth. I'm still crying, still sobbing, still burning. I look up at him and his whole body is cloaked in a rushing fog of blue. He frowns and unbuckles my head, turning my face to look into my eyes. I blink blearily at him, very sure that I'm imagining the colors surrounding him and Iggnok. Everything is dim and my eyes are tired and puffy. I barely make out Riktor and Iggnok exchanging a glance before everything goes dark and I am no longer in pain.
I sleep for at least a day, maybe two. Maybe three. Hell, maybe I sleep for a whole year. I can't tell.
I have strange dreams. In these dreams, I am carried away from that long, broken-down building and brought to the warm room. The infirmary, I recall. My wounds are treated with the most basic of care and I'm put into a second long room, this one warm as well, and I lay on the floor for a long time, unable to move. Riktor, Mouseface, and Iggnok poke and prod at me at random intervals. Eventually, strangers come to poke and prod at me, too.
When I finally wake, my head feels like it is filled with stones. It takes me a long time to sit up, and when I do, I find Riktor crouching patiently in front of me. He hands me a cup of water, and I drink it eagerly. Too fast, it turns out, but he is prepared for that. I vomit into the bucket he holds out. He offers me a second cup of water, and I drink it far more slowly this time.
"How do you feel?" he asks, which is odd, because normally they don't care.
It takes me forever to be able to speak, and when I do, my voice is still hoarse from all of the screaming I did. "Not... great," I croak, which is the understatement of the century.
Riktor nods knowingly, and I wonder if he experienced the same thing when he was younger.
"It will be a while before your body heals. You'll have another day off training, but then you have to rebuild your muscles."
I nod, and I cringe as he pulls me to my feet. I immediately collapse like a blade of spring grass in a winter wind and he catches me before I can fall. He scoops me up and carries me back to the barracks. My wind block is still up, and there's a wood fire burning inside. He sets me down against the back wall where it's warmest and I lean against it and close my eyes.
"Kurai," he says, and I open my eyes again. "You're from the south. What's your family name?"
I open my mouth, but the words die on my lips. It takes a while before I shake my head.
"I don't remember," I say, and I'm being honest. I can vaguely picture our clan symbol, but I can't remember the words that go with it. I haven't spoken the southern tongue in years.
"Okay," he relents, and he stands up. "Don't die." He leaves me there.
I move onto my belly and crawl toward the fire, curling up naked in front of it so I can be warmer and closing my eyes against the flickering light. My body is still aching, my head pounding, as I try to sleep again.
I don't know how long I'm out before I hear a commotion and it stirs me from sleep. I blink my tired eyes open and roll over. Ataeru is back, sleeping in one corner. Kotori and Sileny are back, too. Sileny is leaning against the back wall, the fire glinting enough to light up her sunken eyes and cheeks. She looks like death. Kotori is hovering over her, trying to tend to her in some way or another. I force myself to roll over and crawl over to them on my hands and knees.
The sight before me makes my blood run cold.
Sileny has a bruise on her elbow, spreading black marks through her veins like blood poisoning. She's sitting in a puddle of her own blood. It's leaking from between her legs, heavy enough that I think she might be hemorrhaging internally. It's too heavy to be the monthly thing my brother's female friends used to complain about. It's bright red. Too bright.
I force myself to get up and force myself to get on my feet. Everything hurts. My world pitches around and I fall back down, skinning my knee open on the stone floor. But I force myself to crawl to the door, to haul it open, to wander through the snow on hands and feet until I get to the infirmary. I grasp the door frame and haul myself up.
Riktor is there, putting stitches in the face of a boy with dark blonde hair. The cut stretches from his temple to his jaw in front of his right ear. Riktor looks over at me and frowns.
"It's Sileny," I pant, "Sileny's... she's gonna' bleed out."
His eyes widen a little and he stands up.
"Stay, Den," he orders, and the boy nods.
Riktor picks me up and carries me back to the barracks because I'm too slow. He sets me down by the fire when he gets there and crouches over Sileny. She's still bleeding out.
"Okay, here we go," he murmurs, and picks her up. He carries her out, leaving us there alone with the sleeping Ataeru and the puddle of blood.
I have the very distinct feeling in my stomach that I'm not going to see her again.
Kotori and I don't say anything, we just curl up by the fire. Her body is bruised, and when I look over at her, I see that she has tiny spots by her temples like she's been injected with something. The veins around her forehead are raised like she's getting a headache, which she probably is. She has track marks on her elbows, too.
"I want to go home," I say quietly, admitting it out loud for the first time.
Kotori nods and signs, 'Me, too.'