Little Hunter
Nanku kept herself still.
A lack of wind obscured Dusk and Dawn's scent. Nanku's power kept them more patient than their instincts. They weren't in Brockton Bay and didn't have the noise of the city to obscure their movements.
And their prey was skittish.
Four-legged, hooved, and lean. The horns were elaborate but not impressively so. A simple grazer, not a predator or hunter of any kind.
But Pe'dte never trained her to be sloppy.
Pulling a small disk from her hip, Nanku gave it a quick flick with her wrist. The blades shot out with the sound of sliding metal. Five of them, long and curved like a fan.
Rising slowly, Nanku wound her arm back, taking aim as Dusk and Dawn picked up their pace and moved in from the flanks.
Few approaches are perfect.
A boom echoed. A sound from the east.
The deer's head jerked up.
The muffler banged again. The deer began to turn. Hooves dug into the wet ground as it tried to wheel about.
Nanku unleashed her hounds.
Dusk and Dawn hurdled forward. Both leaped at the same time, their mandibles opening wide. Wings fluttering to startle their target. Talons spread out and raised high to make them appear bigger.
The animal jumped back as Dusk crashed into the clearing.
Dawn leaped from the other side, her wings flapping loudly.
The animal cried in a long and droning sound. It whirled back around, running from the twins as they encircled and cut off its chosen escape. As the head turned the other way, Nanku took a single quick step and swung her arm.
Straight, fingers pointed all the way through.
Her weapon snapped into the air, whirling as it arced to the right and turned sideways. The deer froze at the sudden flash of movement, stopping just as the blades sliced through its neck. The creature's legs carried it a few steps. One firm. One wobbling. One collapsing.
Nanku stepped forward, hand held up. The weapon spun back toward her, and she snatched it from the air. With another flick, the blades retracted into the disk, and she fit it to her belt.
Her mind reached out as well, staying Dusk and Dawn's instincts.
Her cloak pulled back with a charge of lightning and ozone. Just like the man in the city, the animal deserved to see her before it died. To know what happened to it rather than be caught in some nameless terror as its life faded for no apparent reason.
Nanku drew the knife from her hip—a long serrated straight-blade—and crouched by her kill.
The deer wheezed, struggling to breathe as black eyes looked up at her. Blood spurted from the open neck. Despite the wound, her prey kicked and flailed, desperately attempting to run even as it lay on the ground.
Pe'dte told her to never become numb to that.
The look of something that knew it was about to die.
Especially when they struggled for every last breath, unlike that man in the city. The one who simply gave up.
Everything lived. Everything died. The stronger endured, and the weaker perished. Stronger and weaker. Not strong and weak. Someday, she'd be the same. On the ground, dying, looking at what had finally managed to best her. She felt closer to that knowledge after a good hunt. Further from a bad one.
One could only realize the limits of their life when it was tested, not when it was easy.
"Only the Black Warrior wins every battle," she whispered.
Driving the knife into the deer's throat, Nanku pulled and cut the airway in full. She let the beast pass and waited with it as the final wheezing breaths escaped. The last jerks in the legs.
It struggled until the end, and with the last life spent, Nanku began cutting the body. She separated the hide from the muscle underneath. Removed the head. Cut the bowel.
It was bloody work, but she'd long grown accustomed to it.
Severing a leg free, Nanku weighed it and tossed the limb over her shoulder.
"Dawn."
Dawn's jaws opened, grabbing the limb from the air and throwing it to the ground. Nanku loosened her hold, letting the insectoid's instincts take over. Dawn bit hard, snapping the bone in her mandibles as she started violently shaking her head back and forth. She cut into the meat with her talons, tearing it apart as she picked the bone clean.
"Dusk."
Nanku repeated the action with another leg, thrown in the opposite direction. Dusk took it with a leap and quickly began mimicking his sister.
With the twins fed, Nanku busied herself preserving the rest of the meat.
Using two of her spears, she hung the hide upright so the blood could drain. The fur and leather would be useful when winter arrived. Her armor and body net were intended for the warmer climates the Yautja enjoyed.
Her skin was tough. It protected her from the burning blood of the serpents. Many other things too.
Not the cold, though.
With the hide hung, Nanku kept her power's eye on Dusk and Dawn while she stepped away.
Firewood was plentiful in the forest. Cutting longer and sturdier branches from trees, she found what she needed to make a spit. A fire started in moments with the torch in her field kit.
She built her fire long and wide but low.
Removing the last two legs from the body, Nanku tied them with twine and hung the cleaned and disemboweled corpse from her spit. She stood it over the flames, set to let the meat smoke and dry for the next few hours. Unlike Dusk and Dawn, even virtually everyone else in the clan, raw meat had never settled with her.
Her biology was different but still human. Humans cooked their food as part of the cleaning process. It made for a lot of awkward conversations and looks over the years while others ate as she went about building fires.
Nanku rose, looking everything over twice before she walked away. The crawdads were small but larger than many of the bugs in her range. And it was wet.
Stepping up to the water, Nanku began removing her armor and equipment. She set them neatly on the ground, arranged like a shell she'd shed. Pulling the cord from her temple, her mask came off, and she looked at the woods with her own wide eyes.
It was dark and quiet. Her power silenced the insects and, with them, most of the sounds of the forest. It was still and silent.
Familiarly so.
With a shake of her head, Nanku shimmied out of her body net and stepped into the water.
The stream was freezing, so she didn't linger. She washed the blood away, cleaned herself from the grime of running and climbing, and cleaned her braids. The cold did help soothe and a dull ache in her limbs, but it stiffened her joints. She'd been running around a city all night.
It was tiring work.
She cleaned her armor next, crouching beside the stream and using a small cloth to wipe the blood away.
The deer had been big, but not even fifteen feet away, Dusk and Dawn were chewing on their shares of the kill. They'd pick the bones clean in about ten minutes. Guessing, Nanku figured the meat on the rest of the body would last two to three days at most.
It wouldn't be nearly enough, but she'd suspected as much.
Dusk and Dawn needed food, and so did she. She'd need to find a reliable and steady source. Coming and going from the city every few days and hauling the carcass of a kill each time would take too much time.
She turned her head, listening to the distant noise of a country road.
The bugs covered the forest, stretching wide. Following the road with them as points on a mental map, she traced the winding dirt path to a gravel lot and a rotting wooden sign overgrown in ivy.
With a deep breath, Nanku rose and redonned her armor save her mask. Her mask she clipped to her belt. Dusk and Dawn chewed on their bones as she passed them. They remained under her power, watching the fire while she traveled the short distance from the clearing to the camp. Their eyes watched her, tracking her hand's movements as she reached down and grabbed the deer's head.
"Wait here," she ordered at the same time she used her power.
Trophy in hand, she started walking.
The walk wasn't long.
It was a strange thing how a place seemed able to accumulate a spirit of its own. She'd seen it before elsewhere. Whether it be the massive half-frozen waterfalls on a world of snow-covered jungles or a shallow cove that stretched on for miles reflecting the sky…
There were places that seemed alive in their own right. They absorbed all around them and teemed.
Or wallowed.
The bugs of the forests preceded her. They crawled along the walls. The floors. The hole in the ceiling where one of the R'ka broke through and dragged the boy with the sandy brown hair away. She still remembered the nameless boy's eyes as he was pulled through. His screams were silenced by a hand closing over his mouth, but the eyes pleaded. There was a hole in the floor of another cabin. Nanku wasn't sure who was taken there.
All signs of blood or slaughter were long passed.
Only silence and ruin remained.
Nanku stepped over the yellow tape, stopping for just a moment to cock her head at the letters. The ribbon of material lay half buried and dirty on the forest floor, visible only because of the color. Bright even as it faded. She knew what they said. She'd seen them on TV and when her father died.
Police line. Do not cross.
She'd always assumed the police would come. Just not fast enough to save her or anyone else. A few others clung to that hope. Others ran. Thinking of Naomi and Thomas, Nanku's lips turned upward. They'd struggled despite everything, and they'd survived.
At least someone did.
Ahead, Nanku's eyes swept over the campground, memories flashing past her eyes.
The buildings were abandoned. Windows shattered. Some partially disassembled or broken down. A roof had caved in as a tree grew out of one cabin. A decrepit old truck lurched, its tired, torn, and worn down to the rims of the wheels. Everything was overgrown in ferns, vines, and cobwebs.
Stepping toward one of the cabins, Nanku found the broken door removed entirely. Inside, the cafeteria was empty. Someone removed all the furniture and cleared away the rotten floors to reveal cold earth. The bunk cabins were in even greater disrepair, though she found some of the furnishings remained. All the bunks were gone, including the one in the back she'd rushed to claim for herself.
She'd chosen it back then out of fear. Fear her mother would change her mind at the last minute and come get her.
She'd thought she could hide from the woman, avoid being taken back to the house, and shut in all over again. Finally being freed and allowed out, and it ended so… Nanku didn't know a word to describe it.
It never crossed her mind how it would all end. So much death and screaming. The complete change in her life that followed.
It was a complicated feeling.
Looking up through the broken roof and between the branches of the tree, Nanku scanned the stars. They weren't as brilliant as from the ship, but further from the city lights, they were easier to see. And they were still brilliant.
A single place can define a lifetime.
A single night.
A single moment.
The strong and the quick survived. The unlucky and the slow did not. It was a simple truth with more truth behind it.
Exiting the cabin, Nanku crouched and set the deer's head down.
She removed a small canister from her kit and twisted the dial at the bottom. She hadn't come to Earth for trophies. She came for answers and peace. To bury the past behind her and move on with her life.
Nanku's life.
Taylor Hebert died ten years ago, like all the others.
She pointed the nozzle and sprayed a white mist over the head. On contact, the mist fizzled into a foam and started hissing. Unlike the blue liquid, the mist in the canister was more discerning. The flesh began peeling away instantly, crumbling into dust and falling from the bone. Additional applications kept the process going.
In a matter of minutes, the skull was clean and pristine white.
Nanku stabbed a branch into the ground, burying it deep with the strength she'd gained that night. She'd become stronger. Not as strong as a Yautja, but stronger than a twenty-year-old girl should be.
Girl.
On Earth, she'd be a woman.
To the Yautja, she was still younger than most Young Bloods.
Confident the stand wouldn't fall over, she lifted the skull and reverently balanced it atop the tip. The eyes looked out over the old camp, the antler prominent above the sockets.
It wasn't much, but it was fitting.
She'd seen a deer once before. At camp, of course. They'd been going on a hike with two of the counselors. They found the creature along the trail at the bottom of a ravine. They were downwind, and it didn't notice them. Its hooves dug at the ground, its teeth biting at a root of some kind.
Just one deer, and they'd all talked about it for the rest of the day.
Nanku recalled one of her first lessons with Pe'dte.
Death was not a weakness.
Everything died, even the strong. Nothing lived forever. A mistake was made. Bad luck caught up. Circumstances conspired. Sooner or later, the Black Warrior came for everyone and everything.
It was the struggle that mattered. The skill and wits, and even the luck, to stave death off another day. To subvert it for a moment longer. To live. To thrive. That was strength, but not the greatest strength.
The greatest strength was to walk closer to death and to fight against it until one's limbs fell limp and their heart stilled. No one could master death, but it could be defied. That was the Yautja way. The way of one who dared with death. The way of a hunter.
The deer she'd killed was a meager trophy, but it fought.
It kicked. It whined. It struggled.
It was strong.
Until the end.
Rising, Nanku turned away and walked toward the end of the campground.
The trees cleared ahead as the highway passed, giving her a view of the city's tallest towers and the dome of light in the bay. The answers were there. The start of them, at least. It had been ten years, and her prey had had plenty of time to cover its tracks or even get caught. She'd find out. Whatever it took.
"I'll see you all again. Head held high."