Chapter 14:

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She came for me three days later.

I woke to her standing over me — not grandmother as I’d always known her, but the thing underneath: fully present now, not bothering with the posture of age. She moved me to the cave before I was fully conscious, one hand locked around my wrist, and when I tried to speak she hit the back of my head in a way that made the world go white at the edges and then dark.

I came back to myself tied to a wooden frame in the cave’s main chamber, my wrists and ankles bound to the corners with cord. The pool had been drained. The jade floor was clean.

Grandmother stood a few feet away, watching me wake up with the patient expression of someone who has done this before and knows how long it takes.

“My mother called you an old witch,” I said, because my mouth was functioning before the rest of me and it seemed as good an opening as any.

“Bah.” Something crossed her face — almost amusement. “It’s been years since anyone said that to my face.”

She crossed to me and took my jaw in her hand, turning my head left and right. Her grip was clinical. She was checking the skin at my temples, my jaw, the curve of my throat.

“If it weren’t for this,” she said, almost to herself, “I’d have cut you open the night I found you in the passage.”

𝗝𝗈іո 𝗍h𝗼𝘂s𝘢𝗻𝖽𝘀 о𝗳 𝘧𝘢𝘯𝗌 𝗼𝘯 𝘨𝗮𝗹ոo𝘃е𝗅𝘀.𝗰𝗼𝘮

She stepped back. And then, without preamble, she began to undress.

I had prepared myself for this. I had spent three days preparing for exactly this moment. It didn’t help.

She pressed her fingers to the center of her own chest — both hands, ten fingers, nails first — and simply pulled. The skin separated down the middle with a sound I don’t have a word for and hope never to need one. It peeled back from the tissue beneath with the slow, deliberate ease of something designed to come apart.

What was underneath was not muscle. Not bone. Not anything with a name I knew. The body that stood in the cave once the skin was gone was black and smooth and utterly still, and it looked at me with whatever served it for eyes, and the intelligence in that look was old — not wise, not cruel, just old, in the way that things become when they have been doing the same thing for long enough that the original reason no longer matters.

It walked toward me.

“A few more decades,” it said, in grandmother’s voice, from a face that no longer had a mouth. “That’s all I need.”

Its hands reached for my chest. The nails were very sharp. I felt them break the skin and I did not make a sound, which cost me something, though I don’t know what to call it.

Then it stopped.

Its hands were still on my chest. Its head turned down, slowly, and it looked at its own body with an expression I had never seen on it before: uncertainty.

The knife had been on the floor beside the wooden frame — grandmother had set it there, ready. My mother must have picked it up while the thing’s back was turned. She was behind it now, pulling the blade back from between its shoulder blades. Her arm was shaking. She drove it in again, and again, saying something under her breath that I couldn’t make out — not quite words, or maybe words worn down to their syllables by repetition.

The thing that had been grandmother turned to face her.

My mother drove the knife in one more time.

The body didn’t fall. It came apart — a rapid, total dissolution, starting at the edges and moving inward, dust and then nothing, the cave’s air moving briefly with the displacement of it. What was left on the floor was a single object: roughly fist-sized, black, glistening, contracting and expanding with a slow, autonomous rhythm.

A heart. Or something that had learned to function as one.

My mother cut the cords. Her hands were still shaking, the knife trembling against the rope, but she got through them. I looked at my palms. Unmarked.

I stepped down from the frame and turned to my mother and put my arms around her and felt her shaking, and I held on for a moment and felt genuine, uncomplicated relief — the pure kind, the kind you feel before you have time to remember who you’re holding.

“We did it,” I said. “It’s done.”

“Yes.” She pulled back and looked at me, and her eyes were very warm, and her hand moved to the back of my neck. “I did it.”

The knife went into my stomach.

I looked at it. Then at her.

“Why?”

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