Interspersed with the humans ran the odd animal, all clearly more than dumb creatures—here a snake kept rapid pace with a woman; there a tusked deer galloped by with the fear of a man in its eyes, twisting its neck around to look behind. To the side a wild horse galloped with children clinging to its back and a baby clenched carefully in its teeth by the swaddling clothes. Rosa resolutely looked past them—The grundwirgen are fleeing just as the humans are, ignore them, ignore, focus on your purpose …
Some of the escapees cried out to Hou Yi and Rosa. For help? In warning? Their cries were left behind too fast for Rosa to unravel the meaning in the words. Hou Yi didn’t slow and so neither did Rosa; nothing they could do for these villagers would make any difference if they could not stop the birds.
Rosa’s breath began clenching in her lungs, and her throat bucked in a spasm of coughing. Her feet stumbled, suddenly heavy, and she raised her head to find the air ahead clogged with smoke. The movement of fleeing humans, animals, and grundwirgen had become ghostly shadows. Rosa’s eyes stung.
Beside her, Hou Yi paused long enough to wrap a scarf around her nose and mouth. Rosa did the same, pushing up her red muffler and binding it tight. Then she looked to Hou Yi.
The other woman scanned the haze, searching for signs Rosa had not yet learned to see. Then she pointed in quick, sweeping motions: You, that way. I, this way.
Rosa gave a sharp nod she wasn’t sure Hou Yi could see and struck off toward where her fellow hunter had directed.
Washes of brightness came through the smoke, haze diffusing the fire into a deceitful softness. The size of the flares took her aback. Either she was near, or the bird was huge. But a glowing line against the ground had to be where the farms were set ablaze—too low, too dim for her to be near yet.
The bird was huge.
Rosa forced herself to stumble on, pushing through the smoke as if it were a physical barrier. Her hand went to her nose and mouth, clenching the muffler close. Her stinging eyes had filled with enough tears that she wasn’t sure if it was salt water or ash that so blurred her vision—she closed them and drove forward.
She broke out into hell.
Fire was everywhere, dancing through broken roofs, sweeping across fields; a devouring monster neither Rosa nor Hou Yi could kill. The odd form lay unmoving across the hellscape, human or animal or grundwirgen, impossible to tell between them. Nothing but the fire moved here. The fire, and what had brought it.
The bird screamed overhead. Rosa’s rifle came off her back and up out of reflex, its stock socking against her shoulder like a piece of her own body fitting into place. She brought her right hand over the top to swipe at her streaming eyes. The iron sights of the rifle snapped into focus, one behind the other, aligning with flames behind them.
Flames in the shape of a demon.
The bird spread its wings and screamed again. It towered over the scene, as big as a small cottage or bigger, its wingspan spreading twice as wide. The conflagration poured directly from its monstrous outline, engulfing the feathered silhouette and leaping to the heavens in a brilliant inferno. Half bird, and all fire.
Rosa’s world reduced to the tiny front sight of her rifle, her best rifle, the one Xiao Hong had pressed into her hands that last day. Before she lost her vision again in the haze, she squeezed her finger back.
The rifle kicked her in the shoulder, but its roar was muted behind the crackling thunder of the flames. The bird screeched and reared, beating its wings down and wheeling to the side. One wing crashed through the half-burnt thatch of a house, wild, no longer responding to its owner’s commands.
Rosa barely moved fast enough to save her life.
The bird reared up and pounced, its beak stabbing down exactly where she had been, fire pouring forth from its maw. Rosa dodged between burning timbers. The heat was all around, bearing down on her from every side, blistering her skin and making her heady and weak. Or was that the smoke … was she breathing? She couldn’t tell. Her lungs curdled inside her. She tried to cough and her throat seized.
The world wavered. If you pass out, you’ll die, she thought.
Isn’t that what I deserve?
Her boot hit something. She fell. The act of falling barely imprinted on her, as if her mind had checked out and was only waiting for the body to catch up.
Sharp grass stabbed her cheek. Eyes stared into hers, eyes blank of all life but frozen in a rictus of terror. She had tripped on a dead man.
This wasn’t what they had deserved.
Rosa’s knees wanted to bend back on themselves, but she pushed herself upright. Years of habit kept her from leaning on the rifle for help, the inane thought chasing after: What good is the rifle if you’re about to die?
The bird had stopped screaming. Rosa tried to quiet herself to a creep—the infernal beasts had the keenest of hearing—but it was too much of a job only to keep herself ambulatory. Even in this environment, though, her hunting instincts kicked in, tracking direction, leading her to the side, around to flank, yes, that’s where the wounded prey will turn.
She brought her rifle up again, so heavy now.
The bird burst forth from nowhere, from nothing, a tower of flame filling her vision. Rosa thought, the whites of its eyes, even though such a thing made no sense, even though the things had no eyes she’d ever been able to glimpse, and she stood strong and did not flinch as her finger squeezed back.
An avian scream, and Rosa thought, I wounded it, only wounded, it’s over. Her hand automatically swept back to work the bolt but no time, no time.
A dark flash of length against the fire. The arrow shaft disintegrated in immolation. Rosa did not see the arrowhead fly through.
But it must have, for this time the bird whirled in pain, its headlong charge arrested. Its wings beat at the air, the ground. The flames engulfing it dimmed and sputtered.
Rosa tried to move, but she was too slow.
The enormous, extinguishing wing came at her as if through molasses. Nowhere to duck. Nowhere to run.
The impact jarred her old bones. Then nothing.
* * *
The world still burned.
Rosa’s face was against the ground, eating the dust. She tried to move. Some part of her twitched. Her rifle. Where was her rifle?
“It’s you,” Hou Yi said, and Rosa wanted to say, It’s I, who else would I be? But her mouth was too slow for the thought.
“I killed you,” someone else said instead.
“You killed me,” Hou Yi answered.
That couldn’t be right. Rosa’s brain was fogged; she must be having trouble with the language, hearing the wrong words …
“This was you,” Hou Yi continued. “You—” And here Rosa did lose the thread of meaning, catching only the word “called.” Or “call.” You called me? I called you?
“I did,” the other answered.
Rosa blinked her eyes to a crack, only now realizing they had been closed. Two shapes stood before her. Hou Yi, stance firm, an arrow nocked and her bowstring drawn taut, but no sign of the strain.
And aiming at a person, a man, only a few paces before her. He too held a bow. He too held an arrow nocked, albeit loosely.
Their tableau was backlit by fire.
“What are you going to do?” Hou Yi asked.
The man lifted his bow and arrow a few inches, but did not draw tight.
“You know I … better … always,” Rosa caught from Hou Yi, half the words spiraling into nonsense.