Page 19 of These Godly Lies
“Anna named the donkey Loki after the god of lies. Is that you?”
The muscle in his jaw jumps, but Khiran doesn’t deny it. “It’s one of the many names I’ve earned over the centuries, yes.”
In her chest, Anna’s heart gives a painful twist. “Those are myths, Jiro. Stories. They aren’t the truth,” she explains gently. “Khiran isn’t your enemy any more than I am.”
For the first time, he looks at her. “He can be anywhere, right?” He spits the question with vehemence, as if the words themselves are coals that have sat in his heart, simmering and waiting to catch. Toburn. “Isn’t that how it works? Why he’s always bringing different food home, and it’s always still warm?”
Anna doesn’t understand the source of his anger, but she knows a lie now would land like dynamite. Cautiously, she nods, grateful when Khiran seems to accept her leading the conversation. “That’s one of his abilities, yes.”
“Must be great,” he sneers. “Like one big party all the time, right? Eat what you want, be where you want. Watch the stupid little humans kill each other for entertainment.”
“Jiro—”
“Why do you always defend him?!” he shouts, standing. Thebarrel of the gun hits the wood floors with a dull thud. Anna’s just relieved his finger is no longer near the trigger. “He’s a god! So why the hell isn’t he doing anything?”
“He is—”
“Then it’s not enough!” He looks at Khiran, anger and pain making his eyes glassy. “Why weren’t you there?! Why didn’t you stop it? They put us in horse stalls like we were animals! When they finally let us go, we didn’t have anything to go back to!”
Understanding softens Khiran’s expression into one of pity. “You were forced into one of the internment camps.”
With one sentence, Anna sees where his anger stems and the poison starts. There is a feeling of emptiness in her chest, a hollow echo chamber of regret.
“Yeah, I was!” Jiro snaps. “So where the hell were you?!”
She knows exactly where Khiran was.
He was in Germany inspiring mutinies and deserters. Gathering secrets to slip to allied code breakers like buried treasure. Whispering in the ears of journalists and photographers, turning their eyes towards the horrors in hopes that they would tell the world in words and pictures. In China, Korea, Indonesia—bearing witness to horrors he refuses to share even with her.
She knows, because it was her he came home to. Tired and beaten, he’d fold himself into her arms and tell her all the ways he had failed while he was gone. Anna had held him, listened to all the ways the world tore itself apart from the comfort of the little home she had made herself.
Khiran had been overseas, killing himself trying to make a difference. Anna had been here, living her life of gardens and honey, painting and reading. Enjoying a peaceful life in the same state that rounded up anyone of Japanese ancestry and stripped them of everything in the name of national security. It’s not Khiran who deserves Jiro’s resentment, buther.
She tries to swallow, but her throat is so tight it feels like swallowing sand. There’s an apology on her tongue that she can’t bring herself to speak. It’s too weak. Words are too weak.
“I was in Washington,” Khiran answers. “In London, Paris,Osaka, Hong Kong, Berlin. There is nothing entertaining about witnessing what humans do to each other.” He softens, resigned to a truth Anna has known for decades. “I cannot be everywhere. Not at once.”
Jiro picks up the shotgun, resting the wooden stock against his shoulder and looking down the barrel. Straight at Khiran. “I don’t believe you.”
Anna steps between them, her hands open. Placating. “It’s the truth. We aren’t without limitations, Jiro.”
His face changes. The hot fury that burned so brightly goes out, his face paling in realization. “You’re one of them.”
It isn’t until the words leave him that Anna realizes what she probably should have from the beginning. He had thought her to be like him—mortal and suffering under the same cruel neglect from gods he didn’t believe existed until today. How would he have thought her to be anything else? She has no power, no magic, like the others. Aside from her immortality, there is nothing that excludes her from being strictly human.
“Yes,” she murmurs. “And no.” She lowers her hands, lets them hang limp at her sides. “I live a very human life, but I don’t… I don’tdielike one.” Her chest aches around the words, but she can see Jiro struggling to understand the difference. “I’ve been alive for more than eight centuries. I’ve helped those I can, how I can, but I only have mortal means in which to do it.”
She gestures to Khiran behind her, not daring to take her eyes off the boy she’s come to love as family. “Khiran helps how he can, but he does it on a bigger scale. One we can’t see, because if we did, it wouldn’twork.”
She takes a step toward him, but Jiro only raises the barrel higher. He aims it at her chest, tears streaming down his cheeks. Anna softens, fingers gently curling around cold steel. “I’m sorry we weren’t there to help you when you needed it.”
Jiro’s teeth clench so hard, Anna can almost hear them groan. “Didn’t you hear us praying?”
“No.” She hopes he can hear the regret that saturates the word aseasily as she can taste it. It sits on her tongue, oily and bitter. “It doesn’t work that way.”
Even if it did, she knows it wouldn’t change the outcome. Their ears would ring with a world’s worth of prayers they couldn’t heed. Couldn’t answer. Anna doesn’t need the whispers of more ghosts to drown in.
“Give me the gun, Jiro.” It’s a request disguised as an order. Anna’s voice is too soft, too gentle, to be a command. “We both know you won’t shoot me.”
