Page 88 of The Girl with a Thousand Faces
Interesting. Despite all that is going on, you feel sorry for him. The need for air still batters at your senses but you find, while watching the soldiers, that it dies down a little. In its place is an urgent and moaning urge for violence that grows the longer you lurk.
The soldiers laugh at jokes, passing food and drink around. The bound mantries to sit up at one point, and a soldier knocks him over. Your shoulders tense. The hate in you that exists for Mei Chi is bleeding into your senses, attaching itself to these men.
The invading soldiers, after all, are the ones who bear responsibility for upending your world, throwing your parents into despair, and ruining your home city. Without them, you’d never have gone to Shek Ham Chau. Without them, Mei Chi would not have escaped your grasp. And without them, it’d be so much easier to find her again.
Besides, you need a way of testing your powers. Of finding out, exactly, what you can do as a ghost. Isn’t this just the perfect opportunity?
In the shadowed darkness, your lips draw back in a silent grin.
The hour grows late. Darkness falls. Eventually, the soldiers finish eating and put out their ill-advised fire. Most of them bunk down and sleep. Only one remains awake to keep watch, leaning against a tree by himself as he stares out over the darkened world, and the hunger inside you is a terrible, dark thing.
The prisoner is awake, too. His eyes are shining in the dark as he glances around. Like you, he is a fighter. Even outnumbered and bound, he hopes for escape. It’s hard not to respect that.
You will spare him, you decide. There is no hate in that ghost heart for a fellow oppressed.
Whisperings and fevered fantasies crowd your brain, blending with the rage you carry for these men, and all they represent. Rise quietly from the water, slow and sinuous.
Your spirit-clothes are a mimicry of what you died in: battered shirt and trousers. Hardly a fancy dress, but it will suffice. You walk along the shoreline, in sight of the soldiers’ camp but not too near it, arms wrapped around yourself and head bowed. As if you are lost, exhausted, grieving. You faux-stumble and kneel on the ground, just within reach of the water, with your back toward the tree line.
Boots crunch down the shore. The soldier has seen you and is approaching, and he hasn’t yet woken his comrades. Rationally, that is a foolish thing for him to do, but he does not recognize you as a ghost.
It is nighttime, and your influence is strongly seductive. To his gaze, you look the way Mei Chi did to you, once: inexplicably beautiful despite the ragged clothing, alluring despite your obvious monstrousness. Vulnerability is a powerful charm.
Shrink back at his approach, feigning a fear you do not feel.
“I didn’t know there were any civilians left in Sai Kung,” he says, in heavilyaccented Cantonese, and his voice contains a cruelty that sets your teeth on edge. “Where are you from, pretty girl?”
Huddle small, saying nothing.
“Did you hear me?” He puts a hand on your shoulder.
Twist round, serpent-quick, baring sharp teeth in the moonlight.
The soldier blanches. “Oh shit—”
You lunge. He is a grown man and trained soldier but you are a vicious water ghost full of power and fury and youdraghim into the fucking sea like he deserves.
He gets out one garbled scream before you both go under and then you are swirling down the steep slope of ocean floor, clutching him to you like a dear and treasured lover.
It does not take much depth to drown. A human can die in four inches of water. You only have to haul him a dozen feet out, where the ocean is chest deep—this is a steep shoreline, not a shallow beach for children—and it is plenty for your needs.
Bubbles burst from his mouth, panic driving him to exhale precious oxygen. He writhes like a snake in a bag, twisting in your arms. Face contorting in an expression of utter terror.
Lock eyes with his, and smile.
You know so precisely what he will be feeling: the building burn of no air, the desperate claustrophobia of waves pressing down, the coldness that seeps into everything and the specks that tinge one’s vision. Time slowing to a single point of finality.
Then he dies in your arms, and his death is the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen.
Ghosts perceive much that the living do not. Energy flows through the world in currents, and souls are like little knots of energy; his knot unwinds, the soul phasing through his body before dispersing in a scintilla of colors. For one extended, glorious moment, you feel no pain, the perpetual sensation of drowning briefly lifted from your chest; his death eases yours.
It would take your breath away, if you still breathed.
He isn’t a woman and so likely won’t return as a ghost, not that it matters to you just then. That problem is not yours to manage. All you know is that his body floats limp, eyes bulging open. His hair billows with the currents.
And then the oddest thing happens. There is a hollow in him, forming. You wouldn’t know how else to describe it. Not a physical gap or wound; outwardly, his body looks the same. But you are struck by the overwhelming sense that you are holding a husk.
It calls to you, fills you with an unbearable urge to put him on like a sack, like a… a suit of clothes. Yes, a suit of clothes. A thing to be worn.
