Of all the things I expected to see when I left my bedroom, a three-eyed cat eating a human corpse was far from the top of the list. And yet, there it is.
Trinity doesn’t seem to notice me emerging, and continues tearing away at the flesh around the stump of Jinlan’s ankle. I stare for a few seconds, dumbfounded, and not sure what to do.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
The cat flinches, then tears off a large chunk of meat and trots over to me. It sets the piece of leg down in front of my feet, then sits down and stares up at me, its three tails flicking behind it.
“I don’t want this,” I say. “Where did you even get it? How is that here?”
The cat turns its head to the side in confusion, clearly not understanding my words. I sigh. I can only assume that when the cat did… whatever it did before, it stored the corpse away so it could eat it later. I assume that ability to store things is probably why the cat is so valuable, but if I have no control over it, it’s really inconvenient. I don’t need this thing leaving corpses all over my dorm.
“Trinity,” I say. Its ears perk up. “Put that away. Right now.”
She doesn’t understand.
“Put the body away,” I repeat, pointing at the body.
“Bella?” says Vanessa from the other side of the door.
“Sorry,” I call back. “Trinity is misbehaving.”
“Okay.”
Trinity perks up again upon hearing her name, but she still doesn’t seem to have any intention of putting the corpse back wherever she was keeping it before. I sigh again, and decide that I’ve given up. I’m not in the mood to try training it right now. Maybe Vanessa can help when she gets in.
I shuffle past the cat, careful to avoid the blood leaking across the tiles from the body as I make my way to the door. Fortunately, while my words didn’t seem to work, my actions did, and as I move, Trinity opens her mouth, making the corpse disappear again, then runs to the door, waiting for me to arrive.
“Good girl,” I say, painstakingly advancing.
There’s still blood all over the floor, but it’s a start.
“Vanessa?” I call when I reach the door.
“I’m here,” she says.
“Is there anyone else out there with you right now?”
“Jacob is. We wanted to grab breakfast with you.”
“Tell him to leave,” I say. “I need your help. Girl stuff.”
“You- you do?” asks Vanessa, sounding confused.
“I’ll wait for you downstairs,” says Jacob, before his retreating footsteps tell me he’s gone.
“Bella, what’s wrong?” asks Vanessa.
“I’m going to open the door now,” I say. “Make sure that no one else comes in. Also, make sure Trinity doesn’t get out.”
“O-okay.”
I shuffle to the side so that even if someone does walk by, I’ll be hidden by the door when it opens, then grab the handle and pull. Even just opening it a couple inches hurts, so I stop there, leaving the rest for Vanessa. This is better anyway, because as soon as the door opens slightly, Trinity tries to squeeze herself through the crack.
The first part of Vanessa I see is her leg, pushing Trinity back into the room. She seems to be wearing the same kind of clothes as the ones in my closet, though she opted for a pleasant green instead of black. Trinity whines, but doesn’t try to force her way back out, letting Vanessa step fully in, closing the door behind her. Unfortunately, my hiding place behind the door worked a bit too well, so she doesn’t see me, instead zeroing in on the bloody tiles where Jinlan had just been.
“Bella!” she shouts.
“I’m right here.”
She whips around, and when she sees me, the concern on her face only deepens.
“Bella, what happened?”
“That’s not my blood,” I say. “Trinity kept Jinlan’s body.”
“What?”
I shrug, then wince in pain. “When I woke up, his body was right there on the floor and Trinity was eating his leg.”
Vanessa blinks a few times, then looks at Trinity before looking back at me.
“I don’t know how to respond to that,” she says. “But what about you? Why are you naked? What did you need help with?”
“Yeah, about that…” I say. “I messed up a bit. My body is in pretty bad shape right now. It hurts to move. Can you help me get dressed?”
“What did you do?”
“It’s a long story,” I say. “But my body feels like I swam 200 miles nonstop with a boulder on my back. I can barely move. I need help.”Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.
“I- I can help,” she says. “But are you going to be okay? We have to go on the Hunt in four weeks, and I was talking to Ganyu last night and he said it would be really difficult.”
“I’ll be fine by then,” I say. “Mostly. But for the next few days, I’m basically crippled.”
“Maybe I can go get Organa. I bet she can-”
“Not her,” I interrupt. “Definitely not her. I’ll be fine on my own. I just need a bit of help for now.”
Vanessa frowns, and looks like she wants to ask more questions, but stops herself.
“Alright. Let’s go then.”
We spend the next ten minutes getting me dressed. It’s a painful process for both of us. For me because I am literally in pain, and for her because she basically needs to move all my limbs around herself. Lifting my legs off the ground on my own is almost impossible, forcing us to resort to me leaning on my bed while she dresses me. I will say that she is surprisingly good at it. Very attentive to detail. She would be a good personal maid.
When we finish, we both take a seat in the dining room for a minute. I’m breathing a bit heavily from the exertion, and she notices that I’m not quite ready to move.
“So,” she says. “Remember in the labyrinth when you said you’d tell me the truth later?”
“...I did say that, yes.”
“Is it later yet?”
I raise an eyebrow at her. I was a little worried she’d try to use my current weakness to demand an answer, but it looks like she’s actually giving me a way out. A way out that I am definitely going to take.
“No,” I say. “Not yet.”
“Well, whenever you are ready, I’ll be here,” she says. “And just so you know, whatever it is, I won’t hate you for it. Unless you’re a demon who took over Bella’s body or something like that. But I don’t think that’s the case. You’re still you, and no matter what secrets you have, you’re still my friend.”
I’ve heard that line before. Many times. Very rarely has it actually been true. Especially when immortality gets thrown in the mix.
“My- my best friend,” she continues, averting her eyes in embarrassment.
I look at her in surprise and a bit of pity. Am I really her best friend? Now that I think about it, I don’t remember her hanging out with many other people. She spent more time in the library with me than anywhere else…
“Let’s go,” I say, deliberately not addressing that last part. “I’m starving.”
“Okay!”
I start trying to stand up on my own, but Vanessa hurries over to me to give me her support. I gladly take it, alleviating much of the burden on my own legs. Progress is still slow, but we eventually make it out into the hallway. There’s no one else there at the moment, probably because they’re all eating breakfast. However, as soon as we step out, I notice a slight major problem.
“Shit,” I mutter.
“What?” asks Vanessa.
“Stairs.”
“Oh, that’s okay,” she says. “There’s a lift.”
“There is?”
“Yeah, over there,” she says, pointing in the direction opposite the stairs. “It’s close to my room.”
We walk down the hall, and I notice a few things that I hadn’t the night before. The numbers stop at 20, but there are a few more doors in between the end of the dorm rooms and the large central lounge. Two are the lift doors, and the rest seem to be private meeting rooms. We enter the nearest lift, which, as far as I can tell, functions identically to modern elevators. The motors are powered by ki rather than electricity, but it still has the same cable pulley system and stops on each floor. There’s no music though, leaving us in a silence that Vanessa decides to fill.
“The food here is really good,” she says. “I tried inviting you for dinner last night, but you didn’t answer your door. I figured you were showering, so I just went to get food on my own. But it was really good.”
“What kind of food is it?”
“It kind of reminded me of Chinese food,” she said. “There were a bunch of different dishes with all kinds of meat. They even had cat meat, but I didn’t try that. Jacob said it just tasted like chewy chicken.”
“You ate with Jacob?” I ask.
It would be good if she got close to someone else. She can’t keep living with me as her best friend. Though I’m not sure about Jacob. There’s something weird about him. He’s very talented, but more than that, something about his eyes just rubs me the wrong way.
“He’s pretty nice,” says Vanessa, avoiding eye contact.
“I see.”
“I’m not interested in him like that though,” she adds hastily.
“Right,” I agree. She’s observant. She probably feels like something’s off about him.
“I’m serious!” she exclaims, not noticing my lack of sarcasm. Maybe not that observant. “Besides, he’s more interested in you. He kept asking about you.”
“He’s probably not interested in me ‘like that’ either,” I say, remembering how he had seen me using ki just minutes after we entered the Tower.
At this moment, the lift reaches the bottom, and we exit. The lift exit is set in a small hallway only accessible from further in the lobby area, which explains why I didn’t see it when we first arrived.
Many of the others who entered the Tower with us are in the lobby, spread out across the various chairs and tables. Some have plates of food, while others only have drinks. The atmosphere is much more pleasant than I expected after so many died yesterday. I guess it must have helped that we’re all pretty much strangers. Plus, good food always lightens the mood.
We pass by a group of middle-aged people, each with plates piled high with bacon, sausages, pastries, and about a dozen egg variants. There’s fried eggs, scrambled eggs, hard boiled eggs, an eggs benedict-looking thing, miniature square quiches, and more. My stomach growls audibly as we walk by, causing one woman to give me a funny look.
I look around for the source of the food, noticing a room with a sign saying “Dining Room.” However, Vanessa does not take me there.
“Isn’t the food over there?” I ask.
“I’ll set you down, then grab you a plate.”
I look over at her and notice that she’s breathing a bit heavily and starting to sweat. Maybe I’ve been leaning on her too much. She was never the active type.
“Works for me.”
She dumps me in the nearest available spot, a comfortable armchair, then stretches her back and smiles.
“I’ll be right back,” she says.
“Thank you,” I say. “Lots of bacon, please.”
“Got it!”
She walks away, unfortunately in a direction that I can’t really watch. I would have to turn my head to do that, and that hurts. All movements hurt, so I just sit where she left me, trying to relax my body as much as possible, and circulate a bit of ki while I wait. Trinity jumps into my lap, making me wince, but once she settles into a comfortable position, the pain fades.
I can feel the gazes of half the people in the room on me, probably wondering how I turned from a bloodstained badass to a cripple overnight. None are brave enough to approach me though, thankfully, so I can heal in peace.
Or so I thought. After not even a minute, I feel a new gaze fixate on me, this one much more intense. It’s coming from behind, so unfortunately, I can’t see who it is, but I can guess. I can hear them approaching, and I can hear all the conversations go quiet as they pass by. Only two people would cause that reaction: Organa and Ganyu. And this person is wearing shoes, which rules out Ganyu.
I sigh and open my eyes again, just in time to see the winged woman enter my periphery on the right with a stern look on her face.