The Kiss: An Anthology About Love and Other Close Encounters(31)

“It’s not about breeding,” her mother used to say. “It’s about training. We have to learn new habits.” Maia had no idea what she meant.

“So we’re supposed to train the whole world, Mom?” she would say, as if her words would have the effect of a refutation if only she could get the tone of voice right.

“No, sweetheart, just the people we meet.”

These words echoed in her cavernous heart, making her chest throb until she couldn’t run any further. Maybe if she hadn’t reacted so quickly to that hunting party, slashing at them before they could raise their crossbows… maybe Nero would still be with her. But she couldn’t risk doing anything else.

Rainwater collected in a broken leaf rinsed the salt from her eyes. A sharp kick to the tree trunk brought a fine drizzle down. She shivered it off and followed a stream along the jungle floor until it broadened out before the falls she’d heard a few minutes earlier. With a vine wrapped around one arm to steady herself, she leaned out over the edge to gauge the height of the cataract. Mist obscured the pool at the bottom, but judging from the trees and the path of the water flowing away it couldn’t be more than sixty or seventy feet. Now to find a way down.





*


When she righted herself, having to tug harder on the vine than she expected, they came into view. The noise of their approach must have been obscured by the rushing water. Maia looked them up and down.

“How could I have been so stupid, gaping over the falls like an innocent,” she growled.

Two men and a mangy dog stared at her, armed with guns and bows, but perhaps they didn’t have any ammo. Lots of folks carried weapons for show. Bullets were a much scarcer commodity.

“Look what we got here, Jake,” the ugly one said. “A girl, all by herself in the woods.”

“Chui, you idiot,” the other one snarled, swinging the rifle off his shoulder. “There’s bound to be others. Keep ‘em behind those rocks while I suss it out. And do what you can to keep her quiet.”

Maia shrank down into her least threatening posture while she sized Chui up. “If I hand him my gun,” she thought, “it might distract him long enough to slide the machete out under my arm. After that, I’ll have to run for it. But run where?”

She glanced at the falls behind her and mulled the prospect of going over. “Would there be rocks at the bottom?” she asked herself. “And even if there weren’t, the pool at the bottom might not be deep enough to land in safely.”

A darker voice spoke inside her: “What does it matter whether you survive, now that Nero’s dead?” This question had presented itself to her before, and she’d had no answer to it, though its obdurate fatalism helped her find the ferocity to fight through more than one nasty encounter. But this time, for reasons she couldn’t bring into focus, the question felt not quite the same, as if the voice spoke in an ever so slightly different register. She shook her head and loosened the band holding the machete in the sheath.

Just as she slid her rifle down to hand to Chui, a snap in the underbrush caught her attention. There were more of them! Her eyes scanned the foliage behind a nearby log. Chui turned to look, giving her an even better opening, until she saw a little head peek out.

“Uncle Chui, we’re hungry,” the boy muled. “And Zane’s tired.”

“Stay down,” Chui growled, and then turned back to Maia, who breathed a sigh of relief and slipped the band back over the machete handle.

From the other side, loud noises and a simulated birdcall turned both their heads toward Jake, who had raised his rifle and trained it on whatever might emerge from behind the foliage.

“It’s not about breeding,” Maia muttered, and then cried out “Don’t hurt him! He’s with me.”

“Maia,” Noah called out. “Is that you?”

“Please don’t hurt him,” she implored Jake, though she had no notion that he would care what she said. Why should he? Two strangers in the woods—the law of the jungle was clear: kill them or make whatever use of them you can. But don’t burden yourself with their baggage.

If she followed this line of thought any further, it led back to her original plan, gutting Chui like a fish in front of the children, and she no longer had the stomach for it. But could she really risk trusting these people?

“Noah,” she cried. “I’m over here, with some… new friends.” As she said these words, still uncertain how they’d be received by Jake and Chui, an unexpected sensation washed over her, dissolving her bitterness and carrying all her recriminations over Nero out with the undertow.





*


Later, sitting around the fire with Jake and Chui, and the boys, Zeke and Zane, she leaned on Noah’s shoulder. And when he reached his arm around her neck and began to pick some nits from her head, she didn’t push him away. Maybe her mother had been right all along. It is about training, even if the only person she could really train was herself.

“What happened to their mamma?” Noah asked.

“Dunno,” Jake replied. “We lost track of her in the last battle on the big island. Lost our sisters, too.”

“You mean they’re…,” Maia caught herself before she finished that thought in front of the little ones.