UNWANTED

CHAPTER 24 - G.19.24 - LIZAVETA

"Ma!" A voice called out into the flames and smoke. I could barely see a thing. "MA!" It was then that I realized it was coming from me... But I wasn't me.

I turned a corner, then another, then across a flight of stairs... Nothing. She's gone. The non-me thought, in guilt and acceptance. The flash of her struggling body hanging by the neck from the ceiling made me nauseous. My father's back turned to me made me want to kill.

"Si Zabdiel?!" I heard the servants scream from a floor below me. "Si Ami?"

Ami.

Immediately, my feet ran, jumped over a gaping hole to an inferno, and kept running as floorboards broke underneath my feet right as I pulled them up. "Ami?!" I screamed with all my might.

"AMI!" My hoarse throat screamed yet again. "AMI!"

Nothing. And then-

"KYA!" I heard a little voice from across a broken five feet of flooring.

"Ami? Are you there?" I asked.

"Kuya!"

Looking around, I couldn't see another way to the door she was shouting from. No piece of wood I could make a bridge out of. If I jumped, I would fall into the fire raging below. I breathed in the smoke.

Then my panicking mind went silent.

I can't die anyway. I heard myself think. I bounced on the balls of my feet and with one breath, I jumped.

It only lasted a second, but it felt like years until my toes grabbed on to the other edge. I curled my torso into rolling towards the door I knew led to the nursery. The floor below my body groaned at my weight.

I could feel the heat there, but it didn't hurt. Pushing myself up, I continued running and stopped at an open door. Her voice came from there.

I stared across a room of toys. "Amihan?" I called. "Ami?" I panted, my eyes watering now, my throat itchy from the smoke. I could barely see anything past her teddy bears. Where are you?

I sniffled. I told myself it was because of the smoke, but I knew it wasn't. He can't get rid of us like this.

And there she was in her crib, a little girl of dark hair and molten amber eyes, her body encased in a bubble of air so clean, her arms pushed outward as if to keep the bubble from bursting. "Kuya!" She leaped into my arms.

That sigh of relief was deep, and it made me cough on the smoke that entered my lungs.

"Can you put a bubble around me too, langga?" I asked her, the weight of her a comfort. The softness of her arms around my neck made me forget how dire the situation was. "I need to breathe too, langga..." Her prodigious two-year-old brain understood.

Immediately, the pain in my throat subsided as a helmet of clean air surrounded me. My vision cleared, and so did my mind.

I grabbed her and dashed.

There were screams everywhere but I stopped for no one. I knew that if I did, they'd slow us down, see us with the air around our heads and know... I detested my sense of self-preservation.

I couldn't help but count the voices stuck in the smog, each voice I left for dead.

I made it out into the lawn where the servants gathered in broken clumps. Some were trying to use the garden hose to no avail. Some were cursing the fire extinguishing system and how it failed to function.

It was my fault.

I could hear the distant wail of sirens. I looked down on to the sleeves of my white shirt... All singed. And yet under them, my skin was flawless.

He made me do this.

×+×

I snapped out of it with Zabdi's gasp. And I was back in the small hospital room in the med bay of the train which was entering the Tajik border. The clock above the door said only two seconds passed.

"You killed your mother." I whispered. I was in his body, at that time. "She was still..."

His mouth hung agape, a single tear sliding down his left cheek.

"I-" Zabdi managed to say.

I touched his wrist, making sure the fabric was between us. He saw what I just saw. Whatever happened a few seconds ago happened when his fingers touched my ankle. I couldn't let that happen again... I wasn't sure I could survive seeing it again. My lungs still felt heavy from the phantom smoke.

He reached out to me anyway and wiped my left cheek. A tear ran down it as well. I braced myself for another vision, but nothing came.

"What was that?" He asked, his flaming eyes dampening.

"I read you?" I assumed. He said I would be able to eventually.

Zabdi shook his head. "It doesn't work like that. Reading is when... We talk inside here," He tapped my temple. Like this. I heard his voice echo in my head. "I don't know what happened just now. You saw the fire."

I nodded. "You started it."

He looked down, ashamed, frustrated, in pain. "It was..."

"You were tricked." I said, trying to coax him to look up. I wanted to see his eyes again. They looked like the fire at the house. "Another thing we have in common."

"Your father tricked you?" He finally snapped out of his trance a little. For a moment there, when his eyes were dilated, I was sure I was in his mind.

"No." I whispered, avoiding his eyes now. I felt what he felt, I lived what he lived. "People get killed if they love us."

"Your brother is alive."

"My father loved me." I confessed. "My grandfather killed him because he loved me." The discovery of that fact drove me to Everest after General Hori, my father's best friend and the first in the Pentagon League, confessed on her deathbed.

She was ordered to kill him. She couldn't refuse. She was in the Pentagon League. No one there could.

The knowledge of that made me forsake my country, my inheritance, and bloodline. I almost killed my grandfather when I heard the truth... And yet I couldn't. "The ones we love die... Because of us."

He snorted ruefully. "I don't want you to die so... then I'll make sure not to love you, Diwata." Wiping yet another tear from his cheek, from mine.

"That will be easy for the both of us." I smiled, knowing that after I saw his life through his eyes, that would be a lie.

×+×

That night, Zabdiel didn't leave. He curled up into a ball in the plush couch next to my bed and draped his leg over Jazzy. He was a silent sleeper save for a few mumbles about his palm wine that apparently an American stole.

I couldn't sleep at all. I didn't anticipate how hard it was to accept that I was a myth. I thought I already did.

All this time I thought the Onus were fairytales and nightmares, or if they were real, they deserved to die. I couldn't come to terms with the fact that I was one.

I tried taking it in stride but what happened made it impossible. Zabdi was a tortured child, and still, he smiled at me with no contempt for the world.

How could Onus be evil?

We were human.

Weren't we?

As I lay there, with the weight of a new reality sinking in my stomach, I saw a glimmer of blond hair pass through the peephole. It was probably Natasha, but something about it didn't sit well with me.

After a few hours of seeking sleep, when I finally found it, closing my eyes, I understood why. She didn't come from the direction of the entrance, and she didn't check on me. Her shadow came from two doors down and so did Ji Su's.