The Last Panther

by Todd Mitchell

  Kiri stroked him behind his ears, and Snowflake finally appeared to relax. He stretched out, making soft snuffling sounds.

  Most of Snowflake’s fur was the brown color of dry cabbage-palm leaves, where wild rats liked to nest. Kiri had found him beneath one such tree when he was a pup. At first she thought he’d fallen out of the nest, but he had bites and scratches from other rats, so maybe he’d been kicked out. That was why she’d taken him home and cared for him. He was an outsider, like her.

  She named him Snowflake because of the odd star-shaped patch of white fur between his eyes. Kiri’s da had told her stories about snow, claiming that when he was a kid, he played in piles of it. She couldn’t imagine frozen water ever falling from the sky in delicate six-pointed stars, but she liked the stories, and she liked the sound of the word snowflake. It seemed a suitably improbable name for an improbable creature, which was another thing they had in common.

  The music player crackled and faded to silence as the generator-cells ran out. Not long after, the ladder creaked beneath her father’s weight.

  Kiri closed her eyes and lay still. Snowflake curled in the space between her shoulder and neck. The room brightened for a moment when her da pulled back the loft curtain. Kiri pretended to be asleep while he climbed over to his side of the loft.

  When at last she heard his deep, hushed snores coming from the other side of the loft, she pushed back her covers and crept toward the ladder. Snowflake bounded after her and cocked his head. She could almost hear him say, Did you think I’d let you go without me?

  Kiri grabbed her sleeveless hoodie and held it open until the rat clambered in. Improbable outsiders like them needed to stick together.

  The hardest part of sneaking out was crossing the kitchen floor. She grabbed her tire sandals, but didn’t put them on. Bare feet were quieter. Stepping carefully, she avoided all the boards that creaked. The only sound was the hum of the cooling fans and her father’s deep breaths. So far, so good.

  She slid open the outer door and tiptoed onto the deck. Her da always raised the chain ladder at night. She tried not to let the metal links clank against the deck as she lowered the ladder and climbed down. Once she reached the ground, she strapped on her sandals and set off for the village.

  The cut on her cheek began to sting and bleed again when she ran, but she didn’t slow her pace. She hoped the cut would leave a scar. A long, thick pink scar. All the netters had scars—rope burns up and down their arms from hauling in nets, and slashes from hooks and jellyfish stings. Her ma had probably had scars like that, too. Scars told you who you were and where you came from.

  Elder Tomas was wrong to call her a waller. She’d show him and all the others that she was a fugee, same as her ma.

  Steal it like you stole Laria from us, thought Kiri, remembering what Charro had said. It was one of the only times she’d ever heard a fugee say her mother’s name.

  Kiri had just a few wave-worn memories of her mother. She knew her ma’s parents had died in a scav raid. And she knew her ma had lived in the village and gone out on the skiffs to pull in the nets and crab traps.

  According to her da, her ma was the only netter who helped him when he came to the village to collect specimens. He said she talked to the other netters for him because most fugees thought he spoke funny and were afraid to answer his questions. But not Laria. She was daring and wild, and, as Kiri’s da put it, nothing could hold her back. Not long after he arrived, Laria moved to the swamp to live with him.

  He took her and killed her, thought Kiri, recalling the other thing Charro had said.

  The red fever killed her mother—that’s what her da had told her. But what if there was more to the story?

  The thought made Kiri uneasy. She stumbled, nearly slipping off a log into a patch of black water where cottonmouths liked to nest.

  Kiri tried to push Charro’s words from her mind. The red fever had killed her ma—that’s all. Since her da was a waller, he didn’t have to worry about catching the fever. Wallers were protected from illnesses like that. But her ma wasn’t, and wallers never let fugees into their cities.

  Maybe that’s why fugees hated wallers. While fugees got sick, starved, and watched storms and scavs destroy their homes, wallers stayed safe behind their city walls and did nothing. They let countless fugees die.

  Kiri reached firmer ground. She kicked the mud off her sandals and began to run again. In the moonlight, she spotted the back of what looked like a sleeping gator on a grassy ridge ahead. She probably should have taken another route, but this was the fastest way. Kiri raced toward the dark form. It was definitely a gator, and a big one at that.

  She leapt over it, landed on the other side, and kept running. With any luck, the feast wouldn’t be over. Fugee celebrations sometimes went until sunrise. When she got there, she’d ask for a bowl of soup and eat it in front of everyone to prove that she wasn’t a waller. Then everyone would see she really was her mother’s daughter, and Nessa might take her in. And in the morning she could go out on a skiff and pull in the nets like her mother had done. She could earn a catch share, and finally have a place in the village, and never be called Waller Girl again.

  It was thoughts like this that spurred Kiri on, despite how tired she felt. By the time she made it to the ghost forest, the moon had moved a few fingers across the sky. Fortunately, enough light reflected off the clouds to keep her from tripping over rubble.

  At last she smelled it—smoke seeping inland from the fires on the beach, and the salty, dark scent of the soup. She slowed and listened. In the distance, she could barely hear the breaking of waves and the faint rise and fall of laughter, but the forest around her had suddenly become too quiet. Even the crickets stopped chirping. Snowflake curled into a tight ball, deep in her hood, as if he sensed it too. They weren’t alone anymore.

  Kiri paused and glanced back. She thought she saw a shadow move at the edge of her vision. As soon as she looked, it stopped. She scanned the forest, studying the shadows carefully.

  There, near a palmetto, one of the shadows moved again. Or was it just the wind blowing a branch? It had to be the wind.

  “Who’s there?” she asked.

  No answer.

  “I know you’re there. You don’t scare me.”

  Still nothing. She continued on, annoyed that she’d let fear get the better of her. Fugees weren’t afraid of the dark. Only wallers clung to lights and thought darkness was bad.

  But as she stepped, the shadow stepped with her.

  “I see you,” she said.

  The shadow paused again. If it was just the wind, then why did it stop when she spoke?

  Kiri’s pulse skipped. She took a few more steps and the shadow approached, fluid and ghost silent. Soon it would reach her.

  “Hold tight, Snowflake,” she whispered.

  The little rat burrowed deeper into her hood.

  She bolted toward the sea-grape tunnels. They weren’t very far off. If she could make it through the sea grapes, she’d reach the dunes and the open beach, where other people were. She’d be safe then and could laugh at whatever had spooked her. She just had to make it to the beach.

  Something slammed into her shoulder. Time stuttered and slowed as claws pierced her flesh and pulled her down.

  Kiri started to scream, but when she hit the ground, stumbling and rolling, her breath whooshed out and the scream died in her throat.

  A shadow hovered over her, its broad head blocking out the night sky. Hot breath scalded her skin as the shadow sniffed at her neck. Kiri felt jolted from her body. She lay perfectly still, staring at the shadow creature’s wide, yellow-green eyes—eyes that gleamed in the moonlight with wild intelligence.

  Whispers filled her head. Although Kiri couldn’t understand exactly what the whispers said, she felt them calling to her, urging her to listen. She remembered an elder in the village saying once that a powerful connection flowed between predator and prey at the moment of death. Hunters needed to respe
ct what they hunted, and they needed to connect to it to kill it. Perhaps that’s what this was—the whispery connection that would bring her end. But in the shadow creature’s gaze, Kiri saw something other than death. Something closer to kinship.

  Firelight pushed back the dark, followed by a woman’s sharp cry. “Sheee!” shouted the woman. “Sheee! Sheee!”

  The shadow glanced to the side and Kiri saw that its tawny head was twice as wide as hers, with spear-tip ears and a stout muzzle. It bared long, pointed teeth.

  The woman shouted again, waving her torch. Quick as liquid through open fingers, the creature vanished into the forest.

  Several seconds passed before Kiri realized she wasn’t breathing. She opened her mouth, forcing her lungs to fill with air again. It felt as if her life had already left her and she was only now tugging it back.

  Her breath returned in ragged fits, like a net caught on rocks. She wheezed and coughed. Pain from her shoulder surged through her as she tried to sit up. It hurt so much that her vision blurred and she fell back again.

  “Waller Girl?” said the Witch Woman, leaning over her with the torch. “Great gods, child. What are you doing here?”

  Hush, my child, don’t you fear

  When thunder rumbles, the rain is near.

  Kiri heard a woman’s voice singing. It sounded far away at first, and as raspy as dry palm leaves rustling in a breeze. She tried to open her eyes, but her body felt distant and detached. It took a few seconds before she could get her eyelids to move, and when they finally fluttered open, sunlight spilled in, blinding her. Her head reeled and she had to shut her eyes again.

  Don’t try to fly like a broken-winged dove

  They all fall down and drown in the mud.

  The voice sounded closer now. Softer. This time Kiri opened her eyes only a sliver, to let them adjust to the brightness. Colors swirled around her, gradually coalescing into the figure of a woman with several thin black braids cascading around her face.

  Hear the crickets chirping in the grass

  When the wind blows the clouds come fast.

  The woman leaned over and pressed a wet cloth to Kiri’s forehead and cheeks. It felt blissfully cool against her skin.

  Little crickets know how to hop

  While the rains go drip-drip drop.

  Even better than the cool cloth, though, was the sense of being cared for. As the woman sang and dabbed the cloth against her forehead, Kiri’s chest swelled with warmth. Her da never sang to her—not like this. And he wouldn’t have pressed a cool cloth to her head either. What she felt was something else entirely. Something she’d had a name for once, but hadn’t spoken aloud in years.

  The name rose from the dark depths of memory and swept across her tongue. “Ma?”

  “Shhh…I’m here, Cricket,” replied her mother.

  She looked just like she did in the vids her da had shown Kiri. Her eyes were dark and kind. Her lips curled up in a wry smile, and a few of the black braids sprouting from a cluster on her head fell across her cheeks. The resemblance was so striking that Kiri thought she must have been watching a vid, except her ma hadn’t called her Cricket in any of the vids. But as soon as her ma said it now, voice lilting over the syllables in a musical way, like the sound of a door unlocking—Crick-et—Kiri remembered her mother calling her this hundreds of times before. A true memory.

  “I thought you were dead.” Kiri kept her eyes half-open, not daring to move and disrupt whatever vision she was having.

  Her mother dabbed the wet cloth against the cut on her cheek, wiping off the blood. It stung a little, but it also felt real, and for that reason, wonderful.

  Kiri tried to sit up, no longer afraid to move. She needed to hold her mother and keep her here.

  “Easy, Cricket,” said her ma, placing her palm against Kiri’s forehead. “You should sleep now.”

  Kiri lay back, confused. “Am I dead?” she asked. That was the only explanation for how this could be happening. She must be in the land of the dead, where her mother had been waiting for her.

  “No. You’ve been marked.”

  Kiri frowned. “Marked? Why?”

  “That’s not for me to say.” Her mother picked up a small glass bottle and poured a few drops into a cup. “But you know. Or you will. You wouldn’t have been chosen otherwise. That’s why I gave you the knife.”

  “What knife?”

  “The knife I’ve been keeping for you. I stitched its sheath to your belt.”

  Kiri reached down and felt a sheath of smoothly worn leather attached to her belt, and the stiff handle of a knife against her hip. Touching the knife comforted her and made her feel older. All the netters carried knives like this for cutting lines and gutting fish.

  “One who’s brave enough to be marked by the Shadow That Hunts is brave enough to carry a blade,” said her ma. “Just remember, a knife isn’t only for cutting. In skilled hands, it can also mend. Now drink.” She held the cup to Kiri’s lips.

  Kiri was so thirsty, she took a sip without asking what it was. The bitter liquid made her mouth pucker and her throat burn.

  “It stings,” she said.

  “That’s why you need to drink, Cricket.”

  Kiri swallowed a few more burning sips. The liquid trailed fire down her throat, warming her stomach.

  Her mother nodded, pleased. Then she put the cap on the bottle and stood.

  “Don’t go! Ma!” cried Kiri.

  Her mother looked back, only now she appeared thin and wrinkled. Her hands were gnarled as driftwood. “Poor child,” she said. “You’re too young to speak to the dead.”

  In place of her mother stood an old woman with cloudy eyes and gray, stringy hair.

  “Where is she?” asked Kiri. “What did you do with her?”

  Kiri thought she must have been looking at the wrong person, but when she tried to search the room for her mother, a wave of dizziness overtook her. The warmth from whatever she’d drunk spread through her body, pulling her down.

  “She was here,” muttered Kiri. “She was right here. Bring her back.”

  The Witch Woman shook her head and gave her a sad look. “Rest, child,” she said. “You’ve been marked for a reason, and you’re going to need your strength.”

  The next time Kiri woke, it was to the sound of people arguing.

  “She’s twice marked,” said the Witch Woman. “You know what that means?”

  Kiri struggled to open her eyes. It was so bright she had to force herself to squint and focus on something until the dizziness passed. Finally, her pupils adjusted and she saw Snowflake’s brown back. The rat was curled on her hoodie, near her head. Even asleep he wouldn’t leave her side. Beyond him, she noticed the ankles and feet of several people standing on the sand. Other people were sitting on overturned buckets next to piles of nets. The air smelled of seaweed and rotten jellies, and the sunlight glowed blue from the tarp tied to poles overhead.

  She was in the mending tent, where netters came during the heat of the day to untangle their lines and mend their nets. Nessa was there, along with Senek, the Witch Woman, and a few other fugees she couldn’t see. She had no idea how she’d gotten here, or why she lay on a straw mat in the mending tent instead of in her own bed.

  “You and your portents, woman,” said a gruff voice. It must have been Charro speaking. Kiri spotted his hairy calves and dirty feet on one side of the mending tent. “A feral cat scratched her, that’s all. The girl has a way of finding trouble.”

  “No. The Shadow That Hunts marked her. I saw it with my own eyes.”

  “You had too much palm wine.”

  “We all had too much palm wine,” mumbled someone else.

  “There is no Shadow That Hunts,” continued Charro. “It was just an overgrown feral heading for the waste pits.”

  Kiri tried to turn her head to see more. Her cheek stung, sending another wave of dizziness through her, and her eyes were unable to catch up with her movements.

  “I�
��m telling you, it was no feral,” asserted the Witch Woman. “She’s been marked. Once by a devi of the water, and once by a devi of the land.”

  Charro snickered. “Hear that, Senek? Crazy old woman thinks I’m a devi.”

  “Not you,” said the Witch Woman. “The bone of the creature you killed. That’s what marked her. That’s the devi I speak of.”

  “If that was a devi, then I’ll be a rich man when the tide turns and I trade its head, shell, and bones to the boat people,” said Charro.

  “I warned you not to kill it,” continued the Witch Woman. “I warned you to let it go. Now there’s been a second portent.”

  “Why two portents?” asked Nessa. “I thought portents came in threes.”

  “They do,” said the Witch Woman. “So we best pay attention now, or a sky devi will mark her as well. And if we don’t listen then, death will follow.”

  “Death might come, but not for us,” said Charro. “It’ll come for her. That’s all that mark on her back means. A feral cat attacked her, and if the wounds are bad they’ll get infected and make her sick. The sort of sickness you don’t wake from.”

  “Quiet!” said Nessa. “She’ll hear you.”

  “I’m only saying the truth,” grumbled Charro. “I’ve seen it happen before. So have you.”

  Nessa said something to Charro that Kiri didn’t hear. Then Tae’s voice cut through the group. “Waller Man’s coming,” he said. “Paulo and I saw him in the ghost forest.”

  Kiri sucked in a breath, realizing they were talking about her da. She attempted to move her arms and push herself off the ground, but her muscles barely responded. She felt as weak as a jellyfish on sand.

  “Shhh, child,” said the Witch Woman, kneeling next to her. “Save your strength.”

  Kiri opened her eyes fully. Several fugees were staring down at her like she was something foul that had washed ashore.

  The tarp rustled as someone else entered.