"I was worried you might not wake up in time."
Atiya opened his eyes to Leishna watching him from across the room with her usual expression of mild entertainment.
He lay there for a moment taking stock of himself. His body had used the hours well, the worst of the fog lifted, the shaking gone. He was not recovered, not by any reasonable definition, but he was functional. He sat up.
*One thing after another. Domino effect or whatever.*
"Won't there be others with me. How can I steal it."
Leishna looked genuinely pleased that he had gone straight to logistics without preamble.
"My my. I know someone you would get along with very well."
'Here she goes again. Yapping.'
"Answer my question."
"Don't worry," she said, dropping the tangent without ceremony. "Except for you, no one will be there."
Atiya listened to the plan Leishna laid out with a deepening frown. It relied entirely on non interference from start to finish and he was absolutely certain that was not going to happen. The village was not the kind of place that left things unattended out of simple carelessness.
Still he listened.
The plan was basically to go in at night and steal the sculp—
"Wait. What is the sculpture exactly. Are we talking about the statue in the center of the village. How would I even lift that."
Leishna stared at him.
Then she broke into laughter, genuine and full, leaning back with it.
"Hahaha! You thought that was the sculpture! I thought you were out there analyzing and investigating everything and you completely missed the most important thing! Hahaha!"
Atiya reached over and pulled her hair.
"Tell me where the real sculpture is."
Leishna wound down, wiping the corner of her eye.
"Did you see the pillar behind the statue? The end of it is bowl shaped. The sculpture is kept there."
Atiya thought back. He remembered something like that but not clearly enough so he pulled out the drawings he had made during his village tour and found the pillar. No bowl end in his sketch.
*I forgot to draw it.*
"You are actually pretty dumb, you know that."
He could not deny it so he moved on.
"And how do I climb the pillar."
Leishna looked at him with an expression approaching genuine pity.
"That is the dumbest question you have ever asked me. You are not worth a single nail of Sherlock Holmes."
Atiya was quite offended and asked anyway.
"I have done rock climbing before but a slippery looking pillar in the dark—"
"By a ladder, you dumbshit." Leishna covered her mouth. "Ah. You are hilarious. I genuinely like you."
Some time later a man dressed in a woman's robes walked toward the center of the village.
Atiya looked at the statue and looked around it and found nothing. No guards, no watchers, no one passing through. It made sense when he thought about it.
*They have lived here for thousands of years and know exactly how important the statue and sculpture are. Nobody from within the village would dare touch them. And the outsiders, well. One is supposedly in bed with Screja and the other is under their spell.*
He scanned the surrounding area and found the ladder almost immediately, leaning against the side of a house in plain sight. No attempt to hide it, no lock, nothing. He picked it up and carried it to the pillar and leaned it against the stone.
*It is not cold here but once we leave it will be freezing.*
He started climbing.
The effort it took was considerable given the state of his body but he moved steadily, hand over hand, testing each rung before trusting it.
'I am not that great of a climber but, I have gone neough training for this mundane things.'
He kept his senses extended outward as he climbed, feeling for anyone watching from a distance. Nothing reached him. For once the universe appeared to be leaving him alone.
He reached the top and looked into the bowl shaped end of the pillar.
'Is this it.'
An egg. White stone, smooth, roughly the size and shape of what he imagined a dinosaur egg might look like, not that he had ever seen one. It sat in the bowl like it had been there forever.
"Yep. Let's get this over with."
He tucked it inside the robes against his body and climbed back down, returned the ladder to where he had found it, and moved in the direction Leishna had instructed.
The village sat quiet around him.
It was time to leave. Find the ritual survivor. Sever whatever skill was binding Leishna and keeping her tied to this mountain.
One thing at a time.
Atiya's footsteps were fast but his mind was running slower with every step.
It was not the few people still outside their houses at this hour that was bothering him.
The discrepancies had been accumulating and now that he had space and silence to line them up they made an uncomfortable picture. Leishna had given him the antidote as though she already knew what Screja was going to do.
Then out of nowhere she had mentioned the ritual survivor, dropped it casually like something she had simply forgotten to bring up earlier, as if she had known all along and chosen her moment.
'Come to think of it, Screja was always talkative.'
He turned that over.
Before the two days she had simply started, no preamble, no seduction, no buildup. Just did it as if a switch had been flipped. As if something had overridden whatever personality had been operating before.
'She turned out like that after she went to see Leishna off'
He kept walking.
He was likely walking directly into whatever Leishna had arranged for him. He was fairly certain of that now. The antidote, the coded message, the plan, the timing, all of it too neat, too conveniently sequenced. Leishna's fingerprints were on every surface he touched.
But his options were what they were.
He reached the edge of the barrier. Invisible, but he could feel the boundary of it, the faint pressure change in the air.
Leishna was already there, standing in the dark holding a large sack that hopefully contained everything necessary for surviving a frozen mountain.
He stopped in front of her and looked at her face.
"Before we depart I will tell you about where we are going, but come quickly. The real threat was never Inumaki Village. It is what is outside."
Atiya was well aware of that. The village with all its rituals and immortal villagers and two days of forced captivity had never been the thing that kept him up at night. The mountain was the thing.
The creatures Leishna had described that made the spider yai beast look like something you could step on.
'I am not some overpowered protagonist who has everything go his way,' he thought, following her toward the fence. 'And nothing has been going my way properly this entire time.'
He and Leishna reached the fence and jumped.
Their feet hit the ground on the other side and the cold found them immediately, sharp and total, the kind that gets into the joints before the skin has even registered it.
The barrier was invisible behind them. The village was invisible behind them. Inumaki with its tomb and its ritual and its dying species and Fredo's quiet dignity and Screja's ashes in the fireplace, all of it on the other side of a line they had just crossed.
Neither of them looked back.
What they did not know, could not have known, was that the moment their feet left the ground on the other side something else began to move. Not the yai beasts in the dark ahead of them.
Something older than that. A current that had been running quietly beneath every event that had brought them to this exact point, planted long ago by someone who had known where it would eventually arrive.
The real plan had started its course.
****
Three days had passed since the incident.
Mavine had been with Zelaine every moment of it and what she had learned in those three days was that the woman who had once felt like an older sister was, at her core, an insatiable glutton.
The money they had went mostly toward fuel and food, disproportionately food, with Zelaine making decisions about portions that Mavine found genuinely alarming for a single person.
They had been sleeping and eating inside her parents' car. Living in it, essentially. Public washrooms for everything else.
"Can't we just go back and live in my home?"
Zelaine scoffed, eyes on the road.
"We will go back but not now. I don't know enough yet about the white light—"
The car jolted hard, the impact rattling through every surface simultaneously, and Zelaine's sentence ended there.
Another car had clipped them at speed and kept going without so much as a tap of the brakes.
"Mother fucking shit!"
Mavine grabbed the door handle.
Zelaine's foot found the accelerator.
"Fucking mother fucking la drivers!"
The car surged forward and Mavine pressed herself back into her seat and closed her eyes and began praying to anything that might be listening as Zelaine pursued the offending vehicle at a speed that suggested she had completely forgotten there was a seven year old in the passenger seat.
"Just let me get you and I will mince you for food."
Though she was a vampire, that sounded genuinely disturbing even coming from her own mouth.
"Please slow down."
Mavine's voice came out calm despite the white knuckled grip she had on the door handle.
Zelaine considered this for a moment and reduced the speed from a hundred to eighty on a road where a sign some distance ahead read sixty kilometers per hour maximum.
"Don't fucking mess with me."
She had been running on too little food for too many days and everything was sitting on a knife's edge because of it.
Gluttony as a sin required volume, required excess, and what they had been operating on was nowhere close to sufficient.
She did not fully understand why she was this angry but somewhere in the chase she arrived at the conclusion that it was not worth it and let the other car go.
She noted the plate number anyway.
She pulled over carefully on the empty road, cut the engine, got out and slammed the door behind her.
"Ahhhh!"
The shout went out into the empty landscape and came back as nothing.
Mavine got out on her side and immediately bent over and vomited onto the road.
Zelaine produced a water bottle and held it out.
"Bwargghh."
Zelaine watched her with something approaching pity.
"It is all that driver's fault."
Mavine straightened up, wiped her mouth, and gave Zelaine a look that contained several fully formed sentences she had decided not to say out loud.
'You are the reason I am like this.'
She kept it behind her teeth.
Zelaine looked at the girl more carefully. Something about the way she was holding her midsection had been off for a few days now.
'She has been like this since the incident. I think she is sick.'
"Are you good."
Mavine gave a thumbs up.
"No you are not."
Zelaine sighed and pulled out her phone, searching for the nearest pharmacy.
Some time later.
"Give me the cheapest medicine for long drives and motion sickness."
The pharmacist looked at her. Scarlett hair, slim fit cotton shirt that he recognized as considerably more expensive than the word cheapest had any business coming out of. He processed the contradiction quietly.
"Cheapest. Okay, Vomistop. That will be 12 Sen."
Zelaine looked at the box.
'We have 4,000 left. It's time we enter the resource management arc.'
She picked up the box anyway and stared at it for a moment with the expression of someone doing arithmetic they do not enjoy.