Chapter 22

I’m standing on the surface of a planet I don’t recognize, in a forest I’ve never seen before. My dress is gone, the collar, too, and I’m blissfully light.

Part of me knows I should care that I’m naked as a newborn, but I can’t find it in me to do more than shrug about it.

The grass here is a strange shade of murky purple, the sun deliciously hot overhead, and I’m surprised to find I’m parched. So freaking thirsty I think I might die if I don’t get something to drink.

“Be patient, young human,” the voice that’s been living inside me for days speaks. She sounds tired. And close by.

She’s not inside me.

“Give an old friend a lift?” she asks. A bird with brilliant red feathers tipped in gold perches on a low branch of a nearby tree. Intelligent eyes watch me, and I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is the so-called goddess. I recognize her as easily as I would my own face in a mirror.

“Friend is a bit of a stretch,” I tell her. Still, I hold out a hand, and the red and gold bird slowly, painfully hops off the branch.

“I could have been kinder to you, I suppose,” the bird says. “But you should know better than anyone that we all do what we must to survive. To make things right.”

“That’s fair.” It is. It’s true, too. “What happened?” I ask it.

I’m walking through the pale violet and green tinged forest, my feet bare against the plush grass beneath me.

“You’re thirsty,” the bird says instead. “You should rest a while.”

“That’s not an answer,” I tell her, laughing incredulously. “What happened?”

The bird droops, sighing heavily, and when it picks its way up my arm, a gold chain I hadn’t noticed before jangles around its foot.

“We match,” I say suddenly, stopping and looking at my own gold tattoo around my ankle.

“Of course we do,” the bird says easily. She’s perched on my shoulder now, heavier somehow, her gold-tipped claws digging into my skin just enough to be painful. Her beak nibbles at my hair, then she spits it out, looking confused. “I haven’t been in this form in a long time.”

“You’ve been pretty busy possessing me,” I say, stepping over a fallen branch.

“That’s such a crude way to put it.” The bird preens its feathers, unconcerned.

“How would you put it?”

“Coinhabiting.”

I snort. “Right. Sounds like possession to me. So am I dead?” I’m remarkably unconcerned about the possibility. More vaguely curious than anything else.

“Death is such a final idea.”

“You really don’t like answering things straight on, do you?”

“And humans are remarkably concerned with everything matching their extremely limited binary worldview. Right and wrong. Dead or alive. Possessed or sharing.” The bird picks at a feather, pulling it out, and it turns gold as she drops it to the forest floor.

“Where are we?” I ask gently. “The least you can do is tell me that.”

“We are in between.”

I throw up my hands, and the bird wobbles on my shoulder, claws digging in tight. “In between what?”

“You have a choice, my old friend. You can go back and finish what you started, or you can go ahead and see what’s next.”

“Why do I get a choice?” I ask, scrunching my nose. “Shouldn’t it be just one way or another?”

“See?” The bird side-eyes me, picking one foot up. “So concerned with only having two options. Humans are so strange.”

“Says the bird.”

“Says the bird.” Her red and gold head bobs. “You get a choice because you are forever changed from having what you rightly called an alien parasite inside you. Your biology has changed extensively. If you choose to go back, you will not be the same. It doesn’t seem fair to send you back into your body without fair warning, even if it is to your Roth king. It also doesn’t seem fair to send you back to a universe that’s treated you so cruelly, in case you want to… see what’s next.”

“Lyko,” I say on a gusty exhalation.

“The Roth king. Interesting, that.” The bird presses its beak against my cheekbone in some strange interpretation of a kiss. “How did you manage to forgive the species that devastated your planet enough to fall in love with one of them?”

I stop completely, my eyes widening. “Love? I never said that.”

“We shared the same brain and body. You didn’t have to.”

“Gross.” My nose scrunches. “You think I love him?”

“Don’t you?” The bird angles her head, watching me carefully.

“I—”

“I don’t know how you forgave the Roth, especially considering humanity’s need to pigeonhole every little detail into right or wrong to fit your worldview?—”

“Pigeonhole,” I say with a laugh, poking the bird. “Nice.”

She fluffs up, annoyed. “I picked up some of your language. No need to make fun of me.”

“He’s different,” I tell her. “He might be a Roth, but he wasn’t responsible for that.” My voice grows softer as I consider it. “I thought I needed to manipulate everyone to make sure that never happened again.”

“You would make yourself responsible for the outcome of your entire world?”

“Well, when you put it like that?—”

“Hubris. That means that you have an erroneously large amount of confidence in yourself that will lead to your downfall?—”

“I know what it means,” I mutter, annoyance prickling through my weird state of mind.

“Well, I’m sure that you do. Only a human supremely convinced they knew best could have bonded with me like you did. Only a human who surprised me as much as you did would be offered this choice: to return or to go on.”

“What are you?” I don’t expect her to answer.

“I was a prisoner once. Same as you.” She sighs, an odd noise for a bird. “Same captors. I could not stand the torture they inflicted on me, one who was once worshipped as a god on that planet. So I cast myself from my physical body and landed among the Roth, waiting. Biding my time on their planet, hiding amongst others like me.”

“The other Roth gods?”

She eyes me. “Something like that.”

“You mean the other gods on Roth are also just… disembodied aliens? Ghosts?”

I wince as she squawks in protest.

“Is it so hard to make peace with the fact that some things are simply beyond your limited comprehension, human?”

Well, yes, it is, but I don’t say that out loud. “What are you going to do? Are you going to pass on… or whatever?”

“I’m going back.” She ruffles her feathers, picking at one on her chest now. “There is a suitable host. And I find the idea of helping her reshape that planet extremely intriguing. And I’ve grown fond of humans, despite your many faults.”

I stare at her. “Humans?” A memory slides through me, but it feels like a dream, of heat rippling from my body, of the human translator who tried to help us limp on the floor. “You mean the translator? Hasn’t she been through enough?”

“Haven’t you? And yet you want to go back. You want to live with your Roth king. You want to live in that world that has been nothing but cruel to you. Why should I deny the other human the same choice?”

I don’t have an answer for that.

“You have a lot of big ideas for a ghost bird.”

The bird tips back its head and laughs.