When Sarroch said we didn’t have long, he wasn’t exaggerating. The reckoning is to take place that evening, with proceedings starting at dusk.
Sarroch and I have gone back to his office, and Sarroch is now working the phone with impressive focus. Sitting behind his large, glass-topped desk, in front of his floor to ceiling windows looking over Panong, he looks every inch the powerful CEO.
If you ignore the conversations he has in a non-human, guttural language over the phone with various Mayak, that is.
I turn back to the window I’m standing in front of, the one overlooking Luyang Temple. It stands out starkly, its red walls a sharp contrast to the deep green of the forest around it.
I lean my forehead against the window for a moment, closing my eyes and just feeling the smooth coolness of the glass. I need a moment. Everything is happening too fast, going from bad to worse.
Not getting a scrap of sleep last night isn’t helping, nor having Shiva’s words bounding around in my head. Murderer. Little murderer.
I give myself a beat to gather myself, no more than that. I’m not falling apart now. There will be something I can do.
I pull out my phone.
“Mmpf… Api, this better be important,” Chai mutters as he picks up, his voice muffled by sleep. He’s not a morning person—even though it’s now late morning.
“Hey, Chai. I’m in a bit of a trouble and I need your help.” It’s pretty hard to keep my voice from wobbling. I wish Chai was here with me.
“Api? What happened?” He sounds alert now. “Did you go out? Damn it, I told you—”
“I’m going to bring you up to date and you’re going to have to keep quiet until I’m done.” I seem to be asking people to do that a lot lately. The men in my life are far too fond of sharing their opinions about my actions.
I tell him all that happened, all the way until this morning.
“Jesus.” Chai sounds properly shocked.
“I know.”
“Where are you now?”
“At Sarroch’s office while he’s trying to find as many Mayak as possible who will speak for me. I, meanwhile, am trying not to fall apart, and also trying to figure out something I can do to help things along. And I thought of some way you might be able to help me, if you’re up for it?”
“Name it. What can I do?”
“This whole thing about having me recognised as part of the Mayak has been complicated because people are apparently worried about the ‘precedent’ it would set. Which got me to thinking, what if there’s already a precedent that’s either been forgotten or is being conveniently ignored? Could you contact as many Touched as you can and find out if they know a story when a human was recognised by the Mayak as—”
“It wouldn’t need to be full recognition,” Sarroch interrupts. “If there was a time the Mayak took care of a human, but not in thanks for something the human did, and not in the sense of a passing favour. Or if anyone did anything to mark them out as kin in any way. That might be enough. And it’s an excellent idea, Apiya.”
“Did you hear that?” I ask Chai.
“I did. I’m on it. I don’t know of anything, but I’ll start asking around. And for the reckoning, can I be there?”
I look over at Sarroch. “Can Chai attend?”
He frowns at me faintly, as if my question is a bit silly. “Of course not.”
Of course. Mayak business and all that.
Chai promises to message the second he has anything remotely interesting.
I take a deep breath. Next up, contact my parents.
I don't try to call my mom's mobile phone, which will be switched off, since it's still stupid o’clock in England. I call the landline.
It rings out, and after a while goes to voicemail. It will have woken my parents up, but they might have gotten up too slowly to get to it on time. I just hang up and call again.
This time, Mum picks up.
“Apiya? Is that you?”
I might be a full-grown woman, but I feel such a rush of emotion at the sound of my mother's voice, that this time I'm unable to keep my voice from wobbling.
“I'm in trouble. I need you and Dad to help me.”
The quality of the audio changes as mum puts me on loudspeaker.
“I'm on the line, pumpkin,” Dad says. “What's up?”
I tell them everything, including the whole thing about killing Chizu, and about being a bundle of stolen energy infused into a dead baby.
I don't have to ask them to keep quiet when I speak.
It was like this when I finally admitted to them that I thought I might have magical abilities. I was so nervous, afraid that they would think I was a freak, irrationally worried that they would send me back to Panong.
Mum looked amused when I finished. “The way you were going on, I was expecting that you would be coming out to us. Telling us you prefer girls to boys. So I put together this whole speech in my head about being proud of you and loving you unconditionally, no matter what. Turns out it works on this occasion as well.” And she gave me the speech.
Dad grabbed me into a big hug. “I was so worried you were going to tell us that you're pregnant.”
And that was that. No hysterics. No questions. Nothing to make me feel bad about what I was.
And it goes much the same way this time as well, and it's one of the many reasons I absolutely adore my parents. I don't know many people who, on hearing that their daughter has killed a supernatural creature, and that she was made from a dead baby and some stolen energy, would remain completely calm and collected.
I finish by recounting our recent interview with Mucalinda, and why the fact that I acted in self-defence is unlikely to be considered.
The only thing Mum says when I finally finish is “You said we could help. What can we do?”
My mum's a bloody superstar. I'm sure she and my dad will have a lot to talk about when they're off the phone, but I'm really grateful not to have to deal with an emotional scene right now.
“I need to know any instances in myths and legends when a human was accepted as part of the Mayak. All it needs to be is the Mayak taking care of a human, or recognising the human as kin in any way.”
“There are lots of stories of men being tricked into marrying various shape-shifting creatures,” Dad says at once.
I relay that back to Sarroch. He shakes his head. “Tricking Mundanes is common and doesn't give that human any particular standing.”
Dad changes tack at once with the myths of babies being stolen and replaced by a changeling.
I'm pretty sure I know the answer to that one, but I check with Sarroch just to be safe.
“Those babies either get found by a predator and eaten, or they are destroyed to avoid complications.”
Sarroch told me about that before. How some female Mayak go a little crazed with the need to care for a young and steal a human baby.
Dad continues going through every instance he can think of off the top of his head. People getting turned to stone in Langkawi, in Malaysia—are the stones now part of the Mayak world? No.
He tries the Japanese legend of Samebito, a shark-like Mayak who cried blood and rubies over the death of a human friend. Also no. That human had first helped Samebito, and anyway, Samebito had been banished, so wasn’t technically a Mayak when the story happened.
On and on the list goes. It features a surprisingly high number of inns in the middle of nowhere where hapless travellers unwittingly find themselves face to face with a Mayak.
But none of it gives us the precedent we need.
“Okay. I will do some more in-depth digging until I find something. How much time do we have?”
“Until dusk here. Which is only a few hours away,” I reply.
“I will find something,” he tells me, calmly confident.
That's the thing about my dad. Incapable of finding his way around the airport, barely able to survive if my mother isn't around to make him eat, pick out his clothes, and generally keep him at least partly in the real world. And yet I wouldn't be surprised if he actually came up with something that solved this whole crisis.
At least I hope I'm right. I really, really hope I'm right.