closer still, until he stood inches from me, his blue eyes piercing, his smell overwhelming. I stepped back, alarmed by his proximity, ready to turn and walk away, when he struck me.
I understand now that this attack was much bigger than Jabi and me, or even the Montebianco family and the Icemen. This was a moment of reckoning, an evolutionary clash, a confrontation between past and the present. We were part of a war begun some forty thousand years before, when Homo sapiens surpassed other humans to become the dominant life-form on the planet. My people had survived through strength and intelligence, by taking over shared resources, by gradually pushing out the less adept hominids. We survived by creating communities to protect us. We ate well, formulated medicines, reproduced more often, lived longer. We developed speech and advanced tools, grew crops and built shelters. We created language, religion, writing. We became masters of our reproduction, our habitat, our environment. Our technologies allowed us to exist apart from nature and to regard it as something other than ourselves. From this position of dominance, I watched Jabi, knowing that he could easily kill me, but it wouldn’t change a thing. His kind would die. Mine would survive.
Jabi pushed me to the ground. I fell, pain slicing through me. I pulled myself up and tried to stand, but a second blow knocked me flat onto my stomach, socking the wind from my lungs. I gasped, trying to breathe, as Jabi stood above me, growling, his long yellow teeth bared. There was a rock in his hand. A sickening, triumphant smile grew on his face as he brought it down on my head.
Thirty
Uma walked me to her hut, where she pointed to a cot near the window. I sat as she unpacked the medical supplies I had given her. The hut was spotlessly clean, the thick medicinal odor of disinfectant creating a strange contrast to the rough, moss-covered stone ceiling, plants growing from its jointed slabs of granite. The hut had been equipped with three cots, white cotton blankets, kerosene lanterns—all of which must have come from the castle. A man lay sleeping in the last cot, half his face scraped away, his jaw bone exposed, his cheek swollen, a long suture tracking over his collarbone. This was the man who had been hurt hunting, I realized, the reason Aki had needed extra supplies to begin with.
“Are you in pain?” Uma asked. I nodded, too shaken to speak.
Uma put pills in my hand, gave me a glass of water, and gestured for me to swallow them. I recognized the capsules—they were the same pills Vita had given me after my surgery. I swallowed them and watched as Uma went to a stack of clear plastic storage boxes in a corner of the hut and put the supplies away. Bandages and ointments and pills and gauze—Uma looked at each gift carefully before putting it in the box.
There was a row of old medical texts on a shelf. When Uma saw me looking at them, she said, “From Vita. She gave them to me so I could understand your ways of healing.” She said the word “your” with a particular resistance, and I understood how very foreign she found me and my people. She had learned from us, and she had accepted what Vita had given her, but there was a clear line between our civilizations. “Thank you,” she added, as she closed the lids and stacked the boxes back in the corner. “Thank you for bringing these things to us. I am always afraid we will be without them one day. It would make our survival much more difficult. Your kind has created many things we need. Medicine is one of them.”
She went to a basin of water in the corner, wet a cloth, and gestured for me to lie back on the cot, so she could examine the wound.
The rock had left a gash just below the hairline. A warm ooze of blood soaked my hair and dripped over my cheek. I touched the gash, feeling the sting. It was deep. Blood stained my sweater and my jeans. A headache bloomed through my skull, prickling and painful. If Jabi had been given the chance, he would not have stopped. He would have smashed in my head and broken my bones. He would have killed me without a second thought.
“Some time ago, we lost a child to a very bad sickness,” Uma said, as she