ONE
NOW
Nhika gasped awake. A pain-choked sob caught in her throat before she swallowed it and alarms raged across her body. One in her stomach, the line of a scalpel. Another in her shoulder, the hole of a bullet. Her skin felt borrowed, scalp aflame, nails wishing to dig themselves into her chest and drag out her heart.
Yes—that’s where the pain was the strongest. Her heart, aching and squeezing and tearing itself in two. She clamped a palm over it, feeling an unsettling absence at her sternum. It took her a moment longer to realize that her bone ring, which she’d always worn on a string around her neck, was missing.
Nhika closed her eyes. A face came to mind, dark brown eyes looking tortured and lips trembling with tears. A name pulled at her lips, the man she’d given her bone ring, her heartsoothing, her… life? Yet, she was here.
Nhika stilled. Where was she, exactly? Her surroundings were just beginning to settle in. From how sickly she felt to how foreign this bed was, she might’ve assumed this was a hospital, but the exorbitance of the room suggested otherwise. Her postered bed sat against one wall, red drapes offering privacy and frame carved with lacquered reliefs, while equally ornate furniture pieces filled the rest of the spacious room: a writing desk, a bench, a wardrobe for clothes she didn’t have. The door to the bathroom was cracked, and through it she saw the rim of a porcelain tub. There was even a full-length mirror in the corner, and her image blinked dazedly back at her: golden-brown skin blanched of blood, deep bags beneath her eyes, hair tousled.
Memories of a home came to her in parts: well furnished and elegant, endless hallways of endless rooms, a dining room table always full. A manor. Yet, she’d explored those rooms, and she didn’t recognize this one. Outside the window, she found neither the gardens nor the driveway nor the acres of land that she remembered from the manor. Instead, it was just forest.
Everything felt foreign—this view, no shining city that she could see; this room, bathed in moonlight and scented in jasmine; her body, with her skin clean and stomach full and heart anguished. They came with the dissonance of comfort and anxiety.
A reassuring reality rooted her to sanity: Her name was Nhika, and she was a heartsooth. All these maladies across her body, she could soothe.
The art came back to her with reluctance, as though she were writing with a nondominant hand. Her influence was shaky, jittery, with a wandering focus onerous underneath her direction. Nhika let out a slow breath, re-grounding herself. Her heartbeat, steady in her chest. Her arms, growing in feeling. Her skin, starting to feel like hers again. With her body resumed under her control, she soothed the little fires, the pinpricks in her fingers and the narrowness of her throat and the flip in her stomach. That pain in her heart, though, was untouchable, no matter how she hushed and smothered it. She felt the tightness of something foreign on her abdomen, and when she lifted her shirt, she found a line of scar tissue where there should’ve been a cut. Another incongruent feeling hailed from her chest and she pulled down the collar of her shirt to reveal a star of raised skin.
The memory came with pain. A bullet shattering her shoulder, a scalpel traced against her stomach, a hospital turned into a graveyard. And… a surgical suite, a boy tied down on the table, Nhika bent over in a—
The door opened.
A girl pushed herself in with her hip, holding a tray with a washbasin and towelettes. Nhika remembered the girl—but not like this. Not in loose slacks, her black hair braided and coiled. There should’ve been dresses, pinned hair, makeup. She remembered those eyes, touched with blush: looking at her from over a fan, through tears, with anger. But not with doting.
At the sight of her, the girl froze, brows raised and lips parted. Then the tray toppled, and water spilled, and now those eyes were wide, fragile, disbelieving.
“Mimi,” Nhika said, her lips forming the name by themselves. A second later, her mind caught up—yes, she knew those eyes anywhere. This was Congmi Mai Minlan, and this place must’ve been the Congmi manor, but Nhika didn’t feel like herself. “What’s going on?”
Mimi didn’t answer. She only stepped forward once, twice, like her legs were made of cogwork. She closed the rest of their distance like a failing automaton, falling to her knees at Nhika’s bedside and clinging to Nhika’s hand, as though in prayer.
Then Mimi bawled.
It was a raw sort of wail, grief and pain laid bare. Nhika knew its tune well, had known it thrice with each of her family members. But she had never known anyone to cry over her, so she was too stunned to do anything but stare and let the girl weep against her legs.
“I’m sorry,” Mimi said, though Nhika wasn’t sure what for. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry.”
She kept repeating it as though she sought repentance and Nhika were some goddess who might be able to grant it. At last, the stupor lifted and Nhika placed a hand atop Mimi’s head, quelling her.
Mimi looked up. Her cheeks were wet with tears. The look was familiar; last Nhika remembered, she’d been bleeding out of her stomach and Mimi had been begging her to seek treatment. But she hadn’t, because at the end of that dark hospital hallway, there was a… someone had been…
Nhika squeezed the bridge of her nose, and the memory disappeared. “I gave you quite the scare, didn’t I?” she asked.
“Scare? You…” Mimi paused, swallowed her words, and shook her head.
She what? Last she remembered, she was… dying. That’s right—dying for something she believed in. Someone she believed in. His name came now, tasting like blood on her lips: sweet before it was bitter. “Kochin.”
“You remember, then?” Mimi asked.
“He… healed me?”
That was the only way she could’ve awoken. Nhika didn’t know how, both of them bleeding out on that bed with limited energy between them, but he must’ve discovered something.
Mimi put on a thin smile. “Right.”
“Where is he now?”
At that, something dark passed over Mimi’s eyes. “You should probably take a moment to rest, Nhika,” she said, clunkily changing the subject. “It’s too much excitement. I’ll explain it all later, okay?”
Nhika stared at her, dread prickling her throat. “Is something wrong?”
Mimi held her gaze for a moment too long. “No. Everything’s fine.” She stood abruptly, swiping tears from her eyes and collecting her discarded tray. “I’ll go grab you a meal and let the others know you’re awake. Make yourself at home.”
The offer of a meal was almost enough to make her forgive Mimi’s evasiveness, but the suspicion lingered, even as Mimi retreated from the room and closed the door behind her. She had little idea of where she was, how she’d come to be here when the last thing she remembered was the operating suite, but she collected what she did know:
Her name was Nhika.
She was a heartsooth.
And she had to find Kochin.
Excerpted from His Mortal Demise, copyright © 2025 by Vanessa Le.
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