“I killed myself the first day here,” Jang informs him as he feels his own red blood drain from his face in shock. “Hung myself with the room’s curtains and re-formed as a gwisin. I kept my heart but threw my body overboard.” With a horrible drop of his stomach, Seokga remembers the dragging sound outside of his room the first night. The woman who insisted she heard a “splash.” “Except the heart. For me to remain on the ship, that particular organ needs to, as well. It’s hidden somewhere safe. Please remove the sword, Seokga. It’s a bit uncomfortable.”

“You should at least be in pain,” Kisa whispers, sounding both terrified and fascinated. “You should be in debilitating pain—I don’t understand how—I have patients who come in for scabbed knees…”

“I’ve done what they can’t, through years of preparation for this very moment,” Jang says smugly. “Separated my consciousness from the memory of having a body and what should happen when I’m stabbed. I’ve realized that death is death, and once I’m dead, flesh wounds won’t do anything. It’s an enlightened state of being. Mireuk will allow my ghost to wander the planes of Gamangnara forevermore.”

“How did you separate—that’s impossible—I’ve tried, I can’t even…” Kisa seems to realize she’s coming dangerously close to displaying admiration and abruptly shuts her mouth.

Jang smirks. “Now where were we?” she asks Seokga as Bound God’s Pass approaches in the distance. “Oh, yes. I was about to revert to using force.”

Chapter Thirty-One

Kisa

The tiger growls as it launches into the air, claws outstretched for the trickster god, who’s currently recovering from a nasty-looking crash into a pile of fallen pool chairs. It is, reflects Kisa as she dances out of the ineo’s clawed reaches, awfully inconvenient to no longer have Hani’s powers. She learned how to fight at NSUMD, of course—studying the art just as much as she studied anatomy, or history—but she’s never been in a real fight and, most of all, has never been expected to battle while carrying a child…

Her feet are bare as they hop over thrashing tails and swiping claws. “Shh,” Kisa urges Hwanin as he wails in her ear. “Everything is all right, everything is perfectly all right—” She looks around desperately for Hajun, who seems to have constructed a mountain out of plastic lounge chairs and is balancing precariously at the top, swinging a rolled-up towel at the ascending mermaids. Well, she thinks.

Perhaps everything is not all right.

“My fox bead doesn’t work down here!” Somi shrieks, running around in circles, much like Kisa. “What am I supposed to do?”

“Fox form!” Kisa yelps.

“Without claws? Fox teeth aren’t very large—”