Some Thing Called Myself (Complete)

XXXVII: Something Secretive

Ch. 37: Something Secretive

2:47 AM

With her organs asleep, whatever her body perceived was translated to her senses unfiltered by feelings and a lot more intense. The lights, the shadows, the smells, and the predator's sharp sensation that powerful foes hid all around her. Mara walked forward, her eyes never blinking, never watering, never wavering from Numa's shadowed silhouette.

Numa stopped, her back pressed against the walls on the second floor. She smirked, and something in Mara's body told her to run...to her.

She wasn't fast enough. Numa leaned behind a rectangular column on the wall and winked. Mara didn't see exactly how, but in a moment, Numa was there—in the next, she bowed and disappeared, almost as if she was merging with the damned wall.

"Fuck," Mara roared. She pushed herself harder and raced the final distance between her and the place where Numa had disappeared. Mara narrowed her eyes. She placed a hand on the naked walls and around the column. She pushed, knocked it here and there, and growled when she found nothing. "Fuck, fuck."

Maybe this was a hallucination. It wouldn't be hard to believe it since there was a fungus colony growing inside her.

She reeled back from the wall to stop herself from punching it and leaned on the metallic railing. Mara took a deep breath and stared at the Kerana tree.

It was dying. No matter what Tai, Granny, and the others believed, the scale Mara had brought would never be enough to fully recover it—and like Numa's most recent disappearance, once the tree died, there was nothing Mara or anyone could do to reverse it.

A crease formed between her eyebrows.

"Wait a second," she whispered. Mara looked at the cold cement path on the patio, at the tree, and then at the wall behind her. Mara replayed a scene from the Junina party in her mind's eye. This was the same place Jano and Commander Carlos had disappeared yesterday, right between meeting rooms number twenty-eight and twenty-seven. The same place Bernardo had asked to meet her in a few hours.

Why would Numa lead her to a place like this?

Mara stepped away from the railing and looked around the corridor. There must be a hidden entrance in here somewhere. Nothing looked out of place, sure, but...she closed her eyes. Mara sharpened her senses and listened. There was the sound of the leaves dancing in the breeze, the creaking of wood, the squeaking of metal, the cockroaches running in the vents...and there, underneath it all, the whistling noise of air blowing through a narrow opening.

And with it came the scent of blood.

She opened her eyes. Mara focused on the metallic smell and walked forward until her hands met the cold roughness of the concrete wall. She sidestepped, searching for crannies until her hands met the sharp angles of the column. She leaned in and slid her fingers to the side. Like all the others, this column was old but well-kept, with no cracks in sight. With almost half a meter in width and a meter in length, Mara wasn't sure if this was really structural or simply part of the contemporary style of the building, but whatever it was, the smell came from here. She looked up.

Like all the others, this one had narrow glass bricks encrusted at the very top. For a short second, Mara imagined Numa watching her through them. Her stomach gurgled in anger—she would find Numa and give her a piece of her mind. And maybe take a piece of her flesh too.

Mara closed her eyes again. The burnt cement of the wall was cold, littered with tiny imperfections and dents that showed the building's true age. Here. Her fingers stopped when they caught the softest of drafts. Mara looked closely at it. Between the side and front faces of the column, a millimetric height difference split the two slabs of concrete. Mara felt the other side—it was perfectly aligned, almost as if made of one single piece of concrete.