Black Halo by Sam Sykes

much .’
    She had smiled once.
    Kataria stared up at the sky, folding her arms behind her head as she lay upon the shore. The sun was moving slowly, sliding lazily behind the grey clouds, completely unconcerned for her careful scrutiny of its progress. By the time it peered out behind the rolling sheets of cloud, as if checking to see if she were still watching, she estimated three hours had passed.
    She craned her neck up, looking past her bare feet.
    The shoreline greeted her: vast, empty, eager. It was all too pleased to show her the rolling froth, the murmuring surf, the endless blue horizon stretching out before her.
    And nothing more.
    There was no wreckage, no movement, not even a corpse.
    She sighed, turning her gaze skyward again, wondering just how long it was acceptable to wait for signs that one’s companions might have survived after being cast apart in an explosion of sea induced by a colossal, flesh-eating sea serpent.
    What does one look for, anyway? she wondered. Wood? A severed limb? She recalled the Akaneed’s gaping maw, its sharp, flesh-rending teeth. Stool?
    Very little sign of any of that, she noted with a sigh. And why should there be? What were the chances of one of them washing up, anyway? And if they did, why would they wash up as she did, having lost nothing more than her bow and boots?
    They were dead now, she told herself, floating in the sea, resting in a gullet, picked apart by gulls or about to wash up as a bloated, pale, waterlogged piece of flesh. They were dead and she was alive. She should count herself lucky.
    She was alive.
    And they’re dead .
    And she was not.
    And he’s dead .
    And she was a very lucky shict.
    Shict , she repeated that word in her head. I am a shict. Shicts are proud. Shicts are strong. Shicts don’t fight fair. Shicts were given instinct by Riffid, nothing more. Shicts fight to protect. Shicts fight to cleanse. Shicts kill humans. Humans are the disease. Humans are the scourge that overruns this world. Humans build, humans destroy, humans burn and humans kill. Shicts kill humans. Shicts do not trust humans .
    Nature conspired in silence at that moment. The roar of the ocean lulled, the whisper of the breeze stilled, the sound of trees swaying stopped. All for a moment just long enough for her to hear a single, insignificant thought that crept into the fore of her consciousness.
    But you did .
    The creeping thought became a sudden rush of memory, memories she had tried her best to shove in some dark corner of her mind until she could experience a blow against her skull and lose them.
    But they came back, no matter how much she tried to block them out.
    She remembered the sight of a silver mane, remembered how she thought it was so unusual to see in a human. She remembered how that had made her lower her bow, lower the arrow that had been poised at his head, a head so blissfully free of suspicions and projectiles alike. She remembered being intrigued, remembered following him out.
    Shicts kill humans , she told herself, trying to drown the memory in rhetoric. Shicts slaughter humans. Shicts cleanse the world of humans. Mother told you what shicts were .
    But she could not drown the sounds. His sounds, the sounds she had studied and learned: the murmurs that meant he was nervous around her, the griping that meant she had said something he would think about if not talk about, the sighs that meant he was thinking about something she had yet to learn about him.
    Humans don’t have thoughts , she growled inwardly. Humans only have desires. Humans desire gold, desire land, desire whatever it is they don’t have. Father told you what humans were .
    And through it all, she heard the distant beat of a heart. The sound of a heart that had beat fiercely enough to drown out the sound of a roaring sea. The sound of a heart that she was supposed to cut out, the sound of a heart that had fed the pulse in a throat she was supposed to slit. His heart, his pulsating, hideous