Chaos by Sarah Fine

throat.
    “Zip brought us to the bottom level of her den. We’re below the square.”
    The squar e . . . I dug around in my brain for the sequence that had landed me here. I remembered being in the square, seeing Malachi—
    I sat up suddenly, my heart jabbing against my ribs. I was in a cement-walled, windowless room with a steel door. Goatskins were piled in one corner and spread over wide concrete-block chairs. There was a concrete table in another corner and a row of buckets in a third corner. The place reeked of wet fur and goat.
    Zip was in the corner, hunched over a rocking, mumbling human, stroking the woman’s wild, curly hair. My mother.
    I’d gotten halfway off the floor before Takeshi appeared in front of me. He grasped my shoulders, his expression grim. “Stay down. Or you’ll probably fall down.”
    Dizziness making the cinder-block walls undulate like snakes, I allowed him to guide me back to the floor. “Malachi,” I said in a scratchy whisper. “She killed him.”
    “No, she didn’t.” Ana scooted toward the goatskin pallet I’d been lying on. “Apparently it takes more than that to kill someone here.”
    I rubbed my hand over my chest. “She tore his heart out, didn’t she?”
    Ana’s eyes were full of sorrow as she nodded. “But according to Zip, she’s done that to him every night since he arrived.”
    My face crumpled as I tried to keep from crying. That was why he had that barely healed wound in the center of his chest. That was where her silver claws had torn him open and claimed their prize. “How could that not kill him?”
    “I told you it was hard to die here if you’re a human,” Takeshi said quietly. “You have to be decapitated, or your body has to be completely destroyed. But if you’re wounded, even something that would be fatal anywhere else, you’ll heal. Badly, though. You’re never quite the same. I’ve seen it many times. I’ve lived it.”
    Ana took his hand, and seeing that connection between them made me feel like my own heart was being ripped out. “What will happen to him?” I choked out.
    “His heart will grow back. It grows back every day. And every night, the Queen—”
    I held up my hand, and his mouth snapped shut. “How long have we been here?”
    He sank to the pallet next to Ana, all slender animal grace. He’d claimed to have lived through that awful kind of wound, but he looked pretty whole to me, pretty healthy. “We haven’t been here long. We brought you here when you—”
    “When I lost it. You hit me, didn’t you?”
    He nodded. “It was the only way to stop you from killing yourself.”
    “I wasn’t trying to kill myself.”
    “That’s for sure. You were trying to kill us , Lieutenant,” Ana said in a hard voice as she rubbed her temple. “But you were also trying to hurl yourself from the fourth story of a building, straight into a hostile crowd that would probably enjoy seeing you disemboweled by their Queen.”
    She was right. I wasn’t about to thank her, though. A bump on the side of my head throbbed with the hot, sick beats of my heart, sending another wave of dizziness rolling over me. From the corner, I heard more Spanish mumbling, then a shuffling of feet and hands. My mother was crawling toward me, her amber eyes riveted to my face. She paused a few feet away, her head tilted. Her hair was combed and pulled into a bushy ponytail. Her cheeks were sunken. Her fingers twitched like she wanted to touch me.
    That was when I realized—this woman, my actual mother, hadn’t laid eyes on me since I was four years old. I’d seen her much more recently, but only while her body was occupied by Zip. The real Rita Santos had already been here, trapped in the Mazikin city, apparently serving as a renewable food source for these creatures. I watched mutely as she edged closer. A few tears fell to the bare concrete floor. Hers, not mine. I was too emptied out to cry, even when she tucked herself against my arm and leaned her