10. A Predator’s Vacation

~ Anari ~

The light inside the paper space that cradled Anari was cloudy and crepuscular. She awoke already glamoured and lying on the top half of her bunk bed. The bottom was overcrowded with half potted plants and a whole mess of gardening tools.

Anari rarely came down from the top bunk. She had everything she needed. Her sketchbooks, gameboy, snacks under her pillow. And built into the wall, there was a door to a refrigerator. Anari opened it, knowing what would be waiting for her inside. She reached for a sweetly decorated package and popped it open. The unleashed aroma made her feel like she was standing inside of a bakery. She bit into the egg tart and for a moment, she was soothed. The walls of her room moved and swirled in various, whimsical patterns. The pastel tones darkened as her glamour dropped. Her bunk bed faded away, as did all of the plants and mundane objects. Naked, true in her essence, Anari balanced on a bed of silk that she had woven herself. The groovy apartment had given way to a webbed labyrinth. The walls that had once appeared close and cozy were now concave and cavernous.

The air echoed with muffled cries. Anari swallowed the last of her egg tart. She didn’t want to respond to those cries, but she had put them off long enough. She leaned back until she was upside down, letting her four back legs splay open. It was so much easier to think upside down.

The suffocated sounds were coming from her prey. She had cocooned the two Yingchi bastards in silk nearly a week ago. Nothing too tight. There was room enough for them to breathe. But they weren’t all that happy about it.

She could eat them both. Heaven knows she needed the fuel.

Still, they were trolls, which were not popular among the spiderfolk for their flavor. They were big too. The bigger the prey, the longer it took to die.

If you stay here belly-aching all day, you’ll never eat.

Anari fought back the urge to get to work on the trolls. She was a professional after all. So she reached for the thread that would wire her straight to her employer.

Her heart casually thumped as she dialed the line. She knew she didn’t do anything wrong. The mission went as planned with only some minor hiccups, but he didn’t need to know about all of that. It was normal for her anxiety to spike whenever she had to check in with the director. He was a Sun, afterall. One day she was his best agent. The next, she was his biggest disappointment.

It was all up to Luck now.

The line rang. Anari held her breath until she heard the click.

“Next Dimension Inc, please hold.”

Anari steadied her breathing. She usually was put straight through to the director. Why was Tabitha answering the phone?

“Management speaking.” Sun Bai’s gruff baritone caught her off guard.

Anari wanted to keep the report as short as possible. As she went over the details, she could sense the amusement in his silence, as if he were waiting for her to get to a punchline. When she was done, he held out the pause for a while before asking, “And you phoned me because . . . ?”

Because it’s policy.

Sun Bai already knew that. He wanted Anari to go along with his little game. It would appear that she had caught him in a playful mood.

She was done playing his games. But he didn’t need to know that.

“I just want to know what you wanted me to do with them.” She glanced at the writhing bundles. “They’re ripe.”

“Oh, is that so . . .” he mulled it over. “Well, in that case, I think the Yingchi Clan has suffered enough. Let’s give them a season to see if they get the message and reform. How many hostages did you say you had?”

“Three.” She did not dare lie.

“Nar-Nar, you sound tired – ” She hated when he called her that “ – did the trolls get your web in a knot?”

“I’ll be fine.” And she would as soon as she could get something to eat.

“Hmm, you work too hard, Nar –” Because you give me all the impossible assignments! “ – let two of your hostages go so they can take the message back to their clan leader. Save the one who gave you the hardest time. Hopefully he’s the juiciest.”

It was a carrot – one of many that Sun Bai took pleasure in dangling before her. These days, ignoring the carrots was more costly than becoming further indebted to him.

“Thank you,” she said, intentionally weighing down her voice with more gratitude than she truly felt. Then she added, “Do you want me to return to headquarters after?”

“No, that’s not necessary at the moment.” The deadly humor was mostly absent from his voice. He seemed all business now. “Take a vacation. You deserve it. I’ll drop you a line when I need you.”

He didn’t wait for her to respond before he hung up. Anari stared at the thread, still vibrating from their conversation. She waited there until her heart rate returned to normal. Sun Bai’s final words echoed in her head.

Take a vacation.

It was a sign that he was pleased. For how long, only the Great Sage knew.

Once Anari’s nerves were in check, she made her way towards her hostages, which had gone quiet. She approached them tentatively. One had gotten loose. As soon as Anari realized his absence, she was attacked from behind. She didn’t have enough energy to stop the blow. So she rolled with it, and took the troll down with her. This was her paper space after all – her domain. The hostages had not a clue in all the Ninth Heaven what they were doing.

Together Anari and the hostage slid across one of the surfaces of the web labyrinth. She could hear the other two gasping from their silky cages. Even though the troll that had attacked her had lost control, he fought viciously. Anari merely treated him like a marble underfoot. She maintained her balance and did not try to steer where his tumbling took them.

“Get off me, you eight-legged witch!”

Anari saw her chance when he turned his neck to the side. She sank her fangs there and held fast even when he gave her a bloody nose. Usually she didn’t feed in front of other prey, but this time she made sure the two hostages watched. They would make sure that their leader would know what was waiting for him if he tried to break the law again.

When Anari had finished and let the other two go, she stepped back into her glamour and let the paper space return to looking like a cozy flat suspended in twilight.

She felt so much better. Not only was her stomach in the right place, but her mind was clearer. She thought back to the events at the noodle house and regarded them with light chuckles. If she hadn’t been so close to getting busted at the time, she would have found the situation a lot more amusing.

Sun Ritsu’s face came to mind and she paused. A handsome monkey indeed. A complete idiot, however, when he was outside of the Immortal State. She wondered if he and the pig ever got out alive. Guilt poked her at her gut. He had saved her life and she had barely thanked him. She owed him more than that.

You’re already in the debt of one Sun. You don’t need to be beholden to another.

But it was more than that. This Sun Ritsu didn’t seem like he craved reimbursement. Something else compelled him to save her and the pig. Even when he was Radiant, he seemed different.

It took Anari a moment to realize that she was staring off into space, her face tingling like some bashful school child.

Take a vacation.

The spider rolled her shoulders, her fine bones clicking underneath all the glamour. She wanted to see that Sun again and properly pay her debt. Didn’t he say that he needed help looking for a staff or something of the like? How hard could that be? Anari hadn’t left any sort of tracker on him, so she would need to use all of her skills as a predator to find him. What better way for a hunter like herself to relax than to chase after something – not for food or to satisfy an employer.

No, if Anari went looking for the Sun, it would not be for survival.

It would be for sport.