Before Kap could take out her bolo to take out the pitcher plant by the roots, Bok disappeared into thin air, a curious kind of disappearing, as if she slowly camouflaged into the rest of the forest landscape. There were sounds of struggling and muffled screaming that suggested that Bok was still there somewhere, so Kap took out her walking stick and poked vaguely on top of the pitcher plant. Her walking stick was stopped by an invisible force.

Kap panicked as Bok’s muffled screams became weaker, but slowly the whimpering turned into a soft, amused kind of giggling.

“I remember now,” Bok said, caressing the plant with the back of her knuckles. “The thing Malagar tried to say about the corpse. I couldn’t feel the anger from them, but I could from the bigger ones. I remember feeling pain, sure, but not from what happened. Pain, coming from who did it.”

“You mean the killer was hurt?”

Bok shook her head. “Like a balance, an equation, an acceptance. There is pain here, in the killer, and that is why there is pain here, in the way the killer shredded the osik. A creature that could do this, Malagar seemed to say, a creature that can inflict this kind of pain—is itself in pain.”