Archive of Our Own

Rumi got her first job at five years old.

Her first job was, at its bare essentials, a task desperately assigned to her by Celine in a last ditch attempt at getting her to stop bothering her while she gardened. As a kid, though, it was the most important task in the world to Rumi, and it was as simple as this: when breakfast was eaten and the sun was rising in the sky, Celine would go out to garden, and it was Rumi’s job to keep her safe. It was called protector of the garden, Celine told her, and Rumi wore the title with pride.

“This is a very serious task, now,” Celine told her on her first day, kneeling in the dirt next to the plants with a gloved hand resting on Rumi’s squirming shoulder. “I will be busy gardening, so it’s up to you to protect me and the plants. What I want you to do—Rumi-ya, look at me, this is important—what I want you to do is keep the bad bugs off of the vegetation. Do you think you can do that?”

“Garden protector!” Rumi roared, proudly showing off all three of her missing teeth.

Celine laughed softly. “Is that a yes?”

“Yes!”

“Good.” She released her shoulder and instantly Rumi began to stumble in excited circles, scouring the grass for bugs. “Remember, you’re keeping the plants safe, so do not crush any of them. Do you hear me?”

Rumi, already squatting in to the dirt and prodding for bugs, paid her no mind.

At first her job was easy. While Celine gardened, Rumi watched her back, and whenever she saw anything that vaguely resembled a bug, she pounced, even if it was just a rock. It was always better to be safe than sorry, and Rumi’s job was to keep everyone safe—Celine especially.

She kept an eye on Celine while she worked, checking in on her every once and a while to make sure no bugs had snuck past her defenses. She must have been doing her job really good, because she never found any bugs on Celine, although she was always shooed away before she could do any real investigation. Celine obviously didn’t understand the danger she was in, but it was okay. Rumi was strong and she knew she could protect her no matter what.

It was always most exciting when Rumi found a real bug. The first time she did, she shrieked and lunged at it so fast she fell right on her face. When it squished between her hand, her chest burst with warm triumph, and, scrambling back to her feet, she made sure to share the development with Celine.

She tapped her on the shoulder and waved a hand in her face. “I protected you!”

Celine’s smile tightened when she turned to see Rumi’s bug gut covered palms waving an inch from her mouth. “Oh?” she said, leaning away. “That’s good, Rumi. Good job.”

It felt good to be good, and Rumi began to search harder. When she couldn’t find any bugs on the garden plants or the stalks of grass, she poked and prodded around until she discovered dozens of them worming around in the soil beneath the rocks lining the garden. Rocks buried in the dirt tended to have lots of little enemies under them, she found, and with a powerful roar, Rumi made sure to eliminate them all.

It was fun being protector of the garden. After a successful kill she couldn’t help but jump around the grass happily behind Celine, clapping her dirty hands together and chuffing proudly over her victory. Mid-clap something fluttered past her, and she froze to follow it with her eyes: a big bug, way bigger than she had ever dealt with before, and it had wings. Its wings were big and yellow with looping black patterns, and Rumi gasped.

Patterns.

This was a real enemy. A tough enemy. Scrunching her face in concentration, she lowered herself to the ground and tracked its path, creeping slowly through the grass.

Slowly, ditzily, the bug fluttered through the air and landed on Celine’s shoe. Celine didn’t notice, sitting on the ground tending to the plants, and panic shot through Rumi. With a mighty roar, she leapt from the grass and pounced.

When she looked up, grinning, Celine was frowning down at her. “What are you doing?”

Rumi held the bug up by one of its dangling wings. “Garden protector!”

“Rumi.” This time Celine didn’t look proud. This time she sighed and held out her hand, taking the bug gently in her palm. “I told you to kill the bad bugs.”

“What?” Rumi struggled to crawl half-into Celine’s lap, trying to catch a glimpse of the bug. “Is that not bad bug?”

“I suppose it’s my fault for expecting you to know.” Rumi cocked her head, and with a small, fond smile, Celine shifted until her lap was open. Cheerfully, Rumi crawled into it. “Listen to me closely, Rumi. Butterflies are good bugs. You don’t want to kill them.”

Rumi tipped her head back against Celine’s chest to frown at her. “Why?”

“Because they help the garden. They’re pollinators, which means they carry pollen between different plants to help them grow big and strong. Hurting butterflies hurts the plants, too.”

Rumi tilted her head back down to look at the squashed butterfly in Celine’s gloved hands, her triumph from before slowly wilting into something that did not feel as good. “But he—he has patterns. I see them.”

“Butterflies don’t have patterns like demons have them, Rumi. Butterflies have patterns in the same way humans have freckles or tigers have stripes. It’s what they look like, and sometimes it helps them blend in to survive.”

Rumi reached under her T-shirt sleeve and scratched the tiny splotch of patterns by her shoulder. “What do mine do?”

For some reason Celine didn’t respond right away. She stared down at the butterfly, her eyes tight, her mouth pulled down into a frown. Rumi worried her question had made her upset.

“Yours won’t protect you, Rumi,” she finally said. “They’ll make you stand out, and they’ll put you in danger. That’s why you must keep them hidden. Every butterfly has patterns. Humans…don’t. Patterns are a demon’s mark. That’s why yours are dangerous; because they give off the wrong impression. They’ll scare people, and that will put you in danger.”

It didn’t seem fair to Rumi. Why couldn’t humans have cool markings, too? Then she wouldn’t have to hide her patterns, and Celine would think they were pretty, maybe, just like the butterfly’s, which was still lying limply in her hand, its wings twitching but body unmoving. Suddenly Rumi felt bad.

You should have hid your patterns, she thought. Then I wouldn’t have hurt you. Glumly, she leaned her head against Celine’s arm. “I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”

“It’s alright, Rumi. It’s just one butterfly. I’ll teach you the difference between the good bugs and the bad bugs so it won’t happen again.”

It’s just one butterfly. The skin at Rumi’s shoulders stung, and she quickly pulled her hand back when she realized she’d been digging her nails into it. If it was just one butterfly, then maybe that was okay. It wasn’t her fault she hadn’t known, or that the butterfly hadn’t covered up.

“Can I be garden protector still?” she worried.

“Of course you can. I can’t think of anyone else better suited. It was just a mistake, and it showed your fast instincts, didn’t it?” Celine placed the butterfly down and Rumi slid out of her lap, watching curiously as she placed it in the grass next to the garden and let it lie. “I’ll show you the gardening book we’ve got and you can look at pictures of the bugs you should kill.”

Rumi wasn’t listening. “What’s gonna happen to it?” she asked, pointing at the still butterfly. Seeing it was making her sad. “Can it move?”

“It can’t move, Rumi. It’s dead. Over time it will decompose, or a bird will eat it, and it will help the world in other ways.”

Help the world? “Even if it died?”

“Of course. Now get over here—I want to show you another good bug you shouldn’t hurt.”

Rumi’s eyes lingered on the bug for a few more seconds. It was pretty, now that she was looking at it. Its markings were more like a drawing or a painting than demon patterns, and again jealousy simmered in her belly. It was no fair. Why can’t my patterns be like that?

“Rumi?”

With one last heavy glance at the butterfly, Rumi raced to Celine’s side. She had work to do and things to learn. As garden protector, she couldn’t let one bug slow her down. She was stronger than that, and Celine needed her to be strong to help.

The butterfly corpse, sitting just out of sight, was pushed to the back of Rumi’s mind.

There were plenty of other butterflies to go around.

Rumi learned a lot of things as garden protector.

Like she had promised, Celine taught her all about the good bugs and the bad bugs and how to tell them apart. She learned that butterflies came in many different colors with many different markings, and that before they could be beautiful they had to be caterpillars—small, wormy, and not as good. Ladybugs were good bugs, too, but not all ladybugs were ladies. Some of them were man bugs, but they were still called ladybugs because they didn’t mind it. That was because bugs were cool, and they never got mad about dumb things like names. All they did was wriggle around and fly from place to place, and they helped the world even though they were small, and even though lots of people didn’t like them.

Not the bad bugs, though. Rumi hated the bad bugs, like aphids, who were sneaky and dangerous. They hurt the garden, but it was hard for Rumi to see them because of how well they blended in and how teeny-tiny they were. Celine told Rumi that the ladybugs were also garden protectors, just like her, and that they could take care of the aphids. She told Rumi to focus on the bigger bugs, like the brown marmorated stinkbugs, but she warned her that crushing them would be smelly.

Whenever Celine found a new bug in the garden, she would tell Rumi whether or not they were good or bad—but some bugs weren’t in the garden, so after a long day of protecting Celine and the plants, they would go inside and look at the gardening book.

The gardening book had a section all about good bugs and bad bugs, with big detailed pictures for Rumi to look at when the reading got too hard. She would stare at the pictures for hours on end, taking in the colors of each bug, the shape of their shells, which markings they had, and how they were different from the others. Every night before bed she pleaded that Celine read it to her, and it became routine to fall asleep listening to the gentle hum of bug facts.

Even with the book and Celine’s teaching, though, it wasn’t always easy to tell the good bugs apart from the bad. She was bound to pounce on something harmful sooner or later, although being the protector of the garden meant she was ready and willing to face any and all danger that came her way. At six years old, she was a mighty tiger chasing evil bugs out of her territory, leaping on anything dangerous that came too close. It was during one of her usual patrols of the garden that she saw a flash of movement and a flutter of wings out of the corner of her eye. On instinct, she lunged.

Pain shot through her hand and she reeled back with a wail.

Celine watched her with a frown as she came stumbling over, weepy-eyed, her palm outstretched. Somehow she managed to make out Rumi’s words past her hiccuping sobs, because after a few moments of turning her injured hand back and forth, she lowered it with a sigh that didn’t scream all too surprised.

“Oh, Rumi,” she said. “Did you attack a bee?”

Through her crying, Rumi managed to choke out, “I got—defeated—bad bug—”

Celine clicked her tongue. “You’re alright. There’s no need to cry. Come on, let’s get you inside.” She picked Rumi up with a grunt, muttering something about Rumi being far too big for this now, although it was hard to hear past her own wailing.

Celine set her down on a chair in the house, and gradually Rumi’s crying faded into sniffles as Celine rinsed her throbbing hand under water and rubbed something on top of the sting. Once she was done, Rumi’s cheeks were drying and the sting wasn’t so bad anymore. She placed a bandaid over it, adorned with little ladybugs, and glanced up at Rumi from where she was kneeling. “Alright?” she checked.

Rumi sniffled and wiped her eyes. “Mm-hm.”

“Good. I told you—bee stings aren’t bad at all. You were very brave.”

Rumi puffed her chest out slightly at the praise. “Yeah. And I won against the bad bug.”

“Bees are good bugs, Rumi,” Celine corrected. “Remember? They’re even better pollinators than butterflies.”

Rumi’s jaw dropped. “But it hurt me!”

“Right. Because you hurt it first.”

“No I didn’t,” Rumi muttered, kicking her feet.

“You jumped on it.”

“But—but I thought it was a bad bug!”

“And you were wrong.” At Rumi’s sulky silence, Celine sighed and took her hands, careful not to squeeze her injured one too hard. “It hurt you because it was afraid. You were scared of it—”

“I wasn’t scared! I’m never scared!”

“—you were scared of what it might do, and so you attacked. But the bee was scared, too. It was scared to see you attacking it, and it was simply defending itself. Does that make it a bad bug?”

Rumi frowned down at her swinging feet. “…No.”

“That’s right. It was a good bug, just afraid. Fear makes people do bad things sometimes. It’s the same with bugs, isn’t it? We’re all the same. Some of us are just smaller than others.”

Rumi smushed her mouth together and thought very, very hard. Slowly, her feet stilled, and she glanced up at Celine with eyes that suddenly felt wet again. “Did I kill it?”

Celine’s eyes softened. “What do you know about bees, Rumi?”

“…That if their stingers are ripped, that means they’re dead.”

She nodded. Rumi sniffled roughly, vision blurring, lip wobbling, as Celine’s thumb rubbed soothing circles in the back of her hand.

“Don’t cry,” she said. “You didn’t mean to. It was a misunderstanding, and it was just one bee. We have lots of other bees around to pollinate. Okay?”

“Okay,” Rumi whispered.

It was a misunderstanding. It was just one bee.

When they went out to the garden again, Rumi searched for the bee in the grass, but she couldn’t find it. Maybe it had gotten better and was flying around with its bee friends like usual. Maybe she hadn’t hurt it after all. But she couldn’t shake the thought that she had, and as Celine finished her work in the garden and the hurt of her beesting began to fade, she couldn’t help but think it hadn’t been worth it. It had died just for a tiny sting? For such a stupid misunderstanding?

As she sat in the grass and watched Celine garden, her attention slipped again and again to the bee. It must have been scared. Maybe it had been scared before she killed it, too, maybe even weeks before, maybe even its whole life. Being so small but so loud was dangerous, and maybe it knew that. If it knew that, then—knew people would think it was dangerous, knew it could hurt people—was it really her fault for killing it? Maybe it was the bee’s fault for not hiding.

Picking at the edge of her ladybug bandaid, she couldn’t help but feel bad anyway. I’m sorry, little bee, she thought, head bowed to the ground.

I’m sorry for being afraid.

Many rewards came out of being the protector of the garden.

Obviously, like any good future Hunter, Rumi did her job selflessly with no expectations for payment. She was okay working outside with Celine as long as she got to chase the bad bugs and hold the good ones in her hands. She didn’t need money, or fame, or…whatever the other things people in movies wanted. If she never got anything in return, she’d be totally fine, because a Hunter was selfless and hardworking for the sake of the world, not for the sake of their own desires. At least, that was what Celine always said.

Not expecting rewards wasn’t the same as rejecting them when they came, though. Rumi loved rewards, and she got plenty of them for her hard work. Celine called them “naturally earned rewards”—things she received automatically by doing the work, like fulfillment, exercise, and knowledge. Out of all of her naturally earned rewards, Rumi’s favorite was clean, undamaged food.

It came when the vegetables in the garden were ready for picking. Rumi helped Celine collect them and bring them inside, where they would separate some for later and some for their dinner that night. Something about helping Celine pick vegetables from the garden after a long day of squashing evil bugs (or pretending to, if there weren’t many out), and knowing that she had had a part in protecting them, gave her the same rush of emotion killing bad bugs gave her. This rush was longer, though, and much less intense—it was dull in a good way that sat on her skin and made her feel warm as she dutifully followed Celine’s instructions in the kitchen.

Another one of Rumi’s jobs, this one newer, was kitchen assistant. Once the vegetables were all big and strong and picked from the garden, that was when Rumi’s new job came in handy. In the kitchen she was responsible for many different important things. Celine taught her how to use knives, and she became very good at chopping up vegetables. She was good at putting things in pots and pans and onto plates, too, and she was especially good at watching the food as it cooked to make sure nothing “bad happened”—a task assigned to her with much trust by Celine. Like garden protector, she took kitchen assistant very, very seriously.

And, like garden protector, she reaped the rewards.

“Rumi,” Celine scolded as Rumi stuffed her face with dinner, “don’t shove so much in your mouth all at once.”

“B’t ‘s so ‘ummy!”

“Don’t talk with your mouth full, either.”

Rumi scowled. Reluctantly, she focused on chewing, legs kicking with barely contained excitement as she tried not to shovel her next few bites down her throat like a feral animal.

“Better,” Celine said. “When you’re outside you can act like a tiger all you want, but when you’re inside you’ll have manners.”

Rumi pouted. “Sorry.”

“It’s alright. I’m glad you like the food. You should feel very proud. If it weren’t for your protection, who knows what would’ve happened to the garden.” Rumi squared her shoulders proudly, and Celine laughed. “My little warrior.”

Rumi did her best to keep her manners good for the rest of dinner. She swallowed before she talked and cleaned her plate of all her food, buzzing with her day’s accomplishments, and when dinner was done, she insisted on helping Celine with the dishes.

“I have so many jobs,” she announced proudly as she grabbed a towel from the cabinets and clambered onto the stool by the sink, eagerly waiting for Celine to pass her a dish to dry. Scrubbing them over the sink, Celine laughed.

“You do,” she agreed. “That’s a mark of a good Hunter—ambition and handling responsibility well. When you’re older, it’s very important you keep those traits. You’ll be very, very busy, but you must always work as hard as you can for everyone’s sake.”

Rumi bobbed her head up and down eagerly. “I promise I will! I like working. I’ll be the best demon hunter and idol ever!”

“I don’t doubt it.” Rumi leaned forward with her hands braced on the edge of the countertop, bouncing on the tips of her feet. She perked up when Celine passed a dish her way. “Remember, be gentle. The plate is fragile.”

In no time at all the plate was shining and dry, and Rumi turned proudly to Celine, only to see another dish being passed her way. She pushed the first one aside and quickly took the second, grabbing her now-damp towel and getting to work.

“I was thinking, Rumi…” Celine ran a pair of chopsticks under the sink water, twisting them about almost thoughtfully. “…with how good you are at protecting the garden, it’s about time you received a promotion.”

Rumi paused her scrubbing to tilt her head. “Promotion?”

“Yes. It’s when you get a better position at a job you already have. A garden protector, for example, may be elevated to perhaps a gardener herself.”

The plate nearly slipped from Rumi’s suddenly sweaty hands. “Really?”

“Really. The role of gardener is already taken, of course, but there seems to be an open position for junior gardener…”

“I want to be junior gardener!” The plate clattered against the countertop as she spun to face Celine, eyes wide. “Could I? Please, please, please—”

“Careful, Rumi, the plate—”

She scrambled to tuck it against her chest before facing her again, bouncing up and down on the tips of her toes. “Can I really help you with the plants in the garden?”

Celine sighed, but Rumi knew it wasn’t a bad sigh, because she was smiling. “Yes. We can start tomorrow, how does that sound? I’ll teach you all about how to tend to the garden.”

Rumi’s bouncing turned to full leaps and she nearly toppled off the stool with her plate.

After breakfast the next day, Rumi dragged Celine out of the back door and beelined straight for the garden, tugging on her arm and pulling on her sleeve as she allowed herself to be yanked along like a tired family dog.

Rumi made sure to sit criss-cross, back straight, and hands folded carefully in her lap when they settled in front of the garden side by side. Her new job meant new poise, new professionalism, and new manners, which meant no more pouncing and growling. As junior gardener, she had to act like Celine, which meant a stoic face and taking things seriously.

It was easy to understand why Celine was so serious when her new job actually began. Junior gardener was a much, much harder job than garden protector. A lot more plants existed than Rumi had thought, and they were a lot more complicated than she’d thought, too. Some plants were for food, some were for being pretty, some were big, and some were small. Some plants needed more water than others, and some plants needed more sun, and all of them could be hurt by bad bugs, but some got hurt more than others.

Celine called the bad bugs “pests,” and she taught Rumi how to tell if the pests were causing trouble.

“Do you see this?” Her hand skimmed underneath the leaf of a plant growing in the dirt beside their back doors, ones Rumi had never paid much attention to. She paid attention now, leaning in to examine the tiny jagged holes cutting into the green. “This is why monitoring every plant carefully is important. Bitemarks like these are a sign that pests have been around.”

Rumi leaned in closer, squinting. “But I don’t see any.” It just looked like a chewed-up plant to her. Where were the bugs?

“They can be sneaky sometimes. I’ll show you the best ways to deal with them later. For now, keep an eye out for bites like these, especially on the fruits.”

I thought the best way to deal with them was squashing them? Rumi thought, but Celine had already moved on, and she dismissed the question to rush after her.

It was afternoon when Celine finally ended their gardening lessons, and as Rumi sat in the shade in the grass by the house, staring at the wide array of plants spanning through their backyard, she couldn’t help but feel a bit lost.

“How do you remember all that stuff?” she asked as Celine passed her a plate of cut-up fruit, tacking on a thank you as she placed the plate gently in her lap and grabbed a handful.

“Eat slowly, Rumi,” Celine scolded as Rumi shoveled it into her mouth. She sat in the garden chair next to her. “What do I always tell you?”

“Good Hunters have good manners,” Rumi recited past a mouthful of strawberries. Celine pressed her lips together disapprovingly, and, more glum, Rumi swallowed and repeated herself.

Celine nodded, then leaned back and sighed, staring off into the yard. “Time and experience, I suppose. It might seem overwhelming now, but when you’re as old as me, it will come to you like second nature. Of course, my memory is not infallible. I have a notebook for important information that I can show you later tonight.”

Rumi was wary, at first. How exciting could a notebook be? Yet that night after dinner Celine laid it out on the table, and as Rumi flipped through it, taking in the photographs taped against the thick pages and the carefully handwritten notes and reminders, it became just as cool as any sword technique or impressive high note. Most of the pages were stained with dirt and wrinkled with dry water, but as Rumi ran her thumb and finger against the dirty corners, she felt a budding sensation of awe and desire.

“Can I have a notebook, too?” she asked, studying the tiny illustration of a butterfly on the upper right corner of one of the pages. She couldn’t really figure out why it was there. It had no arrows pointing to it, no labels, no information or facts. It was probably as old as Rumi—they were only on the very first few pages, after all, and Celine had told her as she’d taken it out that she’d had it since before Rumi was born.

“I don’t see why not. I’m sure I’ve got a few empty ones lying around.” Celine barely glanced up as she swiped away a few droplets of spilled sauce from the table with a soapy washcloth. “We’ll get you started tomorrow.”

The next page was full of printed leaves, each one with jagged bite marks and pest-sized holes. Celine had scrawled the name of a bug beside every print, some of them ones that Rumi knew, but most that she didn’t. Aphid, webworm, whitefly, spider-mite. Bad bugs.

Pests.

She lifted her eyes pleadingly from the notebook, and Celine tensed before any questions had even left her mouth. “Can I borrow it?” When her hand stilled and her eyes narrowed, Rumi pouted. “Please? I won’t rip it or spill anything on it or lose it! Just for a little, Celine.”

“You better keep it where it will stay out of harm,” she warned. “That’s an important notebook, and I need it to know when some of the plants will bloom or when they need to be picked.”

“I promise I will! I’ll keep it right beside my bed where you can always see it.”

Celine sighed. She didn’t have to say anything; Rumi knew the cadence in her breath like second nature. She snatched the book off the table with a wild grin and said, “Thank you—”

“If you ruin it I’ll make you wish you hadn’t—”

“I know!”

“—make you five laps around the yard—”

“Uh-huh!”

“—make it ten laps around the yard—”

Rumi had taken the notebook off of the table and was already booking it to her room. “I won’t ruin it!” she called over her shoulder, swinging the door shut with a slam—

“Don’t slam my doors!”

—and skidding to a halt with a wince behind it. “Sorry!” she called feebly, but no more shouting came, just distant grumbling, and with a relieved exhale, she hurried to her bed and placed Celine’s notebook down.

From underneath her bed she felt around until her hand caught on the thick spine of another book, and with a triumphant huff, she dragged it out and hefted it onto the mattress. Climbing in after it, she opened the notebook back to the leaf-printed page and ran her finger down to the second leaf impression. With her other hand and a bit of struggle, she opened the gardening book to the pest page without a single glance to the table of contents, and flipped through it until she found the name her finger rested on.

Scarab beetle.

Grinning, she tucked her legs and scooter in closer, hunkering over the book.

“Scarab beetles,” she read carefully, “can can be identified by their metallic shells…”

Rumi woke the next morning with her cheek smushed against an open book page and Celine’s hand gently shaking her shoulder. Her eyes were still drooping by breakfast’s end; that was, until Celine rested an empty notebook on the table between them and they nearly bugged out of her skull.

Learning to garden was a lot easier with notes, and it made her feel pretty important, too. She tried to focus ten times harder, listen to everything Celine said, and ask as many questions as she could, because she really wanted to learn—and also because she really wanted to fill her notebook up as fast as possible. Rumi’s favorite parts were when Celine let her do things herself, like watering the plants or helping prune the leaves. It made her feel just as important as the notebook did, and being important felt just as good as being good.

By midday her hands were dirty and her clothes were sweaty, and Celine stopped them for a lemonade break. Once again sitting in the shade side by side, she eyed Rumi’s hands, smearing streaks of dirt against the condensation on her glass of lemonade, and sighed.

“I suppose I’m going to have to get you your own gloves,” she murmured, more to herself than to Rumi.

Rumi sipped at her straw happily. My own gloves. That must mean she was really important now. Her notebook, resting by her side, already had a few pages speckled with dirt, and where imperfections typically made her feel upset, the dirtiness didn’t feel imperfect now. Her notebook would look just like Celine’s one day, and that was when she would be the most important.

The thought of Celine’s notebook reminded her of something from last night. Popping her mouth off the straw in her glass, she asked, “Celine, how are caterpillars bad when butterflies are good?”

Celine hummed absent-mindedly. “What do you mean?”

“I was looking at the gardening book last night, and it was talking about bad—about pests, and caterpillars were there.” She swirled the ice in her glass around, watching them bump and clack against the edges. “But how can caterpillars be bad bugs and butterflies be good bugs? Aren’t they the same bugs?”

Celine exhaled softly, turning to gaze at the graveyard in the distance. “I see. They are the same insect, Rumi, you’re correct, but their behaviors are different. Caterpillars primarily feed on leaves while butterflies feed on nectar, and butterflies pollinate where caterpillars don’t. That’s what makes them different. One harms and other helps—it’s a difference in instinct.”

“But they’re still the same.” Rumi trailed her fingernail down the budding liquid on the side of her glass. “If I kill a caterpillar then I’m killing a butterfly.”

“Well, they aren’t quite butterflies yet, you have to remember. What’s important is what they’re doing to the garden currently. Caterpillars aren’t major pests, so killing them isn’t always necessary, but if for some reason they’re causing you a major problem, it’s important to focus on what they are now—not what they could be. Do you understand?”

“I guess.” She settled her glass on her lap with one hand and scratched her shoulder with the other. “Bad bugs are bad bugs even if one day they could be good.”

“Don’t think too hard about it,” Celine said. “What’s important are the plants, after all. We keep the bugs around because they benefit the garden, not because they have feelings.”

Rumi’s ice was melting. She brought her straw up to her lips and chewed on it, mind churning slowly. It’s okay to kill butterflies if they aren’t butterflies yet. Caterpillars don’t have feelings. If they’re bad in the moment then they’re okay to kill.

“Rumi, don’t chew your straw.”

It had started digging into her tongue, so she listened, releasing her teeth and sucking. It hit her stinging tongue, cool and refreshing, and she closed her eyes, the sensation quelling her thoughts.

They came roaring back that night before bed as she was changing in front of her bedroom mirror. Terror as cold as iced lemonade punched her in the throat, and her shirt fluttered onto the floor, abandoned, as she raced out of the room.

In the living room, Celine was sitting with a book in her lap, and Rumi tackled her leg with a high-pitched whining noise.

“Rumi?” She snapped the book shut and rested a hand on the top of Rumi’s head. “What’s wrong?” Her leg tensed in Rumi’s grasp and the hand retreated. “Where’s your shirt?”

She peered up at Celine, throat burning and lip wobbling. Don’t cry, she pleaded with herself as the room began to blur. Good Hunters don’t throw fits. But she couldn’t help herself, and the tears exploded alongside an incomprehensible flood of words.

“Rumi, what—”

“What—if I don’t—m-make it to a butterfly?” she wailed.

“…What?”

Rumi tried to explain, but it was impossible to get the words out through her hiccuping sobs. With a sigh, Celine took the glasses from her face and placed them on the side table along with her book. A moment later two warm, steady hands cupped under Rumi’s arms and lifted her, and she scrambled onto Celine’s lap to collapse against her chest, nose squashed against her collarbone.

A gentle hand combed through her hair, running loose and unbraided down her back. With each stroke, her sobs gradually quieted, until she trembled against Celine with only silent sniffles.

“You mustn’t cry,” Celine said, sounding exasperated. “Crying gets you nowhere, you know this. You must use your words to get what you want. What upset you? Butterflies?”

Rumi whimpered and shoved her face deeper into Celine’s neck.

She sighed. “Work with me, Rumi.” Her hand tugged Rumi away until her face, red and wet with tears, was exposed to the air. “Eye contact,” she scolded. Lip wobbling, Rumi met her stern gaze. “Better. It’s too late for this. Tell me what happened.”

Her shoulder sunk, and she averted her eyes for just a second before she tensed and snapped them back up again. She fidgeted with her fingers instead, lifting a hand to wipe at her sniffling nose.

“I’m scared,” she whispered into the silence, voice cracking, and her eyes began to burn again.

“Scared? Of what? You’re far too old to be scared of the dark.”

Rumi shook her head vehemently. “Not of the dark! Of…dying.” She whispered it like a bad word, but it felt worse than that. It felt like a terrible omen.

It also didn’t seem to be an answer Celine was expecting. “Dying?” she echoed. “Why in the world are you thinking of that? You’re only seven.”

“Exactly!” she wailed. She moved to dive back into the crook of Celine’s neck and bit back a devastated cry when her sturdy hands stopped her again, pushing her back. When she met Celine’s gaze, it was reprimanding, and she slumped her shoulders with a whimper. “I’m the caterpillar.”

“Rumi.” Her face was pinched in the way it always was after she got a headache after a long day. Her eyes were closed, her hand messaging at her temples, her lips flat. She looked…tired. Of me? “It’s too late to solve these—riddles of yours. Stop speaking in metaphors and tell me what’s wrong.”

“What if someone kills me before my patterns are gone?” Rumi blurted.

Celine’s hand froze on her temple. Slowly, her eyes opened.

“And, and—” She was suddenly frightened of making her madder, frightened of seeing an expression on her face she wasn’t allowed to look away from, desperate to explain. “—and it would be okay to do that to me. Because I’m bad right now, like a caterpillar, but if I were good like a butterfly it’d be bad to kill me. But it’s okay if you killed me because right now I’m bad and it doesn’t matter if one day I’ll be good. So I’m worried one day I won’t make it to good.”

“Rumi,” Celine said.

“But I don’t want to die!” The tears erupted again. She scrubbed them furiously away as they fell, one arm still wrapped around her body in a feeble self-hug. “I want to be—to be good before I die. B-but what if I run out of time and someone gets me—?”

“Rumi.”

“I don’t wanna die as a caterpillar!”

“You’re not going to die, Rumi. Listen to me.” Celine gripped Rumi’s wrists tightly, her eyes dark. “As long as you keep your patterns hidden, nothing bad will ever happen to you. Do you hear me?”

“What if it’s by accident—”

“There won’t be accidents. Look at me, Rumi. There won’t be accidents.”

Rumi looked, and in Celine’s eyes she could see her faint reflection: wide-eyed, teary, and disbelieving.

Slowly, Celine’s face softened.

Her hands slipped from Rumi’s wrists. Rumi tried to cling on tight, but Celine lifted her off her lap easily anyway, placing her onto the floor before standing and ignoring her pleading whimper.

“I can’t carry you,” she said. “You’re too big for that. You’ll have to follow me. Come on.” When she walked away, it was faster than Rumi could process, still blinking wetly on the floor by the chair.

Her hand missed Celine’s retreating pant leg by a few inches. Suddenly alone and feeling cold without her touch, she forced her trembling legs to move and stumbled after her.

Her room was how she’d left it: bedcovers pulled back and a T-shirt lying discarded on the floor. Eyes downturned from the mirror, she watched as Celine crouched and picked the shirt up.

“It’s important that you always remember something, Rumi.” She turned and crouched in front of her, fixing with the shirt in her hands. “Everybody makes mistakes. You’re going to hear a lot about how mistakes are good, and how they happen to everyone, and how they can be forgiven, and all of that is true.” She raised the shirt and slipped it onto Rumi, adjusting it until her head popped out from the collar. She smiled when it did, and Rumi, wet-eyed and sniffly, smiled wobbily back. “It’s not true for you. Your mistakes could kill you, and that’s why you must make as little mistakes as possible.”

Slowly, Rumi’s smile slipped.

“When you grow up there will always be people watching you, and there will always be things those people can’t see.” She slid Rumi’s left arm through a shirt sleeve, and then her right arm, then pulled the shirt down to cover her stomach. “The most important thing these people can’t see are your patterns.” Her hand touched Rumi’s right sleeve gently, now fully covering the small patch of patterns resting on her skin. “The second most important thing is your fears. If they discover them, they will exploit you, hurt you, and take advantage of you. A good Hunter is diligent, and those fears, those faults, cannot be known. It’s a rule that applies to you more than it’s ever applied to any Hunter before you. Because of that, it’s important that you begin applying them now.”

She brought Rumi close and cupped her drying cheek. “That means never telling anyone about them. It means no shirt off, even when it’s just us. It means keeping your fear quiet, because people will suspect, and make theories, and pry for more. It makes sense that you’re frightened, but if you listen to me, and you follow those rules, you’ll be safe, and one day you won’t have to worry about covering up or keeping secrets.” She smiled and squeezed Rumi’s cheek. “One day you’ll have beautiful wings, Rumi. I know you will. You won’t die young. Okay?”

Rumi leaned into her hand. “Okay,” she whispered, eyes fluttering shut. Something still rested uneasily in Rumi’s stomach, but Celine had never been wrong before. “Can I go to bed?”

“Of course.” Taking her hand gently, Celine guided her to bed and watched her crawl in. She tucked the covers up to her chin, hesitated, then leaned forward and gently pressed a kiss to the side of Rumi’s head. Exhaustion hit Rumi roughly, tugging at her from the darkness, hungry to pull her under, and her body sank tiredly into the mattress.

Celine pulled away, tucking a curl of hair behind Rumi’s ear, then hesitated, her finger stilling. “And keep in mind that bugs and humans are very different. You humanize them too much. They don’t think like us or feel like us, so don’t feel as if they’re the same as us. You’re not a bug—you’re human. …Alright?”

Rumi hummed softly, already drifting off.

Celine’s shadow hovered over her for a few beats, before it retreated slowly. The lights flicked off and the door creaked shut, swamping Rumi in darkness. She exhaled softly, head hurting from how hard she’d cried.

With the pain in her head, the tightness in her chest, and the lingering unease in her stomach, fighting off sleep was hard. She didn’t want to, anyway. She gave into the pull and let it drag her under.

In her dreams the world was wobbly and off-center, and she sat on her bed in the middle of a beautiful meadow of flowers. Small critters crawled on her blankets and bees buzzed from flower to flower, and she sat with her head tipped back to let the sun on her face. Time stretched long and short and she teetered and tilted, feeling unstable, like her bed was a ship on rocking water, much harder to cling onto. She leaned sideways and caught a glimpse of something on her bedframe, something small and worm-like. The buzz around her faded; the wind picked up, and for a moment the sun was gone and the world was cold as she looked at the caterpillar.

Her left palm was full of ladybugs and bumblebees, and her right palm raised up to hover over the caterpillar. She hesitated, hand half-cupped, half-flat. Should she squash it or pick it up?

She stared for a while, but the air was getting cold, and her left hand was beginning to close on its own. She didn’t want to squash the ladybugs and bumblebees. They helped plants, but caterpillars…caterpillars didn’t.

She recognized this one—a webworm. She’d read they were harmful to trees. Pests. She didn’t like pests, not one bit. Her palm straightened out, shadow swamping the webworm’s tiny body.

Should she? One day you’ll have beautiful wings. Webworms turned into moths, not butterflies. Who knew if it would be beautiful at all? Surely it’d be okay to kill it if it wasn’t like the rest. It wasn’t helping the world by existing and never would.

Palm against the caterpillar’s back, she whispered, “I’m nothing like you.”

She pressed down.

The body squished. It didn’t crunch, or scream, or cry. She wiped the guts on the side of her bedsheets and turned to face the meadow, buzzing starting again. What had she been worried about? Killing it had been easy.

She forgot, as the sun beamed out from the clouds and butterflies dotted her face, that she’d even killed it at all.

A month later Rumi’s demon training began.

What had once been days full of cooking, gardening, schoolwork, and singing lessons became days full of sword drills and sparring. She no longer woke early to help Celine with breakfast, but ran laps in the yard instead, and when the sun beat down on her midday it was with the hilt of a practice sword in her hands where pruners used to rest.

Celine’s goal was to build her agility and quick-thinking skills, her reaction time and athleticism, and when Rumi failed to show those skills, she woke every morning to more and more. More laps, more drills, more spars, paired with hour-long hikes and lessons in climbing, topped off with schoolwork and dance practice and vocal lessons. Along with it all she needed to hone the Honmoon, hone her voice, and strengthen her connection with the spiritual barrier. Within just a few weeks she was in constant motion: wake up, train, sing, dance, spar, homework, eat, train, hike, climb, dance, sing, focus, run, keep running, don’t stop, summon a weapon, talk to the Honmoon, pull down your sleeve, no time for breaks, train, train, don’t stop running, swing that sword like you mean it, take this seriously—

Within a year gardening had become a hobby she had no time for. Her training was tough at seven years old, and even tougher at eight. At nine she had no time to look through the gardening book or tend to the few houseplants she had scattered along her bedroom, because the moment she came in from training, showered, and ate dinner, her bed was a brick aimed straight for the back of her head, knocking her out within seconds. She woke every morning similarly to someone who’d been knocked out by a brick, too: sore, aching, and desperately wishing to stay in bed.

At ten she’d grown used to routine.

Her alarm woke her in the morning an hour before Celine, and she did her homework from the day before until a twin alarm set off across the house and Celine woke up to make breakfast. She had stopped asking a long time ago to help, and instead, with one murmured “Good morning,” opened the back door into the soft glow of sunrise to warm up for training.

She had breaks, of course. Breaks to eat, breaks to sleep, breaks for school. Sometimes, when Celine noticed she’d spent all week working hard, she’d end her training half a day early and tell her she could enjoy the rest of her time. Sometimes Rumi spent it napping, sometimes reading, sometimes finishing up homework. Almost always, though, Rumi would join Celine in the garden.

Working side-by-side was nice. Her notebook was starting to look like Celine’s—dirty and well-loved. As the years stretched on and training made her less and less tired, she would spend her nights before bed with her potted plants, reading them the latest from her gardening notebook, or telling them about her day. On some lucky nights she would find a bug on the wall, and with her hands gently cupped around it, she would open the window and let in the soft breeze, watching the moon and feeling the tickle of legs crawling against her palms.

Nights with the moonlight on her skin and an insect in her hands were the nights that, however briefly, chased her stress away.

At eleven, she summoned her weapon from the Honmoon for the first time. It was as big as accomplishments got, yet Rumi didn’t get a break for it—if anything, training grew more intense.

At twelve, Celine left Jeju Island and took Rumi with her.

It had been the plan for a while, but the news still somehow blindsided her. “I’m not sure when we’ll be back,” Celine said that night over Rumi’s birthday dinner, and her chopsticks nearly tumbled from her hands in shock. “It could take years to find the other Hunters. Take what you absolutely cannot leave behind and everything else will stay.”

On the airplane to Seoul, Rumi checked her backpack for the tenth time to make sure she had what she needed outside of her suitcase: her schoolwork, hairbrush, snacks, notebook, gardening book, and stuffed bear tucked just under her arm as she leaned against the seat and looked at the sky outside the window.

She’d flown a few times before, when she was too young to be left alone and Celine needed to attend an event outside of Jeju. It had been a while, though, and being so high up made her feel like she had wings. It wasn’t an enjoyable sensation. The prospect of her future overshadowed the sight of the clouds below them, and she felt sick to her stomach the whole flight. The only thing keeping her stable was the feeling of her stuffed bear in her arms, valiantly surviving strangulation for her own comfort. She was a bit too old to be reliant on a Teddy bear, but Celine didn’t comment, and Rumi was grateful.

Their hotel was…fancy. Big and white-walled, the only plants were the stiff, fake-looking ones in the corners of the lobby. Their room was equally as bland and sterile, and Rumi missed her plants within seconds of dragging her suitcase into her room. The two of them had re-planted them outside by Mi-yeong’s grave before they’d left, where Celine had promised her mother would take care of them, but it still made Rumi anxious. They could get all the water and sun they needed, but where would they be without Rumi’s stories? Without her late night talks about her day and her notebook? Who would gently pick up the bugs by the windowsill and rest them against the grass outside? How would her plants be without her?

And how would Rumi be without her plants?

The answer was fine, albeit a bit lonely. As the years stretched on, she got plenty of new plants to keep her company in her room, and plenty of people to keep her company outside it. The years certainly stretched on, too, and plenty of people there were.

She would learn in the four years they stayed in that hotel none of those people would stay.

Finding the other Hunters was hard. It involved a lot of training and talking with new people. Many of the other trainees she befriended would leave within months, sometimes weeks, and most of Rumi’s friends came and went, the numbers on her phone drying out with time. She didn’t have time to text or hang out, not when she was so busy with training. It was up to her and Celine to find the other Hunters as fast as they could, which meant burning through more trainees than Rumi could bond with, leaving her feeling like an overworked machine.

According to Celine, four years was fast. To Rumi, turning sixteen felt hopeless.

Meeting Mira was the best thing to happen to her in years.

Although she was weird, definitely weirder than the other girls Rumi had met during their search, and much harder to get along with. Somehow she was both angry and awkward, sharp-mouthed and fumbling. She spoke to Celine stiffly and formally one minute then rolled her eyes at her the next, and when she spoke to Rumi it was with a hesitant, kind tone—one that quickly turned to sharp attitude at what felt like the switch of nothing at all. It was disorienting for Rumi. Why did she lash out at nothing? Why was she always so nervous? She’d thought nerves made people quieter, more reserved, but for Mira it felt like each unsure step back inspired an angry step forward, like she was mad at herself for even being unsure in the first place.

Zoey was…just as weird, if Rumi was being honest, but just as relieving nonetheless.

It was easier to wrap her mind around Zoey’s behavior. She was nervous, energetic, laughed too loud and too much, spoke a lot one minute and then hardly at all the next. She was obvious in her nervousness in a way Mira was not, tripping over her words and retreating when she got too loud, and when she did, Rumi did her best to reach out and bring her back. Smiling, nodding, asking more questions, laughing at her jokes even if they were stuttered or came out in a sentence that trailed quietly and unsurely off. She liked Zoey. Hell, she liked Mira, too—both of them were funny and they were kind, despite whatever was going on with Mira, and although things started off…rocky…all three of them got along well.

Really well.

And suddenly four years felt like nothing. As quickly as they had come, they were gone, and Rumi was facing the same empty hotel room as before, suitcase packed and bag slung over her shoulder, space as sterile as it had been the day she’d gotten there—sterile like she’d never existed in it in the first place.

A few hours later she was facing her childhood home Jeju after four years, taller and older than she had been before. Yet the breeze felt the same on her skin, and her shoulders loosened at the sight just like they always had. Flanked by Zoey and Mira, the stress that had been building up inside her for years seeped from her skin like an exhale.

And with the first opportunity she got, she put the girls to work in the garden.

“I just don’t get why we have to do this,” Mira grumbled, fumbling with the pruning shears in her gloved hands. She reached up to wipe the sweat from her forehead, groaning, and Rumi clicked her tongue disapprovingly.

“You’d have less trouble holding them if you used your dominant hand, you know,” she pointed out, resisting the urge to take the shears from her and do it herself.

Mira grumbled. “Celine told me I should work on using my right hand more, because ‘you never know when you may injure your left in battle.’” She straightened up and imitated Celine’s voice, and Zoey giggled from Rumi’s right. “Sorry we weren’t all born ambidextrous like you.”

Rumi huffed, affronted, but Zoey cut her off before she could protest. “Yeah! You’re, like, the perfect specimen right out of the womb, Rumi.”

“The perfect specimen?” Should she be offended by that? Was that offensive?

“It’s a compliment,” Zoey rushed to assure her. Then— “Wait, should I be using my nondominant hand, too?”

Rumi bit back a sigh. “No. We’re gardening, not training, and you’re going to cut the wrong part of the plant by accident. Just use what you’re best at. This is supposed to be fun.”

“Fun?” Mira echoed incredulously, rubbing sweat from her temple, gloves smearing dirt across her skin. Rumi stopped herself last second from reaching out to brush it away. Her gloves were just as dirty, if not dirtier. “This is torture.”

Rumi gaped. “No it is not!” How could anyone think gardening was torture?

“I think it’s kind of fun,” Zoey offered. “Like, at least it’s not three hours of sword drills, right?”

“I guess,” Mira grunted. “There are just too many bugs.”

“What?” Rumi glanced between them, baffled, more offended than she had been before. “The bugs are the best part!” At the surprise on both their faces, she bristled. “What? I thought you liked wildlife, Zoey.”

Zoey startled. “I do! I-I don’t hate bugs. I just—I didn’t really think—that you—like, you…kind of seem…like, I dunno…”

Mira snickered. “She thought you gave off a ‘snobby girl afraid of bugs’ vibe.”

“No I didn’t!” Zoey cried.

At the same time Rumi snapped, “You’re afraid of bugs!”

Mira shrugged and rolled her eyes. “Yeah, so what? They’re gross.”

“Gross? How in the world do you think they’re gross?”

Mira raised her eyebrows. “Um…have you seen them?”

“Have I—!? Have you seen them?” Mira opened her mouth. “Shut up!” Throwing her pruning shears onto the ground, Rumi turned back to the garden, ripped off a glove, and began to part the plants, picking through the half-pruned leaves.

“…What are you doing?”

Rumi didn’t bother to answer. A shadow fell over her shoulder as Zoey watched from her right, and, after a hesitant moment, Mira joined her on the left. They watched as Rumi peeled back leaves and poked through the dirt until—

Mira flinched back as Rumi pulled her hands out from the garden. Sitting in one palm was a small gray pillbug, rolled up in a tiny ball, and proudly, she leaned back as Zoey leaned in.

“Oh!” Zoey gasped, followed by an English word Rumi didn’t know. At her puzzled look, she repeated it, then helplessly tacked on, “What is it—?”

“Gongbeolle?” Rumi offered.

Zoey snapped her fingers. “Yeah! That! In English I call them roly-polies.”

Rumi laughed. “Roly-polies? That’s cute. Isn’t it cute, Mira?”

Mira, sitting a miniscule yet suspicious few inches farther away than she had been before, stared at them flatly. “No.”

“What?” Zoey leaned around Rumi to frown at her. “Why not? He’s so tiny and harmless!”

Rumi nodded solemnly. “They don’t bite, and they’re great decomposers for organic material.”

Mira didn’t budge. “Don’t care,” she sniffed. “Still gross.”

Rumi held the pillbug up to her chest protectively, as if it could understand their conversation. “They’re important to the ecosystem. They feed on decaying matter and they’re one centimeter long.”

“Don’t they have, like, sixteen legs?” Zoey asked.

“Fourteen,” Rumi corrected.

“Fourteen?” Mira echoed, revolted.

The pillbug uncurled and began to wander across Rumi’s palm. Smiling softly, she lifted it towards Mira, who leaned back, assaulted expression deepening. “Come on, Mira,” she said, exasperated. “Just look at it.”

“Unfortnately, I’ve been looking.”

A hand rested on Rumi’s shoulder. “It’s okay, Rumi,” Zoey said, as Rumi slumped away from Mira with a grumble. “Maybe she’ll like a different bug.”

“There are no bugs I like,” Mira hissed.

Rumi considered it. Realistically, she knew that if Mira didn’t like pillbugs, she probably wouldn’t like any bugs, but she felt determined to find the exception. Everyone had a bug they liked. Mira couldn’t be any different.

It was about time the pillbug went back in the soil, so while Zoey and Mira debated different bugs, Rumi put the little guy back in his home and began to search. Head deep in the garden, gloves dirty and digging, it took a few solid minutes of hunching over the plants before she found what she was looking for. With a noise of triumph, she grabbed the insect she’d found by the head and pulled it up from the dirt.

Mira screamed.

She shot backwards across the ground faster than she’d ever run for any of their laps, and within seconds she was several feet away, fingers strangling the grass, eyes wide as moons. “Rumi!”

Rumi, holding a dangling centipede between her fingers, grimaced. “Not the one?”

“Of course it’s not the fucking one are you kidding me that thing is nasty—”

“Whoa!” Zoey gasped, leaning in over Rumi’s shoulder. “Is that a whole centipede?”

Rumi beamed. “Yes! They hunt pests like aphids and spiders. You can see right here, on its belly—”

“Stop swinging it around!” Mira shrieked.

“—that each of these wriggling things is a leg. They have two legs per segment, and while I think English uses a word for ‘one hundred’ in its name”—Zoey nodded—“they usually never have one hundred legs. They usually have around fifteen to just under two hundred segments, although interestingly enough, the number of segments is always an odd number.”

“I think you’re an odd fucking number,” Mira spat. “Put it down! It’s gonna—bite you, or some shit!”

“It might,” Rumi agreed. She rotated her hand so the centipede rested on her palm and laughed as it began to crawl around her wrist. Mira gagged, and Rumi rolled her eyes with as much over-exaggeration as she could. “You’re so overdramatic.”

“How do you know so much about bugs?” Zoey cut in, sounding awed, before Mira could snap back.

“How do you know so much about sea creatures?” Rumi countered. “Or mammals? I do a lot of research, mainly for the garden. I have a notebook.”

“Can we see it?” Zoey pleaded.

Rumi’s stomach flipped, although surprisingly it had nothing to do with the tickling legs crawling up her arm. “Yeah. Yeah, I can show you before dinner.”

Every time Rumi looked at Mira she was farther and farther away. Now sitting halfway across the garden from them, legs hugged against her chest, her eyes seemed glued to the centipede as it wriggled up Rumi’s arm.

“It’s going up your shirt,” she said, sounding nauseous.

A split second before it could crawl up the sleeve by her elbow, Rumi plucked it from her skin and held it up again. “You sure you don’t want to say hi?”

“Can I say ‘goodbye forever you stupid nasty thing’?”

Rumi rolled her eyes. Crawling on her knees and one hand, she leaned back over the garden to place the centipede back into the soil. It skittered away, and with a small wave, she bunched her hand (now empty) into a cupped fist and suppressed a climbing smile.

She peered over at Mira. Distantly, her eyes narrowed.

“Rumi,” she warned.

Rumi twisted around and swung her cupped fist in the throwing motion straight towards Mira’s face.

That night, before dinner, after a long scolding from Celine about being a good leader, and a heartfelt apology to Mira about pretending to throw centipedes at her face, she showed the girls her gardening notebook.

Sitting on the floor with their backs pressed against the couch, hunched over the open notebook on the ground, Rumi flipped through the pages. She was a bit self-conscious, at first. Aside from Celine, nobody else had ever seen her notebook, and the dirt caking the edges and the poor illustrations of various insects made her feel suddenly small. If either of them were upset by it, however, they didn’t say so—in fact, with Zoey’s endless stream of questions and Mira’s occasional impressed grunt, she sat up straighter and straighter with each flipped page, until a warm feeling in her chest had her puffed up proudly.

They liked her gardening notebook. They thought it was cool.

Convincing Celine to give them breaks so Rumi could teach Zoey and Mira more about the garden was a bit of a battle, but one she managed to win with a whole lot of wheedling and promises. She allowed them a few days for longer breaks, where Rumi would drag Zoey and Mira off to the garden with her notebook and do her best to guide them.

She, of course, also had a bit of a side goal in mind. Teaching them about gardening was fun and useful, but a small question had been on the back of her mind for a while: Mira’s favorite bug. She had to have one. With so many different bugs out there, there had to be one she at least tolerated. The night after their first experience in the garden, when the three of them had long since been told to go to bed and the other two long since had, Rumi dug her notebook out in the darkness and flipped to an empty page. Across the top, she wrote, WHAT IS MIRA’S FAVORITE BUG?

She underlined it, and then, for good measure, underlined it twice.

On the first day, she made a few discoveries. Much like with the pillbug, Mira wasn’t fond of any of the other tiny bugs. Ladybugs, for example, were “cute but too creepy.” She wasn’t repulsed by them, just uneasy, so Rumi crossed it off the list. Throughout the day her discoveries only grew. Big bugs were “disgusting,” bugs with lots of legs were “horrifying,” bugs with lots of eyes were “gross,” bugs with two eyes were “still gross,” colorful bugs were “weird as hell,” and dark bugs were “just as weird.” She cringed away from damsel bugs, screamed at beetles, gagged at cicada skin, and became unnecessarily violent around anything that buzzed.

“How are you going to kill a demon if you’re so afraid of bugs?” Zoey giggled one day as Rumi held Mira back from swinging her training staff at an innocent bee.

“I’m not afraid of bugs,” Mira said. In the same moment, the bee looped back around and buzzed past her ear, and with an ear-splitting shriek, she kicked out of Rumi’s grasp and arced her staff through the air.

Rumi tackled her and the two of them wrestled around on the ground. “Bees are good”—She grunted when the training staff jabbed her in the ribs—“for the”—She kept her arms wrapped tightly around Mira’s waist as she tried to roll away—“enviroment—!”

She was starting to feel pretty hopeless about the whole thing. Maybe there really was no hope for Mira. She was blind to the true joys of the bug world and would forever despise anything with six or more legs. Would Rumi just have to live with that?

On one of their last gardening days, Rumi’s answer came fluttering out of the sky and landed right in front of her.

More accurately, it landed right in front of Mira, its wings wide and outstretched, dotted with beautiful markings: a butterfly. Rumi cringed, waiting for a repulsed cry or scrunched face, but it never came. Instead, Mira spotted it and smiled, and Rumi couldn’t help but make a face.

Mira caught it and rolled her eyes. “What? You think I’d be afraid of a little butterfly?”

“Wh—but—they’re—” Usually she was a very eloquent speaker, yet now Rumi was utterly speechless. “It’s still an insect. You hate insects, and all the things that aren’t insects that you think are—”

Mira shrugged a shoulder. “Can’t I have exceptions?”

Yes. An exception was exactly what Rumi had been looking for. But—

“But I thought you hated caterpillars.”

Mira raised her eyebrows. “Yeah. Because they’re weird and long and have a bunch of creepy legs. Plus, aren’t some, like, poisonous or something?”

“Venomous,” Rumi corrected.

“…Literally, that’s worse.”

“But—” She paused, eyes landing on the butterfly in the grass, its wings still moving back and forth, entrancing. “But they’re the same. It used to be a caterpillar.”

“So what? Not anymore. I can appreciate a girl with a glow-up.”

Zoey laughed alongside Mira, but Rumi stared, mind drifting, at the hypnotizing sway of the butterfly’s wings.

“I guess,” she said eventually, voice faint. “So you only like them when they’re butterflies?”

“Don’t make me sound like a monster,” Mira grumbled. “Am I wrong? Like, they’re way prettier, and they aren’t venomous.”

“Caterpillars can be pretty,” she protested weakly. “And—and butterflies can be poisonous.”

“Poisonous is only when you eat them, though, right?” Mira pointed out.

Zoey laughed. “If you ate it I think it’d have a right to kill you.”

They laughed again. Rumi tucked her gloved hands under her arms, chewing on her bottom lip. Mira was right. Caterpillars were grosser, more dangerous, and less helpful. Butterflies were better. The ideal bug, really.

“Rumi?” Mira said, when their laughter died down and they noticed she hadn’t joined in. “You, uh…good?”

“Yeah.” She cleared her throat and straightened back to attention, giving them an apologetic smile. “Yeah, sorry. Just surprised. I didn’t think I’d ever find a bug you liked.”

Mira scratched her arm awkwardly. “I, uh…am sorry if…me not liking bugs is—ah—”

“No, no!” Rumi cried quickly. “Come on, they’re just bugs. I don’t care that much. I mean, they’re definitely gross, you’re totally right about that.”

Mira blinked. It was clear she had more she wanted to say, but after a bit more fiddling with the hem of her shirt, her expression tightened for a brief second and then straightened out. “About time you admitted it,” she joked, and whatever frustration had passed over her had done exactly that: passed.

Rumi laughed. “Whatever. I knew, okay? I’m just not a coward. Zoey’s right, how are you ever going to fight demons if you can only handle pretty bugs that don’t scare you?”

“Those are literally two completely different things!” Mira cried. It made Zoey laugh, which made Rumi laugh, so Mira scowled, and the moment breezed past like all moments did.

That night, when the house was dark and Mira’s soft snores filtered in through the bottom of Rumi’s bedroom door, she pulled her gardening notebook out and flipped it open. Under various notes and bullet points, she hovered her pencil over the empty line looking up at her for a long time.

After a while she brought her pencil shakily down and wrote: MIRA LIKES BUTTERFLIES.

She underlined it.

Then, tears rolling down her cheeks and onto the page, she underlined it twice.

Bad bugs were the first she ever learned, pinned beneath her imaginary paws, and good bugs came soon after—but the worst bugs of all weren’t taught to Rumi until midway through her first year gardening.

Invasive.

“They’re bugs that don’t belong here,” Celine explained as Rumi examined the butterfly-like insect crushed in her hand. “They come from other places, maybe where they’re useful, maybe where they’re not, but they certainly don’t belong here. They are mistakes and nuisances. They provide nothing beneficial, and they only exist to be destructive.”

“Is that why they’re bad?” Rumi asked. “Because they’re pests?”

“They’re worse than pests. Pests have natural predators that keep them in check. Invasive species escape their natural predators and have nothing to control their population. Since they have nothing higher than them on the food chain, they reproduce and reproduce with no fear of death. Then they’re everywhere, destroying everything, and there’s nothing around to kill them.” She met Rumi’s eye seriously. “That’s why finding them and killing them becomes our job.”

“But it looks like a butterfly,” Rumi protested. It was shaped the same, with two big wings, brown and dotted and twitching limply by its side. A red color peeked out from where they used to rest.

“It may look like one, but it isn’t. Don’t let it deceive you. This one is a spotted lanternfly, and you can identify it by the patterns on its wings.” She brought her free hand up to poke and maneuver its limp body around until its wings were even farther apart. “Do you see that red there? It likes to hide it under its wings, but once they try to take flight, the color will show itself. The moment you see it, you must kill it immediately. Do you understand?”

The red, harsh and exposed, burned at Rumi’s eyes.

“I understand,” she said. The red dropped lower, burning in her gut. Angry and hot, it made her shift uncomfortably in the grass. “It doesn’t belong here and it’s just hurting the planet.”

Celine smiled. “Very good. A creature like that shouldn’t belong anywhere at all.”

It was easy to understand what was wrong with invasive bugs, and even easier to understand why it made them the worst bugs of all. Rumi hated them—learned their names, squashed their bodies against the white pages of her notebook, and circled them in red.

INVASIVE, she wrote. KILL ON SIGHT.

“Demons,” Celine said one hot summer day years later, as she paced before Zoey, Mira, and Rumi, who stood rigid with her hands clasped behind her back, “belong in the Underworld. Any demon found above the Honmoon is dangerous. Any demon found above the Honmoon does not belong. Any demon within your sight must be…?”

“Killed,” they chorused.

“Precisely. Demons know this, and they love to disguise themselves. When small groups of demons make their way through the Honmoon, it may not deliver a signal. They’ll go after civilians, but more often they’ll go after you—which means you must be diligent when it comes to your surroundings, and observant when it comes to strangers. Demons, disguised or not, have identifiers. Can anyone tell me what those identifiers are?”

A silent beat. Rumi pressed her lips together. I know you two know. But when she glanced over, Zoey’s head was tipped down, and she was twisting her foot in the grass boredly.

“Zoey,” Rumi hissed quietly.

Zoey’s head snapped up, eyes wide. “Wh—what?”

Celine stopped moving and bit back a sigh. “The identifiers of a demon. What are they?”

“Oh! Um. Weird. Acting—acting weird, I mean. …Right?” She glanced panickedly over at Rumi and Mira, and when Rumi glanced to her right, Mira was staring dead ahead, expression blank. Probably daydreaming about dinner, she grumbled internally.

“Weird how?” Celine pressed.

It took Zoey a beat to realize she was still the one being addressed. “Weird…like…acting weird. And erratic. Using appliances wrong, suspicious behavior, following us around, wearing clothes the wrong way and—and…”

“Smiling weird,” Mira offered, gaze still boring unflinchingly into the grass, half glazed-over with boredom.

Celine nodded hesitantly. “Well, that one’s not an official trait, but yes, they tend to have odd, nervous smiles, since they know they’re somewhere they don’t belong.”

Zoey tilted her head thoughtfully. “If they can be nervous, does that mean they have feelings?”

“Not any feelings that advise them against mass murder. What are the other identifiers? You’re missing a big one.”

“Patterns,” Rumi said. She didn’t have to—Celine knew she knew; it was Zoey and Mira she was quizzing, and yet it slipped out uninvited anyway, and hung in the air for a moment before Celine turned and gave Rumi a quick, tense nod.

“That’s right. Patterns.” To Zoey and Mira, she asked, “And what do those patterns look like?”

“Oh!” Zoey gasped. “Purple!”

“Zig-zagged,” Mira added. “Like lightning.”

Celine nodded. “And they can be found—?”

“Everywhere?”

“Under their clothes. Under the sleeves and on the arms are the easiest to uncover.”

“Good,” Celine said. “They’re lazy creatures, so they won’t be bothered to hide the patterns already hidden under clothing. You’re right as well, Zoey; once the disguise is broken, you’ll see the patterns have truly been everywhere the whole time. Although it’s important to remember that if a demon is using lots of power at once, its disguise may waver and the patterns may appear briefly on their skin. Keep an eye out for that, too.” She began pacing again, turning her eyes to the distant horizon. “And, again, if you spot one of these demonic traits, you…?”

“Kill it,” they chorused.

Celine nodded again. “Technically you cannot ‘kill’ a demon. They’re already dead. To counter this, the Honmoon makes weapons that send demons back to where they belong, and that in itself will protect the civilians.” She stopped before them again and held their gazes one by one. “When you see a demon, no matter where you are or what you’re doing, your reaction should be the same every time: kill. Up here, it is up to you to kill every demon on sight, because if you don’t, they’ll spread, and people will die. Down there they’re controlled by the Honmoon. Above it, they can thrive, and they will take and take and take if you don’t kill on sight. Do you understand?”

Her eyes burned hot into Rumi’s own. She wanted to look away, her skin heating uncomfortably, heart hammering, feeling a bit sick, but she didn’t—couldn’t—whatever. The heat was getting to her. It was scalding out. The moment Celine’s gaze released its hold on Rumi, a cloud passed over the sun, and briefly a faint coolness washed over her.

She still felt sick. “Yes, Celine.”

“Yes, Celine,” the other two echoed.

Celine nodded. Now she wouldn’t meet Rumi’s eye, or any of theirs. She turned away. “Grab your weapons.”

Her words rang through Rumi’s head that night in the bathroom before bed, the towel from her shower lying on the ground by her bare feet. She ran her hands along her patterns, watching in the mirror. They were smooth; if she closed her eyes, she could almost imagine they weren’t there at all.

She thought of it: a world where she stood above the Honmoon with no fear. Where it twisted towards her hands with gentle obedience instead of suppressed hunger. Where it didn’t tug at her heels, urging her downward, as she walked.

I belong up here, she told herself.

She was no demon. The patterns could grow all they wanted, but she would never, ever be one. She was human. A Hunter. A leader. An—

Intruder.

She closed her eyes tightly and exhaled softly.

“I’m human,” she whispered, hand digging into the flesh on her right shoulder, smooth and soft just like the skin on her left.

Mira and Zoey’s laughter drifted past the walls, muffled. Her eyes opened softly at the sound. In the mirror the jagged patch of patterns bored back at her.

Ugly.

She lifted her towel from the floor and wrapped it around her shoulders until the bruised purple was smothered, and then squeezed tight, arms tucked against her bare, shivering skin. She should join them.

Deceiver.

Her throat burned.

“I belong up here,” she whispered, a tear rolling down her cheek.

The shadow behind her curled forward, draping itself over her shoulder, whispering in her ear.

Kill on sight.

They debuted.

The voice in her head grew louder. It clung to her incessantly, standing just out of eyesight, an ever present unshakable feeling, breathing down her neck and casting her in a cold shadow. It loomed over her during training, darkened her reflection in the mirror every morning, and slept under her bed at night. It grew with the patterns on her shoulder, a patch of bruised purple weeds, clawing their way closer and closer to her elbow. They were worms beneath her flesh, thorny vines she couldn’t weed, and each millimeter they grew was another tick on her body’s clock, counting down to a fate slumbering in a golden-hued darkness—a fate that bled desperately through her hands like inky water the longer she tried to hold on.

With each inch the marks on her skin grew, so did the distance between Rumi and the girls. It was a man-made distance, crafted by Rumi’s own dirty hands, but it was a necessary one.

It was hard to stop her laughter when a hand grazed too close to her sleeve. Hard to filter each word when a conversation strayed into something vulnerable. When an idea became too risky, it was her hard job to rein it in, to reject the invite, to enforce a rule. It was always a few careful steps back while they stumbled, laughing, forward, and it was hard. She wanted nothing more than to race after them. To hug them like they hugged each other, look them in the eye, and tell them the truth.

Restraining herself was one of the hardest things she’d ever done.

Harder still to play it off as natural; to give off the impression that nothing was amiss. It was just who she was: modest, personal, and professional. Zoey and Mira were the closest friends she had ever had, and if the world was perfect, maybe they would be something just a bit more. It wouldn’t be a hard role to slip into. To Rumi, they already felt like soulmates. It was why pushing them away felt like tearing something out of her own skin.

Yet soulmates saw every inch of each other. They didn’t keep secrets. Rumi was still crafting her perfect world—wasn’t there quite yet. Once she was…

She imagined it a lot. In her perfect, unmarred world, where her skin was smooth and spotless and her secret was nothing but a fading footprint on the path behind her, what would they do? How would they spend their time together, free of the suffocating blockade of Rumi’s secret?

Some nights she pretended her blanket was warm bathhouse water lapping against her blank skin; others, she imagined limbs entangled with her own underneath them, unafraid to roam. In the cold darkness of night she envisioned hot sun beaming down on her bare shoulders and sweat dripping down her tank top, washed away by salty water and a bathing suit more skin than clothing. As she drifted in and out of unconsciousness, she could hear the distant roaring of fans from a singular changing room built for three, and every night without fail, as sleep tugged her downward like the sticky webs of the Honmoon, she glimpsed a mirror to come home to after each and every long day.

A mirror that showed her an unstained and unruined body. A mirror with a perfect reflection.

Those were her good fantasies.

And sometimes, when the day was long and the night stretched longer, they grew…darker.

Sometimes the mattress at her back was cold, hard concrete—sometimes her blankets were gone and the cold chill of the room became the biting night breeze. She clawed her way across the concrete with dark claws, nothing above her head but the swirling expanse of stars and the too-bright beaming of the moon, and smeared a trail of blood as she writhed. Sometimes, in the comfort of her isolated bedroom, her heart thrummed in her chest like she was running—running across rooftops, between alley ways, two shadows on her heels, silent, fast, getting closer and closer, the ground clinging to her feet like a web. She could never outrun them. It wasn’t until she lay with blood pooling out of her neck, staining the alley around her, that she saw her pursuers’ faces: Zoey and Mira, their eyes wide and horrified, blood dripping from the blades of their weapons as she choked on the hot liquid in her throat. In these fantasies they would always weep, kneeling over her with their faces pressed to her stuttering chest.

What she asked them didn’t change no matter how often she imagined it. Why did you do it? she would say, again and again, with a mouth hanging eternally mid-scream. How could you do that to me?

We’re sorry, they sobbed every time, although she wasn’t sure they would be. Why would they be sorry for killing a monster? We didn’t know. We were afraid.

But so was I.

Their voices rang in her ears even when the stars turned back into a dimly lit bedroom ceiling and the concrete beneath her had turned to thin sheets, clutched between her shaking fingers. We’re so sorry. We were just scared. Again, and again, and again. It was a misunderstanding. A stupid, stupid misunderstanding.

Those nights she would lay trembling in bed until pure exhaustion clawed her under. If she was unlucky, she would dream.

In her nightmares, she fought back.

When Zoey and Mira attacked, she moved on instinct, fangs bared and claws unsheathed, heart hammering in her chest until theirs were no longer beating. It was only once they’d stilled, bodies soaked in blood with her own to match, that she realized what she’d done.

She could try all she wanted, but with her big, clumsy claws and all her trembling, she couldn’t stop the blood. Over their bodies she would scream, pulling their still chests up to her ears, soaking them with her tears.

I’m sorry, she would wail. I thought you would hurt me. It was only self-defense.

It was those nightmares where she woke up shaking, cheeks damp, heaving for breaths in the cold quiet of her room. It would take her hands strangling the bedsheets for dear life to keep herself from stumbling drunkenly out of her room into theirs to wake them and weep apologies into their shoulders, ear pressed shakily against the pulses on their necks. Instead she listened to the beating of her own frantic pulse in her ears until sunlight streaked in through the slit in her curtains and the skin on her cheeks was soft and dry.

Those mornings she would pretend she’d forgotten to eat breakfast when the girls finally stirred. It was easier, that way, to pin the shaking of her hands on something natural.

“Rumi! Bug on the couch!”

Rumi perked up from her computer and, for the first time in what was most likely hours, straightened her back out with a groan. “Coming!” she called, rolling her chair away from her desk and springing up.

As expected, when she arrived at the scene, Zoey was crouched a few feet away from something on the couch while Mira stood a good several yards away, leaning distrustfully against the kitchen bar. Her shoulders loosened a bit when Rumi entered, and she rolled her eyes fondly. “First Rumi sighting of the day and it’s for a bug. Big surprise.”

“Grow a few more legs and maybe I’ll come running when you call me,” Rumi sniped back, circling the couch and dropping into a squat next to Zoey, who cheerfully hopped back and pointed to the insect on the couch. It was a dirty yellowish-brown color, and it was small—too small for Mira to be afraid of, really—with dark markings. Its body was long and a bit blocky, its black legs even longer, and its two dark antennae twitched starkly against the white couch. She made a face. “Ugh.”

“Uh-oh,” Zoey said. “Bad bug?”

“Yeah.” She reached out and plucked it from the couch cushions, letting it skitter around her hand before pinning it between her fingers. “I think it’s a meadow plant bug. It eats plant sap and grass seeds. It’s not a major problem for gardening, but it’s a pest when it comes to grass.” Its tiny legs moved frantically between her fingers and she balled her hand into a fist, crushing it, hardly feeling its body break. From the kitchen bar, Mira gagged. “A tiny problem’s still a problem, though. I wonder how it got in here.”

Zoey watched her closely as she stood. Rumi smiled at her. “Not dangerous, though, don’t worry. Hear that, Mira?”

“Yeah, whatever,” Mira muttered, hands shoved in her pockets, posture hunched. Rumi watched with amusement as she slunk back over to the couch, eyeing the ground like another bug would miraculously skitter out from underneath it with massive pincers or rows of fangs. When none did, she tentatively flopped onto the cushions and tucked her legs underneath her. Rumi smiled and turned.

Zoey finally stood, eyes still locked on Rumi as she made her way to the kitchen, bug still squished into bits in her palm.

“Why do you kill them?”

Rumi paused. Slowly, she cocked her head and turned. “What?”

Zoey shuffled her feet and glanced over at the couch where the plant bug had been. “I mean, the bugs. You just like them so much, I was—like, I didn’t know—I know they’re bad, but why don’t you just put it outside?”

Rumi looked at her, faintly amused. “They’re bad. If we put them outside, they’ll do bad things.”

“Will they?” Zoey said. “I mean, I know you’re the expert, but…”

Rumi waited for her to finish. She didn’t; instead she averted her eyes, looking like she was thinking hard, but didn’t say more. Feeling a bit lost, Rumi said, “They will. I mean, there’s tons of proof they will. It’s just what they do. It’s better to kill them than let them do it.”

Zoey hesitated. “Yeah, but—it was just one.”

“One can turn into a lot more,” Rumi reminded her. She was becoming aware of the sensation of dead bug against her skin. “I’m going to wash my hands.”

“Okay,” Zoey mumbled.

From behind the screen of her phone, Mira’s eyes darted back and forth between them, eyebrows scrunched. Rumi turned—

“But they’re alive,” Zoey said.

—and stopped.

“Yeah.” The sticky sensation in her palm was becoming unpleasant. “But it’s just a bug.”

“Just a bug?” It was Mira who spoke this time, her phone lowering in her hands, expression disbelieving. “If we said that about one of those nasty wasp things, you’d be livid.”

“Right,” Rumi said slowly. She opened and closed her hand, feeling the cling of the guts on her skin like fresh glue. “Because the Braconid wasp is a beneficial parasitic bug. It helps control pests by laying eggs in them, and it doesn’t even sting. Meadow plant bugs don’t do anything like that. They’re causing damage, even if it’s minor. One of them helps and one of them doesn’t.”

“So you kill it because it’s not helpful?” Zoey said, expression falling.

“Zoey.” It came out a bit more exasperated than she would have liked, but really? “I kill it because it’s harmful.”

“It wasn’t harming us,” Zoey protested. “Putting it outside would have been nicer.”

“To what? The plants it would have eaten and destroyed?”

Mira arched a brow. “It was one bug.”

“If everyone had an ‘it was one bug’ mindset, who knows how much damage would be done?”

“I feel like you’re a little out of touch about this,” Mira said.

“You don’t even like bugs,” Rumi snapped back, a bit more venomous than she wanted.

Mira raised her hands placatingly. “I’m not saying I know more than you. Just that I don’t think letting one bug live will be the end of the world. Maybe chill on the Bee Movie rewatches—”

“Oh, shut up.”

“I’m sorry,” Zoey cut in meekly. “I’m just trying to understand—”

Rumi whirled to face her, and she flinched back. “I’ve explained this to you before. We have insects that are pests and we have insects that are beneficial. If we let the pests live, they do damage, so we kill them. It doesn’t matter if it’s alive—all of them are alive, but some of them need to die.”

Zoey didn’t respond. She seemed frozen between hesitancy and something else, like she had something she wanted to say, something she was struggling to articulate—

“Why?” Mira asked.

Rumi glared at her. “Why what?”

“Why do they need to die?”

“Because they’re harmful. Are you even listening to me? Why would I let it live if we all know it was in that bug’s nature to do harm? You can’t run from your nature. That’s how I know killing it was the right choice, because if I released it, it wouldn’t have gone out to do anything good. It wasn’t helping anything inside and it wouldn’t have helped anything outside. Do you know how it could help?”

Zoey didn’t look torn anymore. She didn’t look hesitant, either. She was looking at Rumi with her eyebrows furrowed and her mouth pulled into a tight, confused frown. More than that, she looked upset, like something she’d said had hurt her feelings. The look immediately blew out the odd fire billowing in Rumi’s stomach. The tension left her shoulders, and her right hand, grinding the remains of the bug to a pulp in her palm, finally stilled.

“How?” Mira said quietly. Zoey continued to stare at her like a puppy that had just witnessed a murder and was trying futilely to solve it by itself.

Rumi clenched her jaw and swallowed, turning her head away.

“By dying,” she muttered.

“Alright, edgelord,” Mira said. “Wash your hands.”

Rumi scoffed and marched away.

What’s so confusing about it? she wondered as the sink water washed away the smeared blood. Her jaw hurt from clenching it. Why do they care? They’d known her for years now. They’d been killing demons together for just as long, so what was their problem with a few pests? It was an easy concept to understand: bad bugs were bad, good bugs were good. If there was nothing good about them, why should they live?

“It’s not that hard to understand,” she muttered to herself, drowned out by the pouring of the sink. Her hands were clean now. The water was starting to burn. She knew Zoey cared about animals, but…but…

Pests weren’t animals. They were pests.

Was that hard to understand?

She scrubbed her skin with the hand towel until it was red. Tossing it haphazardly onto the kitchen countertops, she inhaled, trying to calm the uncomfortable heat in her gut. Without the sound of the sink, the kitchen felt quiet.

By the couch, Zoey and Mira were talking. They were speaking low enough that she couldn’t hear what they were saying.

She should apologize. Snapping at them over something stupid like that had been out of character. It was just…important to her. She wanted them to know that, and a good leader would apologize.

When she exited the kitchen, however, their conversation stopped abruptly and their eyes cut towards her. The air trembled for a moment. The apology clung to Rumi’s throat like the guts of a bug.

Were they talking about…me?

The fire sparked again. Furiously, she stomped it down.

It wasn’t until she was stalking back to her room that Mira spoke again, voice hushed.

“…weird, but probably nothing. …working a lot, and if…then let’s just…”

Rumi kept her bedroom door open a crack, ear pressed against it, but couldn’t make out the rest of their words—just the murmur of Zoey’s voice and a small laugh the two of them shared. Her chest burned. So did her face.

She abandoned the door and sat back in her chair, thrumming her fingers against the side of her desk. It doesn’t matter. They don’t get it, but it doesn’t matter.

When she moved her hands back to her computer, her fingers trembled over the keys.

“It doesn’t matter,” she gritted out.

The plants on her balcony, swaying in the breeze, didn’t respond.

After the biggest performance of her life, Rumi’s tense shoulders needed only one thing: a nest of pillows and blankets piled in front of the couch to collapse onto.

Luckily, Zoey had fixed them exactly that. With an exhausted groan, she flopped onto the floor and relaxed instantly against the softness. For the first time in hours she let her eyes close and her limbs hang like wet noodles beside her, perking up only at the sound of Zoey’s feet pattering across the ground her way.

“Okie-dokie!” she said, flopping onto the pillows next to Rumi, who opened her eyes to smile at her. She smiled back, although she’d been smiling the whole way back to the penthouse and was still buzzing from the adrenaline of the concert,
and probably couldn’t grin harder if she tried. While Rumi was finally beginning to crash, she knew it would hit Zoey a lot later—and a lot harder—when it was finally her turn, which meant the twitching and giggling wouldn’t die down for a long while yet. Rumi didn’t mind; her breath still caught every time she remembered what they’d seen today.

“I know you’re dying to know what my super secret Rumi celebration surprise is…” she continued.

“It’s been killing me,” Rumi agreed, and with the way her legs were aching she was beginning to think something was. Her eyes were drooping, too, but she fought to keep them open for Zoey, who’d been chattering their ears off about their post-concert celebration the entire drive home, all through changing out of their stage outfits, and in between splashes of water while they washed the glitter from their skin. Not that she wasn’t interested. It interested her a lot, actually, especially since she’d been putting a lot of emphasis on how Rumi would love it. That being said, it was around three in the morning and if she postponed it any second longer…

She bit back a yawn, and hurriedly Zoey scrambled for the remote.

“Well,” she said, frantically smashing the on button, “let it hurt you no longer! Mira?”

Mira, who had been meticulously organizing the takeout bins in their pillow nest for the past few minutes, glanced up with her eyebrows still scrunched. “What?”

Rumi waved her over. “Zoey’s showing us the surprise.”

With one last pointed glare down at the takeout bins, Mira finally clambered onto the nest and sprawled out next to them. “This better be good, Zo,” she sighed, sinking into the coziness of the blankets.

“Oh,” Zoey said, grinning, “it’s so good. Rumi’s going to lose her mind.”

Rumi scoffed. “Come on, Zo. When do I ever ‘lose my mind’?”

Mira opened her mouth—

“I wasn’t asking you.”

—and, with a roll of her eyes, closed it again.

“There’s a first time for everything,” Zoey declared, scrolling through a list of movies on the TV, which only helped to confuse her more. Why would Rumi lose her mind over a movie? Was it going to be another sad one that had them all weeping? At three in the morning?

“Oh! There it is! Close your eyes, close your eyes!” She scrambled to throw a hand over Rumi’s face at the same time Mira did, and whatever was on the screen was obscured instantly as two pairs of hands covered her face at once. She tried to shake them off, the overlap of hands squishing her nose, but they clung on tight. Too tired to put up a fight, she sank into the blankets with a scowl.

Suddenly Zoey’s mouth was next to her ear. Parted slightly, Rumi could feel each soft puff of breath and the curve of her lips as they brushed her skin.

“Rumi,” she murmured, voice teasing and low, and instantly Rumi tensed, her heart leaping into her throat. “You were really good tonight. Like, so good. So good we saw the first glimpse of the Golden Honmoon ever. Isn’t that awesome?”

Rumi’s throat felt dry. Her heart, hammering in her throat, made it hard to breathe. It took her a while to realize she was being asked a question. “Yeah,” she choked out. “Yeah, it—it is.”

It was awesome. The first glimpse of the Golden Honmoon—the first glimpse into a future of no demons, of no Gwi-Ma, of no patterns—was more than just “awesome.” It was monumental. Historical. Yet at that moment Zoey could have whispered three digits of pi into her ear incorrectly and asked her if it was awesome, and Rumi would have agreed with her in a heartbeat.

That most likely had something to do with her own heartbeat, which was doing its best job at exploding through her ribcage and making a mess out of their nest of blankets and pillows. Suddenly she was glad for their hands over her face, obscuring the hot flush building its way onto her cheeks and ears. Ears still being subjected to beautiful torture. One ear in particular that Zoey leaned closer to, her voice lilting in the way it always did when she was becoming too excited to keep something in any longer.

“I saw something the other day that reminded me of you. I was gonna show you during a special occasion, but I think this is as special as it gets before we get super busy writing that Golden song to seal the Honmoon once and for all. So…without further ado…”

Her presence retreated from Rumi’s ear and she thought desperately, No. Please further it. Don’t go. No such luck. Both the bodies by her side leaned slightly away and the hands began to rise from her face. For a second she foolishly believed the TV had been a distraction and the reveal had nothing to do with it at all, and instead had everything to do with the weird energy she was feeling in her body and was sort-of-but-also-not-at-all hoping they were feeling, too. Again, no such luck—or maybe she was incredibly lucky. It was kind of hard to find the silver lining with hands all over her face.

But they retreated all too soon after far too long, exposing the lights had been dimmed—Oh, my God—and the girls were watching expectantly on either side of her—holy shit—and the TV was proudly presenting a two hour long caterpillar documentary—

Hold on. What?

“Ta-da!” Zoey cheered, sitting up and brandishing a hand toward the screen. “I found it three days ago when I was browsing for turtle documentaries. This one’s brand new and I know you’re, like, weirdly obsessed with caterpillars, so I thought you’d really like it.” Her smile strained for a second and she added, with an obvious twinge of anxiety in her voice— “Do you?”

A two hour long caterpillar documentary.

…a two hour long caterpillar documentary she hadn’t watched.

“Rumi?” Mira said warily.

Her mind finally reunited with her brain cells. A caterpillar documentary that she hadn’t watched. One that was two hours long.

“Oh my God,” Rumi burst out. “Are you kidding me? Turn this thing on immediately.”

Zoey laughed, the anxiety melting off her face, and collapsed onto the pillow nest again. “Told you!”

“Oh, come on.” Mira rolled her eyes. “She didn’t lose her mind.”

“If it melts I think it counts as losing it,” Zoey countered, squishing herself against Rumi’s side, and damn it, she’d just cooled down. “Like, if your ice cream melts, you wouldn’t say you still had it.”

“You do still have it,” Mira argued, doing the same on Rumi’s other side, and damn it, she’d just cooled down! “Just in a different form. Don’t you know the law of conservation of mass?”

“I don’t know if that applies—?”

“Girls,” Rumi interrupted, giving them both an expectant look. “The documentary…?”

“Oh! Right.” Zoey hit play, the screen darkening and the speakers humming with a dramatic instrumental, and snuggled closer. Mira followed suit until the three of them were strung together like a fly trapped in a spider's web, limbs entangled with the blankets. They were close, skin to skin, and Rumi was having a hard time loosening up.

If they noticed, neither of them commented. Once they’d successfully impersonated three tangled earbud wires, they quickly remembered the takeout they’d left lying in the center of the pillow pile. Luckily, Mira had remarkably long limbs and a considerate enough heart and was willing to reach out and drag the containers into their laps for easy access.

With the warmth of the bodies and blankets around them and the narrator’s low, soothing voice, Rumi, against her best efforts, found herself sinking into sleep’s pull again. She couldn’t help it. After such a long day, a full stomach and a soft place to rest her limbs had her feeling like a well-fed cat in the middle of a napping pile. Despite her attempts to resist, her eyes slid shut just as quickly as she forced them open, and her mind wandered sleepily no matter how often she tried to redirect it.

Being in the center didn’t help at all. Zoey and Mira were cozy and warm. They smelled good after their showers, too. It was nice hearing their voices, occasionally piping in to make a comment or ask a question (although those waned along with her consciousness when they noticed her responses growing short and sluggish). All the while, the narrator droned on.

“…the process of metamorphosis…”

Mira shifted to her right, tucking her chin against Rumi’s shoulder. It jolted her slightly out of her half-sleep, but not for long; when she melted back into it this time, it was with Mira’s warm breath on her neck.

“…a caterpillar’s chrysalis. Made out of its own shedded skin, it…”

Her body felt heavy. Simultaneously, she felt afloat—a boulder sinking in tar.

“…during the process, the caterpillar’s innards, like their digestive system and organs, rip apart and begin to dissolve…”

Mira’s voice was muffled, like it was coming from the other side of a wall. “Sounds painful.”

“I wonder if it really is,” Zoey murmured distantly.

“…complications in metamorphosis…”

If her mouth hadn’t felt like an immovable stone, she would have told them that it was unknown whether or not the process was painful, or whether or not caterpillars could feel pain at all. Nobody had gone through metamorphosis before. It sounded painful, sure, but maybe it wasn’t. If she hadn’t been so tired, she would have told them evidence suggested caterpillars reacted to pain. She would have told them she thought they could feel it. Why wouldn’t they? They were alive, too.

If they feel pain, is it bad to kill them?

She jolted slightly out of the tar. Slowly, with much effort, she opened her eyes. The TV cast a soft glow across the floor. From the dark windows outside, the city lights twinkled. On the TV screen, a chrysalis hung rotten and damaged.

“…dangers of metamorphosis…”

Her eyelids, reliable as broken blinds, began to fall again.

“…wasps, which take advantage of the vulnerable caterpillar…laying eggs inside the chrysalis and feeding on the developing butterfly…”

The black chrysalis burned in her mind. A wasp crept along it, poking and prodding.

“…parasites, damaging the butterfly during its pupal stage. Unable to leave the chrysalis…”

Trapped. The heaviness of her limbs felt suddenly frightening, the pressure of the girls against her suffocating.

“…sometimes emerging only half-developed…an inevitably short lifespan…”

“Damn,” Mira’s voice said distantly. “Can you imagine that?”

“Imagine what?” Zoey asked, shifting against Rumi’s right shoulder. She had begun to feel her heartbeat in her throat. Wrapped in shedded skin, she was surrounded on all sides. A wasp crawled just outside the soft, silky walls.

“…other natural conditions…unstable ones, for instance…”

“Like, imagine working your whole life to be one thing, and getting so close, then something goes wrong at the last minute. Then what? You’re just half that thing for the rest of your life?”

“Yeah,” Zoey said softly. The chrysalis shook. The wasp pounded the walls outside. “Especially since you know you wouldn’t have long to live.”

“…lack of food. Many factors can influence the timing of a caterpillar’s metamorphosis…”

The chrysalis, rotting and black, began to melt and drip.

“It’s terrible,” Mira murmured. “Like, don’t get me wrong, it’s interesting, but…”

“You don’t get why she likes it so much.”

“…but undoubtedly, waiting too long can be fatal.”

The wasp’s head burst through the chrysalis—

Rumi shot up with a strangled gasp.

The plate of mandu on her lap spilled onto the blankets. Both Mira and Zoey scrambled forward in a futile attempt to catch it, but quickly snatched their hands back again when Rumi rose to her feet, fighting with the blankets clinging stubbornly to her legs.

Mira said, “Rumi—?”

“Are you okay?” Zoey cried.

“Yeah,” Rumi gasped, throat dry. Everything was too loud suddenly—their voices, the narrator, her own pounding heart. “Yeah, I—” The blankets weren’t untangling from her leg. She kicked and wrestled with them, stumbling, mandu squishing beneath the heels of her feet, and Zoey made a noise of protest. “I’m just—why is this fucking thing not—”

“Let me—” Mira began, reaching forward.

“You’re stepping on the food,” Zoey said at the same time, high and frantic.

Rumi tore her legs from the blankets and staggered off of their nest, tripping over the pillows and takeout boxes as she went.

“Where are you—?” Mira said.

“Bathroom,” she grunted, stumbling blindly into the darkness, leaving the light of the TV behind. Their gazes burned into her back as she retreated, shoulder-checking her bedroom door on the way, hip ramming blindly into the side of her bed. The pain made her more nauseous. It was hard to see in the darkness, hard to hear anything past her own heartbeat. When she slammed her bathroom door shut, cutting off the narrator’s distant voice, the silence pressed in until the warmth of her skin had been replaced with a cold tremor.

She clutched the edge of the bathroom sink and stared into the mirror, her own haunted face looming back. She looked awful—face scrubbed clean of makeup, the bags under her eyes stretching like shadows, her hair falling from her braid in crooked strands. A cold splash of sink water to the face didn’t help. She was already shivering, already gasping, already dripping with sweat. She raised her shirt collar to wipe the water from her face, and when she brought it down again, the soaked fabric trembled in her hands.

Her fist tightened around the fabric, and in one sweeping motion, she tore the shirt from her back.

The bathroom light was off. She raised her hand to the light switch and kept it there, hovering.

In the dark her patterns looked like shadows, running jagged along her skin. When she flicked the light on, they exploded against her skin like a flashbang, and hurt worse than the sudden light. All over her body, from her arms down to her chest, creeping down to her abdomen, were patterns. That wasn’t a surprise. It had been like that for a while, growing more and more every day. What was new was the small, almost unnoticeable pattern crawling up from her chest, making a beeline for her throat. She bit back a strangled noise and reached a hand up to claw at it, but like an army of immovable ticks, her patterns clung to her skin, sinking their fangs into her flesh and eating, feeding, growing—

A knock at the door. “Rumi?”

She had her shirt back over her head before she’d processed the voice as Mira’s.

“Yeah?” she tried to call back, but it came out as a raspy gasp of air. She cleared her throat and swallowed before trying again. “Yeah?”

“You alright in there?” She spoke slowly and warily. She knows you’re dangerous.

Rumi glanced back at the mirror. She pushed herself off of the sink’s edge and straightened her back, inhaling sharply. With her still-shaking hands, she tucked a few fallen pieces of hair rather uselessly back into her braid.

“Yeah,” she said.

A shadow shifted outside the door. She kept her gaze fixed on her reflection. She inhaled again, squaring her shoulders.

The Honmoon will be gold soon.

“Yeah,” she repeated. She lifted her chin and closed her eyes.

It’s going to happen soon. You’re faster than they are.

She touched her collarbone, fingertips trembling on the tip of the climbing pattern.

You’re faster than them. You’re going to make it.

“Okay,” Mira said. Her shadow backed away. “Alright. Just checking.”

“Thank you,” Rumi said. Her voice was steady now. Her muscles still felt weak with adrenaline. She turned to call towards the door, “I’m sorry. I’ll be out in a second. I’ll clean the takeout up, too, don’t worry about it. I was still half-asleep.”

A pause. Then, with a soft chuckle, Mira said, “Yeah. We could tell. …No rush, alright?”

“Of course,” Rumi said.

Mira’s shadow hovered at the door for a moment. Slowly, it backed away.

As soon as the sound of her footsteps were gone, Rumi’s shoulders slumped, her breath quickening. Elbows braced against the edge of the sink, she buried her head in her hands, nails digging into her face.

“I’m faster,” she mumbled into her hands. “I’ll be faster.”

It took her ten minutes to leave the bathroom. By the time she did, the TV was off and the girls had cleaned up.

“We can finish it tomorrow,” Zoey told her. “We were all getting tired anyway.”

You mean I was getting tired, Rumi thought. Out loud, she said, “Yeah, good idea. It’s late anyway. We have plenty of time tomorrow.”

We have plenty of time.

“Goodnight, girls,” she said. They said the same to her. Alone in her room, she recited it, again and again, to the dark bedroom ceiling.

I have plenty of time.

She was running out of time.

The patterns reached her throat. They weakened her voice. Like an unraveling cocoon, the Golden Honmoon was slipping from her grasp.

The wasp crept closer and closer.

Jinu was in her head. He was there when she closed her eyes, there when she covered her ears, there when she woke, and there when she slept. He clung to her mind like slime, his own head full of cobwebs, and when she stared up at her ceiling at night she saw him standing across from her on the rooftop, eyes sad and knowing.

He was in her head and he was whispering. Demon, so she sang louder during rehearsals. Denial, so she ran faster during hunts. A demon girl had her stabbing her saingeom through the heart of every demon twice as hard. I know what it’s like—

“Rumi!” Mira called after Rumi as she stormed away, the night wind whipping through her hair, hands shaking on the hilt of her saingeom. “What’s up with you lately?”

A constant reminder of a shame of your own.

“I’m not in the mood, Mira.” The breeze carried her voice away. Mira and Zoey stood like statues as she slunk into the shadows, the slime in her head dripping down to her heart.

They didn’t call after her. They were mad. Mad she’d made a few mistakes in the hunt. Mad she was distracted. Mad she was walking away. In the bustling quiet of the night, head down and hood obscuring her face, the loudest words in Rumi’s head were her own.

Across the rooftop to the empty air—

I’m nothing like you.

She knew something was amiss when she opened her bedroom door and was hit with a soft night breeze.

The door to the balcony was open. Warily, Rumi stepped forward, fingers straining for the Honmoon, curling the threads into the shape of a sword. As she moved closer, she spotted the silhouette of somebody crouched by one of her plants, and she tensed. Had he—? I told him not to come here!

But no; she stepped closer and saw the long hair falling down the figure’s back, and the familiar tallness as they stood.

“Mira,” she realized, saingeom dropping back into the Honmoon.

Mira turned, although she didn’t look surprised to see Rumi. Probably because she was the one intruding. “Hey.”

“Hey.”

Rumi stepped to the side as Mira shoved her hands into her pockets and stepped off of the balcony. Rumi pressed her lips shut but didn’t comment, reaching to close the balcony door instead, eyes lingering for just a moment on the city lights outside.

That could have been dangerous. What if the tiger had come? Feeling a flare of irritation, Rumi turned to Mira and opened her mouth to speak.

Mira beat her to it. “Your plants don’t look too good.”

Rumi’s mouth hung. “What?”

“Your plants. They’re browning.”

Rumi eyed her. “I’ve been busy.”

“Busy watching that caterpillar documentary for the one millionth time?”

The words were teasing, but something in the calculating glint of her eye made Rumi bristle.

“Why are you here?” she demanded.

Mira’s eyes widened. Rumi wanted to backtrack, but her face wouldn’t twist out of its scowl, so she squared her shoulders against Mira’s hurt look instead.

“Do you not want me here?” Mira asked.

Rumi didn’t respond.

After a moment, she turned away and scoffed softly at the floor. “Yeah. Alright. I shouldn’t have come anyway. I just—” Mira looked up again, lips tight, eyes searching the ceiling for something. The shadows on her face made her look almost mournful. When she turned to Rumi, the look didn’t leave her face, and it took everything in Rumi to keep her chin raised, her expression flat, as Mira’s shoulders slumped and her voice tipped into something soft and desperate. “You know you can tell us anything, right?”

Rumi swallowed roughly. Something in her quivered—the precarious tightrope she’d been walking for years, growing thinner and thinner, trembled underfoot. For a second she wanted it to snap. She wanted to tell Mira everything. I have patterns. I’m half-demon. I’ve been meeting up with Jinu every night. It wobbled on the tip of her tongue, tipping dangerously on the edge of the tightrope, but she swallowed it back down and kept her face steely. Slowly, with the precision and detail of shaping clay, she fixed her face into a soft, appreciative smile.

“I know,” she said. “You can talk to me, too.”

If anything, the shadows sunk deeper into Mira’s face. “I am.”

Rumi frowned. “Are you worried about something?”

“I’m worried about you.” You bent unwillingly into something desperate, and her face twisted into a helpless frustration. She used to get that look a lot when she was younger, whenever she had something she wanted to say but was struggling to articulate it. Rumi hadn’t seen it in a while. She softened.

“You don’t have to be worried,” she said. “I know I’ve been…shorter than normal with you two, and I know I’ve been making so many mistakes, and I’m sorry. It’s just—”

The look deepened. “That’s not what I—”

“It’s just the stress of everything getting to me. We’ve just been so busy with Golden, and the whole problem with my voice, and the Saja Boys…it’s getting in my head, but I think things will get better soon. And I know everything will be better once the Honmoon is gold. I promise.”

Mira looked at her like she was speaking a different language. The longer they stood in silence, the more dejected her expression became, until she no longer looked frustrated and only stood there looking sad.

“Goodnight, Rumi,” she whispered. Defeat was what Rumi had wanted from her, but it still felt like a slap to the cheek.

“Goodnight,” she whispered back.

When the door clicked shut behind Mira, Rumi’s face fell. Her back hit the edge of her bed and she slid onto the floor, shoulders slumping. She dropped her head into her hands. Mira had been upset, and she hadn’t helped at all. If anything, she’d made things worse, but what else could she have done? She can’t know. She can never know. Hopefully, soon, there would be nothing to know. Silently, she willed Mira and Zoey to hang on. Things will be less confusing soon. I promise.

Something thunked against the balcony window. She lifted her head to see Jinu’s blue tiger staring at her from behind the glass, his head cocked and his tongue sticking out, a small card resting on it. On his head was the six-eyed bird, who stared at Rumi accusingly with all three pairs.

She forced herself to her feet and slid the balcony door open. As she took the note from the tiger’s tongue and shook the saliva off, the bird continued to stare.

“Shut up,” she muttered to him, opening the letter.

It was bordered with small smiling ladybugs. Meet me tonight? it read.

She glanced behind her. The light under her bedroom door glowed softly, free of Mira’s lingering shadow. Her thumb flicked against the corner of the invite, lip wedged under her front teeth.

She slid the balcony door shut behind her, and the bird cooed disapprovingly as she hauled herself up onto the tiger’s back.

“I said shut up,” she growled. “Aren’t you on his side?”

The magpie turned away with a huff. The tiger turned to her quizzically—a chance to back out.

Her eyes landed on the potted plants beside them. Mira was right. Their leaves were brown.

She looked away. “Let’s go.”

The tiger braced his legs and flew, leaving the penthouse behind.

That night she dreamt she was a butterfly with wide, patterned wings. Jagged and purple, the markings ran across her, up her, down her, all over her, and she was weightless. Wings wide and on display for the world to see, she fluttered above Seoul and didn’t think of all the people watching. They could gawk and stare all they wanted to. So close to the stars, she knew they were looking with awe, not disgust.

In the shimmering night sky, the moon was bright. It got brighter and brighter until it was falling, no longer the moon but the wide, horrified whites of an eye. As it fell closer, a familiar face appeared from the shadows: it was Zoey, and it was Mira, and it was crushing her, killing her, leaving her twitching and helpless on a wide patch of grass near a familiar, towering garden.

The plant stalks parted and out stalked a beetle, massive and covered in shiny markings. Crushed and dying, she could only hold her fleeting breaths of terror as it stopped next to her.

Its eyes were wide and black and held her reflection like deep water, and in it she saw she was no longer a butterfly, but a beetle, body half-squashed and twitching. Her patterns weren’t beautiful. She had been wrong. They bored grotesquely against her body just like they always had.

In the distance came a thundering herd of footsteps, growing louder and louder, but she couldn’t tear her eyes away as a crowd of children approached. They ran past her and poked her with sticks, squealing and shrieking. Ew, ew, ew— they cried, their voices high and mocking. What is that thing?

You are one of us, the towering beetle said, as the shadows of the gathering children loomed around her, growing taller and taller in a circle that blocked out the sky. You can dream of being a butterfly until the wings fall off your back, but when they do, you’ll have nothing left to hide your shell.

A massive boot blackened what was left of the sun and bored down on her. She had no wings to escape, no matter how hard she tried to move them, and the boot landed, resting heavily on her back. It crushed her slowly, painfully, her bones snapping one by one and her shell cracking little by little. Around her, the kids cheered louder and louder until her body gave in under the pressure.

The sound cut out.

She woke with sweat sticking to her forehead, her heart pounding in her chest. She checked the bedside clock—three in the morning—and her body sagged.

The Idol Awards were today. She closed her eyes and exhaled.

By midnight tonight, her patterns would be gone.

Her hands had turned to darkened claws, her patterns torn-up rivulets of blood, and her body not her own. The only part of herself that was real were her nightmares, torn from her wicked mind and stapled onto her skin like a bloody animal’s pelt, as she stood curled in on herself like a frightened pillbug, stage lights out and cameras flashing.

Zoey and Mira found her beneath the stage.

Or rather, she found them, as she clawed her way down the railing with her shaking claws. When she looked up, her heart leapt with breathless hope, but sank mercilessly down to her stomach when she saw their faces. If her eyes were broken headlights, they stood like two horrified deer frozen dead center, torn between the danger and the light. Torn between fear and recognition.

In the end, what won was both fear of her and recognition of what she was. In her high on stage, she had reached her hands towards the golden-threaded clouds and had missed, and she was plummeting, plummeting, plummeting from her chrysalis, mangled and deformed and wrong, with no wings to catch her.

She stepped towards them, and they stepped away. The light of the red Honmoon glinted off their blades as they raised them, which in turn painted their faces in red. Rumi paused, claws outstretched. Her shadow smeared across the wall like the guts of a squashed bug.

They pointed their weapons at her, faces grim, and Rumi knew they would do it if they had to. They would kill her, and she couldn’t blame them. She would kill her, too.

She should have long ago. She had always known what she was. Invasive. A pest. Bad.

With what she had left of her rotten, ruined body, Rumi ran.

Celine couldn’t do it.

She had raised Rumi mercilessly on blood, blades, and cracked insect shells, yet faced with the worst creature of all and a sword on a cracked silver platter, she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t kill Rumi.

Why?

She wanted to sink into the splitting Earth and rot beneath the soil. She wanted to decompose beneath the roots of the land and help for once in her life. At the very least she wanted to finally hit the ground. She was sick of hanging around in a world she only knew how to destroy. From the moment she was born, Celine must have known she was destined to fail.

So why hadn’t she killed her on sight?

“I can’t,” Celine choked. When Rumi looked up, her hands were shaking and her eyes were horrified. Rumi understood. She had seen Mira before—too afraid of the bug to kill it.

Just do it, Rumi begged. Can’t you see there’s something wrong with me? I was born bad and nothing can fix me. Why won’t you help me? All I’ve ever wanted to be was good.

She groveled on the ground in heel-crushing distance for death, but the boot never landed. Just gentle, cupped hands, shaking and terrified, lifting her up. Celine was face-to-face with her, telling her they could still fix it.

Some things in the world were irreparable, like cut thread, or scarred flesh, or half-formed wings. Rumi was the snipped-off leaf of a garden plant, the holes of her rot consuming her. Simultaneously, she was the bug, eating herself from the inside out. She was it, and nothing could fix her.

Nature always caught up eventually. It had caught up to Rumi now: the violence that had spent a lifetime nipping at her heels. Her nature. She had landed roughly in the dirt and now it sunk its teeth into her leg and dragged her across the tattered Earth, and she knew she couldn’t run anymore. She could feel its breath against her neck. In the dirt laid the sword that could kill it. Her hands hung limply by her sides.

She closed her eyes and let it bite.

Rumi couldn’t stop staring at the light.

The night sky had plenty more things for her to look at, like the moon, or the stars, or Celine as she did the last of her outdoor chores in the yard. Yet Rumi was enraptured by the small warm light that hung just a small distance away, dangling off the edge of the roof. It wasn’t just because of the way it burned a black hole in her vision the longer she looked, or the gentle light it illuminated on the wooden porch Rumi sat criss-cross on. What caught her eye was the small flickering dots that buzzed around it.

She knew they were moths. Moths were bad bugs, a worse version of the butterfly, because they liked to chew up clothes. It was why Celine didn’t like them getting inside, and why Rumi was allowed to kill them. Rumi was still small, though, and she wasn’t certain she could jump high enough or grab enough of them to kill them—but she also wasn’t certain she would have killed them if she could. Not when she was so curious about what they were doing.

She didn’t notice Celine approaching in her enraptured state, not until she halted beside her and let out a heavy sigh.

“I’ve finished. Come on, let’s get inside.”

“Why are they doing that?” Rumi asked, pointing at the light.

Celine took a deep, steadying breath. “Why is who doing what?”

“The moths. Why do they go to the light?”

“Oh, I see.” Her breath released. “They think it’s the moon.”

“What? How? It doesn’t look like the moon at all.”

Celine shrugged. “The moon is bright. They’re looking for a source of brightness to guide them, and they believe they’ve found it. They’ll circle it until the morning. Or I suppose until they die,” she added, muttering it more to herself than Rumi.

Rumi heard it anyway. Her eyes widened. “Why? Does it hurt?”

“Well, presumably, if it emits heat. I believe it disorients them as well, and they can’t exactly eat if they’re circling aimlessly all night, can they?”

Rumi pouted and turned, a black spot the size of the light chasing after her vision. “Why don’t they just leave it?”

Celine gave her a pitying look. “Why would they? They think they’re going in the right direction. To them they’re flying into paradise. We can’t do anything to help. They’ll probably fly themselves into an exhausted death before they realize they were chasing the wrong thing the whole time. They’ve done it to themselves. Now, stand up and come inside.”

Rumi hesitated, turning back to the light where the moths circled on and on. She felt bad leaving them there to die chasing the wrong light when the real moon was just a glance away. Even if they did see it, though, would they go for it? It was so much duller, and smaller, and so far away. It must have felt like an unrealistic goal compared to the light, which was all they could see, and it was probably all they thought they could reach. But it was killing them. Did they really deserve to die obsessing over a task that would get them nowhere?

“Rumi,” Celine stressed. “Get up.”

“Can’t we help?” Rumi pleaded. “I don’t want them to die.”

“They’re moths, Rumi,” Celine sighed. “It’s better if they die.”

She was right. They were bad bugs. Did they really deserve her pity? She watched them circle the light, bump into it, crawl across its blinding surface. Other bugs crawled along it, too—smaller ones. They weren’t moths. What if they were good bugs? They were staring it dead in the eye and they would never get anything out of it. It didn’t seem like a merciful way to die. If Rumi could, she would squash them fast and painless. It wasn’t their fault they had been born bad. She didn’t blame them for wanting to follow the moon and fly far, far away from it all.

Celine exhaled sharply through her nose and said, “Get up, and I won’t say it again.”

Rumi got to her feet sullenly. “I’m coming,” she whined. Celine put her hand on her back between her shoulders and guided her inside, where Rumi threw one last glance over at the bugs by the light.

In the morning they’d be gone, but the next night they would be back, and the next, and the next, circling endlessly on and on. Rumi watched, but she never intervened. Celine was right; what would helping them do? Maybe they deserved it.

Maybe this was their punishment for being alive.

If she couldn’t help the world by dying, maybe she could try another way.

The Honmoon was no longer red, but it was no longer golden, either. It was every color all at once, a blend of rainbow, and it circled the world in a blinding light, even from so far up above the ground.

She’d been chasing the Golden Honmoon for so long. It wasn’t exactly what she’d hoped for, this mirage of every color spanning across the barrier’s waves, but it was closer to peace than anything she’d ever seen before.

On instinct, she focused on the light, but paused when a hand squeezed her own. She turned to Zoey and Mira, standing on either side of her. The Honmoon glowed, but for the first time in her life, she didn’t chase it; she squeezed their hands in return, and looked at them, really looked at them, now that she had them back. The Honmoon had pulled her attention away, and as long as she lived, she swore she would never let it do the same again.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered to them when their feet touched the ground. She was done chasing gold. Bigger things existed, however far they had seemed, but they had been there the whole time, and she was done blinding herself to them. She was done pushing away her girls when they had only ever been there to support her. She had been wrong, and she hoped desperately that they would give her another chance. This one she swore she wouldn’t waste.

“We’re sorry, too,” Zoey whispered, eyes glistening, her face blurring as Rumi sniffled back. When she turned to Mira, her face was twisted in a poor attempt to hold back her sobs.

“I promise I’ll explain everything,” Rumi swore shakily. “And you don’t have to forgive me.”

“I already forgave you,” Mira said, “but you don’t have to forgive us, either.”

“What? None of this was your fault.”

“Are you kidding me, Rumi? The way I—”

A camera flashed. Mira cut off, and hurriedly, Rumi wiped her eyes and inhaled slowly. They looked between each other in silent agreement: Later. At the penthouse.

Patterns stark against her skin and two hands held in her own, she turned towards the flashing cameras and weeping fans and held her head up high. For the first time in her life, her confidence felt real. Wavering and uncertain, sure—but real.

“Would you still love me if I was a caterpillar?”

The moment it left her mouth, Rumi cringed. She laid with her head in Mira’s lap and Zoey’s head lying on her chest, and both of them paused, Mira’s hand in her hair stilling and Zoey’s hands halting in their play with Rumi’s fingers. Mira squinted down at her and Zoey squinted up. With a rough swallow, she fought not to avert her eyes.

Then Zoey smiled. “What?”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Mira laughed, and the incredulous fondness in her voice slowly eased the tension from Rumi’s shoulders. Her hand began stroking through Rumi’s unbraided hair again, soft and repetitive, Rumi would have closed her eyes if anxiety wasn’t steadily sizzling a brand new hole in her gut. “That’s totally a Zoey line.”

“Hey!”

Rumi laughed softly. “I know. I just—I know you don’t like them, Mira.”

“I don’t,” Mira agreed. “So what?”

“So I was wondering…if I turned into one—hypothetically—would you still love me? Even if…”

Mira’s hand paused again. She watched her carefully, and Rumi was glad her head was facing away so she didn’t have to make eye contact. It was easier to speak without it, even with Zoey’s eyes boring up at her.

“Even if?” Zoey prompted, running a finger down Rumi’s collarbone.

Rumi swallowed. “Even if I never became a butterfly.”

“Why wouldn’t you become a butterfly?”

“I don’t know,” Rumi whispered. “Maybe I just can’t. Would you love me still? Even if you thought I was gross, and weird, and had too many legs. Even if I was venomous and accidentally hurt you. Even if you waited forever and wished every night that you’d wake up and I’d be a whole new thing, something that was actually pretty and helpful and—”

“Rumi,” Mira interrupted. Rumi broke off, fingernails digging into the palms of her hands, pleading Mira wouldn’t lean down and try to catch her eye. She didn’t, but her voice was soft and worried. “What’s this about?”

Rumi sniffed. “Caterpillars,” she said, and from the mirror across the bedroom she could see both of them staring at her with an odd intensity.

Neither of them said anything. Not until Zoey shifted into a better position to meet Rumi’s eyes, put her chin in her hand, and said, “I’d love you.”

“Yeah?” Rumi choked out.

“Uh-huh. I love caterpillars. I think they’re cute. If you were a caterpillar you’d be the cutest one to ever exist, and I’d put you in a little terrarium and feed you caterpillar food every day and read you stories and sing you songs. I’d write you songs, too. And I’d let you be the lead singer even though you’re a caterpillar.”

“Caterpillars eat leaves,” Rumi told the ceiling. “And they can’t sing.”

“Then tell me what your favorite leaf is and I’ll let you loose in a forest of them.” She poked Rumi’s cheek and added, “Also, yeah they can. I’ll record my own voice and put a little bug voice filter over it and pretend it’s you.”

Rumi laughed wetly. “But it wouldn’t really be me.”

“Trust me—I can understand Cater-Rumi and I know she’s spitting bars.”

That got Rumi, and Zoey’s head fell against her shaking chest to stifle her giggles, but when Mira didn’t join in, Rumi’s laughter faded. With all her bravery, she tipped her head backward and met Mira’s eyes.

Alarmingly, they looked wet. “Rumi,” she sniffled, “if you turned into a caterpillar I’d love you, too.”

For some reason, Rumi’s own eyes began to sting. “Yeah?”

Mira nodded, biting her lip to stop its trembling. “I wouldn’t wish for a stupid butterfly when I already had everything I want with you. I’d—I’d get over my fear of caterpillars if it meant I could hold you every day. I don’t care if you’re venomous, either. I can take some fucking venom. I’d hold you all day even if it melted my hands, and then I’d buy prosthetics so I could keep holding you. You’re never gross to me. You could sprout sixteen arms right now as a person and I’d still think you were one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen.”

Zoey was sniffling now. “Mira…”

“You could probably use gardening gloves,” Rumi whispered, blinking away the tears in her eyes. Unfortunately, “away” meant out of her eyes and down her cheeks. “To hold me, I mean. So you wouldn’t lose your hands. Although I don’t think the melting sounds realistic.”

“My point is that I’d love you,” Mira sniffled. Her face suddenly steeled as best it could past the glistening of her cheeks and she asked, “Why?”

“I was just wondering.” Rumi tried to laugh it off, reaching a hand up to wipe at her eyes. “Zoey must have possessed me for a second.”

Zoey wormed her way up Rumi’s body and laid limply across her chest. She stared up at her with big, wide eyes, and said, “Are you sure it wasn’t something else?”

“What?”

“I just…I dunno. I feel like you compare yourself to them a lot.”

Rumi frowned at her, sniffling. “To caterpillars?”

Zoey nodded. “Well, all bugs, really,” she conceded, “but mostly caterpillars.”

“This is the first time I’ve…?”

Zoey fiddled with the collar of Rumi’s shirt, avoiding her eyes. “I mean, like, you’ve never—when you did it before it wasn’t…I don’t think it was a conscious…”

“Zoey told me she thinks you’re projecting your hatred for yourself onto innocent helpless insects,” Mira finished helpfully.

“Mira!” Zoey cried.

“What? You weren’t going to say it, and I agree.”

“What?” Rumi sputtered.

Zoey whined and buried her face in her hands, flopping against Rumi. “I just—I don’t know! I always thought you were kind of weird about the bugs, but I could never figure out why, because you were always so rigid about the whole ‘good versus evil’ thing and it felt kind of obsessive and you were really defensive about it whenever we brought it up? And I thought, okay, whatever, Autism is cool, but something about it always rubbed me the wrong way with the way you talked about the evil bugs, and it wasn’t until the whole demon thing came out that I started lying awake at night thinking about everything that happened and it all started coming together and—”

“Zoey!” Rumi said.

Zoey’s jaw snapped shut so harshly the sound practically echoed. She spread her fingers apart and peered up at Rumi nervously. Rumi smiled, soft, and reached out a hand, brushing her fingers away and caressing her thumb softly against the bone of her cheek.

Looking her deeply in the eyes, she said, “I am not a bug.”

“Exactly.” Zoey’s eyes were suddenly fiery. She squirmed forward and grabbed Rumi’s hand from her cheek, squeezing her fingers. “Which is why your weird self-inflicted metaphor makes no sense.”

Rumi, although in disagreement, was offended. “First of all, there is no self-inflicted metaphor.”

“Your biggest insecurity is your DNA that you think makes you inherently evil and your favorite pastime is massacring creatures who are destructive by nature,” Zoey fired back.

“Oh, come on. You’re reaching.”

Mira arched an eyebrow. “Wasn’t one of Celine’s many philosophies ‘kill all bad things on sight’? I remember her teaching us that was the only method to kill demons, and you told us she did the same thing teaching you about pests. Is it crazy to think that maybe some lines blurred, and that maybe that’s why you’re always tormenting the insects you think are bad? As some sort of fucked-up self punishment?”

In Mira’s flourishing garden of incredibly wrong statements, Rumi could only focus on one word. “Tormenting? I treat them the same way Celine does! I’m not tormenting them! I’m showing them—mercy. If you think the harshest way for bugs to die is by being stomped on, then you need to rewatch that caterpillar documentary again.”

“I already watched it twenty times,” Mira said flatly, “because you won’t stop putting it on. Almost…obsessively, I’ve noticed…”

“Okay, that is a reach!”

“Celine uses, like, natural repellents,” Zoey interjected, frowning. “You crush them in your bare hands and say they deserve to die because of what they are.”

“We have different methods,” Rumi said, but she was starting to feel her conviction wavering. Could they be right? She tried to think back on her childhood, on her time in the garden with Celine, and despite the plants, tools, and years of lessons, the most prominent thing in her mind were the bugs—not the good ones, but the bad ones, squashed in her palms, lying limp in the grass, smushed starkly against the green of a leaf. It was the earliest thing she remembered. “I don’t…it’s for the sake of keeping the garden safe—”

Mira delivered the final blow. “Your gardening notebook has more pages dedicated to the evil of the common caterpillar than the art of taking care of any plant. I know ten different ways to kill a leafhopper and zero ways to keep a basic houseplant alive.”

“That’s you,” Rumi argued weakly, “not me. I know those things, I don’t need to write them down. Plus, you can’t take care of a plant if it has pests.”

“How often do they have pests?” Zoey murmured.

The answer was never. She monitored her balcony garden like a well-trained guard never off duty, and in all seven years of keeping it, she’d never had a major issue. Sure, a stray pest here and there, but they were right. It wasn’t a big enough problem for two pages, let alone ten.

“Sometimes,” she whispered. It may have been weak and immature, but suddenly she couldn’t meet their eyes. Her hands were shaking, and she felt like the two of them had grabbed her by the legs and tied her ankles to a whirring fan. Her insides felt jumbled and upside down. Why did she care about the bad bugs? “I really don’t think you two are making any sense. It’s—I’m not…abnormal about it. I’m the same as Celine.”

“Rumi.” A hand touched her cheek. Mira. Rumi took a deep breath and dragged her eyes upward to her gentle gaze. Her hand on Rumi’s cheek moved to tuck a strand of purple hair behind her ear. “I’m saying this as lovingly as possible, but Celine is abnormal about a lot of things, so that’s not saying much. And I’m not saying we’re completely right,” she rushed before Rumi could interrupt, “or that this is some crazy psychological thing, but just—listen. We know you love bugs because they’re interesting. We know you like to garden because it’s a hobby of yours. We know you know all about pests because it’s necessary if you want to keep the plants safe. But we’ve also noticed some patterns and kind of think it could kind of be contributing to the unhealthy way you think about yourself. …We’re talked about this once or twice before. We don’t have to talk about it now, though. But maybe…with that new therapist Bobby got us…?”

The energy seeped from Rumi’s body and she sagged onto the bed. Maybe the therapist would work. She was wary about that woman, and so far their short handful of sessions had left Rumi feeling more like she was leaving a surgery where they implanted a metal bar into her spine—something the therapist was eager to point out day two—but Bobby was insistent upon it. Mira, too; she’d been to therapy before and swore up and down that it would help the three of them out.

Why in the world they wanted to bring up Rumi’s gardening hobby when they had far more traumatic things to dump onto her was beyond Rumi, but if it was bothering them…

“Fine,” she muttered. “If you guys are really that worried.” She’d promised to be more open and understanding, anyway. She could think about it as something she was doing for them. “I guess we could try it. …Even if I think you two are kind of crazy.”

Zoey had an overactive imagination and Mira was a chronic worrier. Most likely the therapist would listen to what they had to say and tell them not to worry. In fact, she’d probably be delighted to hear she had a hobby, and Rumi would be able to sit back and relax while the therapist dissected Mira and Zoey’s speculative nature.

More confidently, Rumi sank back against Mira and nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, we can bring it up.”

Both of them eyed her suspiciously, only more so at her disarming smile. Then, Zoey beamed and leaned forward to peck Rumi on the lips.

“Thank you,” she said sweetly. “You won’t regret it, promise.”

“Of course not,” Rumi said, more focused on their close proximity and Zoey’s big, dark eyes. She leaned forward for another kiss, the topic sliding to the back of her mind. Mira’s hand ran through her hair again, and she melted against her, pulling Zoey farther on top of them.

Sure, they could bring it up to the therapist. Why not?

The therapist did not brush the topic aside. She latched onto it like a starving dog and shook it around until Rumi felt like a tormented squirrel hanging from the hound’s locked jaws. Then, of course, she was dropped gently to the ground, licked on the head, and ordered to come back in a few days to be thoroughly tug-of-warred once more, this time alone. Rumi left the hungry dog’s den and came back a few days later by herself to meet her death.

(She did not die. She was shaken around again, and again, and again, until it began to feel cleansing, like the fog had been shaken from her head and the puzzle pieces had fallen from her mind onto the floor and clicked slowly one by one into place. The starving dog was not starving or a dog, but was actually a very helpful therapist, and Rumi was starting to come around to her. So, fine, whatever. Maybe the girls were right.)

Rumi had chosen the seat outside the café next to the plants for the express purpose of seeing a bug on the drooping leaves, so she wasn’t surprised, just delighted, when one wound up on the edge of her table a few minutes after she did.

It was a beautiful day outside, which meant it was only a matter of time before a fan spotted Rumi with her hair out of its hood and her patterned-covered shoulders bare and took her away from her peace. She was hoping her focus on her phone and the fact her hair was unbraided would draw suspicion away from her, but she was only kidding herself. She had already begun to get some sidelong looks. She was really hoping they were Look at this disappointing lady with her bright purple hair and bizarre tattoos looks and not I’m going to go over there and disrupt that woman’s day because she’s my K-pop bias looks.

Her gaze was drawn away from any looks, however, when a brand new movement in the corner of her eye caught her attention. Sitting at the corner of her table, basking in the sun, was a large caterpillar with its head raised to the sky. The smile slipped from her face, and the next warm breeze that blew through her hair felt colder.

She wondered if she should pretend she hadn’t seen it. She was still gripping her phone—tighter now. But she had seen it, and slowly she rested her phone face down on the table and stared.

The caterpillar crept its way closer, searching the table for something to eat. She could place it back onto the plant, where it would chew holes into the leaves, or she could drop it onto the concrete floor under the shady table and stomp it, quick and painless.

She held out her hand, lying her finger across the table at its face. It felt at her finger, then slowly crept onto it, and she lifted her hand with the other cupped under it, raising it up to her face until they were eye to eye.

It crept up her finger onto her palm. It was cute. She had never really thought that way about caterpillars, but up close, this one was. It was a green leaf color with darker stripes, its body small and compact, and she recognized it as an Asian Swallowtail larva. They were pretty butterflies, with tiger-like stripes on their wings, one of Rumi’s favorites. It was a minor pest at best, and the color of the one in her hands told her it was close to getting ready for metamorphosis anyway. She didn’t feel particularly keen on killing it, so she watched it creep across her palm, trying to sink back into the feeling of the comforting sun.

“Hey!” The chair across from her scraped and she lifted her head to see Zoey settling into the seat across from her, and Mira in seat to her left. She noticed the caterpillar in Rumi’s hand as she began setting their drinks onto the table. “Oh, what’s that?”

Rumi lifted it and said, “Asian Swallowtail caterpillar. What do you have?”

Mira slid a drink over. “Strawberry lemonade for our overheating Disney princess. You said caterpillar? Are you going to…?”

Rumi brought the drink up and sipped, rotating her hand as the caterpillar made its way across it. “No,” she decided, popping off her straw, and Mira’s eyebrows raised in surprise. “It’s only a minor pest. It’ll be a butterfly soon anyway.”

“Yeah?” Zoey grinned and kicked her heels against the ground under the table—something she did when she was excited. “Hey, how do you know it’ll be a butterfly soon?”

“Its color,” she explained, bringing the caterpillar into the center of the table. Zoey leaned in when Mira leaned back, but both of them studied it curiously. “It’s in its fifth instar, which is its last. Each instar, it sheds its skin to compensate for how fast it grows, and in the earlier ones it’s a white and brown color.”

“Why does it change?” Zoey asked, lifting her own drink to sip.

Rumi brought her hand up to the plant beside their table, gently guiding the caterpillar onto the nearest leaf. Hopefully there was a citrus plant nearby. She wondered if she should carry it with them until they found one. “It’s brown and white to imitate bird shit. Anyone would get tired of that.”

Zoey choked on her drink. “It’s”—she coughed—“what?” When she glanced over at Mira’s disgusted face, her coughs broke into laughter, only to dissolve into more coughs.

“That’s nasty,” Mira complained.

It was hard to hold back her smile. “It’s necessary for survival. You wouldn’t eat your own shit if you were a bird.”

Mira narrowed her eyes. “I wouldn’t eat my own shit no matter what.”

“If you were a dog you probably would,” Zoey interjected.

“Ew, Zoey. Step projecting.”

Zoey gasped, offended, past her giggles, and Rumi rolled her eyes fondly. “Should we get going? I know you want to get to that store before lunch, Zoey.”

Zoey and Mira’s eyes flicked over to the caterpillar creeping along the leaf. They swapped a quick, soft look, then glanced back up at Rumi and nodded. As they stood, Rumi gave the caterpillar one last hesitant glance.

A hand grabbed her own. She glanced over at Zoey, who smiled at her. “Ready?”

Rumi nodded. Mira’s hand rested on her shoulder, and she turned her head away from the plant, feeling somehow looser as they walked, hand in hand, down the bright streets of Seoul.