Path of the Tiger

she had come to realise that their sadness at Paola’s passing was every bit as indubitable as hers. Between beastwalkers, the bonds of friendship were in many ways different to those forged between mortal humans, with their short lifetimes and their support systems of lovers, families and children. In the lonely existence of a beastwalker – an existence in which one was permanently forced to exist in the murky twilight of society – flitting always from shadow to shadow to remain as invisible as possible, one’s only family was made up entirely of friends; other rare individuals who knew all too intimately the pervasive fear of being constantly hunted, the grief of seeing mortal friends and lovers consumed by age, disease and death, and of having to tear up one’s roots from the earth the moment they started drinking of its deeper waters, over and over and over again. Even if the bonds of friendship these beings forged were created in a short time, they were dense and strong, and as genuine as anything she had felt for her friend. And, what was more, she had come to understand that the beastwalkers were saddled with an additional burden: that of guilt, of having dragged her and her friends into this war, and of now having to deal with the fact that an innocent child had died because of it.

Each had dealt with the pain, sorrow and guilt differently. Zakaria, the warrior monk, the perfect soldier, the ascetic, had plunged himself even further into the rigours of discipline, prayer, combat training and meditation. Every day he was up long before dawn to practise katas and weapons drills, and he slept on his own on the depths of the jungle, speaking to the others only when he had to issue commands and instructions, or to oversee their training.

William had dealt with it in his own manner too. He had become more withdrawn and less gregarious, and his gaze would often seem to drift off in the middle of conversations, focusing on invisible phantoms wafting through the trees. He would leave sentences half complete and trail off before finishing what he wanted to say. Some nights he would disappear on his own in his tiger form, and return muddied and bloodied up, often a day or two later, with no explanation as to where he’d been or what he’d been doing. Any concern about his erratic behaviour was swiftly deflected, and the topic firmly changed.

Njinga had become calmer and gentler, not just with the men, but with Chloe especially. This was something that the teen was starting to resent, though; here she was, the only child among adults, and all she wanted was to be treated as one of them, but Njinga’s persistent coddling of her was making her feel even more singled out and isolated from the others instead of allowing her to feel as if she was integrated into the group.

‘The training is going well,’ Zakaria grunted as he filled up the mugs, one by one, with boiling water.

‘Aye brother, we’re almost ready for the assault,’ William muttered, dumping a spoonful of instant coffee into the last of the mugs.

There were ten mugs on the rock; four for Chloe, Zakaria, William and Njinga, four for the other Rebel beastwalkers who had joined them, or were about to join them in Cambodia, and one each for the Thai Army colonel and his assistant who would smuggle them across the border into Thailand in a few days. Lightning Bird, Jun and Daekwon were still in North America, protecting Parvati. Jun would have been more of a risk than an asset for this mission, and while Daekwon’s athleticism and natural talent for combat would have made him a perfect addition to the Rebels’ ranks, the fact was that as a nearly seven-foot-tall black man with vitiligo, he would have stood out like a sore thumb in this part of the world, and the Rebels could not afford to draw attention to themselves.

There was something else bothering the beastwalkers, though – something they had not told Chloe. A few weeks earlier they had lost all contact – or, perhaps, all contact had deliberately been severed on the other end – with Lightning Bird. They did not know whether he, Parvati, Jun and Daekwon were safe or not. They had elected to keep Chloe in the dark about this worrying fact; the girl was stressed enough as it was, and they did not want to add weight to her already hefty emotional burden. They could only hope that no news was good news.

Chloe and the beastwalkers had been training intensively in the Cambodian jungle from sunrise to sunset each day, with a few hours of night training thrown in on top of that. Breaks were few and far between; the importance and dire risk of the mission demanded peak physical performance, an acute level of alertness and extreme mental and emotional endurance. For a new recruit like Chloe it had been a process of learning entirely unfamiliar actions, movements and skills, as well as new ways of thinking, observing and analysing, and unlearning old, unhelpful habits.

In addition to the physical training, Chloe had been learning a number of languages, as well as the skills of moving unseen through the shadows, and the arts of stealth and deception. Her teacher in this was a beastwalker named Ranomi Indrawati, an Indonesian woman who could transform, in stark contrast to her tiny and almost childlike frame, into a six-hundred-kilogram Sumatran rhinoceros.

Chloe could not help but smile as she thought of her teacher. She would be coming back from her training in a few minutes, and she looked forward to seeing the petite woman’s crooked smile, so full of lively mischief, and her almond eyes, creased permanently around their ends with lines from too much laughter. Ranomi’s innate joy was a welcome respite from the gloom that hung like a shroud of unmoving fog around the others.

Ranomi had had the