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Akio is laying on the ground, covered in a sickly green viscous fluid. Yoriko wants to shake Orokapi by the lapels and demand, “What have you done to him?” except only that she knows the answer. She had watched in real time as Orokapi dragged her outside to that cemetery where her child had once lain, as he retched and hurled.
Next to Akio is a slightly dented metal can filled with bones. This too—the bones, that is—are covered in the same fluid.
“You might want to dry them off,” Orokapi says. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. His skin is beginning to scale. “I’m not sure how long they’ll last without me.”
In the end, Yoriko can only ask, “Why now?”
The look Orokapi gives her is pitying.
She straightens her back and says, “I’m not going to thank you.”
“I wouldn’t expect you to,” he says, and once again, he is looking off into the distance. What he is thinking of—she doesn’t care, she tells herself, but there is a lurch of empathy in her heart as she glances down at the still Akio.
“Is he—”
“He’s not dead,” Orokapi says. “The antidote is probably making its way through his body around now. He’ll wake up—well, if he doesn’t, I tried my best.”
The knowledge that for him to do better is that he would have to become like Ahu’az is left unsaid, and Yoriko almost wants to demand it of him. She has been left grasping at straws for so long now; can’t he see that there’s nothing left of her at this point? Perhaps that’s why he’s doing it. She holds in her words because it would do her no good.
“You—you’re going now, aren’t you?”
He finally turns back to her. He hasn’t activated his eyes, but she can almost see the pleasure anyway; perhaps it is the forlorn expression on his face.
“Tokinaga has died,” he says. There is a grief she hadn’t thought gods could feel. Even still, something vindictive settles within her. “Vollof has died. Alula has died. Even Ahu’az has died. The others want to return home. Don’t tell me you think we shouldn’t?”
She doesn’t, but—“You want to go? Is this about—is this about what he said, about gods making mess—”
He smiles. “What’s left for me here?” He nods towards Akio’s body. Yoriko swears she can see his finger twitch. She isn’t sure if she’s hallucinating. “They’ll always be a part of me,” he says, to which Yoriko understands as those who he’s eaten. It’s a finite list, with neither Tokinaga nor Alula’s names. “Tokinaga spoke my name before he died. You know mine. I’ll carry everyone else who deserves it.”
Yoriko nods. “Go on then,” she says, and names him, the full thing; Kaka Haha Mi Mui Orokapi, the snake god. “I have to wipe them down, after all. We’ll meet again, should Tokinaga’s spirit rise again.”