Nakasi loped through the jungle, bow in her hand where it belonged. With each stride, her eyes scanned the ground, calculating where to place her foot next among the sharp roots and crawling vines that carpeted the jungle.
An officer from the Bonde Wakulima police had been lecturing her about due process and justice and long-term solutions, treating her alternately like a child and a savage. Then they had heard the gunshots. The exact minute the officer had averted her eyes, Nakasi had sneaked off.
Killing people out of necessity was not bad for her karma. Nakasi had known this from young. But now, she was on the hunt for the bandits who had hit the mine. If she took them down, it would be an act of justice. It would refresh her karma for the first time in months. And that wasn't her only reason. Once she made these kills, the townspeople would start trusting her, and she could settle down, earn money and live as they did. She could buy food and eat it with a knife and fork, and she could sleep in a bed that didn't have any insects in it. She could travel without carrying a weapon.
If she was accepted into this town, she would never have to live like an animal again.
She spotted the bandits ahead, bent under heavy sacks of stolen goods. Out of habit, Nakasi wondered how much their treasures were worth, then forced the thought back down. This time, she wouldn't be keeping the loot for herself.
Crouching, she peered through her bow's magnifying scope. The bandits sat down in a ring, pooling their spoils between them. Two of them stood guard, but they both faced towards the town, not at her. That mistake was about to cost them.
Nakasi opened her pouch to select her arrow. When she had first acquired her bow, as a six-year-old browsing through the possessions of a murdered ecotourist, it had come with fifty arrows. Now, sixteen years later, she was down to twelve arrows, all of them irreplaceable. She fingered past her mandible-tipped arrows, her two cone-tipped arrows and her prized three-bladed one, and she selected one of her reliable broadhead arrows.
Clicking her arrow onto place, she used her finger hook to grab the string and pulled it smoothly back to the corner of her mouth.
Choosing her target was not difficult. She aimed for the leader, the one who stood up straightest and had everyone's eyes. Nakasi lined up the targeting dot on the base the target's ear. The dot rested there for two seconds as she savored the thrill of the kill. Then she squeezed with her index finger, the hook clicked open, the string snapped forward and the arrow was gone.
Screams came like thunder. Nakasi readied another arrow and pulled it back, then watched through her scope as the bandits scrambled. If any of them tried to carry off the leader's body and take her precious arrow with it, Nakasi was ready to drop them, but no one had the presence of mind to try it. They disappeared, leaving the best of their loot behind.
Now Nakasi had a few precious minutes before those bandits found their courage and came back. She ran for the camp they had abandoned, her legs picking smoothly across the pits and mires of the jungle floor, and knelt over the fallen leader's corpse.
The leader was a tough-looking woman, fully built and sinewy. She wore a belt full of power cells and a pair of fancy dark-vision binoculars, both of which Nakasi tore away and strapped onto herself. The arrow had smashed an eyeball-sized hole in the bandit leader's skull, and when Nakasi pulled on the shaft, it came away easily, red and grey slime dripping from the arrowhead like egg yolk.
It had been almost a year since Nakasi had killed someone-- quite a dry spell. She wiped off the arrow on the grass, stuffed it back into her pouch, stood up and grabbed the two most valuable-looking sacks the bandits had left behind. Slinging one sack over each shoulder, she sprinted back to Bonde Wakulima. Halfway there, the strap of her new binoculars snagged on a branch, and she felt a painful tug on her neck. For an instant, her senses exploded with pain, and she could see the torn strap flying in front of her face as she pitched forward. But before she could hit the ground, she caught herself on her hands, pushed herself up by the legs, snatched up the binoculars and kept running.
