Page 53 of The Last Tiger

Seung

I’m being dragged by the arms down a dim, foul-smelling hallway.

I moan, blinking, trying to take in my surroundings.

Dragon soldiers holding each of my arms hoist me roughly forward as they march; my nose wrinkles at the rude smell of their sharp body odor.

Somewhere behind me, I’m distantly aware of Eunji’s presence.

I can feel her heart beating. Her pulse feels distant and irregular, and she’s passed out, but she’s alive. She’s surrounded by soldiers, like me.

Jin, also unconscious, is somewhere behind them.

I groan and slump down, slipping back into a troubled unconsciousness.

The next thing I know, I hear a metal clang reverberating around me—I stir, catching a glimpse of a pale flickering light in the hallway ceiling on the other side of a barred door.

I’ve been left inside a jail cell, blocked off by an iron gate. The soldiers exit, slamming the door.

Beside me, Eunji is collapsed on the filthy, cold floor. In the next cell over, Jin has been blindfolded and bound.

I cast my gaze around hazily at the prison cell as the sound of the soldiers’ boots fades away.

Thick metal bars run from floor to ceiling, forming three walls of the room.

The fourth side is a hard concrete wall to which a cot with a filthy blanket is affixed.

I wrinkle my nose; I can feel the gleeful humming of lice hopping around inside the blanket.

Feeling weak, I lower my head back down to the floor and close my eyes.

The world distorts, swirls.

I can feel a fever breaking out over my brow.

My head nearly bursts with a searing pain; blood pounds as it moves through my temples.

Behind closed lids, slipping in and out of wakefulness, I still see, like shadows thrown from a flaming torch, the ever-changing scenes of other people’s memories, other people’s lives.

For how long I don’t know, I slip in and out of those dreams.

Reality seems to dim at the edges…the room shrinks away from me…

Gradually, the flashing memories settle down.

A black darkness more complete than any I’ve ever seen before lowers over the world.

I find myself standing somewhere in that darkness with sudden clarity.

I look down, seeing nothing under my feet but a black void—I seem to be…

floating in the air…above an endless sea…

Where am I?

When I look back up, directly in front of me, her paws standing on empty space, is the tiger. She exhales softly, the air slightly troubling her lips. Her ancient, mournful, yellow eyes blink slowly.

I can tell at once that she’s in pain. A rumbling noise curdles in her throat.

I’m sorry, I want to tell her. I failed you.

Before I can speak, the tiger turns away from me, as if hearing something behind her.

She snarls and arches her back, fur bristling.

In the black void behind the tiger, I see four or five Dragon officers appear, running toward her, drawing their swords.

She snarls at them again before the vision falls away.

No. I raise my hand in vain, trying to stop them—but she’s gone—

I sink to my knees—

Isao has captured the tiger.

He’s going to kill her soon, if he hasn’t done so already.

We’ll never free the Tiger Colonies now.

How could you do this to us? I cry silently, to whoever will listen. You made us outcasts, strangers in our own home.

We were so close.

Tears well. The droplets fall away from my face, floating up and off into the darkness. They swim in the air, hovering in the empty space around me, floating free, drifting in some invisible wind. A strange light permeates through them. They look…beautiful.

I squint, seeing something in the distance.

Some one .

The figure steps forward, through the void, its footsteps echoing.

He takes one last step forward, his face coming into view—

I gasp. It can’t be—

“Hey, son,” says Dad, smiling.

He’s dressed in casual clothing—not the miner’s uniform he used to wear every day to work, but his everyday slacks and the white shirt he always had on around the house on his rare days off. I remember so often seeing him passed out on his cot in these clothes, his face blank in sleep.

But something’s different. I always remembered him with dark circles of exhaustion under his eyes. Here, now, all of that is gone. The weariness, the stress, the knotted brow, all vanished. In their place his face is radiant and clean. He looks years younger. His smile is peaceful now.

Something catches in my throat.

“What? Tiger got your tongue?” Dad winks. “Won’t you say hi to your old man?”

I shake my head, almost afraid to engage with the vision, the dream—if I reach out to him, will he disappear?

Dad walks forward nonetheless, his arms open. He looks so real. As if he really were right there. His arms close around me in an embrace, and I find that he smells just like our house in Kidoh. I’d almost forgotten that smell, somehow. It feels like something from a lifetime ago.

“Look at you, Seung.” Dad steps back, appraising me. “You’ve grown.”

It’s true. I must have grown more in the past year than I realized, because I now stand a few centimeters above him. I always remembered him being so much taller.

“It’s only been a year,” I murmur.

“A lot can happen in a year.” Dad wipes his eyes. “Hey, how about taking a walk? There’s something I want to show you.”

I look up.

Beside me, I hear the burbling of a creek. Afternoon sunlight casts a brilliant, silver-white tint over the surface of the water. We’re standing on the banks of the river that runs through the village of Kidoh.

I know this place so well. Dragonflies hover, glinting, above the stream, before turning and zipping away. By the water’s edge, reeds quiver in the gentle waves.

Dad and I walk side by side along the riverbank.

“Dad…is this real?” I have to ask him. “Where are we really?”

Dad shrugs, looking out over the river.

“Who can say? I’m not sure I know the answer, Seung.”

“Dad, I—am I dead too?”

Dad laughs. He puts a hand on my back, between the shoulder blades.

“No, Seung. You’re still very much alive. Your body is still back there, in the prison in Hannam City. This is just—you and I are just taking a stroll.”

At that, my spirit falls. Reality comes crashing back to me.

“Dad…I failed. I was so close. I had a mission, to free the Tiger Colonies, but…”

I squat beside the river, my shoes sinking into the soft wet clay, putting my face into my hands. Through my fingers I can see the stream rippling as it winds slowly past us.

“You never got free,” I continue. “You spent your whole life at the mercy of the Dragon Empire. Never climbed up, never escaped your fate. I was so scared that would be my fate too.”

I pause as the memory of someone else’s life passes before my eyes. It’s gone before I can grab hold of it.

“And you weren’t the only one,” I say. “There were so many people like that. People who tried everything to make sure that their lives would be different, but they failed.”

“I know.” Dad’s voice is sober.

“Dad, I…I just don’t get it. What’s the point?”

“Seung.” Dad stands behind me, whistling out through his teeth. “Let me show you something.”

Dad raises a finger. His hands used to shake from weakness sometimes, but now he’s perfectly calm as he lowers his voice to a whisper. “You see that crooked tree by the bend?”

I squint, following his gaze out over the silvery surface of the river.

Where the river bends out of sight, an old, gray, wiry tree clings to the edge. A few scraggly roots hold it in place; it’s nothing more than a twisted, worn strip of bark with a handful of leaves. A good shove would push it over.

But it’s also obvious from its worn trunk just how old it is. This tree has lived here, by the river’s edge, for decades. Maybe a century or more.

“Every little thing in this world has its place,” Dad says.

A dragonfly lands on one of the old tree’s branches. It vibrates its wings and takes off again.

“Seung, we all know that there are things in this life that you can control, and there are things you can’t. Life can do a lot to you, Seung. It can take away your chances at passing an Exam. It can take away what you hoped would be your future.

“But it can’t take away your dignity. Take a look at that old tree—see how proudly it stands by the side of the river? No one can take away your dignity, Seung—they can try all they like, but they can’t take it. It will be with you always. The only one who can make you give it up is you.”

I think back to Dad’s last words before he died.

He told me something similar that final night. At the time I wasn’t ready to accept my fate. I was desperate to fight it at any cost. To break out, to rise up against my circumstances and claw my way to a better fate.

I tried. I tried so hard. And I failed. The weight of everything stacked against us…in the end, it won out. Just like it always does.

Yet, even through that crushing realization, I feel a certain calmness. I don’t know where it comes from.

Maybe it’s the thousands upon thousands of lives that I’ve now lived. Every single one of them teaches me something.

Suddenly I see everyone’s struggle. I see the snares, the systems and circumstances, against which the Tiger people have fought so desperately as long as we’ve been around.

Every generation has given their whole life in blood and sweat and tears for one thing: to survive.

To climb above our station. To make a life that’s bearable for ourselves and for our children.