Page 58 of The Last Tiger

Eunji nods and runs quickly over to the side of the stage, where Kenzo and Jin stand with their heads bowed. She rips the bags off their heads and unties their wrists. Kenzo stares at the ground, expressionless, as though he’s trying to block out the scene around him.

Jin’s pupils expand to fill her eyes. She looks straight at the soldiers holding the tiger down. “Drop your weapons. Do it now!”

The swords clatter to the ground.

Jin strides forward, picks up one of the swords, and lifts the tiger’s chains. She raises the blade to cut her free.

Everything happens in a matter of seconds. The audience has scarcely had time to react. With the general captive, the soldiers around us seem unable to move—

It’s almost too easy.

Beneath my hands, the general begins to shake. But something is wrong. I don’t feel the fear inside him. I don’t feel him paralyzed. He’s quaking, but—not from terror or confusion—

He’s…

He’s laughing …

Like I said. Too easy.

Isao guffaws. His laughter barks out, a harsh, grating sound. Then, to my horror—his arm reaches forward steadily, through the stream of Tiger ki I’m training on him, and grabs me by the collar.

Isao twists. I cough, choking.

Eunji whips around. She barely manages to make it a step in my direction before the Dragon soldiers around her grab her arms and clamp them behind her back.

Isao yanks, forcing my chin up. His expression is black steel.

“Miss Yamamoto,” Isao says, clicking his tongue. “I was hoping you’d make a more tactful decision today.”

Behind him, Eunji squirms against the soldiers holding her arms, defiant.

“My name,” she shouts, “is Choi Eunji .”

Isao narrows his eyes.

“You’re not going to kill the tiger—” Eunji calls.

Isao tilts his head to the side. With his free arm, he pushes the microphone away and leans toward us, away from the crowd. He looks from one of us to the other, lowering his voice with pleasure.

“That’s right. I’m not.”

We stare at him in confusion.

Isao goes on, his voice soft and dangerous. “Something occurred to me today.” He gestures to Kenzo. “This young man, despite his disloyalty and cowardice, sparked an interesting idea. It never occurred to me before to think that Tiger ki could be given to a Dragon person. To a Dragon loyalist.

“What better means to control a people than to manipulate their hearts? There’s only one tiger left in existence; with it firmly in our control, the empire would have a monopoly on a power of great use to us.

Think of it: a special intelligence branch of the Dragon Army, dedicated toward emotional influence… ”

Isao leans forward.

“I just thought you might like to know that,” he says, intimate.

The general turns and addresses his soldiers.

“Take the tiger and prepare it for shipment home. You can execute the prisoners now.”

I twist against Isao’s grip. The Dragon soldiers holding Eunji push her down to her knees. Behind us, others encircle Jin and Kenzo, closing in.

Jin steps next to the tiger as the soldiers surround her.

She desperately barks out commands, but this time they’re disciplined about looking away, as if they’ve been trained to avoid her eyes.

Jin waves the sword back and forth in front of her, panic growing.

She looks from the tiger to me and Isao, to Eunji, and then back to the tiger. I see the desperation in her eyes.

And then I see the idea form in her mind.

A black cloud appears over her, blotting out the light. She knows the life that Isao has in mind for the tiger from here on: a fate worse than death .

Caged for life, the tiger will serve as the governor-general’s ultimate weapon. For the rest of her life, they’ll treat her like a machine. She will be forced to relinquish her magic, day after day, to the very captors that destroyed her kind. Forever.

An instant before Jin moves, I realize what she’s going to do.

With Isao’s fingers held fast around my throat, I scream at her, “JIN, NO!”

Soldiers closing in around her, Jin turns with the sword—

And drives it directly into the tiger’s side.

I scream wordlessly. The tiger crumples to the ground.

I feel the blade shatter through me. Through her.

No. No—

Isao joins his other hand to my neck. With his iron grip, he begins to squeeze.

“You should be grateful,” the governor-general says quietly. “For once in your life, you had proximity to power.”

No, I think, desperately, stupidly. I kick my legs, squirming against the general’s hold to no avail.

From very far away, I can feel the distant crowd. Someone cries out as the Dragon soldiers begin beating down upon them.

My mind slows as it loses air. I feel a strangled cry, stifled in my breast. Behind me, the tiger slumps over, blood streaming from the wound in her side.

Memories dance before my eyes—my own, this time.

I’m cold, studying by lamplight in the winter weeks before the Exam.

The oil is running low. I turn and blow out the candle.

What was it for? My little life—the friendships I made, the pain and dignity.

And for what? For me to die here?

Is this where my story ends?

A molten glow runs through my veins, filling my blood with hot gold.

Suddenly my hands begin to shine. A golden aura, then a piercing shaft of light, erupts from my chest, through the armor.

The general gasps and drops me to the floor, shaking his hands as if burned. He steps back, shielding his eyes. The soldiers to either side back away as well, averting their faces.

I feel myself standing. Something is moving through me.

My whole body radiates a brilliant, white-hot blue.

A wind begins rising around us, swirling over the stage.

I walk forward, toward Isao, who continues backing away with a hand over his eyes.

When I open my mouth to speak, it isn’t just me.

I speak with a thousand voices, male and female and neither and both.

“YOU CAME TO RULE THE TIGER COLONIES, GENERAL. YOU THOUGHT YOU WERE A SAVIOR TO A LESSER PEOPLE.

“BUT YOU FORGOT TO LISTEN TO THOSE YOU BELIEVED YOU WOULD RULE. AS THEY CRIED OUT FOR RELIEF, YOU COULD NOT HEAR THEIR VOICES. YOU HELD NO SYMPATHY FOR THEM IN YOUR HEART.

“IF YOU ONLY KNEW WHO THEY WERE. IF YOU KNEW WHAT THEY FELT. ONLY THEN WOULD YOU KNOW THE SUFFERING YOU HAVE RELEASED UPON THE WORLD.”

My hand lifts. A vast energy flows through my fingertips. The clothes flutter at my back.

I lean forward—

And touch my hand to the general’s chest—

Isao wails. It’s a piercing, ungodly sound.

The windstorm whips around us, wreathing the two of us in a rainbow of colors.

Members of the audience shout, ducking down.

I hold my hand fast to the general’s chest, not letting go.

I feel the dark, glittering heart of the mighty Dragon leader pouring into me.

I feel his greed, his will to conquer, nearly blot out my vision.

The veins bulge in Isao’s temples.

But in the midst of the storm, I feel something else.

I feel the ghosts of tens of thousands of men and women who have suffered under the Dragon Empire. They’ve come alive, passing through the spirit of the tiger to me.

I feel Eunji’s desperation, pent-up in a house she can never leave.

I feel Jin, placing a pin on the map in her office. I feel her scooping up a young Resistance kid in her arms as they run through the streets.

I feel Hoyoung’s little belly hurting, and the tears spilling down his cheeks. I feel Mom, with infinite care, holding him while he cries in the night. I feel my dad walking home from the gold mines, seeing the lantern lights of my home at the top of the hill.

Joy, fear, hope—all the things we feel—

With the ki of the Tiger spirit flowing through my veins, I gather up their lives and emotions, adding to them the tens of thousands of memories from the spirit well.

I feel our pain, our suffering, our love, our joy.

The beauty and tragedy and triumph of our lives—I take the memories of the Tiger people and weave them one by one into a mighty strand—

And pass them on, through my fingertips, into Isao.

All of them.

Their memories, their emotions—I give them all to Isao.

They are a part of him now. They will be part of him forever.

Isao screams, his neck bulging.

I feel the agony streaming off him in every direction.

The general kneels in the midst of the maelstrom whipping around the arena at enormous speed; I feel twisted scarves of pain and fear and anger lashing out of him.

At the center, the very eye of the storm, are the two of us. The Tiger rebel and the general.

All at once, the wind stills and the light vanishes. A loud bang rings out as Isao falls back, knocked to the ground. I feel myself returning to my own body.

Stillness. Nothing moves.

Soldiers rush to grab me—they draw their weapons—

But a gruff voice screams:

“STOP!”

It’s Isao.

His face is pale. He’s a shell of the man who stood proudly upon this stage moments ago.

“Let him go,” Isao whispers. “Don’t hurt them. Please—don’t hurt them.”

The soldiers, perplexed, freeze.

A flash of moonlight falls onto the stage. One ethereal voice pierces through the air: a ringing, melodious woman’s voice, stronger than I’ve ever heard her before, singing a song it seems I once knew:

ARI-RANG…

ARI-RANG…

A-RA-RI-RO—

The song rises, falls away. Silence. Then a lone voice emerges from the crowd.

“Ari-rang,” warbles a single baritone. “Ari-rang.” An elderly man stands in the middle of the packed arena, tears streaming down his face.

I don’t know quite how I know this, but I can feel deep down in me that this is an old Tiger song. One long forbidden by the empire. One that flows out now, when it’s needed most. It’s like a song from a forgotten dream, a melody that my bones recognize.

Somewhere in the crowd, a woman begins to cry.

And like a tub of water spilling over, the emotion spreads from her to those around and beyond. Tears begin to slide from faces. The dam bursts as all the pent-up frustration, anguish, grief, and longing of decades surge forth.

The beam of moonlight fades now as the crowd in the plaza suddenly explodes, charging toward the stage, full with a purpose larger than any one of them. They move as a wave over the stage, overwhelming the gathered Dragon forces. They’ve had enough. It’s now or never.

“Down with the empire!”

“Freedom for the colonies!”

Some of the soldiers begin to panic. They start to beat down on the crowd, slugging them brutally with enormous bats.

I watch helplessly as a woman with blood streaming down her face hits the ground.

The officer who shoved her slams the back of his sword into her head.

My vision swims as I feel the pain explode in her skull.

Eunji grabs my arm. “Seung. We have to get the tiger out of here. Now.”

A sharp pop! pop! pop! breaks out from behind the line of Dragon soldiers.

An acrid smell hits my nostrils, and more screams can be heard from the crowd as a nauseating, yellow smoke fills the air.

The crowd disperses, breaking out as the tear gas spreads through the stadium.

A sudden, mad burning strikes my nose, torturing my lungs.

I try to cover my face with my sleeve, coughing. Tears stream down my face.

“Seung!” Eunji pulls at me again, and I flinch at the sharp staccato of smoke bombs going off. Eunji holds up a hand to her mouth and staggers as they explode around her. But she doesn’t stop. She dashes straight toward the tiger and lifts her up onto her shoulders. “Come on , Seung!”

With awesome strength, Eunji hauls the tiger off the stage. I finally come to my senses, following her.

We dodge as fast as we can through the crowd, moving out into the empty city streets.

The two of us sprint headlong for minutes that feel like hours, winding through the deserted alleyways until we get to the gate of Mount Tangun.

I swing my hand up to the Haechi statue, and the walls heave themselves open.

Beyond the gate, the clearing at the base of Mount Tangun is as we left it.

Except for a giant boulder, and several smaller ones, plowed into the earth here, jutting out of the soft soil.

The mountain above stands severed, its two halves stark against the skyline, the gap between them a jagged crack leading down to the ravine.

As the stone gate closes once more behind us, everything falls quiet.