Mikal woke up one afternoon on a patch of dry, red earth, bruised and bone-aching beneath scorching, white sunlight. So tremendously tired, she felt like she may have been asleep for years. Perhaps thousands of them. There were rags on her body that might have been clothes, once; under the tatters her limbs were sticky with sweat, and her coarse hair was matted to her face. She couldn't remember ever perspiring so much, or why blood might be caked with dirt on her scalp. Mikal couldn't remember much of anything, other than a name she assumed must be hers if she didn't recall knowing anyone else.

She walked for two days and two nights. On the second evening, she entered the city of Bogotá. She was in Colombia, but she wasn't sure how she knew this. How she knew English, knew Spanish, knew the currency, knew how to steal it from someone and how to fight off the two men who tried to take it from her later with a loaded gun. They lay in pools of their own blood near a dumpster while she ran from them, her mouth and hands dripping; she thinks they probably died there slowly on the pavement.

It was enough money to sleep in a room for a night and clean up. Mikal might have carried on that way for weeks, had she not eventually met a man who said he could give her a job. Identification papers. More money. More than she probably knew what to do with, he said. With a ticket from him, she rode in an airplane for what she guessed was the first time, but she still somehow felt it was the wrong way to fly.

When in America they denied her payment and tried to cut the drugs out of her stomach, she once again fled, and once again two men were left for dead, throats torn out with large teeth. Slick, red paw prints led away from their bodies and then disappeared.

Mikal has a name, but no home. She has a talent, but it is gruesome. She behaves like an ordinary human, but she knows she can't be. She would like to remember what she is, instead.

From above, a pale man named Michael looks upon her, with ghosts for eyes resembling hers on his unfeeling face.