The Last Fallen Star, Graci Kim [books to read in your 20s .TXT] 📗

to the trunk of his car and takes out a baseball bat. “Don’t come any closer, or I’ll use this!” He waves it around like we’re mosquitoes about to give him malaria.

I shake my head. Too bad he doesn’t know what Sora’s dominant element is.

Sure enough, she rubs her wrists and snaps her fingers. And just like that, the baseball bat breaks into two clean pieces.

Mr. Pyo’s jaw drops. Then, finally admitting defeat, he falls to his knees and starts begging. “Please don’t hurt me. I’ll tell you anything. Just don’t hurt me!”

Sora steps forward and glares down at him. “Tell us why you did it. Why did you frame our clan and get us banished? Why did you go to such lengths at the expense of so many lives?”

Austin spits on the pavement in disgust, and even Taeyo’s face has gone red with anger. “And where is the last artifact?” I add.

“She made me do it! She said if I did, she would reward me with the artifact. But if I didn’t, she would kill me.”

“Who’s she?” Auntie Okja demands.

“Sookhee Harrison. She made me do it, and then she killed all those people to get the ax. But after Sookhee was killed, it was too late to come out with the truth. I couldn’t reveal the part I played. So instead, I blamed the Horangi…. What else was I supposed to do?”

Emmett gasps and I frown. That couldn’t be right. Emmett’s mom had told the gwisin halmeoni that she didn’t kill those people. She said someone she trusted had betrayed her. Someone who was working with the council.

“You’re lying!” I say. I want to shake the man until the truth rattles out of his mouth.

Then I remember something else Emmett’s mom had said through the gwisin halmeoni. I didn’t want to hurt anyone. I was possessed.

The cogs start spinning in my head. “Are you sure it was her?” I ask Mr. Pyo. “Are you sure it wasn’t someone who just looked and sounded like Sookhee? Someone who happened to be using her body?”

Emmett grips my arm. “What are you talking about, Rye? The man is clearly delusional!”

Mr. Pyo gapes at me as if I’ve just asked him to eat his arm. But then his eyebrows merge until they look like one long caterpillar on his forehead. “Wait…” His face goes as white as Appa’s makgeolli, and he drops his head in his hands. “Oh Mago, that makes so much sense,” he mumbles.

“What makes sense?” Sora asks. “Spit it out.”

He pulls his hands down his cheeks and sighs deeply. “I didn’t understand it before, but I do now. The girl is right. She wasn’t Sookhee. It wasn’t her.”

“Who was it, then?” Appa demands, his hands placed protectively on Eomma’s shoulder and mine.

“The Cave Bear Goddess,” Mr. Pyo whispers. “It was her.”

We’re all stunned into silence.

Impossible.

Emmett and I have met the goddess. She is kind and benevolent. Yeah, she may have been a bit quirkier than I’d expected, but she’d given me the chance to save Hattie’s life and become a Gom in my own right. She’s the Gom’s patron goddess. Would she really go to the length of possessing one of her Gom subjects to steal the sunstone ax? Mr. Pyo is just playing with us. Messing with our heads.

Then again…

Emmett’s mom had said that she’d been betrayed by the one she had trusted most. Could she have been talking about her patron goddess? I mean, it’s unbelievable, but everything that’s happened over the last few days has been the definition of unbelievable. It’s not that much out of the realm of possibility that the Cave Bear Goddess has been playing with us mortals this entire time.

“Blasphemy!” Eomma cries.

“How dare you!” Appa shouts. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

But Mr. Pyo has started to piece things together in his mind, and he’s now on a roll, discovering truths as he says them out loud. “Yes, of course! The eight artifacts are the fallen fragments of the dark sun and moon, which means they’re the physical manifestations of the six goddesses’ original sin. It’s only logical the goddess would want them all destroyed.” He slaps his thigh and groans. “She was never going to give it to me. I should have known!”

Sora must be at the end of her tether, because she breaks the remaining two pieces of the baseball bat into tiny splinters with another snap of her fingers. “Stop mumbling. Speak so we can understand!”

Frightened, Mr. Pyo nods frantically. “Don’t you see? The goddesses believe that if all the fallen artifacts are destroyed, their original sin, too, will be wiped away. They are assuming their punishment will be rendered null and void and they will have open, unfettered access to the three realms once more.”

Emmett and I look at each other, trying to understand what we’re being told. We’d learned about the fallen stars being symbols of the original sin, and how Mago Halmi had locked the six goddesses in the Godrealm as punishment for their actions. That’s why the gifted clans were born—to do the will of the goddesses on Earth. Is that what Mr. Pyo is talking about?

“So, what you’re saying,” I start, my head spinning, “is that if the last fallen star gets into the Cave Bear Goddess’s hands and she destroys it, the six goddesses will be free to walk the Mortalrealm?”

Mr. Pyo nods solemnly. “Precisely.”

I breathe out, imagining what kind of chaos they might create. Would it mean six divine beings happily mixing and mingling with the saram over burgers at the local In-N-Out? Or six divine beings using mortals as their playthings and stubbing us out as they fancy? If what Mr. Pyo says is true, the latter seems more likely. Not to mention the potential devastation on the gifted way of life. The goddesses won’t need the clans to do their will on Earth any longer, so would they even let us keep our gifts?

“We can’t let that happen,” Austin