I tried to accept that. I wasn’t Nathaniel anymore. I was Niel, a creature of the outside with the memories of a man of the Jungle inside me. I had to separate the two but still keep them together. It was tricky. It made me think of an egg, a rare treat in the Jungle. The outside was a shell, and inside, there were the white and the yellow parts. They existed together, but they could be separated too. Even if they came apart entirely, some part of the white always seemed tocling to the yellow. No matter how separate they became, there was no changing the fact that they were from the same shell.

I rolled onto all fours then rocked back onto my foot-paws and crouched in the grass. I touched my neck. The gash from the man’s knife was long and wide, but it wasn’t bleeding, and...

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