by Avi Silver
On Sohmeng’s part, anxiety and agitation had been the two ruling feelings of the day, oscillating back and forth faster than she could keep up with. From what she could glean, Hei didn’t seem to be any more at ease. Unsurprising; they probably hadn’t started their day expecting to find the twitching remains of a loud-mouthed idiot in the middle of their jungle. She knew she ought to be more grateful to the person who had just saved her life, but frankly, Hei was weird. Hei was unpredictable. Hei clicked like a reptile and bumped noses with sãoni.
It was kind of a lot to take in.
One of the sãoni huffed, thumping its back leg against a thick tree trunk. What Sohmeng had thought were falling leaves fluttered up again, revealing themselves to be butterflies, moving in a rainbow of synchronization across the canopy. For a complete death sentence, Sohmeng thought, the jungle’s got a pretty nice view.
Hei made a soft, birdlike coo, reaching for Mama. Sohmeng stared in shock as her saviour stuck their entire arm into Mama’s big, bumpy cheek. They pulled it out, still in one piece and slick with saliva.
“What are you—oh seriously?” Sohmeng whined in protest as Hei wiped it on top of the herb mash they had applied.
Hei shushed her, wrapping her leg in a swath of sãoni skin. “It’s good for you. It will harden as it dries. Seal the wound to keep out sickness.”
“It’s spit.”
“You bled on her. Only fair she spits on you.” Hei trilled at Mama, who puffed air through her nostrils in a way Sohmeng took to be laughter.
“It’s disgusting,” she muttered, not quite brave enough to argue any further. She sighed heavily, watching Hei tie off their makeshift bandages. While everything else on their person seemed to come from Eiji, a mishmash of survivalist ingenuity, their bag had the distinct style of Ateng’s craftsmanship, complete with faded patterns of the twenty-five lunar phases. “How did you learn all this?”
“Practice.” Hei shrugged. “Luck.”
“Did you have a teacher?” she asked. Hei nodded to the sãoni without a trace of irony, tying the bag back onto Mama’s head spines. “. . . like, any people though?” Hei made a sound Sohmeng couldn’t even begin to interpret. This was getting ridiculous. “Bear with me, because this might come as a shock, but I am a human person that does not speak—I don’t know, Sãonipa.”
“Maybe you should learn,” Hei said, turning to pat Mama’s cheeks. “After all, you’re in their—” They noticed Sohmeng poking at her bandages and whistled sharply, fixing their green eyes on her with disapproval. Sohmeng jumped, scowling as a couple of the sãoni peered at Hei in response to the apparent reprimand.
“Is it really so difficult to answer a few questions?” Sohmeng continued messing with the bandages, determined to keep Hei’s attention on her long enough to get a response. She was well-practiced in the art of being difficult to ignore. “I’m not asking for your most intimate secrets—just the basic things! Who are you? How do I gender you? Why aren’t you up in the hmun?” Hei hissed irritably through their teeth, grimacing. Sohmeng took the reaction as a sign to keep pushing. “I mean, you are from Ateng, right? Your voice, it’s not shaped like a trader’s—the accent’s different in the vowels.” She remembered hearing it in her parents’ voices as they practiced Dulpongpa over the fire, the small differences distinct as veins of wovenstone. She cleared her throat. “I don’t even know what the other hmuns’ dialects would be like, so—you sound like me. Like one of us.”
“One of you.”
Their tone was like the yanking of a cord: tight and abrupt and full of potential energy. Looking at Hei, with their tooth-ornamented hood and the cautious hunch of their shoulders, their choppy hair and the charcoal rubbed thick around their eyes, Sohmeng could see how foolish she must have sounded. “I just mean—”
“I only speak Hmunpa for you, Sohmeng Par.” Once more, the words were sharp, made doubly so by Hei’s piercing eye contact. Apparently even falling from Ateng wasn’t enough to keep Sohmeng from hearing her name as an insult.
“What?” she challenged, refusing to back down. “You’d prefer to shriek and growl and act like an animal?”
“I am an animal,” Hei said, stepping toward her with a fierce look, and Sohmeng flinched despite herself, aware of the state of her body and how unevenly matched they were. Seeing this, Hei moved no further, even as their voice stayed shale-sharp. “And so are you. So are we all. It would serve you to remember that, now that you’re down from your ever-wise hmun.”
Sohmeng was well-aware that this was the perfect time for her survival instinct to step in, pat her on the shoulder, and encourage her to take a seat. But as always, her curiosity belayed that order, drawing her attention to the human standing terribly close to her, their hurt nearly tangible.
She considered their extensive knowledge of the jungle, their disdain for speaking like a human being, their choice to save the life of someone they could barely tolerate, their lunar cycle bag in tatters, their snarling contempt for the hmun.
“You’re hãokar, aren’t you?” Sohmeng asked, unable to help herself.
She prepared for an explosive reaction, a sãoni shriek or a hard shove. Wasn’t that to be expected of an exile? But Hei did nothing of the sort; their shoulders dropped slightly from their defensive stance, and for a long moment they were quiet, brow furrowed as they stared at nothing in particular.
“Hãokar,” they echoed at last, looking up at Sohmeng with a softness that ached, an expression that might have been relief. “I suppose I am.”
And at that, even Sohmeng had to fall silent.
As the day progressed, the jungle filled in the gap between them: the rising and falling hum of insects, the playful song of the frogs who would feast upon them. The sãoni were constantly growling or chirping, social as the monkeys that swung enthusiastically across the canopy. Even though they weren’t speaking to Sohmeng, Hei still made plenty of noise, interacting with the sãoni with ease. A drastic difference from the high-strung, awkward person who communicated with Sohmeng primarily in grunts and cagey looks.
Viunwei would say that’s how any reasonable person would treat her. Her fists clenched at the thought, stinging the scrapes on her hands through the paste Hei had cooked up. What would her brother be thinking right now? For all he knew, she was dead, crunched at the bottom of the rainforest like a beetle underfoot. And Jinho—he was probably blaming himself, even though it was her own stupid fault. If, by some miracle, she ever made it back up to the hmun, she had a lot to apologize for.
She examined the silver ring wrapped snugly around her middle finger. In the light, it glinted with a brightness reminiscent of the stripes of the sãoni-repelling silvertongue plant. She thought about waving her hand just to see if it would ward them off, if it would shake the surface of her vision and prove that this had been a dream all along.
Unlikely, if her throbbing wrist had anything to say about it.
A whistle broke across the clearing; Hei had their hood back up and claws on, and was standing in front of a group of tiny sãoni with their back arched, scuttling around like a spider that had tumbled into a fermenting barrel. The sãoni they were taunting, which Sohmeng guessed were babies, took the bait, leaping forward and wrestling with Hei. Sohmeng straightened up in alarm, watching for blood, but Hei only laughed as they wiggled their arm, wrapped in sãoni skin, from the creatures’ mouths.
She flexed her foot, feeling the tug of the raw skin beneath her own wrappings. The thick sheen of saliva Hei had smeared on was working, hardening into an elastic casing that reduced the itching pain of the injury. Much as she hated to admit it, their knowledge of the sãoni was proving itself to be sound. No, not knowledge—familiarity. There was a difference between studying sãoni from afar and literally playing between their jaws.
It raised a few concerns.
How had they come to join this colony? Were they completely delusional? What crime had they committed to get exiled? Had she known them before? Were the
re other hãokar like them, roaming the jungle and befriending the local predators?
“Sohmeng Par?”
She looked up, startled by Hei’s voice. They had shaken off the tiny lizards and walked over to her while she was lost in thought, breathing hard from the exertion of sãoni wrestling.
“Hei the Elusive?” she replied, disappointed to hear that her exhaustion ruined the effect of the recalcitrance she was aiming for.
Hei rolled their eyes, pulling back their hood and crouching down to eye level with Sohmeng. She scanned their face for anger, for hostility left over from earlier, but instead was greeted with a surprising amount of civility. Perhaps even warmth. She held her arm closer to herself as the pause dragged on between them for a beat too long.
“. . . you’re making a joke,” Hei said at last, nodding somberly.
“Not a very good one if it takes you till next Par to get it,” she said, a tense laugh escaping her lips.
“I’m not very funny,” they replied. Sohmeng was trying to figure out the least insulting way to agree with that when Hei whistled through their front teeth, nodding their head at her. Sohmeng stared at them, uncomprehending, until Hei made the gesture again, this time waving at her arm. Without thinking, she held it out, making a face as her wristbones creaked.
Hei took her arm, turning it over in their hands with care. They tested her range of motion, humming sympathetically in response to her pained wincing. Behind them, Mama rested her great broad throat on the cool forest floor, watching closely.
“I realize that I haven’t yet asked how you came to be hurt,” they said as they bent back her fingers. “Forgive me. I was . . . surprised. To see you.” They leaned toward her, brushing their filthy cheek against hers. Sohmeng tried not to cringe; she didn’t want to be rude again, particularly in the face of such jarring sincerity.
“I sort of . . . fell.”
“From one of the trees?”
“Technically, I guess, if you count all the shrubs I slammed into on the way down the cliffside,” Sohmeng mused, her back aching in response to the attempted humour about her own near-death experience.
Hei’s eyes went wide with disbelief. “You fell from the mountain?”
Sohmeng nodded. “Off the side of it. Like a rock, straight down. Well, no, I might have spun around a few times while I was scrabbling for some godless thing to grab onto. It’s kind of a blur.”
Hei turned to Sohmeng’s shredded hands, their face still lemur-like with surprise. Up close, they looked a lot more human than they probably cared to be told—strong square jaw, honest, expressive eyes, a freckle that interrupted the slope of their upper lip. Beneath the sãoni skin, their body was stocky, muscular, with broad shoulders and gently curved hips. For an exiled lunatic with a disastrous haircut, Sohmeng mused, they were pretty handsome.
She cleared her throat, daintily wiggling her fingers. “Got a cool ring out of it, though. Stole it from a bird. Talk about divine retribution, huh?”
Hei glanced at the silver band, frowning slightly. “It’s a miracle you survived,” they murmured, circling Sohmeng with newfound concern, animal in their motions as they inspected her, turning her neck one way and the other.
“Well if you pull my head off—”
“Why would I do that?”
“To eat it, maybe. You run with a crowd that’s pretty notorious for biting heads off.”
Hei blew an annoyed exhale through their nose, releasing their hands from the base of Sohmeng’s skull and turning back to face her. “That’s not—it’s a misconception.”
Sohmeng laughed loudly, forcing her heart rate steady as a whole mess of images and memories tangled up in her mind. “Oh really—”
“Yes!” Hei insisted as they dropped into a crouch. “Really. It’s true that sãoni can and will eat humans, and some colonies will target them in specific circumstances, but generally, humans aren’t their preferred prey. Most of the time, they’re just reacting to a territory conflict, or—”
“Actually,” Sohmeng said, crossing her arms with a tense smile, “I changed my mind. I’d rather not discuss the dietary preferences of the monsters that have been picking off my hmun for the past three years.”
“They aren’t monsters,” Hei snapped. “And Mama has nothing to do with that. Fochão Dangde isn’t even my family’s territory!”
“Your family—” Sohmeng began, voice rising in anger, but was interrupted by a long, loud growl from Mama. The sãoni reached out a front leg, swatting in their direction. Sohmeng balked, and Hei backed off sheepishly. Regardless of whether Sohmeng understood Sãonipa, she recognized a scolding when she saw one. How many times had her grandmother sent Sohmeng and Viunwei off to do separate tasks after a squabble? How many times had her mother hushed her with a single look?
She leaned her head back, following the pattern of the vines above to try and slow her racing thoughts. While the sãoni had not devoured her just yet, she could not escape her history and the part these creatures played in it. She was making a point of trying to appear fearless, but there was more trepidation inside of her than she cared to admit. She glanced at Hei—Hei, who had shared and lost the same hmun as Sohmeng. Hei the exile. Hãokar.
Sohmeng thought of Grandmother Mi patiently reminding her of the different worlds everyone lived in: her brother Viunwei Soon in his world of responsibility, young Tanshi Ginhãe the oracle in her world of conflicting futures, batty old Esteona Nor, getting lost in the caves and singing in a world where her family had not been cursed with Minhal. A world for each of her neighbours, and all of them unknowable.
Sohmeng glared up at a bright fungus growing from a tree, feeling sufficiently chastised. She had known Hei for less than a day—it was impossible to understand a thing about their world, and unfair to snap because her own had unexpectedly changed. She glanced over at Mama, who watched them with narrowed eyes, cheeks puffed and bumpy. Idly, she noticed that the sãoni’s purple throat stripes had begun to glow softly as the sun went down.
Hoping that she wasn’t about to make an idiot of herself, Sohmeng leaned in and pressed her cheek to Hei’s.
They started, their shoulders lowering uncertainly from their ears. She took it as a small victory.
“So where is your family’s territory?” she asked, picking up a fallen stick and poking at the ground. Behind them, Mama closed her eyes and laid down, tucking her forelegs neatly underneath her.
“Where they roam,” Hei replied, their voice as careful as Sohmeng’s. Navigating around each other’s personalities seemed to be a struggle on both ends. “Sãoni migrate throughout the seasons. Or, they try to. But the route’s been . . . disrupted.” Their eyes turned dark as they fidgeted with the claws on their fingers.
“Disrupted?”
“Hmun are stepping out of their bounds. It’s gotten in the way of the sãoni migration route, pushing colonies to where they can’t thrive. Many of them are stagnating, becoming territorial. The colony on Fochão Dangde is a pretty good example of that—I can’t remember the last time they moved as they’re supposed to. You’re lucky it was us who found you. That colony has a taste for—” They caught themself. “They’re less compassionate, toward humans.”
“Yeah,” Sohmeng said, not meeting their eye. “I’ve gathered that.”
“My family—we’re still migrating. For now.” Hei leaned back against a tree trunk, gently pushing aside the fronds of a fern that tickled their forehead. “It looks like we’re on our way to the Ãotul River. We’ll follow its path north, I imagine. Do what we can to avoid any of the other territorial colonies.”
Sohmeng’s heart squeezed at the mention of the Ãotul—it had glittered like a gem in the view from Ateng. She could only imagine what it would look like up close. But that wasn’t what she should be focusing on right now. “Is it really that big a deal if we bump into another colony?” she asked, gesturing to the sãoni pawing at trees, curling up in heaps of heavy tails and glo
wing throats. It was remarkable, how benign they could look. “They’re all sãoni, aren’t they?”
“Being of the same species is not the same as being allies.” Hei laughed softly to themself—it was not a happy sound. “Sãoni don’t tend to bond outside of their own colonies. They don’t trade like humans, and they don’t compromise on their leadership. Too many of them in one place is a recipe for bloodshed—it’s why they used to keep a healthy distance from one another on the migration route. But a stable colony is secure, like my family.”
The babies were climbing along the mean-looking sãoni with the green-striped throat, squeaking and biting at its head spines. Occasionally it would nudge them off, but for the most part it tolerated their antics, wriggling into the earth in search of a comfortable spot to sleep.
“For the most part, we avoid Fochão Dangde and the trouble that would come with it. Their alpha is older, more mellow. All she seeks is food. If we keep our distance, there’s no trouble.” The statement would have been reassuring to Sohmeng, if the food in question wasn’t human flesh. She swallowed, watching the babies play, unsure of how to respond. “We have more trouble with Sodão Dangde. Their alpha is difficult.”
“Difficult how?”
“She and Mama . . .” Hei frowned. “Ownership of the mountain is a point of contention between them. They used to be in a stagnant colony there together, before Mama went her separate way. Now it belongs to . . .” They searched for a name to give to the alpha. “To Blacktooth. If Mama gets too close, it’s mayhem. They just provoke each other, I can’t really explain it.”
“Have you tried asking her?” Sohmeng asked dryly. “Hello Mother, a growling biting morning to you, why can’t we go climb that nice mountain all together?”
“That’s not how their language works,” Hei said, narrowing their eyes at her suspiciously, “and I have a feeling you know it.”
