by Avi Silver
“I only know what I’m told.” Sohmeng grinned in spite of herself, leaning back on her arms—which would have been fine if it weren’t for the whole broken wrist issue. She squawked, yanking her arm back to her chest and hissing curses.
Hei jumped up, going to her side and examining the injury. “We really ought to get spiceroot for that. It’ll dull the pain, bring the swelling down. The taste isn’t so bad, either.”
“Incredible,” said Sohmeng. “Can we grate it over dinner or what? How spicy is it? I’m not trying to burn my tongue off, here.”
“You’ll have to wait to find out. We have to harvest it first.” Sohmeng’s shoulders slumped. Nothing could ever be that easy, could it? She was about to bemoan the complete unfairness of the situation, but was paused by the grim look on Hei’s face.
“What?” she asked warily, already dreading the answer.
“That rival territory I just mentioned? That’s the closest place I’ve seen it grow, and the easiest to get to by half.”
That meant Sodão Dangde. Sohmeng swallowed, uncomfortable showing this stranger how complicated she felt about heading toward what was once her second home—for reasons beyond bloodthirsty sãoni. “There’s seriously nothing else I can chew on that’ll fix it?” she groaned.
“Nothing that will work as well.” They ran a hand through their mop of hair, sighing. “If we keep at this pace, we should be close enough to spot some spiceroot in a few days’ time. We’re fortunate that it grows en route to the Ãotul, even if it does bring us closer to Blacktooth than I’d like.”
“Right,” Sohmeng muttered, deflating. “Lucky us.”
The babies’ squeaking got louder, prompting an annoyed rumble from the sleepy, green-throated sãoni. With a condoling click Sohmeng’s way, Hei went to intervene; Sohmeng was left to consider precisely which spices to baste herself with in the time she had left. After all, no one in the world was fortunate enough to avoid becoming a meal for the sãoni twice in a week.
“EEEE—RKK?”
“Not quite. More lift in the first sound.”
“YeeARCK?”
“No, you don’t really voice the second part. It’s in the back of your throat. More like this.” Seated behind Sohmeng, Hei let out a sound like grinding gravel, loud enough to get the attention of all the sãoni. Realizing what they’d done, Hei released a few clicks of apology, earning a string of irritated growls and a swat from Mama’s tail for the false alarm they had raised. They cleared their throat with a sheepish smile. “Does that make more sense?”
“I have no idea how you remember all of this,” Sohmeng said, rubbing the ear Hei had screeched into. They nudged it with their nose, and Sohmeng tried not to pull back.
Three days of close proximity had yet to help Sohmeng get over the amount of physical affection Hei tended to display. From what she could see, a lack of regard for personal space was a trait consistent among most of the sãoni. But they were animals—it was far more bizarre to have another human be so open with their body, particularly when they weren’t exactly the talkative type. Hei nursed her injuries with familial care, and had taken to detangling Sohmeng’s hair with their fingers, as though their relationship was one of intimacy and not mere tolerance. When the two of them rattled each other’s nerves enough that Mama took notice, Hei was always quick to press cheeks.
Odd as it was, Sohmeng couldn’t really complain about the dynamic that was currently keeping her alive. Hei had stabilized her wrist with a splint of tree bark and more sãoni skin, which had reduced its insistent twinging to something bearable. They gathered useful herbs as they could, and Mama’s saliva was sealing up the scrapes on Sohmeng’s hands quicker than she would have guessed. The pains in her body had fully established themselves, giving Sohmeng a better idea of which injuries were minor and which were more severe. While she was eager to get to the spiceroot so she might actually sleep through a night, she had to admit that she was grateful for the recovery time their journey imposed.
“How much longer now, do you think?” she asked, stroking tentatively between Mama’s head spines and earning a pleased rumble. Beside her, the vicious green-throated sãoni that she had come to call Green Bites let out a squawk, wanting a pat as well, which Sohmeng did not indulge; she’d nearly been chomped last time. Hei said he was just at that age, fickle and temperamental, but Sohmeng wasn’t so quick to forgive.
“We should be able to find some spiceroot by tomorrow, I hope,” said Hei. The colony’s movement through the forest was mostly dependent on Mama, whose whims were not always easy to track. Sohmeng was baffled that Hei’s wants had any influence at all, but Hei was baffling in general. “I’ve been keeping an eye out for the flower, just in case any strays are growing this far out. Is your wrist hurting again?”
“No more than the rest of me.” The sãoni meandered into a clearing, a spot where the dense treetops opened up to reveal Sodão Dangde watching proudly over the valley, closer than Sohmeng realized. By the moons, these lizards moved quickly. She absently slid her hands along Mama’s cheeks, prompting a deeper growl out of the sãoni.
“I hope that’s a good sound,” Sohmeng said, laughing nervously.
“It is,” Hei replied fondly. “She likes you.” They took Sohmeng’s good hand, guiding it along the sãoni’s cool, leathery skin. Mama’s cheeks were bumpy on the outside, ridged in a way that most of the other sãoni were not.
“Why do her cheeks look funny?” she asked.
“She’s holding her eggs,” Hei said, sounding surprised that she didn’t know. It was an annoying habit they had, assuming Sohmeng hadn’t spent all of her life in a literal cave and just knew these sorts of things. “Her saliva has hardening properties to keep them from cracking prematurely.”
“She holds them in her mouth?” Sohmeng asked, horrified.
“The pockets in her cheeks,” they clarified, reaching around to smooth the outline of one of Mama’s eggs, smiling. The sãoni responded with a chirp and three clicks. A couple of the others looked back in their direction again as they scuttled along, echoing their alpha.
“What did she say?”
“My name.” Hei repeated the sound, an aura of tenderness coming over them.
Out of Hei’s mouth, the sound was more familiar—they had made it after they rescued her, hadn’t they? But it was surprising to hear it from the sãoni. Sohmeng had made up little Hmunpa names for the reptiles, but she hadn’t imagined they would have naming systems of their own. To be fair, she hadn’t thought of them as much more than killers before she landed in Eiji. “How do you know that’s what they’re saying?”
“They direct it at me. And the context makes sense, it’s two sounds, two words, together—hatchling and food.”
“They call you Baby Dinner?”
Hei bristled at that, stuttering an unintelligible reply from behind her. Sohmeng’s self-satisfied snickering was promptly cut off by Hei’s choice to lean down and bite her sharply on the shoulder. She yelled, reaching back to swat at Hei, who easily blocked the blow by grabbing her arm.
“You,” they said, ducking away from a swing from Sohmeng’s bad wrist, “are very rude.”
“So I’ve been told,” she snorted. “Every day of my life.”
“By who?” asked Hei, suddenly sounding very ready to defend Sohmeng’s honour.
“You sure are invested for the person who called me rude in the first place!” Sohmeng laughed.
“Well you’re my m—” They stopped abruptly, mumbling for a moment before letting out an agitated growl. “I just want to know who said this thing.”
“My brother, mostly. And don’t take that tone, it’s not like he’s wrong. I’m pretty much the rudest person I know.”
“Your brother?”
Speaking Viunwei’s name felt a little like a summoning, and all at once Sohmeng’s stomach clenched. She had been trying not to think too much about him or Grandmother Mi since she fell, particularly given the likelihood that they wo
uld never see each other again. Feeling the weight of his worry pressing on her back all the way from Fochão Dangde, she kept her eyes instead on Sodão Dangde—another set of siblings with an impossible gap between them.
Up on the mountain, she swore she saw something move, creeping along the edges of the cliffside. Some animal, or else some old ghost. There were so many ghosts in Ateng, so much wishful thinking.
“Yeah,” she said, attempting nonchalance. “Yeah. Viunwei Soon. He’s older than me. He looked after me after our—our parents died, and our grandmother took her Grand Ones’ Vows. He’s a real piece of work.”
“He says you are rude?”
“Rude, loud, difficult, ungrateful—you name it. Being disappointed in me is pretty much his only hobby.” Insulting him came easy to her. The normalcy of it was almost comforting. “We were close as kids, always playing and arguing. But in a good way, you know? And then he had his Tengmunji and came back as this . . . this totally different person. Serious all the time and worried about everything, like he had to be responsible for everyone. Even my parents could see it, but my mom said that it’s normal for people to change after their Tengmunji, that I’d understand when my time came. Too bad I’ll never know.”
“You’re a tengmun kar,” Hei said, their voice gone soft with realization.
“Is it that obvious?” muttered Sohmeng, an old, angry instinct rising up within her.
“No, it’s just—” They adjusted their grip on Mama. “No one else could be initiated, could they? After the Bridge fell.”
Sohmeng nodded, fidgeting with the splint around her wrist. “Not with the rest of the hmun there, no.” The unfairness of it railed within her as she played through the injustices that came with it: the denied entry into meaningful work, the ban on exploring adult relationships, the way she was talked down to despite all she did within the hmun. “Maybe that’s why Viunwei’s been so foul. Because he feels like he has to take care of me. I don’t know.”
Hei said nothing, reaching to play with Sohmeng’s hair. She waited for them to break the silence, to dig into all the ways she was overreacting, to offer Prince Viunwei’s perspective like she hadn’t heard it all her life. But they kept quiet, offering only soothing touch and more space than Sohmeng knew she was allowed.
Despite the anxiety that tugged within her, she took the opportunity.
“Maybe—maybe things would be different if Mom and Dad were still here. They were good parents. They hunted outside Ateng and traded with other hmun in the network. When they’d come back, they always had all of these stories to tell, and it made me so proud that they were my parents, you know? Other kids’ parents did boring, everyday things, but mine were explorers.” Her mother used to spin her around after so many phases away; her father would bring home pressed flowers to introduce her to Eiji. Lahni Par and Tonão Sol. It was hard not to love them. Especially now that they were gone. “You know, even my damwei was pretty cool—he was a record keeper, he knew all of the stories. He could name every Fua back ten generations.” Her heart squeezed with fondness at the memory. While some badamwei had little to do with the children they helped produce for the hmun, Rikelho had always been happy to spend time with her and Viunwei. They called him Damdão Kelho, and considered him a third parent. “He went down with the Bridge. A couple months later, my parents descended for an excursion to repair it. They never came back up. Same as everyone else who tried.”
“I’m sorry,” said Hei, and the sincerity in their voice drew Sohmeng’s attention to the heaviness that had closed around them thick as fog.
“Me too,” she replied a little too hastily, uncertain of what she was apologizing for. Oversharing? Being a burden? Surviving the fall? But she wasn’t sorry about any of those things. She wanted to survive, and to be honest, and if that meant causing trouble, she could live with it.
And so, it seemed, could Hei. Sohmeng picked at a thread on her tattered pants, knowing then what needed to be said. “Look, Hei, I know that after you saved me I was . . . sort of touchy. Which wasn’t fair, considering what you’d done for me. Like, yes, I had just fallen off a mountain and was feeling pretty lousy, but . . .”
“You don’t have to apologize,” Hei said. The teeth on their hood pressed lightly into Sohmeng’s back as they leaned in; she found she didn’t mind. “It’s understandable. I guess living out here I just . . . I forgot. I forget, sometimes, how others might feel. I should have been more considerate.”
As Sohmeng was trying to figure out how to reply to this unexpected reasonability, Mama lifted her head and released a bone-shaking bellow. Sohmeng squinted against the rays of the setting sun shining through the trees; evening was falling faster than she had noticed. She cleared her throat, taking a deep breath and trying to shake off the loss that still clung to her thorn-stubborn. “Bedtime?”
“It seems so.” Sure enough, as they came to a clearing, the sãoni began the great quest for the coziest spot, climbing and piling, nipping and chirping. Hei held Sohmeng steady as Mama circled a few times until she slumped down in front of a large tree. “I can make a shelter for when the rain comes, and a fire. Roast a jackfruit, if you’d like something warm.”
“Warm sounds nice.” At the mention of food, Sohmeng’s stomach rumbled. Even though she had hardly done any walking today, having stayed firmly put on Mama’s back, the simple act of staying alive was taking up most of her energy. She was grateful when Hei helped her down. Together they sought out their own spot, one where they were less likely to have a sãoni roll over and squash them in the night.
Sohmeng leaned back against a mossy rock, watching the creatures pile atop each other, their throat stripes glowing as they prepared to rest. For deadly hunters, she had thought the sãoni would be light sleepers, or perhaps not even to sleep at all. Instead, she had learned that they became sluggish once the sun set and their body temperatures dropped with it.
In the midst of the sãoni heap, the babies—or hatchlings as Hei called them—climbed all over their mother, who huffed at them in annoyance. Hei gathered sticks to sharpen and spear into the ground, patting Mama’s head fondly as they walked by. With a tightness in her throat, Sohmeng realized that this was closest thing to a family she had seen in a very long time.
A soft melancholy descended, leaving her unusually reserved for the rest of the evening. She kept her knees tucked to her chest, her injured arm pressed close to her heart, as if she could fold herself away from the rawness that had been opened up. Beside her, Hei kindled a fire with the dry vines hanging above and cooked their meal in companionable silence. After they had eaten, she stared up at the snippets of night sky visible through the canopy, searching for the gaze of Ama and Chehang. But, as it so often happened, the gods’ eyes had landed elsewhere.
Several hours later, Sohmeng was woken abruptly by her own idiocy. She had never been a particularly sound sleeper, and had a tendency to flail around and hog every blanket that had the misfortune of brushing her side. This time, she had managed to roll onto her wrist, and all the splinting in the world couldn’t protect her from the sharp zing of pain.
Gritting her teeth and grumbling curses, she sat up, cradling her arm. After the initial euphoria of surviving such an enormous fall wore off, she was left feeling annoyed by how easy it was to repeatedly re-injure herself. She sighed. No chance she was getting back to sleep any time soon.
All around her, the sãoni were out cold. Hei was nowhere to be seen—perhaps curled up with one of their reptilian siblings, or off doing whatever it was that Hei did. They hadn’t exactly given Sohmeng an extensive list of their hobbies beyond screeching. She stretched, groaning softly as something popped into place in her back, and returned her gaze to the patches of sky above. If she leaned to the left, she could see Sodão Dangde clearly in the distance, the escarpment studded with soft luminescence. She hadn’t been this close to it since before the Sky Bridge fell. It was surreal to see from this angle, a confirmati
on of how far she was from home.
How close she had been to being trapped up there now.
When the last batengmun had been selected, Sohmeng had been too young to join them by virtue of being born one day too late. At the time she had been furious, and nervous, too—she worried they might not be her friends by the time it was over. They would have a shared experience between them, she had thought, something private and powerful as the secrets of adulthood were unlocked. All the while, she would be in Fochão Dangde, staring forlornly at the Batengmun’s Lantern glowing on the far side of Ateng. Missing out.
It had been a long time since anyone had seen that hopeful flame alight on Sodão Dangde. She certainly couldn’t see it now. After the Sky Bridge fell, there was no way of retrieving the batengmun, no way of raising the Third Finger’s portion of the Bridge to return them to the hmun. The children were left waiting, and party after party were sent to their deaths trying to rescue them.
No one was really surprised when the Lantern eventually went out.
Sohmeng stared hard at Sodão Dangde, searching for the version of herself that had completed her Tengmunji, that had been given the chance to learn the secrets of the mountains and come out whole. It was the same type of fantasy she had played through her mind since she was nine: she would emerge from her Tengmunji to find Grandmother Mi, who would pat her cheeks and sense the change that had come. In her heart, the first red sliver of Ama’s eye would appear, lighting something that had not been there before. At last, time would begin to flow for her again. She would be kinder, and more patient, and less difficult. Easier to live with. Easier to love.
Of course, that wasn’t to say she’d suddenly become meek or compliant—being a child of Par meant being impulsive, straightforward, contentious. By the hmun’s own standards, if she wasn’t causing a little grief, she wasn’t doing her job. And honestly, Sohmeng liked Par. She liked the range she was given to argue, the roles she had access to as a woman. If she had been raised in Minhal . . .
