by Avi Silver
“I wish,” she started, shaking her head in frustration, “I wish we knew what happened. What actually happened. I mean, we assume the four in the hall ate something bad, but we don’t know if it was on purpose, or how long they were there for, and it just—it makes me crazy not knowing. Just being stuck with more questions. There’s just . . . there isn’t going to be any closure, is there?”
“There never is,” Hei said, the corners of their eyes creasing in a peculiar smile. “No bodies, and we wonder if they’re dead; bodies, and we wonder how they died. A note and we wonder what went unsaid. A survivor and we wonder about the others. Everyone lives and we wonder what they aren’t sharing. All that wondering, that puzzling—I don’t know any other animals that do it quite like humans.”
“Still working on shaking that quality out of yourself then, oh wise one?” Sohmeng snorted. She had seen the way Hei ran themself in circles over the tiniest details. Traumatic morning or not, she wasn’t about to let them think they were above the same stupid lesson she was being forced to learn.
Hei rolled their eyes, gearing up for some retaliatory comment, but was cut off by Sohmeng’s laughter. By the moons, it was good to argue. To be petty and difficult and only have to worry about hurting someone’s feelings. Because yes, she could be rude. She could be inconvenient, and she could do mortifying things that would have her banging her head against the wall years down the line. But she could also recover from it. She could salvage relationships and work on herself and grow. She could recover from everything, except for death. It was a freeing thought.
Grumbling, Hei shuffled down to rest their head in Sohmeng’s lap as they continued picking apart their vine. She smiled to herself, abandoning her own handiwork in favour of playing with Hei’s hair and watching the clouds move lazy as porridge. Her eye caught on a place where they were darker, more concentrated, and she wondered if it was raining in Eiji. Hei nuzzled against her, letting out a soft sigh, and Sohmeng found herself comfortable enough to say something stupid. “You know, I had this fantasy of you and me raising the Sky Bridge. Even with no one alive to help, I imagined the two of us just working together and making it happen. Like heroes or something.”
“Oh?” Hei asked, scrunching their nose.
“I know,” Sohmeng said, swatting their shoulder. “It would never work. Not with only two people, and even with the sãoni to help, it’s so high up and far apart that it would just . . . not happen. But it was something I was considering, before we got up to this place and . . .” And saw the bigger picture. “And saw how bad it looks from here.” She eyed the Fingers, the shape of Fochão Dangde in the distance, its own Lantern still softly aglow. Her brother was in there, and her grandmother. The rest of the hmun, just as trapped as the batengmun of Sodão Dangde. “They’re going to run out of resources, you know. I’m sure you’ve thought of that by now. The system can’t go on supporting itself with humans depleting it, right? That’s the whole point of the crossing.”
Hei hummed in grudging acknowledgement. Sohmeng knew the hmun was a sore spot for them, and after hearing their story she could understand why. But she also knew they cared about the mountains, and they wouldn’t like the idea of humans desperately pillaging them for survival.
“Without the Sky Bridge, they’re going to die in there. Not tomorrow, maybe not even next year. But eventually, they’ll starve.” It chilled her to say the words so matter-of-factly, but there was power to be found in realism. Once she laid out the facts, she had something to work with. “We can’t do it from here with two people, and I don’t know where the nearest hmun is that we could ask for help. And we can’t work on the First Finger because of the sãoni occupying the area. I’m not dragging the family into another fight, not after what happened last time.” Hei clicked softly in surprise, glancing up to meet her eyes with gratitude. Sohmeng leaned down and kissed them. “Don’t be a dummy. They’re my family, too.” She looked once more to Fochão Dangde. “Both of them are. Ateng and Eiji.”
The sun pushed through the high clouds, opening pockets of brilliant green in the valley below. Sohmeng took a moment to just admire it all: the treetops, fine as moss from this distance; the dissipating mists, curling and luminous; the stubborn raincloud, rolling and opaque, closer than she would have guessed. She squinted at it, trying to make out the shape.
“Do you want to go back?” Hei asked softly.
“To the hmun?” She bit her cheek, mulling it over. It felt like the answer ought to be more complicated than it was. “I don’t know. I really don’t think so, not forever. I want my family to know I’m alright, and I want to know they’re alright. But with you, in Eiji, I’m . . . I’m happier, you know? I’m me. And I don’t want to give that up.”
“Okay,” Hei said, sitting up suddenly, their expression tight and nervous. “I’m glad, I just—I don’t want you to stay just because that’s what I want. I want you to stay, I do, more than anything. But I want you to make that choice for yourself, otherwise it’s just me forcing it on you and—”
“Whoa, whoa,” Sohmeng interrupted, giving them a playful shake. “Okay, first of all, that’s not what’s happening. Second of all, when have I ever done something for anyone but myself?”
“You . . . plenty of times! Even now, you’re thinking about the hmun—mmph!” Hei squawked as Sohmeng planted both hands over their face.
“Hei,” she said calmly, disregarding their shouts of annoyance, “most of my identity has been thrown into the air in the past few days. For the sake of preserving my sanity, I’m going to need to keep working under the assumption that I’m a selfish jerk. So is it possible for you to just lighten up on all that charming sincerity? For five minutes, maybe?”
Hei bit her hand in response, sitting up with a huff, and Sohmeng kissed them again, pleased that she was still capable of making them blush in the midst of their grumpiness. Talking about all of this was destabilizing, and sort of existentially demoralizing, but at the end of the day, a kiss was still easy. Her fingers found their way back into Hei’s hair, and she reveled in the way they gasped into her open mouth, hands grasping at her sides. She shifted into their lap, laughing softly because apparently even a surprise gravesite at the top of the world wasn’t enough to stop her from—
“Wait,” she said, peering over Hei’s shoulder. Down below, the mists had cleared enough that she could better see the dark patch that had been building. That wasn’t a rainstorm, that was— “Is that a fire?”
“What?” Hei asked, trying to catch their breath.
“In the forest, I think that’s—I think I see smoke.”
Sohmeng found herself dumped unceremoniously out of Hei’s lap and onto the floor. They jumped up, looking over the ledge without so much as an apology. She was about to yell at them, but then she saw their face. That was a face she knew. She had seen it once before, shadowed by fire and spattered in blood.
They snarled, pacing once, twice, and then thrust out a hand to Sohmeng. “We need to go.”
“Now?” Sohmeng asked, allowing herself to be pulled up. “What’s happening?”
“I’ve never seen them make it this far south,” Hei muttered, shaking their head. After a beat, they tugged her back into the cave. “There’s no time to explain—we have to get down the mountain. The family’s in danger.”
If there was anything scarier than winding up through the tight passages of the cave systems, it was running down them at full speed.
“Hei!” Sohmeng yelled, out of breath as she struggled to keep up with them. “I know that fires are generally pretty urgent but—but also the jungle is pretty big, wouldn’t you say?”
Hei scoffed, pushing off the walls with bruising force. Sohmeng fully expected to listen to them hiss about it for the next week, but at least their arm wraps protected them from the jagged stones of the caves. She, on the other hand, had to move with a lot more caution, being bare-armed and loaded down with supplies that now i
ncluded a cooking pot. “Maybe we could try not going so quickly we fall and break our necks?”
Hei leapt over one of the ledges, extending their hands impatiently for Sohmeng. “We only have a couple hours until sundown. By then, the colony will start getting groggy—it’ll be too easy to catch them unawares.”
“Catch them . . . ?” Sohmeng frowned, lowering herself into Hei’s arms. “Is there another sãoni family after them? One that breathes fire?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Hei snapped, turning to resume their sprint. “Their bodies don’t sustain nearly enough heat to—”
Sohmeng let out a growl of annoyance, a noise made for halting. Hei snarled out their irritation in response, and all at once she recognized the appeal of sãoni interaction: quicker than explaining her reasoning, harder to misinterpret. Less room for hurt feelings.
“Not sãoni,” Hei said. “Humans.”
“Humans? What kind of human would be crazy enough to attack sãoni?”
Hei said nothing, only glowering at whatever memory was gnawing at them.
By the time they pushed out of the caves, the light had dimmed to a warm glow. It would have been beautiful if not for their apparent time constraint. In the distance, the smoke was still visible, thick and dark and curdling. Sohmeng pulled a sãoni claw out of her thigh bag and used it to cut a fistful of vines hanging above the entryway.
“Sohmeng—” Hei called, already moving down the side of the mountain.
“Keep going, I’ll catch up!” The vines came free with a snap; she wrapped them around her arm as she ran to follow Hei. Rush or not, there was always time to restock on resources. And if Hei was right about there being humans brave enough to face off against the sãoni, she wanted to have enough supplies to keep them safe from whatever was headed their way. She secured the pot to her wrist as best as she could while in motion. Riding Singing Violet was enough of a challenge with two hands.
Even with this latest terror looming, Sohmeng found herself beyond relieved to be out of Sodão Dangde. The abandoned hmun had revealed a nest of shame that she never realized she had been feeding. Out in the open, the best parts of herself glinted in the light, bright as the ring that had brought her there.
Despite the dull pang in her ankle, she caught up to Hei, who had not lost the anxiety in their bearing. “Alright, so what exactly are we going up against?” she asked, allowing the urgency in her voice to come through. This wasn’t a time where she could indulge Hei’s tendency to be stingy with their words.
“Nothing, hopefully. Like I said, they’ve never come this far south. But I’ve only ever seen fire burn that hot where they go, so—”
“Who’s they? Hei, I know you’re overwhelmed but—”
They interrupted her with a loud yell of frustration as they jumped over a fallen tree. “I’ve told you about them before—the humans who’ve been interfering with the migration cycle.”
“Wait, from the Great River?” Sohmeng remembered the map Hei had made in the dirt; scribbles and scratches, a circuit disrupted.
“Exactly. They’re not like other humans, Sohmeng.” Hei’s voice was grim. “They don’t stick to their own hmun, they spread like a fungus all down Eiji and any sãoni that cross their path get torched in their sleep—” They broke off into another snarl, too agitated to continue.
Sohmeng felt dizzy. If these humans hadn’t thrown off the migration route, then Ateng might never have been attacked. The Sky Bridge might still be whole, the batengmun still alive. It opened a complicated pain inside of her—and now Hei was telling her that the sãoni were in danger as well. She clenched her fists.
I’m not going to lose any more family to this, she thought. She took a furious breath in through her teeth, trying to harden her fear into something useful.
“So what do we do?” she asked. “How do we handle these people, if they’re as dangerous as you say?”
“We keep Mama and the family awake,” Hei said. “If they keep moving, they’ll retain enough heat to stay alert through the night. They’ll be snappy and miserable, but it’s better than the alternative. More importantly, we have to make sure they stay together. No stragglers. The humans are less likely to attack if the whole colony is there; I don’t think they have enough fire-sand to take us all down.”
From down the last slope, Sohmeng could hear the chirping and clicking of the two sãoni they had left in the cave. The sound made her heart lift, and momentarily she wondered at the direction her life had gone, where the sounds of the jungle’s greatest predators were soothing to her. What had once been the stuff of nightmares was now a reassurance, a promise that things were going to be okay.
The only problem was, Green Bites wasn’t in a particularly helpful mood.
“Come on,” Hei hissed, spitting some Sãonipa curse. “We need to go!”
Green Bites huffed in annoyance, resting his chin back on Singing Violet’s side and closing his eyes. If it weren’t for the urgency of the situation, Sohmeng might have laughed aloud at the petulance he was slinging Hei’s way. For their part, Hei looked ready to tear their hair out, making a whole symphony of persuasive, furious shrieks. Green Bites turned away, nuzzling into Singing Violet, who was watching the exchange with mild interest.
“Hei,” Sohmeng offered with a nervous laugh, “I don’t know if he’s going to—”
“Well that’s too bad because he HAS to!” Hei shouted, yanking on Green Bites’ tail and earning a warning squawk from their brother. “You can show off to your girlfriend some other time, but right now you need to move your scaly—”
All at once, Green Bites lunged, snapping close enough to Hei’s arm that Sohmeng shouted in surprise. It was one thing when two adolescent sãoni got into a spat, biting and clawing and roughhousing their way through their conflicts. But it was another thing entirely when one of those sãoni happened to be human of body. A nip from Green Bites was more like a chomp, and without Mama around to mediate, Sohmeng could see this going very wrong, very quickly.
She moved to step in, but Green Bites leveled her with a snarl that just about sent her to the floor. Hei lunged between them, barking a challenge. They hardly seemed to notice the danger they were in, so adamant they were on establishing their own dominance. Sohmeng groaned, pressing her palms to her eyes.
“Hei,” she called, “do we really have time for this right now?”
They responded with a feral growl, locked with Green Bites in a threatening, circling dance.
Sohmeng threw her hands in the hair, dropping down beside Singing Violet. “Absolutely ridiculous,” she muttered. “Moronic. Childish nonsense. The family’s about to get served as a freshly-broiled side dish and they decide that now is the time for a stripe-measuring contest?”
Singing Violet nudged her nose into Sohmeng’s side, letting out the gentle trill that Sohmeng had named her for. She gave the sãoni a sympathetic look. “I know. What do we see in them?” She stroked Singing Violet’s nose, cringing as Hei made a lunge at Green Bites, only narrowly dodging the snap that followed in response. Waiting for this to end was going to kill her, assuming it didn’t kill Hei first.
But maybe she didn’t have to wait. The last time the family was in trouble, she could barely walk, and she had still managed to come to their rescue. Why should she sit around now?
Sohmeng pursed her lips, thinking for a moment before offering Singing Violet a cautious squawk that she hoped meant ‘go’. Singing Violet blinked slowly at her. Sohmeng tried again, and once more, until the sãoni repeated the sound to her, shifting attentively.
“Yes!” Sohmeng said, amazed that it was working. For all she could communicate in chirps and growls with Hei, she hadn’t had much success with the sãoni themselves. She tried the word again, linking it with the word for ‘alpha’, and when Singing Violet’s gaze moved to the mouth of the cave, she took it as a win.
Before she could doubt herself, Sohmeng climbed onto Singing Violet, grasping the sãoni’s head spi
nes as she was lifted off the ground. She sucked air into her lungs and put the sounds together, loudly enough that her voice echoed through the cave. Behind her, the threatening snarls stopped quite suddenly—but before she had any chance to gloat, Singing Violet was mimicking the sound enthusiastically and hurling her body straight down the mountainside.
When Sohmeng finally managed to stop screaming, she took great pleasure in the sound of Green Bites and Hei following behind.
When she was young, Sohmeng’s parents had told her stories of the Great River: a swath of water up north, so vast that no bank was visible on the other side. How different the people there must be from her. Even in Eiji, where all of the hmun shared the common ancestor of Polhmun Ão, customs and language varied across the network. Who were these invaders, fearless enough to encroach on the lands of the sãoni, careless enough to endanger every last hmun in the valley? Exactly how much danger was everyone in?
They arrived at the foot of the mountain to a chorus of happy chirping. The reunited sãoni rubbed cheeks and sniffed at each other, curious to scent out where their companions had been. Green Bites puffed up at the attention, clearly thinking very highly of himself. Sohmeng slipped off Singing Violet, giving her head a little kiss, and rushed after Hei, who was already running to Mama. Sohmeng had figured they would launch right into explanatory squawking, but instead they paused with their arms around the alpha’s neck, taking in all of the nuzzles and presses she had to give. Despite everything there was to be afraid of, she knew one thing for certain: it was good to be home.
The small army of hatchlings seemed to agree, based on the way they bounded over and knocked Sohmeng off her feet, popping whatever bubble of sentimentality had started to expand within her. She groaned, sitting up straight and trying to pull the cooking pot out of reach before one of them got their head caught in it. Another was nosing at her thigh bag, hissing with disgust but continuing to sniff just the same.
