1

The animal that had been tracking me for days through the feverish tangle of the escarpment forest finally found me as I stumbled and fell into a shallow pool of muddy, brackish water. I had been dimly aware of the animal since it first picked up my trail. We both seemed to agree I was easy prey.

“With a lot of wild animals you just have to stay still,” Merah had told me once. We were children then. “But where we live most animals will run away from you anyway.”

Merah was gone now, and all of Pama with him, and the animals of the escarpment forest had little inclination to heed my brother’s wisdom. It hadn’t rained for months; the land was parched and aching, its fauna starving. At least I couldn’t help but stay still.

The creature was hovering over me within a minute of my collapse. I could feel the cold dampness of its nose where it prodded my bare skin, its sickly warm breath as it tested my scent. Clearly it was unafraid. I was beginning to realize I couldn’t breathe. It ignored my weak struggle to lift myself from the mire. Instead I felt a heavy paw on my shoulder. I gently sank further and further. My legs suddenly clutched strength, thrashing and kicking, a scream desperately bubbling out of the mud around me.

Out of panic, or maybe frustration, the creature raked my back with long, hot claws, from my shoulder down to my hip, then scurried off. The welling of blood made my head swim; the searing pain threatened the edges of my consciousness with blackness, much deeper than my blindness in the mud.

Slowly, aching and burning, I pulled myself out of the pool, gasping from agony and exertion. My pounding head and blurry vision were swimming away. My attacker had left me with more clarity and sense since I’d first fallen ill. I remembered what Ahi had said once, after Merah had been kicked in the chest trying to take down a wily buck: count your hurts. Wincing, I rolled over onto my back, scanning the surrounding brush for any sign of the animal that had just carved me up, and pushed myself up with my elbows.

Of immediate concern was my back. I couldn’t see back there, only felt the wet hum of blood, so I’d have to find some disinfectant and hope for the best. My feet were sore and blistered. I had lost my shoes up on the ridge, along with the rest of my clothes. My legs were tired. The bullet wound in my left calf burned and throbbed; that smell was a pretty bad sign. Pangs of hunger rang emptily in my gut, and my arms were weak, hands trembling. I noted with a curious serenity how they seemed to have changed back so quickly: the right size and shape, nails as short as anyone’s, mostly hairless. The hands of a human being on the outside. They had touched much that should’ve been left alone lately. My skin overall was fairly flush again, a lively chestnut brown when days ago I had been pale and clammy. I sighed and groaned, the noise and breath scraping against the rawness of my dry throat, and pivoted on my hip, turning back to face the pool.

My reflection was murky. The same brown eyes, just sunken into dark circles; the same jet black hair, tangled and oily and flat against the low slope of my forehead, back to its original length; the same crooked nose. Dried spittle and blood clung to my cracked lips. Stubble threatened the underside of my chin.

I cupped my breasts. Still bigger somehow. I gently squeezed my thighs together. There was my pecker and sack, unchanged. I wouldn’t pretend to understand for now.

A mockingbird trilled somewhere nearby. All at once I remembered Merah fully, and Ahi, and Engo and all the rest. A cold, hard sob wracked my body, forcing all the air out of my chest, and my heart broke. I sobbed on the forest floor. In my wild grief my memories of Pama, her old walls and leaking roofs, her trees and goats and fires, all seemed to dissipate in my mind, as if I had paid so little attention to my life my heart had taken them away from me as punishment. All I could see were my brother and grandmother and everyone we knew, far away from me, eating a big dinner quietly, politely. They knew they had left me here and there was nothing they could do. There was nothing I could do. My fists pounded uselessly against the earth. I couldn’t think. I could only wail, and wail, and wail. A newborn lost in the woods, her family all gone on ahead without her. I had never been alone before, and now I was completely and utterly alone, maybe forever, until I died, which might have been sooner than I realized. My empty shell of a body went on crying and crying.

Once I was spent I laid down for an hour at least, shuddering from the cold, in the dry leaf litter by the pool I had nearly drowned in. Everyone was gone. I was here. Count your hurts, Ahi had said, and then get up. I wiped my face and struggled, beyond exhausted, to my hands and knees.

There was nothing but the forest and me. Ancient oaks wound their way towards the light between sycamores and the odd longleaf pine. As far as I could tell the Auye had never ventured this far before, or at least not for some time. No burn sign, just fuel; ripe for a wildfire. I thanked Mother Gar for depriving my addled self of my kit, imagining myself, dumb with fever, trying to light some kindling and burning myself and the forest for miles. Still, once I left the forest–once, I reminded myself, not if–I would need to secure some new flint, new fibers, new medicine. At that moment a honey locust revealed itself to me from the shadows of a primal live oak. I grinned despite myself and began to half-crawl, half-stumble towards it.

There were quite a few good seedpods left. I fumbled at my waist for my kit, forgetting myself, and decided to carry the bunch in my mouth for now. In my haste I pricked my hand deep on the honey locust’s thorns. Another hurt for the count.

Carefully propping myself up on the trunk, I stood, legs quivering. The light was still good; I had a good three hours before nightfall. I couldn’t risk lighting a fire, not with the ridge itself so close, peppered neatly with corpses that would be well missed. My shelter would need to be warm and hidden.

I only had to stumble through the woods for a little while before a beautiful walking stick presented itself to me. It was a bit longer than was useful but I couldn’t stop to hew it down to size, and without a knife or a handaxe I’d risk breaking the whole thing. Grinning madly again, I hobbled along until I found a game trail. I stripped bark and berries from an ash juniper along the way.

Sunlight glanced through gaps in the canopy, warming me as I went. The forest came alive with birds and insects. I crested little rises where the trees thinned and forded streams choked with overgrown underbrush and scum. Along one of these streams, carved a bit deeper and flowing fairly faster than the others, the trill of a frog rang out. I washed my face, then the dried blood off my hands and forearms and chest, then my bullet wound, only lingering long enough to drink before setting off again. Mulberries, agarita, and pawpaws reached out from the walls of leaves and thorns on either side of me; I picked as much as I could carry, which was very little but still more than I had eaten or even seen in days. Somewhere overhead a hawk cried.

Eventually the trail climbed up a gentle ridge past dense stands of shadowy juniper, dotted here and there with aloe and yucca. I had to duck low through the foliage, nearly crawling at some points, until the junipers thinned. The stones at my feet grew larger, looser, and I wobbled unsteadily as I went along. I finally found myself under open sky at the edge of a little mesa late that afternoon, the sun careening towards the deeper forest to the west.

My lungs burned. The midautumn wind chilled me. I had worked up a good heat, warmed my tender muscles, brought myself back into my body, thankfully not as wrecked as I feared. My head was still pounding in time with the throb of sick heat off the wound on my back and the likely infected gash on my calf.

I turned in place. To the south was the escarpment itself; I could barely see it, a deep blue haze amongst the indigo horizon, steadily dissolving into night. Merah was back there, and probably Sudha too, among all those coffins, and days further south lay the ashes of Pama. There were cities to the west, though they and the roads to them were almost certainly watched. Eastwards ran the coastal plain and the sea, and beyond the curve of the great gulf were the mountains and the deserts they hid.

That roaring we had heard echoing through the woods the night before my life became a nightmare, the face of the escarpment they had intended to roll my corpse down before I started changing, the feeble bird in my heart nursing its broken wings: they all pointed north.

My eyes refocused. The wind had died down. The birds were silent. I was exposed atop the highest point for miles. My heart froze. There, in the background, behind my hot, ragged, feverish heartbeat, was the hum of an engine.

I didn’t wait to look for it in the sky. I dropped my walking stick and scurried back down the trail, nearly choking on the seedpods still in my mouth. To my left was a large granite outcropping, neatly obscured by an old juniper. I slipped and fell on the scree trying to pivot towards it, finally crawling just beneath its shadow as the hum of the engines reached its zenith.

The birdship was hovering right above the mesa. I could feel the dust whipping through the air, the heat of the engines, the thrum of machinery through the earth. The junipers swayed wildly at the mouth of the rockshelter. I begged Mother Gar to keep me hidden, pressing myself further against the rough granite. A copperhead squirmed past my bare feet and down the side of the rock face. I squeezed my eyes shut.

Without discerning its purpose or intentions–though I could pretty confidently guess–the birdship moved on. I could only catch a brief glimpse of it as it flew away to the northwest, a strange gray shape, awkward in the way it hung in the sky like a baby’s plaything. Nothing like a bird at all, really.

I stayed curled in on myself for a long while. The sun lit the canopy below ablaze, then sank beneath them into the forest floor somewhere far away. A star winked awake high above me in the indigo gloom. Cicadas began singing as night fell. There must have been millions of them.

Before I could eat or sleep I needed to do something about my leg and my back. I chewed up the already softened locust seeds until they were a pulp, then deposited about a quarter of the mash into my palm. In my other hand I collected rock dust from the game trail, rubbing it into my calf wound painstakingly slowly. Then I applied the seed paste. The rest I rubbed into the deep scratches on my back, raw and hot. None of them were so deep as to be really concerning but there was never such a thing as too careful. Sudha’s parents had both died of infection one particularly hard winter. They had denied mine or Merah’s or anyone’s care until the very end. I remembered how Ahi wept that day, gently, in a way I had never seen her before. The timid trembling of an elder in grief always unsettled me.

My hip was getting sore. I flipped over in place, a process that took far longer than it should have for a hale woman my age. Sleep began to tug at me as I set myself to small yet important tasks: eating as much of the pawpaw and mulberries as I could without getting sick, stripping the juniper bark into fibrous strands, weaving them together haphazardly into a little kit. A few desirable granite bulbs presented themselves to me, each fitting better in my hand than the last. Even a weak hammerstone would go a long way so far from safety. Still I wished for a knife, or a gun of any kind, or my beloved spear, lost in the ashes somewhere, its obsidian blade likely chipped irreparably. Worse, it could be in the hands of one of the soldiers, or scavenged by some itinerant pilferer, seduced by the column of smoke that was once Pama.

I was not wholly alone. There were others like me apart from the Auye and our neighbors, the extended family that stretched uncounted across the continent: Dog Eyes had been one of them, had brought me into this new world, once Talashi but changed into something else, like I was changing. I was becoming something else. I could only hold on desperately to my old skin for now.

Night fell fully. I slept in feverish fits. My calf throbbed. My head was splitting open. The waters of an ancient ocean rushed in to fill the canyons and valleys where my mind had been. Nocturnal animals conversed with one another. There was a stranger in their forest, they whispered, and she would surely be dead soon. Deep in the thickest brakes of oak and pine my hunter was waiting. It would finish me off before long, I decided. I would never hear what I so deeply wished to hear again, that pained, mournful, resounding roar, from what must have been the biggest animal to have ever walked. I listened against hope through the night; I registered nothing but the nightjars and owls and crickets and frogs. Once, near dawn, a sound like a tree falling into a lake carried across the still air. I wondered at that until the sky lightened and the forest bloomed into color. Probably a saber cat. Bad news for sure, but it wasn’t the beast that had wounded me; its claws had been far too long. A saber cat would have just torn my throat open.

Sore and cold beyond belief, I crawled wretchedly out of my rockshelter. In the morning light it seemed a much worse place to rest than I had previously thought. It was good I wouldn’t be spending the rest of my life here. I finished off the last of the pawpaw, tucked the berries into my kit, tied smartly to a band across my shoulders, and started off down the ridge, doubling back once I remembered my walking stick near the top of the mesa.

I needed clothes, and water, and to make my way north, as far as possible from the escarpment, likely out of Auye lands entirely. The birdship would be back. Soldiers on foot had no chance at finding an Auye huntress through the woods, even woods unfamiliar to her, even starving and wounded and weak. They might even be less inclined to confront her having found her handiwork back at the coffin camp. Aerial pursuers were a different story. I grimaced and forced myself into a jog. My body screamed at me, but I was quickly warmed all the way through, and I managed a good rhythm with my walking stick supporting my injured leg. My spirits lifted as the sun rose, even as I found myself glancing over my shoulder, imagining a saber cat bearing down on me, or the sound of engines descending nearby, masked murderers pouring out in the dozens. I had always been adept at scaring myself. Merah loved to say so.

Small chances at life presented themselves to me as I went. The Auye had taught me to keep my eyes and ears open to them. Berries, prickly pears, honey, medicine; I was especially delighted to find a yaupon holly on the trail north. If you can meet preparation and opportunity in the same place, Engo told me once, you’ll live. Then he laughed, which was more like a pained wheezing, and cast his big net into the creek. He didn’t catch anything that day.

Tears brimmed my eyes. I wanted to scream and hit myself on the head. Engo would have stopped me, or whacked me himself, telling me to get a grip. I listened.

Thank you, Engo, I thought, still choking up. I kept walking. There was time yet before despair was inevitable. I had streams to drink from and the fruit of the land to keep me on my feet. If a saber cat or a cave bear or even a coyote were to run me down I wouldn’t go out without a fight. The stench of death followed me everywhere; it cut a path towards survival.

Morning rolled into midday. The sun boiled away the last wisps of clouds still holding on above the dry earth. Even in autumn the heat of the day hushed the land. I could only hear my own breathing, stronger today, and the occasional sigh of the breeze in the canopy, and my bare footsteps over the cracked husks and silent stones of the forest floor. With a little less focus on my own impending death I could have registered some embarrassment. Auye rarely covered their chests but no one had ever seen me like this before; only whatever eyes the woods hid.

The trail began to wind downhill, switching back on itself, gently at first before careening into a sheer cliff. The ground ceased; there was only air. The forest continued some twenty paces below. Another escarpment, I thought, much smaller and probably far shorter a span than the one I had leapt off some days ago. Going around to where the grade was less steep would certainly take some time but likely less than a full day.

A twig snapped behind me. I whirled around. Nothing moved. My breath caught in my throat. Musk, or something just as rank, assailed my nose. My toes dug into the loose soil as I lifted my heels. The shadows beneath the junipers were too deep to see anything. A bird burst from the canopy alongside me, squawking, and a larger branch broke, closer now.

I stepped once and dropped down the cliff, holding on to the edge above. My feet scrambled and flailed, cut by the limestone, until the rock face stopped crumbling and I found a foothold. My heart was sprinting away from me.

Turning to face the drop I found an old live oak. I would really have to jump to make it. Sweat rolled off my brow and stung my eyes. The nerves in my spine sensed, or maybe imagined, that something large was coming towards me fast, its footfalls reverberating through the dirt, its heavy panting growing louder and hotter. I dropped again.

My fingers grasped and missed. The limestone skinned my heels and I fell fully, my back to the ground. I tried to twist in midair, too slow, and crashed through the canopy. A thick branch hit me in the ribs and I was out.

I woke up on my back. My left side was screaming. I coughed, choking, then inhaled, slowly. Maybe something was broken, maybe not. I hadn’t been injured very much up until now. Time to count the hurts again. Nothing as bad as my ribs so far. I tried standing after a moment and collapsed, a spasming bite in my ankle. My stomach clenched.

“Oh,” I said. “Good.”

I curled into a ball and puked into the dirt. It was mostly water. I coughed and retched again, the tightening of my throat muscles pulling down at my eyes. Tears mingled with the vomit, spattering on little red and green flecks.

I couldn’t walk, so I was dead. Whatever had chased me off the cliff, if there even had been anything, and I hadn’t just scared myself, would find me soon and finish me off. Maybe a cat would gently tear me open, or a bear would take my skull lovingly in its jaws, dragging my limp corpse up into a homey cave. At least then it would be quick. If not, smaller scavengers would harass me until I was too exhausted, too hungry to go on, and they would pick me clean over days and days. Vultures and foxes would hop from bone to bone looking for any scraps of me worth worrying at. But no matter what happened, no matter how quickly and serenely or otherwise, I would be dead, which is what really mattered. No more of Merah or Ahi or anyone else’s advice would trouble me any longer.

“Oh,” I said again.

A longleaf pine, monolithic, erect in a self-serious way where its sisters stood crooked and sprawling, seemed as good a place to die as any. Maybe if I had climbed down the rocks calmly, saving my breaths, counting and naming the strains across my battered body, and alighted safely on the forest floor instead of thrown myself off a cliff for the second time that week I would never have appreciated it: the stark elegance of its bare trunk, the fragrance of its needles as I crawled through them, the outstretched hands of its highest branches reaching up and up towards the sun, fixated solely on the sun, whispering to the sun. I was whispering to the sun. I dragged myself against the pine, heart hammering, stomach churning, ankle howling, and looked up, straight up. I thought I would fall forever into the sky, right along the trunk of the tree, or else tumble backwards over myself, the forest and the earth melting away all at once into nothing, into the night that hid behind the sky.

Merah and I stood in a white place, surrounded by nothing. He looked healthy, as usual, bare-chested and somewhat potbellied, with longer hair than I remembered. Shadows played behind him. A wife; a husband, maybe a child. My brother had never kept such intimate company, only me and Ahi and some friends in Pama. I had never asked why. Whoever the shadows were, they were silent, and after another moment of wild cavorting they vanished like smoke. Merah kept standing there, smiling easily.

“How are your legs?” I asked.

“Better, now,” he said. “How are you?”

I shrugged. He shook his head, still smiling, his hair growing wildly, waving like river grass. Then he glanced around.

“Do you see these, too?” he asked.

I looked around with him. Masks, some wooden, some stone, had appeared in the blank sky, scowling, laughing, judging, watching. They weren’t Auye, I didn’t think; maybe Talashi, or Nemayoto, or from somewhere even farther away. Only a few of them seemed the right size to fit a human face. Many of them were small even for children; others were enormous, with elongated countenances, tongues lolling and nostrils flared. One, a wooden face entirely too oblong to be worn, lacked eyes entirely, and a few of the stone masks were either completely featureless or dotted with small holes all over. Something about them seemed so old, like they had been carved from rocks and trees no Auye or any person had ever seen. I knew then they were faces from the Long Before. None of them were looking at me. All of them were fixed on Merah.

“No,” I said. “I don’t see anything.”

“That’s a shame. You would like them.” He pointed behind me. “How about those?”

I turned around. A procession of animals was on parade. Mammoths and horses and camels and shoveltusks bellowed at one another; foxes chased hares and squirrels underfoot while agoutis and ringtails climbed across the backs of caimans and peccaries. Ocelots and mountain lions and saber cats prowled in the shadows of the larger animals; gar, carp, bass, catfish, paddlefish, eels, and turtles swam through the empty air beside them. Herons and grackles perched on tusks and horns and antlers. They were all enormous. They were all singing.

“I can see these,” I said.

“Keep watching.”

The animals began to scream. They reared in rampancy and fear, kicking up blood as if it were dust. A white tail buck exploded into a huge armadillo, crashing together like wet clay. Soon the whole parade was jumping into and out of itself. They became a river of flesh, a cascade of teeth and horns and fur, rolling into and inside and out of each other like waves. Only their eyes remained. They bored into me. The mass undulated and squirmed, stretching and testing its new appendages, reaching out into the pale void for anything to hold. I was surrounded, encircled, such a weak star for so much panic and confusion to orbit.

I looked for Merah. He was walking away, past the ring of screaming flesh and feathers but somehow in front of it still, like the animals had become the horizon. I called after him.

“Don’t worry,” he said. He didn’t turn; he kept walking.

“I’m sorry,” I cried. The animals wailed with me.

“Your leg is going to get infected,” he said, still walking away.

It already is, I thought, finding I couldn’t open my mouth anymore.

Then Merah’s face was inches away from mine. He was a child again, just after his coming of age, about nine years old. There was nothing but him: no animals, no white void, no sound, no fear. I sensed somehow my dream had ended. My brother looked into my eyes, then to the right. I followed his gaze.

The creature nudged me with its head, pushing me hard into the trunk of the pine and jolting me awake. I backed away and hissed in pain. The gashes across my back had opened across the rough bark. I was cornered. I raised my claws in front of my face.

She was about the size of a black bear, only gray and brown with sickly green spotting across its spine. The front half of her body dipped low. A dimly pleased expression crossed her blunt muzzle, her small, dark eyes apparently unfocused. With a grunt, the creature reared back onto her hind legs, waving her own claws absentmindedly, like a toddler trying to swat away a bee. I flinched; eventually she settled back onto all fours. We stayed still for a long while.

Just a little ground sloth, I thought. She thought you were dead and she just came back to check. You’re not dead. Sloths will only eat dead things, they won’t kill an alive thing. I’m alive.

I glanced down at my own claws. They were slowly getting smaller, retreating back into the shape of the hands I had been born with, if a little hairy still. One only needed claws like mine when in danger, I guessed.

“If you come at me I’ll tear you a new one,” I muttered, choking through my dry throat.

The sloth started nosing the roots at my feet.

“No touching. I’ll get out of your way.”

I stood too abruptly and nearly vomited again. I leaned a shaking hand back against the pine, moaning in pain, and waited; slowly, carefully, I planted my injured foot, breathing solely through my nose. My ankle wasn’t broken, maybe only sprained, twisted but intact, and I could keep my weight on it. The going would be slow. At least all my hurts were on the same leg. The sloth chuffed at me.

“Sorry,” I said, and limped aside.

The sloth continued on her way to the tree, my presence forgiven, or forgotten, now that I was no longer an obstacle. I wondered if she had any right to be so impatient.

Years ago, the summer of the only flood ever to hit Pama, Engo had seen a massive sloth, bigger than one of our huts, swimming lazily down the swollen creek, paying no heed to the rushing force of the floodwaters or the debris choking the bends. The old man had rushed up the bank, hollering his news right at the break of dawn. Engo later went on to embellish his story, weaving a whole retinue of paddlefish attendants and caiman knights around it, a great mossy crown atop its head. We still never ate sloth again after that.

The sloth, now finished with whatever business she had at the base of the tree, stretched her forequarters up against the trunk, squeezing her eyes shut and scratching deep gouges in the bark. Sap curled and bled. Four long, fresh scars peeled their way down the sloth’s back right leg; from a jaguar, I thought, or maybe a mountain lion. My gaze flickered from her wound to her face, now turned towards me, and our eyes locked.

For one insane moment I tried to tell myself her dim little expression reminded me of Merah. There was really no resemblance at all. I realized I was just seeing his face everywhere now.

“I’m Eio,” I said. “I’m looking for a big monster. It’s really loud. Have you seen or heard anything like that around here?”

Blinking, the sloth turned her back to the tree and pissed right against the trunk, misting me with the backsplash. She sat back on her haunches, lazily looking around at nothing in particular. I wiped my face dry.

“Okay. That’s alright. Listen. I need to find this monster. You’ve got a good nose, little sloth, and you’ve got good claws, which makes two of us, at least some of the time. I’m going to take you with me. You’re going to help me find it. It’s the least you can do after messing up my back like you did.”

The sloth lowed, a noise like bon. I nodded.

“Okay,” I sighed. I was talking as much to myself as I was to her. “Okay, Bon, that works. Good old Bon. Do you like that name?”

Bon sneezed, which I took as approval, and from somewhere in the forest came a mournful roar, a sound like the flooding of valleys; a second roar answered, this one closer.

Next