Win, Lose, Draw

THE RUSSET SKIAL SCURRIED up a branch, cheeks bulging with two kernels from a spiky seed pod. A hliu shot past me, swooped, and darted through a cloud of yellow-winged insects.

I shifted the straps on my shoulders and moved carefully on, arms out for balance, toes gripping, stepping slowly up the tapering branch. It forked and narrowed, thin shoots the diameter of my forearm reaching for the tips of the next tree’s branches. I lowered myself to straddle the dwindling branch, gripping and scooting myself along as it began to dip with my weight. Pungent needles rustled around me.

Another hliu swooped close to my face. I jerked back, caught myself on the branch, and enviously tracked the bird’s effortless glide. I edged forward on the swaying branch, refusing contemplation of all that empty air down there. I bobbed, took a deep breath, let go, and fell.

Needles and twigs whipped past as I plummeted, eyes streaming. The dark shape of the split fork below flew up at me. I spread my arms and legs, grasping at slippery needles to slow myself. The narrow branch thudded into me, and I clung. I took a deep, shaky breath and sat up. The surge of adrenaline ebbed.

One more down.

I edged along the thickening slope of the bough toward the darker skin of the next tree’s trunk, pulling myself to my feet and striding down through converging forks. The main branch was a fair-sized one, about halfway up the high, bearing portion of the haavriathil. I could have set up a dinner party of a half dozen comfortably on its wide, flat arm.

But it was way too early to be thinking about food again. I squinted up the nearly perpendicular angle of filtered sun shafts, adjusted my knapsack straps in a futile search for spots that weren’t sore, and crawled up the cracks of the trunk to a higher series of branches. One more laborious climb up dwindling branches. Another heart-stopping drop to the thin fringes of the next tree. The next climb. The next drop.

The cycle repeated endlessly to a dull mechanical rhythm. There wasn’t much point comparing my slow progress to the quick, lithe shadows I’d glimpsed three or four times in the past couple days. Shy faces peering around branches above or below me and melting away when I called out. The easy swing and thrust of long arms, the careless grasp of bidigit hands. Graceful figures swarming up vertical branches and whipping down through the meshed twigs, teasing me on in the direction they flew, deeper into the tangled network of trees.

I didn’t have a clue where they were leading me. I hoped it was toward some contact or understanding with the tribe. Maybe the Andurans would get curious enough to break their Rules and hear what I had to tell them.

I scrubbed sweat from my forehead with the back of a grubby hand and shook my head over the ragged remnants of my sleeve. I wedged myself wearily against a forked branch, thighs gripping the smooth, cinnamon-colored bark of the narrow shoot. A dark green cluster of needles beneath me heated in a patch of sun, throwing off a sharp, spicy scent.

I allowed myself two swallows from the bottle I’d managed to nearly refill with rainwater caught in the unripped portion of my rain tunic the day before. I studied the crumbled nutrient chips remaining, and regretfully put the pouch away. It would be a long climb back to the ground to search for food or water. I pulled out the two seed pods I’d picked where the skial had fed. Prying them apart, I eyed the plump kernels inside.

One cautious nibble. Beneath a thin brown skin, the nut meat was white and moist. My tongue burned with its sharp oil.

“Bleah!” I spat it out and dropped the pods through the branches. They hit twigs, bounced, and dwindled into dimness.

My patch of sun flickered and winked out. A green, underwater light flowed around me, branch and needle and dark, distant trunks gleaming dully above and below and beyond. Lodged in the fork of one small branch, I was no more than one of those seed pods among thousands in the branches among the thousands of trees. The swimming light washed through me like the vague, persistent dreams of the past nights. I was a drop of water, a seed, a tiny shoot enclosed by an endless mesh of greenery and branch. Engulfed by the Other.

The chill, pungent air flowed through me as I took a breath, claiming me from the inside out, remaking and reducing me to a small part of the forest—attuned to its cool whisper, resting on its green breast, letting go and feeling its rustling damp arms take me.

I shook off the disturbing sensation. Was it my own smallness? I didn’t matter here. On Poindros, the earth itself hummed to the careful rhythm of the seismic tremor rods that made it habitable. Casino was easy—nothing but a barren rock, if not for the cybernetic artifices to cradle human lives. Even on Sethar, in the wild tangle of the jungle, I’d followed clan trails, and the unseen voices had been those of the dream songs—the wood carver, the hunter, the weaver. The worlds and their Ways dancing to and around human needs. Rough edges, made round for us by the cybers. But here the song was whispered in an alien voice. Humans were superfluous here.

I stared into the maze of branches around me. Their twisting arms blended into shadow, green closing around me.

I shook my head. We had been superfluous here, before Heinck and his rotten schemes had perverted the Resistance group. He was a poisonous worm, eating the heart of the forest, infecting everyone and everything he touched, completely unaware that he was smaller than the virus he was using to steal the life of this world. Maybe the forest didn’t care, but I did. Maybe I couldn’t offer anything here but a canceling-out of his score. I wasn’t sure how, but I was going to do it.