by Avi Silver
Sohmeng’s stomach lurched again, her throat raw from the acid. She had known death before—it was part of life in the hmun. She had even participated in the sky burials of other Pars, a thing she felt conflicted over to this day. But she had never confronted bodies this way, especially not the bodies of people she had known growing up. She took Hei’s hand, grateful for the grace with which they were responding. Eiji was full of death and everyday violence, a constant string of casualties in the endless fight for survival, the food chain in perpetual motion. She supposed the hmun wasn’t so different, with their stolen eggs and roasted armour bugs and wovenstone hacked from the walls. The cruelty was a part of life, deemed acceptable for the new life it fostered. The thought didn’t do much to ease the pounding behind her eyes.
“That could be Sohtei Won. Or Pikong Ãofe?” Hei said quietly. “I’d have to get closer to be sure.”
“In, in a minute, I just—” Sohmeng cut herself off, clutching at Hei’s shirt. She blew out a slow breath, thinking of Jinho Tang, tearful at the thought of his cousin. “Is Foão Mi there? Can you, is she . . .”
Hei said nothing, taking their time observing as best they could from where Sohmeng was keeping them both. “Second to the right,” they said with gentle certainty. “The small one. That’s Foão.”
The closure felt hollow. Shouldn’t it have been a good thing, to have this answer at last? “She’s my, my brother’s, his boyfriend’s—” Sohmeng stopped, attempting to pull herself together.
Par, Go, Hiwei, Fua, Tang, Sol, Jão, Pel, Dongi, Se, Won, Nor, Chisong, Heng, Li, Ginhãe, Mi—
This is what you wanted, she thought numbly. This is what you envied.
Hei gave a sympathetic chirp, nuzzling against her hair. Sohmeng realized she was clenching her fists; her fingers felt stiff as she released them. “Where are the others?” she asked. “I . . . there’s only four, we’re still missing nine.”
“Eight,” Hei corrected, wry and a little bitter. “We already know Maio Chisong’s dead.” Sohmeng cursed, shaking her head. Perhaps it was callous, but she—along with the rest of the hmun—had spent so many years assuming the batengmun were dead that she had not expected the confirmation to upend her this way. Somewhere along the line she had convinced herself that if she found the bodies, they would look different, either like proper skeletons or else themselves but sleeping. A foolish notion. A childish thought. But Sohmeng supposed, in the most traditional sense of the word, that she was still a child.
“What . . . what happened, though?” she asked, the words falling clumsily from her mouth. “They seem . . . peaceful? I don’t know Hei, they, they’re dead.” She was stuttering, stumbling, her mind tripping over itself for answers it did not want.
Beside her, Hei studied the bodies around the fire. “Their bowls are still here. Perhaps they ate something they shouldn’t have. By accident, or on purpose . . .” Their voice softened, lined with regret. “I don’t think they would make such a grave mistake. But I couldn’t say, Sohmeng.”
Unable to bear looking at her dead friends any longer, Sohmeng stole a glance at Hei’s face, selfishly hoping for some indication that they were just as afraid as she was. But they were steadfast as she’d ever seen them, bolstering her even as she fell apart. Why was she being so ungrateful? There was no way she’d be able to handle this if Hei was panicking, too.
Sohmeng swallowed. She was not used to being the more emotionally vulnerable of the two. And while she figured sharing feelings was a skill she’d eventually have to work out, she didn’t feel particularly equipped to try right now. With a shaky nod of determination, she spat one last time upon the ground, then sucked in a breath between her teeth.
“Is there anywhere the rest of them would have gone?” She was cautious to ask Hei about this part of their history. Frankly, it felt offensive to be asking them anything past ‘are you okay?’, but she also knew they were her best chance of piecing together what had happened on Sodão Dangde.
Luckily, Hei didn’t take it personally. “Tansen Se had talked about leading a small party down the mountain to raise the Bridge themselves, from the Third Finger,” they replied, grimacing. “If they did that . . .”
“Blacktooth,” Sohmeng said, covering her face with her hands and taking a long, slow breath. Par, Go, Hiwei, Fua, Tang, Sol— “Okay. Okay. We should try to find them, see if they’re somewhere else in the mountain.”
Hei wore a guilty expression, speaking as though they were sorry for each word that came out. “Sohmeng, it’s mostly likely that . . .”
“They’re all dead,” she interrupted, biting her cheek. “I know, I—I know. I just want to look, to be sure.” As grim as their prospects were, it felt wrong turning her back on what they had found. It would feel too much like abandoning friends who had already been abandoned once before. Sohmeng didn’t put much stock in the idea of honour, but even she couldn’t justify walking back down to Eiji with nothing more than a shrug and a turned stomach. It was better to know. And if she ever did make it back to the hmun on Fochão Dangde, she’d at least have something to make up for . . . everything else. Closure for Jinho, and the others.
“Okay.” Hei took her hand, turning to face the rows of houses. “Let’s look.”
Home by home, the two of them searched through the rooms, pushing back privacy curtains and peering through doorways, whistling to hear where the echoes bounced loudest. They started slowly, taking their time with the details. But eventually, their feet picked up pace, and they moved with solemn resignation. Silently, hand-in-hand.
The houses were so similar to those on Fochão Dangde that Sohmeng couldn’t help but feel like it was some sort of bizarre homecoming. In a way, it was. After all, the mountains were mirrors to each other, complementary halves of everyone’s lives in Ateng. She had been gone for so long that she had nearly forgotten the twin world of her childhood.
As they reached the end of a line, her breath caught. There—a small hut with a rounded right side, a soft cut of purple wovenstone stretching through the awning. She could picture the places where her parents’ old travelling skins would hang before they made the crossing, the corner where Viunwei would tuck away his toys so she couldn’t get into them. The day they left, she had been so preoccupied with bothering him that she had forgotten to take her favourite pair of dice out of her drawer. She had only realized it halfway across the Bridge, and by then it was too late to turn back.
They’ll still be there waiting for you, her mother had reassured her. Next crossing, during your Tengmunji on Fochão Dangde, I’ll hang onto them for you. And then you’ll get to come back to them as an adult!
Hei tugged gently on her hand, clicking inquiringly and jarring her out of the memory. She swallowed, lifting her heels just to prove to herself that she was still capable of moving her feet. “My house,” she whispered. “The Sodão Dangde house. This is where I lived before the last crossing. It’s where I was born.”
“Sohmeng Minhal.” They said her name with such tender certainty that Sohmeng’s shame nearly forgot to rear its head. She squeezed their hand, only able to nod. This would be a lot easier if her body could respond with the same cool detachment Hei was displaying. With doubt lining every step, she passed through the doorway.
Everything was exactly as she had last seen it: bare and clean, if not dusty from the years of disuse. Her family had spent all morning tidying despite the fact that it was her birthday. That was her least favourite part of being born on the first day of First Par—every other year, she had to clean and pack instead of celebrate. Her father had insisted it was a wonderful gift to celebrate her birth with the great crossing, but it had only ever made her feel overshadowed. An afterthought for the hmun.
She went to the drawer beside her old cot and pulled it open. Her set of dice glowed up at her, and though realistically she knew that it was just the wovenstone’s way, she couldn’t help but imagine it was intentio
nal, warm with familiarity. For the second time in as many days, she felt tears stinging her eyes. Of all the things to worry about, this was the one that had kept her up at night as a child: her toys, left alone in a drawer to gather dust, gone cold from lack of use. With a trembling hand, she picked them up, watching the soft glow through her fingers, thinking back to all the nights she had spent casting them for her family, pretending she knew how to predict their futures.
Mom will become the leader of the hmun. Dad will turn into an armour bug. Viunwei will grow a big mustache. Grandmother Mi will learn to fly.
I’ll become such a good dancer that my dancing will move the mountains closer together. I’ll walk all of Eiji, just like Mom and Dad. I’ll go even further. Everyone will be my friend.
“Hei?” Her voice was so small.
“Mm?”
“Is this my fault?”
“No.”
“You didn’t even ask what ‘this’ is,” she choked out, trying to be angry, grasping for a familiar emotion to work with. “You don’t even know what I’m talking about.”
“No,” they admitted, leaning their head against hers. “But I still don’t think it’s your fault.”
Sohmeng squeezed the dice until the edges dug into her fingerbones. Her head was pounding as she resisted tears that had already begun, her thoughts writhing against themselves like snakes caught in a trap. Somewhere, logically, she knew that this, that every bad thing, wasn’t her doing. She hadn’t broken the Sky Bridge, or sent her parents to their deaths, or killed the batengmun. Deep down, the reasonable part of her brain could recognize that none of these terrible things had anything to do with her. And yet the words, the warnings, shone clear in her mind: Under two dark moons, the gods are sightless, and the child will be overlooked. Cast out this unfortunate soul, for it brings only disorder to the hmun.
Grandmother Mi had protected her. Sohmeng had not been cast out, or even been recognized as broken. And though she tried and tried to mold herself properly into the shape of Par, of purpose, her life had still fallen apart around her. Against her better judgment, it was hard not to feel responsible, even when someone was offering her a world where she was not at fault. Especially then.
Godless night, she thought, keenly feeling the sting of the curse in a way she hadn’t before, I’m so tired of this.
Beside her, Hei stood patiently, running a thumb along their sãoni claws, eyes following the lines of the room as they got acquainted with the space. Turning her attention to them, Sohmeng bristled with curiosity verging on disbelief. Hei had been so afraid while climbing Sodão Dangde, rattled and aggravated and outright distraught. But now, in the place that had caused them so much pain, they were responding with an emotional fortitude that Sohmeng never would have anticipated.
“How are you so calm?” she asked, voice wavering. She didn’t want it to sound like an accusation. “This place, everything we’ve found—you should be the one panicking, not me. Weren’t you afraid of coming back here?”
Hei nodded, taking her hand, carefully opening her fingers to see the dice. Their touch was so light that it coaxed Sohmeng into relaxing, into opening herself to a gentler world. “I suppose I was afraid of doing it alone. I was afraid of you leaving when you found out the truth of me. But you didn’t. It makes it easier.” They rolled the dice over in her fingers, thumbing the symbols on each side. Sohmeng wondered if they had ever seen anything like them before. “And . . . I’ve made a life in Eiji. When Ateng was all I had, losing it was like losing everything. But my world is bigger now. This is just one thing. A terrible thing, yes. But just one.”
“Just one thing,” Sohmeng murmured, leaning against Hei. She took a deep breath, looking around at her old home one last time, and released it. They slipped from the house like ghosts and returned to their puzzle, drifting, wandering, seeking.
They spent the better part of the afternoon searching the houses, finding each one as uninhabited as the next. With a small pang of guilt, Sohmeng permitted herself to take a few things that had been left behind before the last crossing: a thick blanket, a necklace strung with wovenstone beads, a small but sturdy cooking pot. Eiji was bountiful, but it could not provide everything that existed up in Ateng. At first, Hei was hesitant to bring down any of these reminders of their old life, but they had a change of heart when Sohmeng suggested stitching some of the beads into their hood to imitate throat stripes. Another hour passed before they both were forced to agree there were no bodies to be found here.
Not yet ready to return to the main hall, Sohmeng suggested they check the cave systems. It was slow-going, physically cramped and mentally nerve-wracking; every time they entered a new space Sohmeng’s heart skipped, simultaneously hoping that they would and would not find something. Someone. The walls seemed to close in on her chest, dizzying in their pressure. It was incredible to imagine Hei spending most of their life in this lonely warren.
Hei relieved her discomfort not long after, admitting how unlikely it was that they would find anything inside, particularly any organic matter. “After all,” they began, “the armour bugs feed on decay. If anyone was there—”
Sohmeng forced herself to stop listening, raising both of her hands with a loud noise to indicate how little she wanted to hear the rest of that statement. “Nope, Hei, nope. Can’t do it.”
Hei nodded with an apologetic quirk in their brow, turning their attention instead to a patch of massively overgrown mushrooms which they promptly harvested and put into their thigh bag. Sohmeng plucked her own with a strange feeling in her belly; as much as she had missed the taste of Ateng’s mushrooms, she couldn’t help but feel like she was robbing the dead.
Eventually, there was only one place on Sodão Dangde they had not yet checked: the site of the crossing.
They pushed through the mountain’s winding throat, feeling the change on their skin as the environment slowly gave up its cool glow in favour of the all-warming light that poured in from the mouth of the cavern. Though it had only been a matter of hours, Sohmeng was flooded with relief to be back under Chehangma’s gaze.
“It’s incredible,” murmured Hei with a little trill. “Without the canopy or the clouds, it’s so bright. It’s . . . almost frightening.”
“There’s a reason the godseye splits at night.” Sohmeng shrugged. “We couldn’t bear it otherwise.”
Her laughter died in her throat as she saw the Sky Bridge, perfectly intact, still furled on the Third Finger. Impossible for the batengmun to reach, but always within sight. A nasty punchline. She wasn’t sure which mountain had it worse: the one that had seen the disaster, witnessing families falling to their deaths in the midst of their pilgrimage, or the one that had seen nothing at all, and been forced to sit and wait, wondering where they had gone wrong.
Hei made a Sãonipa sound Sohmeng didn’t recognize. She forced her gaze away from the Bridge and found them at the wall of the cave, examining the remains of the vines that had hung there. They held up a fistful of fibres that had been pulled into very thin strips, twisted into half-finished braids.
“What are those?” Sohmeng asked.
“Before I was exiled, there was talk of building another Bridge,” Hei said, their flat tone indicating how viable an option they thought that was. “We started, but it was obvious that a project of that scale would take . . . I don’t know, years.” They jostled the vines in their hand, shaking their head. “I told you that some of the batengmun had talked about going down the mountain, raising the Bridge from the Third Finger? They’d have wanted harnesses. None of the rope is left here, and more of the vine was hacked down, so . . .”
“So that’s probably it, then.” Sohmeng felt her shoulders lower, whether in relief or resignation she could not tell. She remembered all the legends Damdão Kelho had told her, with their clear-cut structure, their tidy morals. Right now, sitting on this flourishing mountain, the untended tomb of her childhood companions, she searched for the
logic that would give meaning to what they had found. Nothing came.
She returned to the edge of the cavern and sat down. What lay behind her was enough to make her want to scream, but the world in front of her was so wide that it would simply move on from any attempt she made to disturb it. She tugged at her bangs and looked down at the thick blanket of cloud that had descended over the valley. How strange it was that she could so clearly envision what kind of a day it was in Eiji, that if she closed her eyes she could practically feel the steamy mist teasing over her eyelashes, opening her pores. Above, it was cooler, the air just wet enough to open the lungs for singing, but not enough to cough over or make her clothing stick. She wondered when she had developed the ability to differentiate weather systems in layers. Probably around the time she started squawking like a sãoni.
The thought was enough to make her laugh, a small and slightly hysterical sound. She tilted her head skyward, wondering what it felt like higher, and higher still. All she saw were the shifting colours of the oncoming evening, and the Lantern that had gone cold.
Hei settled by her side and offered her a piece of vine to strip and braid, a bit of futile work to pass the time and ease the hurt. She took it with gratitude, pressing her fingernail in and watching as the vine began to split.
After a few minutes of wordlessly shredding the plant, Sohmeng gathered her thoughts enough to break the silence. “When do you think they put out the Lantern? I mean, I know when, but . . . how do you think they decided that was it? That they finally needed to give up and show the hmun they were desperate?”
“Most likely after Tansen’s group didn’t return,” Hei replied, tying together thin fibres of vine. “But that’s just my best guess. It was a few months after my exile.”
“They really held on for a while, didn’t they?” Sohmeng shook her head, thinking of the four bodies they had found, left to wait for companions that would never return. She remembered the hmun’s leaders debating whether or not they should put out their own Lantern as a signal that the trouble extended to all of Ateng. They ultimately decided it was dangerous to send such a bleak message to the trapped children. Instead, they sent out rescue after rescue, all of which ended up in dire need of rescues of their own.