Amie Kaufman

Humans are such fools.

Well-meaning fools, sometimes.

But fools, always.

The bindle cat gives his own blessings in echo of mine—though they sound more like curses—as he trots along beside me, tail upright and round eyes alert. While everyone in my life knows I ought to have manifested my aspect years ago, and has hopes and expectations for me, he has none beyond his next snack. The bindle cat is just a cat.

If we don’t dream—if we don’t try to go Below, try to push out the borders of our tiny archipelago and see what else is out there—then what’s the point of all our tech? Are we supposed to just use it to make sleeker transports and smarter chronos—to make our lives lazier and easier?

Not me. I want to explore. There’s a way to solve any problem, and if we want to figure out how to survive Below so we can search it for answers, then we need to go there.

“They’ve trained for it all their lives. You can be kind to them, you can show them respect and even affection, but you cannot take from them the acts that give them purpose.”

And the best fighter in the world would still never be chosen as defender of the divine if she could not respect the formality and ritual of the role.

All life happens in cycles, even the world itself, and the life of ours was drawing to an end a thousand years ago.

As it splish-splashes closer, I realize it’s no taller than my knee, and covered in striped hair all over its body. A long tail trails behind it, held up in the air to keep it dry, and its eyes seem to take up most of its face, though there’s still room for a long, pointed nose. I press back into the glider’s side as the thing marches toward me, and with a soft trill, stops right in front of me.

The noise doesn’t sound like it wants to kill me, but for all I know it’s about to unfurl a long, poisonous tongue and zap me with it.

“Hey, little … uh, thing,” I murmur cautiously, trying to figure out whether to lunge right or left if it suddenly becomes hostile.

It blinks at me when it finds out I can make a noise, the movement slow and deliberate, and then it sniffs at me once and burbles cheerfully, as if it’s replying.

“Do you have names, in the sky?” I ask, not sure what I’m expecting him to tell me.

The boy smiles a little more widely. “My name’s North. What’s yours?”

I stare at him, bereft of words. He looks about as divinely significant as the bindle cat. But then, not even a god is born knowing their place in fate’s design. I had to learn about my purpose when I was called to divinity, as any child learns about the world.

“Your presence will be a challenge,” she says. “But I cannot have them raising the alarm when they realize I have slipped away. That will be worse.”

“All right,” I say, reaching for a lighter tone. “Better get introduced before I get you into trouble, then. Everything else I’ve met here except you has seemed to take a deep dislike to me.”

I need her help. I need to be charming. I need to avoid any hint of a threat.

Her lips move, forming for the first time the faintest of smiles. She wears it well, that smile. She can’t be much older than I am, a fact I missed thanks to her spear and her magic and her fighting off a horde of terrifying creatures. The smile is only there for an instant before she’s walking on again. But she’s moving a little bit more slowly now for my benefit, and with a private grin to myself, I follow.

Pinpricks of faint yellow glow here and there for a handful of seconds, appearing and then fading again at random. I try to track them with my gaze, but they vanish before I can get a closer look. Is this more “magic”?

I’m diverted from trying to figure out what chemical could cause the glow when swarms of insects rise around us. I clamp my mouth shut and shield my nose with one hand as Nimh draws a cloth over her face. I cautiously draw breath to ask how far we are from her camp, and a horde of insects invade my mouth, leaving me coughing and spitting in their wake.